Q&A: How to get to know your unhoused neighbors, and take on City Hall

“I got three jobs, I can’t afford to go nowhere else!” cries LaMonté “Monte” Ford, a resident and community organizer at Wood Street Commons. It’s April 2023, and police and city workers have come to demolish the site, the largest homeless encampment in Oakland, and evict scores of people from beneath the highway where have lived for decades.

“Wood Street,” a documentary directed by Caron Creighton, follows residents through the tumultuous year leading up to that moment, showing their humor, resilience and unrelenting determination as they attend City Hall meetings, and work with lawyers to try to stave off eviction.

“Wood Street” will make its Bay Area debut at SF DocFest on May 31 at the Roxie Theater. An additional Oakland screening will take place at the New Parkway Theater in July. 

In advance of that debut, Creighton and two Wood Street residents,  LaMonté “Monte” Ford and John Janosko, talked with Mission Local about what it’s like  to report on, and live through, the Bay Area’s homeless crisis. 

This Q &A has been edited for length and clarity.

Mission Local: A lot of films about homelessness lean on tropes of trauma and devastation. Could you tell me more about what it means to find joy while living under such difficult circumstances?

LaMonté “Monte” Ford: Well, we have to live, right? In any situation, you try to make the best of it as much as you possibly can. So that’s what we did.

John Janosko: People always want to make homelessness into this horror story. Like I always say, “Don’t become homeless to find yourself.” But I was lucky to come across the people and the community that I did. 

It’s horrible not having running water. You’ve got to go across the street to the park to get some water, bring it back and boil it. You’ve got to find a place to take a shower.

But for me, honestly, I got support that I would never have gotten before from people who were housed, including my family, who didn’t really understand what we were going through. We were the best ones to support each other because we were all living it together.

 I’m not saying I loved being homeless. But the people I met were amazing.

Caron Creighton: It felt important to me to avoid some of these tropes that we see in films about homeless folks.

I think those films often go into a deep backstory to create a certain level of empathy for the viewer to let them put themselves in someone else’s shoes. I really wanted to avoid backstory and outside experts.

ML: For people who want to work with unhoused communities, how can they help?

CC: John and Monte will have a better answer than I do. But I think there’s a big problem in the Bay Area of housed people just not knowing their neighbors at all. That feeds into this assumption that your neighbor living in an RV is somehow not your neighbor, and is just a pile of trash that needs to be moved.

It’s important to learn people’s names and say hello to them. That’s the first step: just meeting people, period. Then you can learn how you might be able to help.

LF: I agree with Caron. The meet-and-greet is very important. 

JJ: Bring water. Bring hygiene stuff. Bring hot meals. Bring a table and some chairs, a little radio, maybe some cards, maybe chess or checkers. Go out there and hang out with people for a couple of hours. Build a relationship like you would with your friends, or somebody you met at school or at your job. It’s the same thing with unhoused people. I know it can feel a little scary or uneasy — I admit that. 

But the main thing is consistency. Everybody needs consistency in their life. When you consistently show up, and people start to know your name and what you’re there for, they know you’re there to help. Then they start opening up, and you can have a conversation about what they need, not what other people tell you they need. 

I mean, it’s really messed up, honestly, because they put this narrative out there, like all homeless people are drug addicts, they’re lazy, they don’t want to do anything, they just like living like this.

And that narrative is perpetuated by the way different cities do things. They don’t want people to realize that these are human beings. They don’t bring up the narrative that these people lost their jobs when the market crashed, or these people lost their jobs when the CEO literally embezzled all this money.

They don’t publicize that the federal minimum wage hasn’t been raised in, I don’t know, like 15-something years [Ed: Close to 17 years, July 2009, when it was raised to $7.25]. Even at $15 an hour, working 40 hours a week — if you’re lucky enough to get that — you’re not going to be able to afford anything in the Bay Area [In 2023 the minimum wage in Oakland was $15.97 an hour, slightly more than the California minimum wage of $15.50].

As prices go up in the Bay Area, wages do not, and people become homeless. And then people look at us like we did something wrong.

ML: How can we build more understanding between people who are housed and people who are unhoused?

LF: Well, we started with beautifying the space and trying to make the environment more appealing, so that outsiders would want to come in.

JJ: It’s hard because the city makes it so uninviting — no disrespect to unhoused people — by not removing trash, and by not providing basic things so people can clean up, shower and take care of themselves.

That was one of the main attractions we had at Wood Street: we had a community space. We had the frontage cleaned up. As soon as you walked in, you could see, “Oh, wow, there’s somewhere I can hang out and feel comfortable.”

Most encampments don’t last long enough for people to start experimenting with their ideas of how they would like the world to see them. 

ML: The film revealed that the housing complex built on the Wood Street lot required a minimum income of around $60,000, despite being marketed as “100% affordable,” and that was one of the city’s main talking points and one of its main justifications for the eviction. 

JJ: They didn’t build affordable housing on the lot we were on. They built so-called affordable housing on the lot next door to ours. They misled the public. They built a stadium across the street. Our lot, right now, to this day, is being used as a gravel parking lot.

The whole time, they were pushing a narrative that we were holding up affordable housing being built there. But they already had plans for the Ballers to have a stadium there, and to turn our lot into a parking lot.

CC: If something is 100% affordable, then people assume it’s truly, deeply accessible. But those apartments, those houses — I don’t even make $60,000 a year. How can the average person really afford these things?

It’s incredibly important to explain those numbers in reasonable ways. It was a choice for me in the film not to say it isn’t affordable, because that’s not necessarily accurate based on the government’s definition of affordable housing. But it felt important to say.

ML: How do regular people get more civically engaged on a local level? What is a good entry point? 

CC: Wood Street went to a lot of City Council meetings. That was one thing. I don’t have a ton of faith in electoral politics, but I do have more faith in being able to impact local politics.

If you go to City Council meetings and actually make your voice heard and let people know, you can hopefully create small changes. If there’s something you want to change — whether it’s FLOCK cameras going up in Oakland, helping your homeless neighbors or something else — pick one thing you want to be involved in. Then find other people who also want to work on that issue.

And again, meet your neighbors. I think that’s really a core element of being involved in community.

JJ: For us, I feel like it was really about getting out there. We were really friendly, and we had that space.

ML: The DocFest screening will be the film’s Bay Area premiere. What do you guys hope viewers will learn from seeing the film?

LF: I would like to see them learn how to fight. You know, how to get out there and how to voice their opinions.

JJ: I just hope it touches them. I hope they see what we saw in our community. 

CC: There was so much news coverage of Wood Street as residents were organizing against eviction, and as they were being evicted. But so much of that coverage felt like it came from an outside lens.

My hope is that this film can feel more like the Wood Street perspective on what happened and what residents went through. 

ML: You guys went above and beyond to fight the eviction through the proper legal channels. You had so much support from community members, organizers and advocates. And yet, in the end, the city still won.

 JJ: They didn’t win, though. They got us off that lot, but they didn’t win. The Wood Street Commons community is still out there, wherever the people are who were at Wood Street.

Wood Street created a nonprofit. We still go out there and do outreach to other encampments. We’re still advocating for better conditions. We’re still at City Hall meetings. We’re still in city officials’ offices every other day.

Wood Street didn’t look perfect. It wasn’t perfect. But it was working, and it was saving lives. It was keeping people out of trouble. We were growing as a family and as a community. Our voices were being heard — and not just ours. We were able to help elevate other people, too.

So they didn’t win. We’re winning.