Plan for homeless shelter in Oakland’s Chinatown dropped after pushback
A city council member called the proposal to convert a hotel into 150 shelter beds ‘institutional racism’ amid concerns over safety
Days before California’s Oakland was expected to give its approval for a large homeless shelter to be built in Chinatown, the proposed deal is dead.
Local non-profit organisation Cardea Health was lined up to run the “interim housing” site at the Courtyard Marriott on Broadway, a US$20 million real estate deal that would convert the hotel into 150 shelter beds for those experiencing homelessness.
The hotel was sold last year for US$10.6 million, a value that took a nosedive in recent years amid the local hospitality industry’s decline.
But business leaders in Chinatown successfully lobbied their new city council member, Charlene Wang, whose district includes the downtown neighbourhood, to pull a planned letter of support from next week’s council agenda.
“To be frank, this is a perfect example of institutional racism,” Wang said in an interview about the nixed hotel-to-housing proposal. “You’re placing a shelter right beside this vulnerable population.”
City leaders now have two weeks to endorse an alternate shelter site in Oakland, where crime fears and a battered economy have fuelled contentious politics among Chinatown residents in the years since the Covid-19 pandemic.