I'm Ayesha Roscoe and this is a Sunday story from Up First where we go beyond the news of the day to bring you one big story.
It's hard to remember a time when we weren't talking about America's homelessness crisis.
It's a vast crisis and in many U.S. cities one that is becoming increasingly visible.
In West Coast cities like Los Angeles, Portland,
and Seattle, homeless encampments are a part of the urban landscape.
They sprawl over city blocks and are a point of tension for local residents,
business owners, housing advocates, and elected officials.
During the COVID lockdowns of 2020,
reporter Shayna Shealy spent a lot of time walking around her neighborhood in Oakland, California.
On her walks,
she'd pass people sleeping under underpasses and and makes shift tents on the sidewalks under piles of blankets in the woods and in parking lots.
And she wanted to talk to those people.
Then in 2021,
she heard about a group of people who had barricaded their tent encampment in the face of a city eviction.
They lived at a park along the water called Union Point.
Shealy is a producer for the podcast Snap Judgment.
At the time, she was searching for stories for the show,
so she went to meet people from this tent encampment.
One of the first people she spoke to was a woman named Deanna Riley.
We was a family.