‘Make Housing a Human Right’: Activist Carroll Fife on Joining the Oakland City Council

Carroll Fife, the longtime Oakland community organizer and social justice advocate will soon become the newest member of the Oakland City Council, after defeating two-term incumbent Lynette Gibson McElhaney in a major upset.

On Monday, Fife was announced as the winner of the race for the District 3 seat, which was among the most fiercely contested of the five council contests in the November election. She campaigned on a platform of police reform, environmental justice and the concept of housing as a human right.

Fife, who takes office in January, will represent a district that includes parts of West Oakland, Downtown, Uptown, Jack London Square and Lake Merritt.

Fife gained widespread recognition as the lead organizer behind Moms 4 Housing, a grassroots collective launched after a group of homeless mothers occupied a vacant West Oakland house late last year that was owned by a real estate investment firm.

KQED Forum's Michael Krasny spoke with Fife on Tuesday about her vision for Oakland and the progressive political movement she is building. Below are excerpts from the interview, edited for brevity and clarity.

What do you mean by "housing as a human right?"

I have to clarify, because I think there's still some misunderstanding about that particular civil disobedience action. It was completely to highlight the fact that we believe that housing should not be a commodity. It should not be something that is sold to the highest bidder. And if you do not have the wherewithal to compete in the process of acquiring housing, then you are out of luck.

We're seeing the ramifications of that throughout not just Oakland, but the state of California and the world, really. So we say that housing should be a right and everyone should have access to it, just like they have access to clean water, public education and all of the things that are necessary to build a basic and decent life.

So, you're talking about changing the whole nature of what you call the commodification of housing and moving more toward housing for low-and, frankly, no-income people?

Right. There are many people that are unable to work and have no income. There are seniors who cannot work and can't earn the money that is necessary to afford to live here. There are people who are disabled permanently, who are born that way or through any situation that leads to disability, just unable to earn income. So are we saying that they shouldn't have housing because they can't afford to to live here?

That is one of the primary reasons that housing should be a human right. We have foster children. We have young people that are in college; so many people that are barred from having a safe, affordable place to stay because they just do not earn the money necessary. And even working people are out of reach for most of the housing that we see that's coming onto the market here, [and] that's on the market. There's a huge problem with our entire paradigm. And we need to shift unless we want to continue to see the outcomes that we're seeing with tent cities under every overpass and every street. And it's just untenable at this moment.

And now the home prices are increasing in the Bay Area and we're going to see an end to [eviction] moratoriums soon. And it's just a problem that is insurmountable unless we do something completely different than what we've been doing.

How do you implement this? Would you demand, for example, a mandate that 20% of new housing be affordable housing?

What I would like to see is us put our best thinking towards what it would look like to make housing a human right. That includes people that are, to me, not necessarily doing as much as they possibly could. I think we need all of our best thinking from our developers, from our affordable housing community, from housing rights organizations. Right now, we have public land that could be utilized.

What you're speaking of, the 20% and private developments: I do believe that we all need to do more, especially market-rate housing developers who have been paying impact fees, who've reached out to me even before this election. Like, 'Carroll, can you help us with a campaign? Because we've been paying impact fees and we don't know where they're going. We don't know how much is in the impact fee fund.' So it's not just a failure, according to me, it's a failure across the board from every spectrum of individual that's engaged in housing development.

Are you also talking about an end to real estate speculation as we've come to know it, and things like rent strikes?

Speculation hurts residents. Speculation harms entire communities and entire neighborhoods. When people are engaged in buying up residential property for the sole purpose of flipping it and making as much money as they can, then that leaves out an entire group of individuals who cannot compete in that type of market.

And that's had a specific impact on Black people in the city of Oakland. And it's had a drastic impact on the district that I live in, where speculators, including Wedgwood — the LLC that bought Mom's house — buys properties in bulk. They buy 200 to 300 homes per month for the purpose of speculation.

I think that there should be regulation on that type of behavior. I think that's what's causing displacement and gentrification, and really, racialized displacement. As you've said on your show, 70% of Oakland's homeless population is Black. That is not a coincidence; it is directly tied to our housing policies.

Can you talk about your support for expanding rent control, particularly in light of California voters rejecting Proposition 21, which could have helped expand it? 

The mayor [Libby Schaaf] and the outgoing city councilmember [McElhaney], are far more moderate on their views around rental protections, particularly rent control. They are part of a waning chorus of detractors for rent control. Because the reality is ... the state of California and the residents and the voters of California overwhelmingly supported affordable housing. What they are responding to is millions, hundreds of millions of dollars in ad propaganda that say exactly what we are saying, exactly the same thing that I'm saying, which is Californians want more affordable housing.

The proponents of Prop. 21 just lied in their advertising. So when you lie in your advertising and say that Prop. 21 will kill affordable housing and people were like, 'No, we need affordable housing,' it's just the voters being lied to. And there's never enough money on the opposing side to counter the hundreds of millions of dollars that the real estate industry puts into ads that pop up on every possible medium that you can think of. So what needs to happen is just more organizing on the other end, because that's what's telling the truth about our current conditions.

Can you outline where you want to go with police reform?

For years, city workers, public workers, firefighters, teachers, sewer workers and nurses have received cuts to their budgets. The only institution that consistently gets raises and never has to go through any type of cuts is our police department.

I'd like to see an audit of where we're actually spending our time and have the police bear the same responsibility to caring for our city as all other city workers. I would like to see mental health responses to 911 calls. I would like to see — similar to Albuquerque, New Mexico and Berkeley, California — civilianized traffic stops and things like that.

But I do think that we really need to look at where this $330 million dollars a year is going and find out where we can invest some of those funds into city services that truly keep us safe.