As officials warned they would do in recent weeks, police and Public Works staffers arrived Tuesday morning to do a sweep at an encampment near the Bay Bridge Toll Plaza that had grown to around a dozen residents.

We learned last week that, following a controversial June Supreme Court decision, Oakland city officials were planning to clear the encampment at Toll Plaza Beach — a small stretch of bayfront beach just north of the toll plaza that had attracted a settlement including several RVs, a trailer, and a few shanty structures over the past two years.

As the Chronicle reports, the Toll Plaza Beach encampment began with just one man and his RV back in 2020, 48-year-old Robbie Simpson. Simpson, who had moved his father with dementia into the encampment, suffered a traumatic brain injury himself in a car accident, and he managed to make the beach home for four years.

The beach is across the freeway and just a short distance from Wood Street, another freeway-adjacent area in West Oakland which attracted the city's largest encampment in the last decade, numbering around 300 residents. After a protracted legal battle and several court orders, that encampment was cleared in the spring of 2023. However, photos from the area, and a recent suspicious fire, suggest some campers may have resettled there in recent months.

While the Chronicle's Kevin Fagan describes Toll Plaza Beach as "pristine," it doesn't really appear that way, and Simpson noted that one area near the beach, next to an off-ramp, had been a frequent site of illegal dumping of appliances, stolen cars, and more.

Still, recreational kitesurfers and others who used the beach have complained to the city. And the encampment-clearing plan came both after the Supreme Court decision — which deemed it constitutional for cities to enforce anti-camping laws — and after threats of fines from the Bay Area Conservation and Development Commission. The commission sent the City of Oakland a letter on July 3 saying that the buildup of debris and structures on the shoreline was in violation of conservation ordinances, as the Chronicle reports.

Now it's another game of shuffling — or, as Fagan noted in a retrospective weekend piece about encampment sweeps, "ping-ponging" — this group of a dozen or so homeless people to other locations.

Five people had accepted offers of shelter, but often these don't meet the needs of the people being shuffled off. One resident of the encampment, Michael Avery, told the Chronicle that he was offered a tiny-house cabin at one of the city's shelter sites, but it didn't allow for him to park his van alongside it.

"I’m afraid it would get broken into," Avery tells the paper. "So there’s a spot five of us are thinking of moving to not far from here."

That "spot" could very well be Wood Street, or thereabouts. Thus, ping-pong.

Homeless advocates have decried the Supreme Court decision, and there will continue to be plenty of outcry as SF Mayor London Breed has pledged an "aggressive" encampment-sweeping effort to take place in August.

San Francisco is no longer under legal obligation to make offers of shelter, however officials have said they will continue to do so. And guidance from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld a lower court order obligating the city to "bag and tag" all abandoned belongings so that they may potentially be retrieved by their owners.

Attorney Andrea Henson, who had been fighting against the Toll Plaza Beach eviction, tells the Chronicle that she had simply been advocating for more time "to find accessible, appropriate temporary shelter" to meet the special needs of some of the residents. "Right now they are in a safe place where they can take care of each other. We argue that moving them will create danger for them," Henson said.

Related: Breed Vows Major Encampment Crackdown Coming In August, Says There May Be ‘Criminal Penalties’