Oakland company in FBI crosshairs sought city homeless shelter contracts

Evolutionary Homes, a company owned by members of the Duong family that appears to be at the center of the FBI corruption probe, recently angled to build housing for homeless people in Oakland. The company pitched its shelters, which are manufactured from shipping containers, to multiple councilmembers over the past year.

The company was named in a federal grand jury subpoena served against multiple Oakland city officials last week. The subpoena requires the mayor, councilmembers, their staff, and possibly other city officials to hand over numerous records to the FBI, including documents and communications.

In addition to Evolutionary Homes, federal investigators are asking for records related to the former Oakland Army Base, Oakland's homeless emergency declaration, and California Waste Solutions, the city's curbside recycling contractor that is owned by the Duongs, and other records.

A huge chunk of city-owned land up for redevelopment

The sprawling former WWII Oakland Army Base on the west end of the city near the port was decommissioned in 1999 and returned to the city. Since then, the City Council has recruited several companies to redevelop the land into warehouses, rail facilities, shipping terminals, and other industrial uses. The state prohibits housing on the polluted property.

One of the development deals was with California Waste Solutions. In 2021, the City Council gave CWS the go-ahead to move their 10th Street warehouse and sorting yard to a plot of land on the Army Base called the North Gateway Parcel. CWS's existing recycling facilities on 10th Street have long raised concerns about pollution, truck traffic, and noise from neighbors in the semi-residential area, so the relocation was viewed as a win-win.

CASS, a metal recycler, also plans to relocate from a residential area to the rest of the North Gateway Parcel.

"We worked really hard when I was on council to get recycling out of the neighborhood," said Nancy Nadel, who was a councilmember in the 1990s and is still involved in West Oakland advocacy. The Army Base was a clear choice for the move because it's already "terribly toxic and near an enormous amount of truck traffic," she said.

Around the same time that Evolutionary Homes was created, another company started by a former Oakland mayor was also trying to build shipping-container housing—particularly on the Army Base. City officials say representatives of both companies and other interested vendors sought meetings with them last year and earlier this year. None of these shipping-container shelter plans ever came to fruition, but some of the companies told city leaders they believed there were major funds—possibly federal COVID relief money—to tap into for the projects.

A former mayor's company sought work at the old Army Base

Another company hoping to build shipping container homes in Oakland was Urban Shelters. The company's website says it's a "development management group" that "collaborates with housing partners" to build housing for homeless or low-income residents. However, it's unclear if the company has built any projects.

Urban Shelters was incorporated by former Oakland Mayor Elihu Harris in 2021. Harris declined to give an on-the-record interview but told The Oaklandside he hasn't been contacted by any law enforcement agency and isn't aware of what they might be looking at regarding the former Army Base. There is no indication that Urban Shelters and its personnel are a subject of the FBI probe.

Fife said Harris reached out to her after he saw her speaking about her vision for using the old Army Base to shelter homeless residents. Her impression was that Harris was focused on environmental remediation. He told her he was working with an environmental engineer and that they could clean up pollution at the site that was holding the city back from using it for housing.

John Loh, a real estate broker and former Port of Oakland commissioner who works with Harris at Urban Shelters, told The Oaklandside that he and Harris established the company because they wanted to help fix Oakland's homelessness problems.

More recently, Loh said, Urban Shelters talked to Councilmember Noel Gallo and Alameda County Supervisor Nate Miley about their business.

When Fife was contacted by Harris and Urban Shelters, she connected them with another group interested in building housing on the army base.

Michael Pyatok, a veteran local architect, has been working with the Wood Street Commons, a group of unhoused people who used to live at the Wood Street camp. Together they've drawn up elaborate and detailed plans for a housing project including numerous other community services