PHOTO/SARAH MENEFEE
Editor’s note: On November 24, homeless-led groups set up the Housing Justice Village in front of Oakland City Hall. With 13 tents, this action was organized by The Village, ‘First they came for the homeless,’ Where Do We Go, and others. Twenty people locked themselves into their tents and were arrested, their tents and possessions destroyed. Below is a statement by organizer Maowu- nyo “Needa Bee” de Assis and some words from her tent that night, waiting for the arrests.
Tomorrow we start a new Village. For all of us who have had our homes bulldozed by the city of Oakland. For all of us who have had our vehicles that we lived in towed by the city of Oakland. For all of us who have our medication, medical equipment, paperwork, family photos, ashes of our loved ones who passed away, work uniforms, laptops, clothes, IDs, EBT cards thrown away in front of our eyes despite our pleas to stop. For all of us who have been left on the side of the road after the city demolishes our curbside communities. For all us who were promised support and help but instead got mistreatment—we come together, we assert our right to housing and our right to exist, to flex our resilience…
We came out here to protest how the city is treating homeless folks and also to shed light on how they are mismanaging. This is public space, we are protesting, we are getting shut down. We were notified at 10 pm that the DPW is coming here to take out the ‘trash,’ which is us—one of their biggest jobs is to destroy homeless encampments, they treat homeless people like we are trash. They are anti-homeless, which means they are anti-human.
You’ve got the economic system, you’ve got gentrification, which is making so many of us homeless. So we’re trying to fix it. We’re giving out tents, free food, tarps, and pallets to put your tent on if it rains. This government is not trying to help, they don’t do things like this, homeless people did this!
We are not just speaking for ourselves, but for the 4,000 homeless people in Oakland. Every time a village pops up, they try to destroy it immediately. They ignore people who are totally suffering. The Village creates encampments where there is no suffering, and they want to destroy us. We are speaking for the rights of people who are living like this, who have lost their homes because of gentrification. We are just gonna keep on getting louder and louder, homeless and housed folks together. We aren’t gonna leave without a fight.
