Democracy Now!
Oakland Moms Who Highlighted Housing Crisis Celebrate Unexpected Victory
“In Oakland, California, a months-long struggle between a group of unhoused mothers occupying a vacant home and the real estate firm that owned it ended with an unexpected offer to purchase the property earlier this week. The major win in the mothers’ fight against homelessness and real estate speculation comes just a week after Wedgewood Properties forcibly evicted the families — known as Moms 4 Housing — from the home they were living in for more than two months. Two mothers and two of their supporters were arrested in the early-morning eviction after armed police officers battered down the door. The heavily militarized action sparked widespread outrage and condemnation and left the mothers and their families homeless once again. But on Monday — Martin Luther King Jr. Day — Wedgewood announced, under growing public pressure, that it would sell the property at a fair price through the Oakland Community Land Trust. The moms will then be able to purchase the house through the trust. We speak with Misty Cross, one of the members of Moms 4 Housing, and Carroll Fife, a longtime organizer and director of the Oakland office for Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment. “People are invested in a system that is broken,” Fife says. “It’s incumbent upon our legislators to listen to the moms, to listen to the people who have been part of these programs that are just broken, so we can do something different.”
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