Black Power Network Calls for Housing Emergency NOW

“The Chamber of Commerce advertised this event with the description: ‘Demand to live and work in Oakland is at an unprecedented high, and with that brings new development and great opportunity for new and existing businesses alike.’ “This language is offensive and laden with greed.” said Carroll Fife of The Black Power Network. “It dismisses the thousands of Oaklanders who have been pushed out of the city over the last decade to make way for wolves seeking to make a meal of disrupted lives. We, therefore feel it our duty to disrupt the processes that contribute to this feeding frenzy.”

Despite growing public concern and desperation, Libby Schaaf has pushed ahead with her plans to “develop” Oakland, but at what cost?

— Oakland’s rents are going up faster than any other city in the nation.

— Every day an average of 33 households are evicted in Oakland. The vast majority of these households are Black and Brown people whose families have lived here for generations. At the same time, Alameda County Superior Court is proposing to move all eviction cases to the Hayward, making it much harder for residents to contest illegal evictions. This is a crisis, not an opportunity for profit.

— Black, Brown and working class people in Oakland are being displaced from economic opportunity, from public space, from the political discourse, from educational opportunity, from their homes and from the communities that they helped build.

Scores of people gathered on Friday to tell the Chamber of Commerce, prospective and current business owners in Oakland, and Libby Schaaf that we need a moratorium on no-cause evictions now.

It is a blatant misrepresentation of the facts that we refused to meet with the mayor. We refused to send two individual representatives to meet with her privately where truths could be spun. Rather, in the spirit of transparency, we invited her to come meet with the group. Mayor Schaaf declined.

The assertion that Schaaf and her housing cabinet have developed a plan to solve the housing crisis, or that strong policies to protect native Oaklanders have been enacted, is also false. In reality, their solutions are the absolute bare minimum, and It is shameful that it took an entire year to do anything at all.

There is no single solution to the housing crisis. Of course, we need new market-rate housing. Of course we need the mainstream solutions that the Mayor is proposing. But that is simply not enough. We need solutions that are rooted in the concrete needs of the community today. And in order for those solutions to be developed authentically, those most impacted by development and gentrification need to be at the tables and in the rooms – and not only if they can afford a $95 price tag.