Housing activism forcing change in Oakland
‘We are fed up’: Residents are taking a stand, and the city is responding
The evidence is everywhere — from people squatting in a house they don’t own, to tenants refusing to pay rent, to shouts of “housing is a human right” ringing across the city.
Oaklanders have had enough. Pushed to the breaking point by the city’s staggering rent and housing prices, Oakland residents are responding in ways that are increasingly bold, desperate — and sometimes illegal.
Protests over rent prices, evictions and the treatment of the homeless are happening all around the state, including in San Jose, San Francisco and Berkeley, but nowhere is the unrest as apparent as in Oakland, where activists responding to the housing crisis have captured the nation’s attention, drawn the support of state and local lawmakers, and sparked policy changes.
“We are fed up. We are fed up and we are tired,” said Candice Elder, founder and CEO of community organizing group The East Oakland Collective. “We are fighting back against the further displacement of Oakland’s longtime
and vulnerable residents.”
The movement came to a head with the high-profile victory of Moms 4 Housing, a group of activists who took over an empty investor-owned house in West Oakland and, after a twomonth standoff, pressured the owner to sell the building and let them keep living there.
But the momentum has been building for months. Nearly two dozen activists were arrested in November after setting up a tent encampment in front of City Hall to protest the city’s treatment of the homeless. In East Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood, a group of tenants is refusing to pay rent until their landlord agrees to sell the building so that it can be converted into affordable housing.
Earlier this year, activists showed up to protest a rally for Senate Bill 50, which aimed to increase housing but which opponents said would exacerbate displacement, and at Mayor Libby Schaaf’s State of the City address, activists loudly demanded better housing policies. Now, behind an East 12th Street Burger King, a group is building an unsanctioned tiny-home village for the homeless.
“It doesn’t matter whether it’s right or wrong, legal or not legal,” said 34-year-old Brent Shipp, who has been homeless for more than six years and now lives behind the Burger King in a shed-sized house with no permits, plumbing or electricity. “If you don’t have anywhere to go, and you have to sleep on the streets, you’re going to do what you have to do.”
Oakland has become “ground zero” for the housing crisis and the recent surge of activism, said gentrification and displacement expert Peter Dreier, chair of the urban and environmental policy department at Occidental College in Los Angeles.
That’s partly because gentrification is changing the city at a breakneck pace, with techies and others priced out of San Francisco
moving to Oakland, driving up prices and displacing lower-income residents. Homes in Oakland now sell for a median price of $744,000 — up from $461,000 five years ago, according to Zillow. That’s still a relative bargain compared with San Francisco, where homes are selling for $1.3 million.
But that price hike has dramatically changed who can afford to live in the city. Oakland’s black community is under threat, with black residents dropping from 31% of the city’s population in 2005 to 23% in 2017, according to census data — a destabilizing shift for a city that was nearly half black in the 1980s and has largely been shaped by black culture. At the same time, Oakland has a deep history of activism — from the Black Panther Party to Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter — roots that have inspired residents being pushed out today to fight back.
Oakland’s sprawling homeless encampments also are adding fuel to the fire. While rents soared,
Oakland’s homeless population grew by 47% from 2017 to 2019, with more than 4,000 people living in tents, cars, RVS and other substandard dwellings, according to the city’s biennial point-in-time count. As tent cities and shantytowns spread over sidewalks and vacant land, tensions are rising.
In December, Assistant to the City Administrator Joe Devries was shouted down and then physically accosted by activists at a City Council committee meeting during which he was supposed to present a report on managing homeless encampments, including a proposal to cite homeless people living outside in public spaces.
Even so, by and large, officials have publicly applauded housing activists’ actions — even if they’re illegal. Everyone from Schaaf to Sen. Scott Wiener to Gov. Gavin Newsom threw their support behind Moms 4 Housing.
“It would be bad for any politician to say something bad about (Moms 4 Housing),” Dreier said. “They’ve become a symbol of the housing crisis.”
Less than a week after the Moms 4 Housing activists were handcuffed and forced out of the West Oakland house they’d been squatting in, the house’s corporate owner, under pressure, agreed to sell it and let them move back in. Inspired by the activists, Oakland City Councilwoman Nikki Fortunato Bas proposed an ordinance that would require property owners to give tenants or nonprofits first dibs on homes going up for sale. Sen. Nancy Skinner, D-berkeley, introduced a similar state measure.
It was a monumental win for the activist group.
“This is a game-changer,” Dreier said. “I think we’re going to look back in five or 10 years and see that the Moms 4 Housing victory was a turning point in California housing history.”
But what activists see as a victory, some landlords and property rights lawyers see as an extremely troubling sign. Landlord attorney Alan Horwitz, who runs an Oakland law firm he calls “The Evictors,” worries that by supporting Moms 4 Housing, city officials are encouraging squatting.
“I think it sets a tough example that if you just go to these places and you break in, then you can be rewarded for that,” Horwitz said. “It makes me fearful that it’s just going to create a wave of people doing these things when they don’t have the right to be doing that.”
While Oakland stands out, this type of activism is sweeping the state at a pace Dreier hasn’t seen since protests in the late 1970s spurred dozens of cities to adopt rent control. He credits that partly to the aftermath of the real estate bubble bursting in 2008. Companies swept in and bought up huge swaths of foreclosed homes, flipping them for profit, or keeping them and renting to tenants who often never met their landlord. Now, more than a decade later, renters are rebelling against those corporate landlords, Dreier said.
At the same time, the price to buy a house has climbed out of reach for many, forcing more people to remain renters. That growing population of lowand middle-income renters is fueling the movement fighting for housing, he said.
In Oakland, the new surge of activism already is making a difference. When the city “sweeps” a homeless encampment, word often spreads on social media and activists show up to protest. In the past few months, the city has changed how it handles those sweeps, Elder said, giving residents more time to pack up and move, and making more of an effort to house them elsewhere. Before clearing an encampment at Mosswood Park in January, the city worked with Kaiser Permanente to provide temporary housing for the 50 residents.
It’s not enough, said Elder, who would like to see a moratorium halting sweeps entirely, but it’s something.
“We definitely see the city in the last six months or so being open to new ideas and new solutions,” Elder said. “We often criticized them for not being open enough, and we’re still navigating that. But we have seen a difference in the past six months.”
Darin Ranelletti, the city’s policy director for housing security, agrees that something is different.
“It’s an exciting time in housing policy, although things have gotten so bad,” he said. “Because they have gotten so bad, I feel like there’s the momentum now to really have some strong policy work and funding to address this issue at all levels — at the city level, at the regional level and at the state level. So that’s very exciting.”