These Moms Fought for a Home—And Started a Movement

In Oakland, the Bay Area’s deep-rooted housing crisis is starkly visible. In makeshift encampments, the city's homeless live in tents, old cars, and mobile homes clustered together in parking lots. Vacant houses, all chipped paint and rotting wood, stand feet away from newly renovated properties that tech industry transplants would swoop up in a heartbeat.

At the end of last year, Moms 4 Housing, a group of Oakland-born unhoused and marginally housed community activists, began a campaign to face these issues head-on. They planned an occupation of one home that had been sitting vacant for years, setting their sights on fighting gentrification, institutional poverty, and a speculative housing market that’s completely transformed the city that they grew up in. It garnered attention worldwide, and now, in the wake of COVID-19, their actions have taken on a whole new context. How can California’s homeless population heed the call to shelter in place when there’s no such shelter to speak of?

Dominique Walker, one of the cofounders of Moms 4 Housing, recalls what the East Oakland of her youth was like. “Everybody owned their house on those blocks since the ’50s, when black folks were moving here to escape whatever terror they had going on in the South. They built their lives here, and they worked and passed those houses down to the younger generations.”

It’s a world away from the neighborhood today. After attending college in Mississippi and returning to Oakland last spring, Walker was taken aback by what she found. “I would hear stories like, ‘Nobody’s left in Oakland.’ But it wasn’t really real until I got back here.” What she saw galvanized her to become a full-time organizer for tenants’ rights at Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE), a grassroots, statewide community organization fighting for racial and economic justice.

Misty Cross is another Moms 4 Housing activist who finds the West Oakland that she grew up in to be drastically different from the one that her four kids now live in. When she was a kid, she’d spend time at the arcade, the ice-skating rink, the creek. “Now with all this development, my kids have nowhere to go. Everything’s changed,” she says.

Cross traces her outspokenness on issues of justice to a traumatic injury that she experienced years ago. In 2006, Cross was shot three times on the street. “I had to learn how to walk and talk all over again,” she says. “When my voice came back, I started fighting,” she says, “and I’ve been fighting ever since.”

Last year, Walker and Cross, who had crossed paths over the years thanks to their overlapping circles of community activism, found themselves dealing with the same issues. Walker couldn’t afford any suitable housing, and spent her nights in hotels with her newborn and her young daughter; Cross had spent years on family members’ couches, her four kids in tow.

A community member pointed out to Walker that 2928 Magnolia Street, a small, two-story home with blue shutters in West Oakland, had been sitting vacant for two years. The house wasn’t in pristine condition—small holes punctured the roof, and the roots of a large tree were starting to push up the foundation—but it could still provide shelter and space.

The door was unlocked, and Walker moved in—without the owner’s consent—with her kids in November. They pressure-washed the outside; did construction on the roof; installed a water heater, a fridge, and a stove. Community members brought over crock pots, flowers, and plants.

It wasn’t the only vacant house on that block, but 2928 Magnolia was the only one owned by a real estate company that specialized in flipping properties, according to Walker. Vacant homes are abundant in Oakland—according to the latest U.S. Census data, there are 5,898, enough to house the city’s homeless population, estimated last summer at 4,071 people. Though some housing activists claim that the crux of the issue in California lies less in worrying about vacancies than in addressing the state’s shortage of homes, Moms 4 Housing set their sights on speculation. “We’re seeing speculation displace our people. It was the perfect way to highlight that and to also house ourselves at the same time,” Walker says of setting up residence on Magnolia Street.

At that time, Cross was living in a shelter elsewhere in Alameda County, and she’d spend weekends at the house on Magnolia with her kids for some respite. For Cross, the process of even getting into a shelter had been Kafkaesque. She tried calling the 211 hotline, which unhoused individuals in Alameda County can call to receive housing information and assistance to help them get placed in a shelter, but Cross says it can take weeks to even get through to an operator. (211 Alameda County did not respond to a request for comment by the time this story was published.) She eventually got called in for an intake interview, and as she discussed her experiences with a housing navigator, Cross began to cry. “It was the worst I ever felt. Even after I couldn’t talk and walk after being shot…when I felt that I could not provide for my kids and find a place for them to sleep, that was my breaking point.”

Once in the shelter, Cross felt the environment was too strict for her children. Walker, too, emphasizes the importance of proper housing for childhood development, something that she experienced firsthand with her then-newborn son. “Twenty-eight percent of Oakland’s homeless population is under the age of 18. Being homeless affects your brain development and your physical and mental health. For my son, he wasn’t walking. When we moved into the home on Magnolia Street, he took his first steps and he said his first words. I think we take having space for granted—when you’re homeless, or when you’re housing insecure, your children don’t even have space to be able to crawl and develop and walk.”

After three weeks of living in the house, the moms received an eviction notice on behalf of Catamount Properties, a subsidiary of real estate investment firm Wedgewood, which bought the home last summer at a foreclosure auction for $501,078. The company bills itself as “a leading acquirer of distressed residential real estate.” Each year Wedgewood buys hundreds of Bay Area foreclosed homes, renovates them, and sells them for profit. It’s one of a number of speculative real estate companies operating in the area, and their practices at large are accelerating gentrification and driving up rent and home prices astronomically. According to census data, Oakland’s black population declined by 25 percent between 2000 and 2010, a period during which there was comparatively little real estate development. Between 2007 and 2011, investors bought 42% of all properties that went through foreclosure, and 93% of these homes were located in the flatlands, or the lower-income areas of the city, according to a 2012 report.

In a statement given to Vogue, Sam Singer, Wedgewood’s spokesperson, defended the company’s business model and its actions at all junctures. “As it does with all properties, Wedgewood planned to renovate and rehab it as soon as possible and put it back into the housing market, thereby improving the neighborhood, the community, and the city.” Singer termed Moms 4 Housing’s actions as a straightforward case of illegal entry and occupation. “They had no legal and ethical defense of their actions,” he said. “Wedgewood is sympathetic to the plight of the homeless and is a major contributor to shelter programs, inner-city youth, and the disadvantaged. The company hears what the individuals who were illegally squatting at the Magnolia Street home are saying—but it does not respect nor does it condone the theft of property.”

The moms challenged the eviction notice, and last December their attorneys argued that housing is a human right, which the United Nations codified in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Most of the United States, though, still does not ensure the right to shelter. The judge ruled that Walker had no right to stay in the home. Walker and the rest of the moms, though, refused to leave.

Early on the morning of January 14, dozens of armed deputies from the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department, complete with an armored vehicle, AR-15 rifles, and a robot sent in to scout for potential threats, descended upon the home and arrested Cross on misdemeanor charges of resisting and obstructing the eviction. (The charges were dropped in February.) A locksmith working with law enforcement reportedly tipped off the mothers about the raid, so their children were out of the house. Within an hour of the police response, hundreds of neighbors and supporters had gathered outside thanks to a text message blast. “Folks were like, ‘We have your back,’” Walker says. “But I didn’t know they had our back like that. Moments like that just give us the strength to keep going and keep fighting.”

This network of support proved especially important in the face of detractors who criticized the group’s actions. “It was hard to hear people you think you know say that you’re a bum, you’re just lazy, you just want someone to give you something,” Cross says. “We had times when we just broke down and sat there and held each other and just cried. People don’t know how hard it is to face the world like that.”

After the eviction, as part of a deal brokered by Oakland mayor Libby Schaaf and Governor Gavin Newsom, Wedgewood agreed to sell the home to the Oakland Community Land Trust (OCLT). Created in 2009 to deal with the foreclosure crisis, the trust buys land off the speculative market that stays affordable and in community control in perpetuity—the trust can then transition ownership or rental of the building to the actual residents. Carroll Fife, director of the Oakland chapter of ACCE, says this model essentially voids the speculative aspect of the real estate transaction. “If you want to sell the building, that’s fine, but you can never sell the land,” she explains.

In spite of the common narrative that the moms have proven victorious over Wedgewood, it’s still uncertain if Cross and her children will move back into the house any time soon. (Walker recently moved into a Berkeley apartment with the help of another land trust.) Negotiations over the sale of the house between Wedgewood and the Oakland Land Trust are ongoing.

Gentrification in Oakland, which Walker and Cross have experienced firsthand, can be traced in some ways to the foreclosure crisis of 2008. (Federal redlining housing policies, though, which excluded families of color from homeownership and the generational wealth-building that typically follows, date back to the 1930s.) In the years leading up to the foreclosure crisis, lower-income communities of color were most affected by predatory home loans, which often led to defaults, evictions, and foreclosures. At that time, Oakland neighborhoods where 80% or more of the residents were people of color made up less than half of all housing units in the city, but they counted nearly 80% of all foreclosures. Tens of thousands of longtime resident black and Latino families were subsequently displaced, which left space for corporate real estate agencies to swoop in. In some cities, especially those with an abundance of foreclosed homes, like Nashville or Tampa, housing activists claim that house flipping can generally play a positive role in the market because of the dearth of new single-family homes being built. In Oakland, however, it essentially wiped the slate clean for gentrification—in a city that sits in close proximity to the booming tech industry.

ACCE, where Walker is the head organizer of the Black Housing Union, has supported Moms 4 Housing from its inception. Its largest Oakland group is the Anti-Displacement chapter, composed of homeowners who lost their properties in the foreclosure crisis. “We’re actually experiencing the second wave of devastation from the foreclosure crisis in Oakland, because now folks are getting ridiculous rent increases after losing their homes—and that’s only if they’re lucky enough to become renters. Some folks have been displaced from the city and state altogether,” Fife says from ACCE’s Oakland offices. In a 2019 survey administered to 1,681 homeless people, both marginally housed and unsheltered, 9% claimed that their primary cause of homelessness was due to eviction or foreclosure.

With nowhere else to go, many have found themselves in homeless encampments. In a New York Times survey from last year, San Francisco Bureau Chief Thomas Fuller counted more than 100 camps in Oakland, some of which operate more like mini cities. One oft-cited example was 77th Avenue Rangers, a camp established in 2014 near the Oakland Coliseum. (The camp’s infrastructure has since deteriorated, and many of its residents have moved out.) Full-service medical clinics visited the camp on a weekly basis, and the City of Oakland provided the residents with porta-potties and a washing station, amenities which most encampments lack.

At 37MLK, an encampment located at the corner of 37th Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Way, twinkle lights zigzag across the dozen or so tents, some of which are bordered by miniature white picket fences sticking up from the soil. The residents, almost all of whom are Oakland natives, have set up a solar shower, a communal garden, and a shared kitchen and sink. 37MLK founder Stefani Echeverría-Fenn, a college instructor at the Jesuit School of Theology at Santa Clara University, lives two doors down. Every day, she walked past this vacant lot on her way to work. “Over the past decade, I’ve seen a ton of mainly working-class and elderly black folks on my block get evicted or leave their housing due to gentrification and unscrupulous landlord practices,” she says.

Echeverría-Fenn spent her college years living in shelters in New York City, but it wasn’t until a mother figure ended up in living in an encampment in Oakland last August that she decided to convert the lot. “I just felt like I had to stand up for this chosen family member of mine.”

Now 15 women, along with some of their male partners, live there. It’s functional—safer and cleaner than many other encampments. Echeverría-Fenn can take trash to her dumpster and ferry clean water from her house. But, she says, it’s still far from ideal. “I really consider this encampment a harm reduction measure,” she says. “Humans don’t deserve to have to live in tents, no matter how nice, no matter how clean.”

California’s pernicious housing problem is one that can’t be solved long-term by reclaiming vacant homes—even though there are enough to house the homeless population in both Oakland and San Francisco. But it’s one of the few tangible answers that marginally housed people across the state, from San Francisco to Los Angeles, have right now, and the moms’ occupation in Oakland has become a kind of a guiding light. Oakland councilwoman Nikki Fortunato Bas proposed a law that would give tenants the first opportunity to purchase property that their landlord is selling, in direct response to the moms’ case. Tenants in an apartment complex at 29th Avenue in Fruitvale, who are currently in negotiations to buy the building from their landlord through the Oakland Community Land Trust, also say they’ve been inspired by Moms 4 Housing.

Thanks to Moms 4 Housing’s actions, residents of encampments in Oakland feel emboldened to demand more for themselves and their communities. “It had a huge effect on our camp,” says 37MLK founder Echeverría-Fenn. “Our camp is all-black—virtually all native Oaklanders, and majority women—and many residents of our camp really saw themselves in the women of Moms 4 Housing. It’s encouraged us to reach for more, this idea of not begging for scraps of basic human decency, but going in from a position of strength and power and asserting that this is what we deserve.”

Moms 4 Housing’s tactics have taken on new significance as California’s housing crisis has compounded during the COVID-19 pandemic. There’s a disturbing disconnect between the mandate that Californians must shelter in place when so many are simply seeking shelter in the first place. California Governor Gavin Newsom has authorized $150 million in funding to prevent the virus from spreading among the state’s homeless population. Los Angeles is converting dozens of recreation centers into emergency shelters, and counties all over the state are providing handwashing stations, portable toilets, and clean water to encampments. Though Oakland passed an emergency two-month moratorium on evictions for residential renters, nonprofits, and small businesses, ACCE is pushing for full cancellation of all mortgage and rental debt that people will have accumulated in that time.

Governor Newsom also signed an executive order that will designate $50 million to lease hotel rooms and buy travel trailers for homeless people across the state. As of mid-April, 15,000 rooms had been identified—not nearly enough for an estimated 150,000 homeless people. In mid-April, Governor Newsom admitted that less than 40% of these rooms were filled.

In the past few weeks, spurred by the spread of COVID-19, Reclaiming Our Homes, a group of homeless and marginally housed people in Los Angeles, have occupied some 13 vacant homes in L.A.’s El Sereno neighborhood. The homes were originally purchased by the California Department of Transportation for a project that would extend the 710 freeway; the plan was later scrapped. Founding members and Los Angeles natives Ruby Gordillo and Martha Escudero were among the first to move in, and they too cite Moms 4 Housing as a direct influence on their work, saying that the pandemic accelerated their original timetable. “It’s immoral to have these houses sitting here while people are going to be dying on the streets,” Escudero says. “It’s a public-health crisis. If it affects one, it affects all of us.”

Moms 4 Housing will eventually attempt to secure a headquarters, where they can take meetings and create a space for other mothers who are going through the same things. “We see this continuing. Everything that’s happening right now is about to blow up,” Cross says. “This is happening everywhere where black and brown communities are, not just here. So many mothers have hugged me and cried on my shoulder and said, ‘I’m so proud. I wanted to do that, but I was scared, and I’m proud of y’all.’”