Carroll Fife is a housing activist, a co-founder of Moms 4 Housing, and the city councilmember of Oakland, California for its 3rd district since January 2021.
As a teenager, Fife, the middle of three children, worked in Muskegon Heights, Michigan. Her grandfather was one of the first Black city councilmen.[1]
After becoming a parent, she settled in Pasadena, California and then moved to Oakland in 1999 to create a small school.
Fife has a degree in psychology and worked as a paralegal before working for the community-based Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE). In 2017 she was named the interim director of the Oakland/San Francisco chapter of ACCE.[2]
See main article: Moms 4 Housing.
Fife received national attention in 2019 as the co-founder of Moms 4 Housing, a group of Black mothers who occupied a vacant corporate-owned West Oakland home, advocating that housing should be recognized as a basic human right.[3]
In an 2022 interview, Fife told SFGate that homelessness in Oakland was directly due to "neo-liberal policies" and "race-blind policies" created by the "overproduction of market rate units and rapid speculation". In June 2022, the council unanimously approved Fife's plan to create a rent registry to make rental property ownership and historical rental price information available to the public.[4]
Fife won her 2020 election to the Oakland City Council, defeating the two-term incumbent by nearly 20 percentage points.[5]
On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, in January 2023, Fife, a Black woman, publicized the violent and racist threats she had received against her and other public officials. Fife told KQED news, "The only reason I posted it is because it’s gotten worse lately. Because this has been happening to me, honestly, pretty consistently since Moms 4 Housing".[6]
In November 2023, the Associated Press reported that Fife's resolution to call for a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war passed the Oakland City Council 8–0, unanimously.[7]