Kate Wolffe/KQED via AP
Dominique Walker (second from right) and Tolani King (right) stand outside the vacant home on Magnolia Street in West Oakland, California, that they occupied for two months, as part of the group Moms 4 Housing.
It was entirely fitting that three homeless families in Oakland won a big victory on Martin Luther King Day. Thanks to a bold grassroots campaign that involved nonviolent civil disobedience, an absentee slum landlord reluctantly agreed to allow them to return to the house where they had been squatting for two months, before Alameda County sheriff’s deputies evicted them last week.
The company, Wedgewood Inc., agreed to sell the property to the Oakland Community Land Trust, a nonprofit that buys and fixes up property for affordable housing.
The campaign did not merely highlight the epidemic of homelessness, but the crisis of affordable housing in many communities in America. The woman leaders of the three families, who call themselves Moms 4 Housing, all have jobs. But Oakland’s escalating rents forced the three mothers and their seven children into homelessness. Wedgewood, a private equity firm based in Redondo Beach, in Southern California, purchased the property last year at a foreclosure auction for slightly over $500,000. The median home sales price in Oakland is about $750,000.
The woman leaders of the three families, who call themselves Moms 4 Housing, all have jobs. But Oakland’s escalating rents forced the three mothers and their seven children into homelessness.
In Oakland, where the homeless population has doubled since 2015, there are four times as many vacant houses as homeless people. According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, a family in Alameda County needs to earn $40.88 an hour to afford a typical two-bedroom apartment in the city, which has faced accelerating gentrification and widespread evictions in recent years.
Moms 4 Housing and their allies in the Bay Area housing justice movement place some of the blame for that on Wedgewood, which CEO Gary Geiser has called the nation’s largest “fix and flip” firm. Wedgewood and other outside investors have exacerbated the housing crisis by buying properties and leaving buildings vacant until the real estate market improves, then selling them at a huge profit.
Moms 4 Housing were closely allied with the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE), a statewide community organizing group that engages in direct action on behalf of low-income people, especially renters. Carroll Fife, a longtime Oakland activist and head of ACCE’s Oakland office, helped organize the campaign, consulting regularly with the mothers and helping to broker the deal that will permit them to live in the house.
THE AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN—Dominique Walker, Misty Cross, and Tolani King—and their families began squatting in the three-bedroom vacant building at 2928 Magnolia Street in West Oakland, a gentrifying neighborhood, a week before Thanksgiving. With help from community activists, they installed a water heater, washed the walls, brought in furniture, and carried their children’s bunk beds to the second floor. During the two months they occupied the building, they made sure to pay the water and electric bills.
Soon after the families occupied the home, the Oakland land trust offered to purchase the property from Wedgewood, in order to allow the families to remain in the house and pay rent. Oakland City Council President Rebecca Kaplan and Councilmember Dan Kalb rallied support; Kaplan’s office even threatened to seize the house by eminent domain unless Wedgewood agreed to negotiate a sale.
Another city councilmember, Nikki Fortunato Bas, reached out to Wedgewood CEO Geiser to facilitate a meeting with the families and the land trust, but Wedgewood refused. “I will never negotiate with criminals,” Geiser responded.
Instead, Wedgewood filed suit in Alameda County court to evict the families. Hundreds of residents showed up at the court hearings to support the squatters. The protests persuaded Judge Patrick McKinney to postpone the eviction several times, giving ACCE more time to mobilize support, including dozens of stories on TV, newspapers, and social media. Nevertheless, McKinney ultimately sided with Wedgewood, ruling on January 10 that the squatters had to leave.
The judge’s decision put the activists and their allies on alert. Some supporters rallied at the house Monday evening and kept watch during the night. At 5 a.m. on Tuesday, January 14, about 30 deputies from the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office entered Magnolia Street with armored vehicles and their guns drawn. Some wore military fatigues and helmets—all in the cause of evicting three families whose protest had been nonviolent.
When word got out that the sheriff’s deputies were on their way, ACCE quickly alerted allies by text message. Within half an hour, more than 200 supporters appeared at the home, many carrying Moms 4 Housing banners, to stop them from expelling the squatters. The officers broke down the doors and arrested two of the women and two of their supporters on charges of resisting arrest and obstruction. They were taken away in handcuffs.
Newsom praised the activists at his Thursday press conference in Oakland. “It takes a tremendous amount of courage to do what they’ve done. They deserve an enormous amount of credit.”
Videos of the scene quickly went viral. Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf, who had not previously embraced the protest, was reportedly outraged by the sheriff deputies’ conduct. So was Governor Gavin Newsom, who was scheduled to come to Oakland that week to make a major announcement about a $1 billion commitment to address the homelessness crisis, including the conversion of 100 former FEMA trailers as temporary housing.
Newsom praised the activists at his Thursday press conference in Oakland. “They’re representing tens of thousands of other mothers, families that are suffering,” he said. “It takes a tremendous amount of courage to do what they’ve done. They deserve an enormous amount of credit.”
FOR A WEEK, the families went back to being homeless, but the arrests—and the moral drama of a spirited group of low-income families challenging a highly profitable real estate organization—generated even more sympathetic headlines and stories questioning Wedgewood’s troublesome business practices.
An investigation by NBC’s Bay Area affiliate revealed that Wedgewood buys up foreclosed properties around the country under shell companies called “limited liability corporations” (LLCs), each with separate names, designed to create the fiction that each building has a separate owner when in fact they are all part of Wedgewood’s empire. What they share is a mailing addresses—Wedgewood’s corporate headquarters.
In the Bay Area alone, Wedgewood has operated through at least 98 LLCs, unloading its properties at a significant profit. Wedgewood has flipped 160 homes in Oakland over the past nine years, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. The firm currently owns at least 125 properties in the Bay Area, according to NBC’s review of assessor and recorder records. The company has been involved in at least 300 court cases, mostly to evict occupants, many of whom are former owners who lost their homes to foreclosure. A spokesperson for ACCE called Wedgewood “a displacement machine.”
Companies like Wedgewood are often called “bottom feeders.” They buy homes at short sales and foreclosure auctions and sell them at huge profits. Reflecting its business philosophy, the company has a huge Monopoly board on a wall at its headquarters at 2015 Manhattan Beach Boulevard in Redondo Beach. In 2018, Wedgewood announced that it was bundling 548 loans (average amount: $346,715) into a $190 million security to sell to investors, which the company described as “the largest known securitization pool in the history of private residential money lending.” This is similar to the reckless securitization practices of Wall Street banks that led to the housing market crash and the Great Recession.
Wedgewood’s business model is part of a larger trend of banks, hedge funds, and private equity firms dominating the rental housing market in the wake of the epidemic of foreclosures that began in 2007, often by scooping up foreclosures and spinning them back out as rentals. Corporate landlords now own more than one-third of the nation’s 47.5 million rental units, including single-family homes. Blackstone, a private equity firm, holds 82,000 properties, valued at $1.7 billion, in its portfolio, making it the largest absentee landlord of single-family homes. Studies have shown that corporate absentee landlords are more likely to file eviction notices and raise rents than smaller landlords.
Jeff Chiu/AP Photo
Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf, left, talks with Misty Cross (second from left), Tolani King (center), Sharena Thomas (second from right), and Dominique Walker, all from the group Moms 4 Housing, at a rally outside of City Hall in Oakland on January 7, 2020.
WEDGEWOOD CEO GEISER, who has made over $154,000 in political donations, all to Republican candidates and political action committees, finally recognized that the police-initiated confrontation and media scrutiny of the company’s business practices had become a public-relations nightmare. He talked by phone with Mayor Schaaf about resolving the impasse, and the two brokered a deal, with Fife letting the mayor know what the community activists considered acceptable.
In the future, Mayor Schaaf explained at a Martin Luther King Day press conference at City Hall, Wedgewood will give the city or nonprofit community groups the right of first refusal to purchase all its other Oakland properties at their assessed value, “so they remain permanently affordable,” said Fife. Wedgewood agreed to refrain from flipping its properties for quick profits.
It’s reminiscent of ACCE and other housing activists pressuring the Obama administration to favor nonprofit groups in sales of government-owned distressed mortgages. That experience gave ACCE a precedent it could use to push Schaaf and Wedgewood to follow suit.
With the Oakland victory under its belt, ACCE is likely to pressure Wedgewood to adopt a similar policy in other cities where the company owns properties. ACCE and the Moms 4 Housing also hope that Schaaf will expand the new no-flipping policy to other absentee owners and investors in the city in order to challenge rampant speculation and put more housing into the hands of local nonprofit organizations. Homeless families around the state could be inspired to squat in vacant buildings, hoping to emulate the Moms 4 Housing’s success, similar to Dr. King’s strategy of using nonviolent civil disobedience to expand the civil rights movement’s efforts to dismantle racial segregation from city to city.
“This is what happens when we organize, when people come together to build the beloved community,” explained Dominique Walker, one of the Moms 4 Housing and a former organizer herself. “Today we honor Dr. King’s radical legacy by taking Oakland back from banks and corporations.”
“We want speculators out of our community,” Walker said. “They’re coming in, they’re profiting off harm that’s done in our community, and we want them out.”
