Carroll Fife got elected in part on her promise to solve homelessness. “Are you sick of begging your elected leaders to house those without shelter?” she asked when she was running for City Council. When she won that election, she demanded, “Make housing a human right!”
So why is Fife holding up a 200-unit housing development near the West Oakland BART station that includes 16 “very low-income units”? “Run on poetry, govern on prose,” goes the old witticism about politicians who promise stuff they don’t deliver. But Fife’s case is particularly egregious, because the former Moms4Housing activist, who made national headlines when she squatted in an empty house, has made housing a top priority.
The West Oakland project was to be an eight-story residential building with 222 units, 16 of them designated “very low-income.” Clearly it would have represented a major opportunity for desperately-needed housing, and since it is located in Fife’s district, her support would have helped it forward.
But last week Fife blocked it, citing “concerns” from neighbors about “pollution in the air and the water and the ground in West Oakland.” She demanded “a focused study on how this project is going to impact [people’s] lives,” despite the fact that, as the San Francisco Chronicle reports, “The [Oakland] Planning Commission unanimously approved the project this [2021] spring after conducting environmental reviews required by state law as well as referring to a city environmental review of West Oakland conducted in 2014.”
Fife’s actions resulted in at least one pro-housing organization, the Housing Action Coalition, threatening to sue the city of Oakland if it does not allow the already-approved project to proceed.
I don’t know who these “neighbors” are who expressed “concerns” to Fife. I wish she were as responsive to the “concerns” of ordinary Oaklanders, including me, who resent Fife’s efforts to defund the Oakland Police Department. Be that as it may, it’s odd, isn’t it, that Fife—the “housing is a human right!” proponent—should now be opposed to going ahead with the West Oakland project.
Steve Heimoff