When Bay Area activists Moms4Housing began their campaign, they were fighting gentrification and institutional poverty. Now, as California's housing crisis compounds during the COVID-19 pandemic, their work has taken on new significance.
, 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.
Misty Cross, one of the founding members of Moms 4 Housing, at the office of Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment in the Fruitvale neighborhood of East Oakland.Photographd by Dana Lixenberg 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 , a grassroots, statewide community organization fighting for racial and economic justice.
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.
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