From Councilmember Rebecca Kaplan's Chief of Staff Bobbi Lopez today:

"As this corporation has decided to hire a high powered PR guy to go on the attack, let me clarify-Two city council members sent a letter asking the owner to sit down with a third party and mediate. The third party is the Oakland community land trust. The response of the corporation was to say “We don’t meet with criminals.” So that was an unambiguous response from the corporation about their desire to resolve this amicably. Yes-they likely have a right to sell to the mothers or not. But to be clear-the mothers are offering to buy it at market rate. What the moms are doing isn’t about bringing on a movement of squatters to take over properties but raising the issue of what we do with multi million dollar corporations that form LLCs and leave these properties vacant for years-many, like this house, taken in foreclosure. The judge actually talked about the possible need for government intervention and his move to postone his decision to me signals an acknowledgement of our housing crisis and that if we continue to allow the market and corporations to do as they wish, homelessness will only grow. From the state to the city, we need to rethink our policies profoundly around housing because it isn’t working when we have thousands in the streets. The trickle down of a few million a year from the county and the state isn’t helping Oakland resolve this crisis. If you read the Path report from our Oakland city staff, it’s actually a list of great ideas to resolve homelessness that we can’t afford as the city. We need real help at all levels of government. We also need to think about how easy it is for people to label Black working mothers as “criminals” and yet not talk about Wedgewood’s sordid history in the foreclosure crisis."

Thank you Councilmembers Nikki Fortunado Bas, Rebecca Kaplan, and Dan Kalb for standing with the community instead of the corporations.