Moms 4 Housing: On Poverty, Housing Inequity in Oakland and How Fair Market Housing is a Feminist Issue

Imagine being a single Black mother- you didn’t expect to be a single mom, but like all Black women have been taught for generations, you take it on the chin and adjust. 

Now add to that a job making low wages (whether or not you have a degree or special certifications), a child or children who depend on you and you happen to call one of the nation’s most expensive states home. Sprinkle in rent (insane amount), bills and ONLY necessities and you’ve got a great concoction for poverty fueled homelessness. 

A few black women in Oakland couldn’t afford any version of rent or mortgage in the Bay Area due to shockingly exorbitant price tags, so they found an abandoned house to live in with their kids temporarily, both as a housing option and act of resistance to the sky high price of living. Smart, right? 

It was a quick fix to a permanent problem...until  they were forcefully evicted in the early hours of the morning in January with SWAT and cops in riot gear, a tank and AK-47’s. 

This was and is both the reality and nightmare of Moms 4 Housing, a collective of mainly black mothers who are homeless and insecurely housed due to lack of affordable housing options. Their aim is to ultimately secure housing away from the monster housing proprietors and spectators in Oakland. The group was founded after many Black mothers discovered that they weren’t alone in the fight for accessible and cost-efficient housing.  

2 Black mothers, Dominique King and Sameerah Karim moved into the home and set up bedrooms for themselves and their children in November 2019. King had done extensive research and discovered the property had been bought that August by Wedgewood Properties, a notoriously known rehab housing corporation that buys houses for the low, maybe added a new coat of paint,and sold them for a heart stopping amount. The community donated furniture, and the women made it home for themselves and their children-Walker lamented how her son took his first steps and said his first words in the house. They were later joined by two other mothers, Tolani King and Misty Cross. 

They were very clear from the start that they intended to buy the house-but Wedgewood wasn’t having it and began working procedure to evict the women shortly after they moved in. Wedgewood offered the women free moving assistance and two months at a Catholic shelter if they moved (a very paltry offer), but the women refused with great reason. They received an eviction notice on January 10th. They stayed in an act of civil disobedience and desperation. 

The storm rolled on on January 14th when the Alameda County Sheriff’s department marched in the home, forcefully evicted the women and threw out their things and arrested two of them-this marked the beginning of a media firestorm about the reason why the women were evicted and if there was affordable housing in the Bay, this wouldn’t even an issue. 

In a dramatic and landmark decision as of January 20th, Wedgewood Properties Management has agreed in good faith to sell the house to Oakland Community Land Trust and negotiate price-  the moms can officially live in the house when the sale is complete. 

“This is what happens when we organize, when people come together to build the beloved community,”said King. “Today we honor Dr. King’s radical legacy by taking Oakland back from banks and corporations.”

Moms 4 Housing has changed the conversation on affordable housing/homelessness: flipping the narrative that becoming homeless isn’t always the result of making bad decisions or crime, but something as simple and fluid as simple math, economics and systemic racism. 

Access to sustainable living is a rising crisis in large gentrified and over populated states like California. There are a variety of specific studies that describe why housing is a socioeconomic issue for women, considering that 60% of families that are unhoused are single mothers, mostly black. 

Without substantial living that doesn’t exceed more of 30% of a single mother’s income, women are more succeptible to rape, domestic abuse, poverty and depression because these are side affects that come from forcing women into finding alternative ways to live or worse, survive on the streets. There’s also the emotional and societal burden for women to curate a domestic safe haven for their families- with institutionalized sexism and racism as an underlying factor of these mainly White and liberal big name corporations, women are being put in a pressure cooker over what is a human right. 

Increasingly punitive and underfunded welfare programs, institutionalized racism and sexism and oppression practices are all leading factors into Black women (especially single mothers) being homeless, insecurely housed and sleeping in cars. 

We have the resources to eradicate homelessness, we just need the people power and political policy to press down on lawmakers to uproot these systems. Housing is a human right, and no mother or child should have to choose between jail and housing or food and housing. I stand with groups like Moms 4 Housing and you should, too-our Black women and children deserve better. A win for one is a win for us all.