OAKLAND, CA — It was such an audacious move, a community organizer challenging the first African American woman to be elected president of the Oakland CA City Council, a two-term incumbent who was endorsed by the mayor. Now that Moms4Housing activist Carroll Fife has won the seat that represents some of Oakland’s worst gentrification crises, Fife insists she’s just getting started.
“This one council seat is just the beginning,” she says. “Our campaign is transitioning into a permanent political organization dedicated to passing transformative legislation and building a progressive majority on the Oakland City Council.”
The 44-year-old mother of three, who found her calling in community organizing, centered her winning campaign on the moral values that housing is a human right, and that public safety should be reimagined by shifting the big budgets flowing to the police to more effective social services.
Oakland, like other major U.S. cities, has seen homeless tent encampments expand for more than a decade as low-income, no benefit jobs explode and gentrification makes housing unaffordable for more and more working people. Meanwhile the profitable building of luxury housing has also exploded. It has been estimated that Oakland has 4 vacant housing units for every homeless person, many kept empty waiting for their value to rise even higher.
“That’s what’s criminal about this housing crisis. There are actually places where people can live,” Fife told Democracy Now! in discussing the Moms4Housing takeover by three homeless mothers and their children of a speculator-owned Oakland home. “This is starting a movement where people who are also experiencing housing insecurity… are waking up… and saying, ‘We deserve housing for all.’”
Fife, who takes office in January, came to public attention as the lead organizer behind Moms4Housing. Moms4Housing inspired housing takeovers in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Minneapolis. Her win has the potential to shift Oakland’s priorities in how the city handles its embrace of gentrification and its troubled history with well-funded police violence.
“We’ve tried over-policing, we’ve tried police reform. None of it is working,” she says. “As people across the nation rise up to demand an end to racist police violence, and as our unfunded liabilities put the City of Oakland on a trajectory toward insolvency, it is time to relocate our public resources to preventing violence and avoiding bankruptcy, instead of reacting to it with more violence and throwing our tax dollars away. By moving just half of the public funding we spend on policing in Oakland into programs that are actually proven to prevent violence, we can build a safer community for everyone.”
