Housing activist
Carroll Fife is a housing activist, a co-founder of Moms 4 Housing, and the city councilmember of Oakland, California for its 3rd district since January 2021.
Early life and education.
As a teenager, Fife, the middle of three children, worked in Muskegon Heights, Michigan. Her grandfather was one of the first Black city councilmen.
After becoming a parent, she settled in Pasadena, California and then moved to Oakland in 1999 to create a small school.
Fife has a degree in psychology and worked as a paralegal before working for the community-based Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE). In 2017 she was named the interim director of the Oakland/San Francisco chapter of ACCE.
Housing activism.
Fife received national attention in 2019 as the co-founder of Moms 4 Housing, a group of Black mothers who occupied a vacant corporate-owned West Oakland home, advocating that housing should be recognized as a basic human right.
In a 2022 interview, Fife told SFGate that homelessness in Oakland was directly due to "neo-liberal policies" and "race-blind policies" created by the "overproduction of market rate units and rapid speculation". In June 2022, the council unanimously approved Fife's plan to create a rent registry to make rental property ownership and historical rental price information available to the public.
City councilmember.
Fife won her 2020 election to the Oakland City Council, defeating the two-term incumbent by nearly 20 percentage points. In 2021, she voted to redirect $17.4 million of a $27 million budget increase from the Oakland Police Department to the Department of Violence Prevention.
On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, in January 2023, Fife, a Black woman, publicized the violent and racist threats she had received against her and other public officials. Fife told KQED news, "The only reason I posted it is because it’s gotten worse lately. Because this has been happening to me, honestly, pretty consistently since Moms 4 Housing".
In November 2023, the Associated Press reported that Fife's resolution to call for a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war passed the Oakland City Council 8–0, unanimously.
References.
 ;templatestyles src="Reflist/styles.css" / ;