"It’s not that I didn’t see these things before."
After I went out with Vinny Pannizzo, I began to see things differently. Now, when I drive through downtown Oakland late at night and I see someone sitting in a bus shelter, I wonder if she’ll be sleeping there. On park benches and in doorways, I’ll look for men and women curled up in sleeping bags, using their shoes for a pillow to keep them from being stolen off their feet. Driving down a freeway off-ramp, I’ll notice the tarp strung between bushes or the edge of a tent inside the trees.
It’s not that I didn’t see these things before. Like most people, I noticed the homeless, especially when people would come up to me on the street and ask for money. And like many of us, I also made it a point not to treat those people as though they’re invisible — to acknowledge someone who’s obviously been sleeping on the sidewalk or in a doorway as a fellow human being.
But Pannizzo, who is homeless himself and works with the nonprofit group Mission for the Homeless, opened my eyes a lot wider, and got me to listen and look in a way I hadn’t before.
The government says we’re no longer living in a recession. Housing prices are skyrocketing. But as housing gets more expensive, more people are unable to pay rent. Paul Boden, organizing director of the Western Regional Advocacy Project, said that in 2012, there were 1.168 million homeless students in public schools nationwide. “Yet that same year, only 247,178 homeless households were eligible to receive services through HUD [federal] homeless assistance programs,” he added.
Untold numbers of people are sleeping every night on benches or in makeshift shelters in Oakland and other communities throughout the nation.
To Pannizzo, they’re not numbers. They’re the people he sees and talks with each night.
Every evening without fail, in a parking lot in East Oakland, Pannizzo and two or three homeless helpers unpack big boxes of bread and granola bars, cardboard flats of plastic water bottles, and bags of apples and oranges. They put together about a hundred bags of food. It all goes to people living on the street, and since few people have a stove or a can opener, there’s no point in including anything that can’t be eaten right out of the bag.
The bagging starts about midnight, and goes pretty quickly. Soon the back of Pannizzo’s beat-up white Toyota van is filled. The helpers take their own bags and go back to their camps. Pannizzo hits the road.
For the next three or four hours, he crisscrosses the deserted streets of downtown Oakland, looking for people who need food. Most of them know he’s coming, and many have a relationship with him that goes back years. Bill Davidson heard about Pannizzo, and had eaten his food, long before he actually met him.
“He doesn’t know how many lives he’s saved,” Davidson said. “I’ve seen guys lay down on the cement and never wake up. The concrete sucks the life right out of you.
So Vinny will show up with a blanket, water, and bread. That’s life right there. We know that’s how we have to live out here. Life isn’t about you; it’s about what you do for others, about the right thing to do. Vinny says the truth came to him, and now he’s living that truth.”
Joe Mazarek, one of Pannizzo’s helpers, is a former woodworker who came to Oakland from Milwaukee years ago, and got strung out on methamphetamine. “My wife left, and I was living in a van,” Mazarek said. “I’d sit in it, and think to myself, I’m a good man. And maybe I am. But then the van was towed, with all my tools and possessions in it. I found Vinny, who took me to his camp, gave me a blanket and a place to lie down next to others. He said, ‘Just remember love.'”
Some people, like Mazarek, have been living on the streets of Oakland for years. Together they form a community, and Pannizzo is part of the glue that holds it together. “These have been some of my best years because I have a feeling of acceptance in this community, the people who live on the street in this area,” Mazarek explained.
Some street communities are relatively well organized. At one point in his rounds, Pannizzo pulled off the road next to the Oakland estuary. There, under a bridge, at two in the morning, Jeremy White, his friend Kelly, and their dogs were sitting in a circle of friends. Light emanated from bulbs and a TV hooked up to solar panels salvaged from an old VW camper. “I’m an outdoor resident,” White said. “I’m not homeless, because that means you’re without a home, and we have one here. We take care of this place. I’ve been living here a year and a half, and when I got here we spent two months just cleaning trash out of the water. Everything we have here has been recycled from trash.”
Dozens of bicycles were stacked up against the concrete pylons supporting the roadway above. Homeless people often have to find a place to put their bikes when the camp they’re living in gets swept away by Caltrans in its periodic cleanups of freeway off-ramps, so camp residents take the bicycles down to White and Kelly, who store them. “People have to stick together if we want to survive,” White said.
Pannizzo calls White’s circle of friends a “tribe.” “They’re like a family that looks after one another,” Pannizzo said. “They fight occasionally, but ultimately they love one another. If anyone is in need, the others in the tribe will not let them go without for very long.”
While some people sleeping on the streets have drug problems, many have passed through addictions and come out the other side. “I kicked dope a few years ago,” White explained. “But I’ve still been living on the street in Oakland for three or four years.
Some things you can’t get over. Losing a home. Losing your family. That’s what puts you on the street.”
Bill Davidson has a similar history. At the tail end of the hippie era, he got caught by the cops with marijuana and was given a choice between prison and Vietnam, he said. Like thousands of other veterans, he came back sick from the war and fighting a drug habit.
“About half the people on the street used to be vets,” Davidson said. “Most were my age — from Vietnam. When guys came back, the world was hostile. When we needed medical attention, we didn’t get any. Of the twenty guys in my unit, eight wound up in the hospital, and all of us got sick. I got strung out in the service, and I didn’t get rid of my habit until 2006. The price I paid for being on drugs got to be too high. That’s what made me stop.”
That price included spending many years in prison and losing his family. In 1999, he began living on the street. Today, Davidson, who is white, lives with an African-American woman — Ebony, who, like many homeless people I met, didn’t want to give her last name. “We get hassled every day about being a white man with a black woman,” Davidson said. “People call us names and threaten us. Last week, a guy even pulled a gun on us.”
Pannizzo calls downtown Oakland a unique place because of the diversity of its homeless people. “Many come from other parts of the country,” he explained. “The ones in the camps along the freeways tend to be white and younger. African Americans find themselves less in the camps and more on the benches. But they tend to be Oakland natives, as opposed to people from other places.”
Robert, a black man sitting in White’s camp on the night I visited it, said he thinks black and white people get along okay in general. But turning to White, he warned that “some people just don’t want to see you and me get along.” Davidson is even more worried. “We have to get rid of the denial that there’s racism on the streets here,” he said.
Davidson lived beneath the freeway near Brush Street when I first met him and Ebony. They’d built an elaborate structure out of cardboard and pallets with a bed and mattress. Over the assemblage, they’d draped a big US flag and a smaller Raiders pirate banner. A few days later, I went back to talk, and found them packing belongings into shopping carts. They took me over to the chain-link fence, and showed me the Caltrans notice warning that crews would be sweeping the lot out later that day.
A few weeks later, the barren area had been turned into a parking lot for Greyhound busses. Davidson and Ebony had moved into a fleabag hotel. The population of homeless people and those living in single-room occupancy hotels has so much overlap that it’s really the same community. The couple had managed to save enough money from disability checks to pay the $800 monthly rent for a room at the Grand.
“But there’s no shower in our room — we have to go upstairs,” Davidson said angrily. “There are roaches and mice in the room, and it’s so small there’s hardly any room for anything beside the bed. For me, the street is better than the dump we’re in, but Ebony is sick and doesn’t want to be back on the street.”
To get a fuller understanding of what it’s like to live on the streets of Oakland — what life is like for people like Davidson and Ebony, White and Kelly, and Mazarek, I thought it would best if they told their stories in their own words. Here’s what two of them had to say.
