Black mothers and other protesters are rallying around six homeless women who refused to leave the vacant Oakland property they were evicted from last November, sparking public demonstrations calling for more affordable housing in the Bay Area and less pandering to corporate greed. Armed sheriff’s deputies pulled up to the Magnolia Street property in armored vehicles, knocked down the door, and arrested four people in front of demonstrators Tuesday, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. No children were home at the time, the newspaper reported. The property was boarded up and although those arrested have since been released from Santa Rita Jail, mothers with the group Moms 4 Housing have pledged to continue their fight for these women.
Oakland mothers, Misty Cross, 38; Tolani King, 46; and Jesse Turner, 25, were arrested inside the home on eviction-related charges, and Berkeley resident Walter Baker, 28, was arrested outside on a charge of obstructing officers, the Chronicle reported. “My heart goes out to these courageous mothers (who) are standing up for a basic human need,” Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf told the Chronicle and other reporters at an unrelated event.
The home the women were evicted from is owned by Wedgewood, a real-estate firm based in Redondo Beach that paid $501,078 for the three-bedroom property in an auction July 31, with the company planning to renovate and resell it, CBS News reported. "The solution to Oakland's housing crisis is not the redistribution of citizens' homes through illegal break-ins and seizures by squatters," Wedgewood spokesman Sam Singer said in a statement to the news station. "That is the violent, dangerous, and unsuccessful path taken by this handful of activists and supported by three Oakland city council members and the Oakland Community Land Trust." Describing nonviolent black people as violent simply because it touches on a stereotypical depiction is hardly an original play, by the way.
But I suppose I’m supposed to ignore that because Wedgewood officials offered to pay for the moms to stay at a shelter temporarily, CBS News reported. "We will pay Catholic Charities of the East Bay, one of the leading providers of homeless services in Oakland, to provide shelter and assistance to the moms for the next two months," Singer told the news network. "We will pay the charity to have their belongings moved."
Carroll Fife, an Oakland mom and director of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, called the offer exactly what it was—a farce intended only for positive media attention—in a video posted on Twitter by activist @LeftSentThis. “The housing wage in Oakland is $40.88 per hour. That means there is no housing available to working people in this city,” Fife said in the video. “So to offer them this gesture is the work of a public relations firm. It is not intended to truly house the families.”
She said one of the mothers evicted has been homeless for six years, so adding two more months of shelter isn’t going to magically make affordable housing available to her in the city of Oakland, where the average one-bedroom apartment runs $2,500 a month. "If they were truly interested in housing the families, they would sell this home for what they purchased it for," Fife said. "They have hired a multimillion-dollar firm to spin it and get people including the media to think other than what is actually happening." Fife and the women of Mothers 4 Housing are asking for Wedgewood and other companies like it to sell property to land trusts so that houses remain permanently affordable for the working class “in perpetuity.” “And that is not in the interest of a multimillion-dollar corporation that’s in the business of making profit off what should not be a commodity,” Fife said.