We call Carroll Fife a “squatter” because of what she did when she seized that West Oakland house in 2019 and ignored the owners’ request to leave, thus fueling the revolutionary (and illegal) act she dubbed “Moms 4 Housing.”
In Fife’s fantasy, since housing is “a human right” she had the right to squat in a house she did not own or rent, and stay there for as long as she liked.
Of course, Fife never could explain just how or why “housing is a human right.” Says who—Carroll Fife? Those words do not occur in the Constitution or in the Declaration of Independence or anywhere in U.S. jurisprudence. The U.S. Code, it’s true, declares that “the policy of the United States [is] to provide, within constitutional limitations, for fair housing throughout the United States,” but that’s a far cry from a mandate that everyone has the right to a home, much less to steal one.
It’s also true that 1948’s United Nations Declaration of Human Rights declares the right to housing for “everyone,” but that document, aspirational as it is, enjoys no legal standing, and has never been used as justification for the theft of real estate.
The word “squatter” has a long and unsavory history in America. In fact, squatters were loathed even before the Revolution, being considered idle, shiftless vagrants. A 1788 letter to the founding father, James Madison, from a colleague complained of “squatters” who “lived upon other people’s land” and were “afraid of being brought to account.” At a time when the burgeoning nation needed strong, self-motivated citizens to work hard and develop a continent, squatters were considered “scum of nature” and “vermin,” with no means of support except theft. “Squatting was uniformly associated with lesser people, like Hottentots, who reportedly convened their political meetings while squatting on the ground,” writes Nancy Isenberg, in her bestseller, “White Trash.” In the 1760s, when the American colonies were still owned by Britain, a British officer called squatters “a lawless set of rascals on the frontiers…who often change their abode.” Thomas Jefferson himself referred to squatters as “intruders” on public lands.
Clearly these were people who didn’t fit the stereotype of hardy, brave and patriotic American pioneers felling forests, plowing the land, and advancing civilization. As the nineteenth century proceeded and colonization of the interior West increased (at the expense, of course, of the Native people), “the squatter…became America’s dominant poor backcountry breed,” Isenberg writes. “From the foothills of the Appalachians into the banks of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, the nation leaned backward. The squatter was frozen in time. His primitive hut represented his underclass cage.”
Yet amazingly, today in the 21st century, some people considered Fife a hero when she squatted in that house in 2019 and used the resulting publicity to launch her political career. Mother Jones magazine praised her political position as “in the radical tradition of the Black Panther Party,” even as Fife incited other people of color to rise up and seize houses that didn’t belong to them. Local politicians, including Nikki Bas and our new Congresswoman, Lateefah Simon, have endorsed her. So have unions (SEIU, CNA, Alameda Labor Council). How did we, as a society, move from despising squatters to making them celebrities? This is a question worth asking.
Steve Heimoff