The Response to Asymmetrical Violence in Black Space

Abstract

Oakland, California has been identified as a Black city since the early days of the Great Migration. Migrants from the South brought their labor, families, and most importantly, a vision for the future of Black communities. Alongside the influx of domestic Black folks moving into the city has been a steady stream of Black immigrants who help to push the boundaries for how Blackness is understood in Oakland. Increased anti-immigrant sentiments have added to this violence, putting undocumented immigrants at risk of suffering the abuses of landlords. In this article, I uplift the voices of Oakland community members that demonstrate the tragedies of dispossession as they tell their own geographic stories. These collective stories demonstrate the markers of dispossession on different levels as the sociospatial dynamics of Oakland are being (re)imagined. Oakland has now become one more example of the threat to Black spaces in the U.S. and gives us a roadmap for how these spaces will be reimagined under asymmetrical violence.

1. Introduction

Fana and I stayed in the cafe until it closed. Many times we had to take breaks, because I wanted to care for her as she told her story. She described, “My landlord came to my house every day asking for the rent. When he didn’t come by, he would call and I continued to remind him of my situation. Then there was an I.C.E. raid next door and I knew what had happened without even having to ask”. These are the kinds of stories shared with me throughout Oakland, California as Black immigrants dealt with the abuses of landlords. Fana, who lived in her apartment for 15 years, suddenly found herself being harassed by her landlord during the eviction ban during the COVID-19 pandemic. Her experience matched those of other immigrants throughout California, who had to live in fear as landlords threatened evictions and deportation (Garsd 2020).

Conflicts over geographies can never be seen as politically neutral. Geographies are ensnared in race, class, and gendered processes that impact subjectivity. Anti-Blackness mediates how Black subjects in particular are reduced to the geographies they are held captive in while also rendered placeless through their lack of control over the places they inhabit (McKittrick 2006). As Black spaces are contested through geography, the most vulnerable are left to deal with abuses at multiple levels. In fact, “City redevelopment programmes exclude blacks and relocate them to the distant periphery of new urban spaces. Growing gentrification ‘transforms’ cities but also deepens racial and class divisions by spatially demarcating the socio-economic boundaries of racially ordered space” (Perry 2004, p. 813). Thus, space, Black spatial production, and contestations through geographies will continue to remain an important analytic to consider all the possibilities of Black liberation.

Oakland has gone through many demographic shifts, which have included large populations of Black migrants and immigrants. Because of these trends, Oakland follows the patterns of many Black spaces, which struggle through spatial production. As the recent housing crisis in Oakland has pushed out many of its long-time Black residents, those who struggle to stay in their homes are faced with structural, institutional, and interpersonal violence. Many California residents are facing issues of affordability, conflict with new residents of Oakland, as well as abuses from landlords who want to remove older tenants with rent protections. In this paper, I will explore the experiences of Habesha1 immigrants as they contend with landlord abuse. These interviews were during the Trump administration, and therefore are a snapshot in time. As the Trump administration stoked anti-immigrant fears, landlords have taken advantage of community members’ reluctance to use state-sanctioned channels to resist processes of space that have repercussions on Black subjectivity.

1.1. Housing Policy Is More Myth than Reality

The debate over housing the nation has been highlighted at different points throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These debates led to numerous policy changes, with varying degrees of success, which local, state, and federal governments have implemented to address these needs. For Peter Marcuse (1978), housing policy is much less a monolithic, progressive set of enforceable laws and more of a vision for what governments can create. As Marcuse (1978) states, even to claim the existence of housing policy is to propagate a myth:

“the myth is that government acts out of a primary concern for the welfare of all its citizens, that its policies represent an effort to find solutions to recognized social problems, and that government efforts fall short of complete success only because of lack of knowledges, countervailing selfish interest, incompetence, or lack of courage”

(p. 36)

Widespread belief in the myth of the benevolent and responsive state continues to hinder meaningful engagement with obstacles to accessing quality housing. Instead, the consequence of propagating this myth is continued investment in state policy formation and reform.

Despite efforts at the federal, state, and local levels, lawmakers have continued to propose market-based, conservative solutions to a social problem. In the United States, we have decidedly worked against holding the promise of housing as a human right. This has led to a demonstrably restricted response to every housing crisis throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. More importantly, while housing policies and the debates surrounding them reinforce the notion of a benevolent state that is working to solve the issues faced by constituents, housing policies are anything but cohesive or comprehensive. As Marcuse notes:

“Housing policy may indeed be criticized as illogical, incoherent, ineffective; a set of policies rather than a single policy; a set of policies that is internally contradictory and even self-defeating in particulars; a policy lacking in focus, philosophy, clarity of goals, certainty as to priorities. Yet the underlying existence of a governmental thrust toward the solution of the social problems of housing—of a benevolent state—is implicit in the use of the phrase”

(Marcuse 1978, p. 36)

The fractured nature of these policies is the direct product of responding to a social problem as though it were a market-based problem. The competing priorities and frames for providing adequate housing lead only to a disjunctive conception of whether or not the government can successfully intervene to solve housing problems. Towards the beginning of the twenty-first century, many identified the emergence of a crisis in which housing costs skyrocketed and the cost of rent rapidly outpaced income levels. For many, this thrusted the possibility of owning a home out of reach, while also trapping families with the high prices of rent.

Since the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, the main driver for collective action around housing has been couched in the discourse of affordability. However, the debate around what is considered to be “affordable” has not been settled theoretically or in practice. Yet under the guise of democracy and incrementalism, lawmakers and advocates continue to push for competing policy priorities and frame them as solutions to the same crisis, a lack of affordable housing. Less and less effort has been put into supporting housing for low-income and middle-class families. This has effectively left the market to fluctuate without public interference. “Affordable housing” is a complicated term that needs to be complicated even more (Linneman and Megbolugbe 1992; Gyourko and Linneman 1993). Three important questions that need to be answered to dissect affordability are to whom, on what standard, and for how long? (Stone 2006, p. 96). The distinctions of the types of housing are public housing, market-rate housing, and “affordable housing”. Public housing is designated for low-income residents, seniors, and people with disabilities. Market-rate housing is determined by the demand for housing and has no restrictions on the income, rental rates, or sales prices of the area. “Affordable housing” works as a liminal category that is merged and adapted between them. This term has been adapted throughout the years and continues to be reimagined (Feins and Lane 1981; Rosen 1984); however, the metric for measuring affordability has been left to income ratios that are supposed to account for the cost of shelter. As Stone lays out for us:

“In the United States, there is a widespread acceptance of the ratio of housing cost to income as the appropriate indicator of affordability and of the simple “rule of thumb” ratio standard (25 percent of income until the early 1980s, 30 percent since then) for assessing housing affordability problems, as well as for determining eligibility and payment levels, explicitly for publicly subsidized rental housing and somewhat more loosely for other rental and ownership programs and financing”

(Stone 2006, p. 95)

However, whatever the ratio, “a particular residual income standard is not universal, it is socially grounded in space and time” (Stone 2006, p. 101). Any ratio measure is going to be inherently flawed in conceptualizing how durable affordability is for particular households. Operationalizing an affordability standard takes away from the highly inhomogeneous market that is the housing market. First, the supply of housing and its suitability for a particular family plays a key role. The availability of suitable housing in high-cost areas also problematizes this ratio, because it assumes a generalizable standard of living for individuals and families at a particular income. Second, the “rule of thumb” ratio does not account for non-shelter needs, but rather it obscures the fact that lower-income households do not necessarily have reduced non-shelter needs compared to higher-income households. Absurdly, the ratio purports to provide a way to ascertain whether a household has sufficient resources for non-shelter needs based on how much they pay for shelter.

1.2. Understanding Black Space

Analyzing crisis and conflict through the lens of Black Geographies moves us away from territoriality (McKittrick and Woods 2007). Oakland’s housing crisis should be seen as a political struggle for geographic space (Von Hoffman 2005; Mollenkopf 1983). Black geographies provide not just a method, but also a conceptualization of how to describe anti-political societies and their vision for something beyond social democracy. Black Geographies are defined through “subaltern or alternative geographic patterns that work alongside and beyond traditional geographies and a site of terrain of struggle” (McKittrick 2006, p. 7). Accessing housing has always been about more than seeking stable shelter, but a space to build and define community. Moving away from the question of whether housing is affordable opens our view to include, as Eaves calls them, the “roots of spatial truths” (Eaves 2016, p. 25) These spatial truths not only expose the histories of domination and captivity but point the way toward the possibility of redemption in space. Black geographies in particular complicate our understanding of racialized geographies that help to define Black subjectivity.

As laid out by Edward Soja (1980), the socio-spatial dialectic is the relationship between spatial organization and social content; or the impact that societies have on their environment and the impact the environment has on the organization of those societies. In Oakland, the spatial changes are impacting the way people are organizing socially. This means a housing crisis is happening as the social norms of Oakland are being reimagined. As Santos writes, “The specific role of space as structure of society comes…from the fact that geographical forms are durable… Space as a form, therefore, is not phantasmagoric. Spatial objects are periodically rejuvenated by the transformation of society” (Santos 2021, p. 112). Though there are several large factors and tensions that shape the socio-spatial dialectic, this paper focuses on one micro aspect: housing and landlord–tenant relations.

Black Geographies are measured through regions as they are experienced as gendered, queered, migrant, immigrant, laborer, southern, northern, and/or sexualized subjects, but are always diasporic (Eaves 2016, 2017; Featherstone 2013). Theoretically, Black geographies literature considers the diaspora and the many conflicting desires. In practice, Black geographies are diasporic inherently because they share multiple different types of communities. Black geographers present “knowledge of racialized spaces, bodies, and landscapes, undergirded by and perpetuated through colonial legacies” (Eaves 2017, p. 84). The management of Black people happens through geographies, which is why it is necessary to consider space in analyses of social crises. As Black migrants and immigrants moved to Oakland, they brought with them their “material basis for an ethic of survival, subsistence, resistance, and affirmation”. This includes “kin, work, and community networks that arose from these efforts [that] served as the foundations of thousands of conscious mobilizations designed to transform society” (Woods 2017). Thus, in examining resistance to spatial change, it is important to interrogate protection from these state-led changes, but more importantly institutional ties to nationalistic tendencies.

Studying the conflict between landlords and renters is one thread of the larger geographic contestations happening in Oakland. At stake is not only the use of state power to enforce law, but also the narrative and norms of how space in Oakland should be governed. The City of Oakland, federal and state immigration policy, advocates, and other stakeholders and institutions would take conflicting courses of action to address the housing crisis and immigration. Because of these conflicting courses of action, there have been limited protections for the vulnerable population of Black immigrants.

1.3. Immigration and Housing Issues

The immediate concern in protecting undocumented residents and their families is their ability to defend themselves against landlords. The second, closely related, concern is the ability of these families to reach out to state and local institutions and organizations designed to protect residents against abuses. As the housing market has changed in Oakland, many residents have described the different tactics landlords have committed in order to ensure they reap the benefits of the higher rent prices. This can include harassment from landlords, siding with the harassment of other tenants, changing rental agreements with little or no warning, and not addressing serious hazards that impact living conditions. Rising anti-immigrant sentiments alongside President Donald Trump’s policies have impacted individual families as their neighborhoods have experienced changes in residents. Landlords have targeted this population as the easiest residents they can shift in order to welcome in tenants who are willing to pay for these units at a higher price. In fact, “landlords across California are threatening to report undocumented tenants to immigration authorities. Landlords looking to evict their tenants, raise their rents, or stifle their complaints about their living conditions are exploiting undocumented tenants’ fears about being deported, according to housing advocates and attorneys” (Capps 2017). These fears prevent residents from accessing places that otherwise would be able to protect their rights. For those who are low-income, there are increased barriers of both cost, time, and energy to be able to fight an extended battle with their landlords over housing. Jith Meganathan, policy advocate at the Western Center on Law & Poverty describes, “The scale at which it’s happening has increased dramatically since the November election. We have somewhere between two-and-a-half million and three million undocumented individuals living in California, most of whom are renters. Unscrupulous landlords are taking advantage of their knowledge of the facts to deprive tenants of their legal rights” (Capps 2017). Even when families have mixed documentation status, the pressure to not “cause trouble” is at an all-time high. Families do what they can to navigate disputes, even if that means putting their own health and safety at risk.

The State of California has many protections for renters in order to prevent landlord abuse and illegal evictions. In general, the municipal codes in Oakland provide “more protection for tenants than California Law” (Oakland Tenants’ Rights Handbook 2023). Throughout my research, tenants faced landlords abuses that included undisclosed changes to the leasing agreement, harassment, as well as ignoring crucial safety repairs. All of these violate Oakland and California Law. Three laws directly echo the grievances of the families in this paper: (1) Since the law was first passed in 2002, Oakland residents are protected by the Just Cause for Eviction Ordinance, which prohibits landlords from evicting tenants in good standing. (2) Many of the families discussed in this article are covered under Oakland’s Rent Adjustment Program (RAP), which limits the amount landlords are allowed to raise the rent as well as the number of days landlords must notify tenants of an increase. (3) During the COVID-19 pandemic, California enacted an eviction moratorium which lasted between 1 March 2020 and 30 September 2021, and was extended to June 2022 for families who had applied for rental assistance. However, this did not stop landlords from attempting to harass their tenants out of their units. Many of the tactics committed by landlords are seen as attempting to create a “just cause” in order to proceed with a legal eviction. The solution to renters in Oakland is for them to notify the City of Oakland, or the better-known Oakland Tenants Union, to seek advocacy or legal representation. However, because of the precarious status of this immigrant group, having to face both antiblackness and xenophobia, the reluctance to “make noise” prevents families from reaching out to state and local agencies.

1.4. Mapping Geographic Stories as Communal Knowledge

Oakland has always been what Angela Davis (2005) terms a community of struggle. Thus, this is place-based research, which contextualizes Oakland through the totality of space (Santos 2021). In other words, I see Oakland’s crisis as a local problem with global ramifications for how Black bodies are ordered in space. The crisis in Oakland resulted in the spatial changes developing through the current housing struggles. I map the knowledge of community members facing this crisis to demonstrate their own struggles as the community around them is developed, and thus more and more inaccessible to them. Each of these interviews lasted between 90 and 120 min. Each interviewee identified as being housing-insufficient (under-housed, unhoused, or at high risk for being unhoused).

For this paper, I selected three interviews of second-generation immigrants from the Ethiopian–Eritrean diaspora to demonstrate their unique pattern using a knowledge/capacity building approach (Tang 2008). This knowledge was shared with me through what I call geographic stories, which are accounts of a spatial lineage that holds a multi-generational, cross-spatial identity of values, politics, and struggles as Black subjects experience asymmetrical acts of violence. As Suet-ling Tang suggests, the “knowledge produced through [a] collaborative, community-centered research projects is essential for understanding community problems/needs in their complexity” (Tang 2008, p. 254). The overarching goal of this research is to engage the question laid out by Gilmore (2022): “How do spatially specifics relations of power and difference—legal, political, cultural—racialize bodies, groupings, activities, and places?” (p. 90). For each of these interviews, there is a unique relationality to the state and community that residents always experience both as Black and immigrant.

1.5. Oakland Black Immigrant Stories

Many residents who were undocumented or had family members spoke of this same situation when they came up against fights with their landlords. They describe feeling that the situation was doomed, and they must give in to what their landlords were demanding in order to keep their housing. Anyone with additional layers of precarity talked about these same problems. If they lived in a rent-controlled unit, they knew that holding onto this property, even if they were rent-burdened, was the only step they had at maintaining housing. Community members described increasing hostility as neighbors clashed, trying to explain these solutions to new residents. I have selected three different experiences from Habesha families who are in the middle of this crisis and fighting to stay afloat as their landlords or other tenants put them at risk of losing their homes. Each of these stories demonstrates the lengths landlords will go to in order to get rid of their tenants.

1.6. Siori Halle

Siori Halle and I had been talking about her family’s experience immigrating to America for 20 min before the conversation transitioned into her parent’s housing issues. Her uncles Ogbai and Tesfai immigrated here because of the war between Eritrea and Ethiopia. Her mother and aunt came to the U.S. four months later. Siori was born at Kaiser Hospital, and they grew up mostly in East Oakland.

One day, out of the blue, her mother Haregu called her distraught. Siori explained to me, “She said that the landlord told her that she had been paying the wrong amount on her rent. My mom doesn’t speak English well, and so usually I’m the one corresponding with her landlord. I was heated. I called the landlord immediately to try and figure out what was going on. They tried to tell me that I had been sending in the wrong amount for the rent for five months and that I owed them a bunch of money. I didn’t understand. We had just signed a new lease and there was never any notice of an amount change at all. My mom called me back the same day and said it wasn’t just her. The guy who lives upstairs from her had the exact same problem. He also told her that multiple people in the building were freaking out because they were told the same thing. And it’s messed up. It’s a building full of immigrant families. Many of them have been living there for decades and now they are starting to have all of these problems”.

“Did the problem start this year?”

“No, it all started when the property switched management [companies]. There were all these new issues with the parking and then the mail. I honestly believe they are just trying to kick everyone out because they are all under rent control. They just want to put in new tenants so they could charge them more”.

“Were you able to settle with your landlord?”

She shook her head. Her frustration and exhaustion came through in her tone change. She said, “I think I just have to pay the money. If I don’t, my mom could get kicked out. It’s trash. My mom doesn’t want to press it because she’s afraid they are going to make things worse for her, but also, I don’t want her paying all of this extra money. So now we all live in fear. I contacted the City [of Oakland]. They are supposed to help with stuff like this, but I never hear back. I’ve called multiple times. Now I don’t know what to do and they said if we don’t start paying, they’re going to have to start the eviction process. I’ve thought about getting a lawyer but with what money. The other people who live there are not going to want to press it either. Some of them are undocumented and some of them have extra people staying with them. So, what can they do?”

1.7. Rahel

Rahel looked around the restaurant as we spoke and tried to keep her voice as soft as possible. She explained, “Of course there are anti-Black, anti-immigrant sentiments everywhere, so I can’t place all of the blame on the new neighbors, but things just got worse the more new people moved into East Oakland. You know, that used to be the spot no one wanted to live, but you put a huge luxury apartment building throughout the Brooklyn Basin, and it messes with everything”.

The Brooklyn Basin sits east of the 880 freeway. It is south of Jack London Square and Downtown Oakland. The Brooklyn Basin used to be a small community but has now been developed into a densely populated area. Rahel’s mom lives near International Boulevard, which in this area has a mixture of both small commercial businesses and single-family homes. As the development of the Brooklyn Basin became more realized, the spillover of residents who wanted to live near this area and pay less rent also changed the residents who lived in Rahel’s mother’s neighborhood.

She continued, “My whole neighborhood used to be full of immigrant families and we all knew each other. It was also so beautiful during the different holidays because you could see all kinds of celebrations year-round. My Mom said she came here during the Chinese New Year celebration and that’s when she fell in love with this place”.

Rahel held her coffee with both hands and shook her head slowly. As she started to explain the new tensions in her neighborhood, she grew more and more frustrated. “I’m not even sure when it all started”, she said. “Like I said, there were so many families on our street and slowly but surely, they all started to disappear. My Mom stayed because she loved her neighborhood and really didn’t want to go anywhere else. As her rent got higher and higher, my sister and I started to help her out. But now my rent is rising and I’m not sure how long we are going to be able to do this. Now with this new neighbor, he is just starting to terrorize my mom. It used to be such a diverse place, but now there’s less diversity. And these people aren’t from Oakland. They are from all over, so they don’t know the rules.

“Last year my mom got a note on her car that said, ‘If you don’t know how to park, go back to your own country.’ It was so weird. My Mom can’t read English, so she called me and took a picture of it. I was pissed. I wanted to fight him. But of course, my mom wasn’t going to let that happen. So the next day she wanted to apologize and brought him and his kids some food”.

I interrupted her story, “Was your mom parked in a weird way?”

She gave a heavy sigh and shifted her body in her seat. She explained, “There’s a really small lot around the building. It’s really only built for small cars. My Mom has a little Corolla. When her old neighbor was there, he had a Buick. He would always take up more space and sometimes would move my mom’s car for her when he needed more room. Sometimes if he needed to, he would park behind her. It’s like three spots. Hers is in the middle and the other unit’s [parking spot] is closer to the wall of the house. So at one point her and her old neighbor even switched spaces so he would have more room for his car. But this new dude doesn’t want to do it like that. My mom offered but he said no”.

I directed her back to her other point, “So what happened after your mom gave them food?” Rahel laughed a little, “He didn’t accept it. Which—whatever—he’s an idiot. My Mom can cook, but then it was every day. My Mom would come home from work, and he would bang on her window. Literally, rattle it and tell her to move her car. This went on for weeks. I went to him and tried to settle it. I told him, he’s got a big truck, and my mom has a Corolla. The math don’t math. Basically, he got even more mad, which scared my mom. Now he’s reporting us to the landlord. This makes things even worse. That place is in my name and my mom is undocumented. So of course, now she’s scared. Doesn’t want to deal with this man. So she started leaving her car at my place. But I don’t live close to her, so whenever she needs to go somewhere and drive, she has to call me to give her the car”.

The landlord in this story received seven complaints from this new resident. Rahel believes this is the reason he is going to try and evict her mom. Her mom lives in a unit that has rent control and this new tenant is living in a unit that is not. Rahel mimicked the voice of her mother as she explained this fear, “My mom is always like ‘Rahella the landlord is just going to let him keep troubling me. He just wants me to move. They both do. They are taking away my air.’ I get so emotional. I think she’s just going to have to move in with me, but neither of us want that. She loves that place. She’s been living there for 30 years. Her old landlord would have never let this happen, but when this new landlord bought the building 7 years ago, I knew something was going to come of it. Now, here we are”.

1.8. Biniam

For the longest time, Biniam and his family supported each other through multi-generational housing. At one point there were three so-called nuclear families living under one roof. As the family grew in size and aged, their needs for space became more dire and they were able to rent more units in neighboring buildings. This was helpful both financially and in their efforts of care. In 1997, the family was able to purchase a home in East Oakland, to which Biniam’s uncle moved with his older cousins. In 2009, the house was sent into foreclosure and each of the adults living there went from owners to renters. This was a devastating loss for their family, but they leaned on each other to replicate the same efforts of care which carried them through other financial struggles.

“And then”, Biniam said, “My aunt’s had a pipe burst in the wall. The landlord came to fix it but whatever they did, it didn’t solve the problem. We started to notice mold building up in the kitchen and the dining room. I am assuming that’s where the [pipe]line connects. My aunt kept calling the landlord out for them to address it, but it was always a struggle. One day this guy just showed up at my aunt’s house while she wasn’t there, and my younger cousin answered the door. When my cousin called my auntie, she told him not to let him in because she had no notice that they were sending someone out. That was the last time they ever tried and that was two years ago”.

“Is it still causing problems?” I asked.

“Of course, my auntie has to spray the area every day just so that the problem doesn’t get any worse, but of course, that’s not how mold works right. It spreads if you don’t stop the moisture. She is just trying to do the best she can. My uncle and I have tried to ask the landlord to send someone out multiple times, but he just keeps saying ‘You sent the last one away and I can’t afford to keep sending people out.’ We also offered to pay to fix it ourselves, but he says that would be a violation of the lease”. He paused for a second to shake his head and laughed to himself. “But… we see through this; we know he is just trying to get my family to move”.

“Has he said anything about your auntie moving?”

Biniam nodded and rolled his eyes. His voice took a sarcastic tone, and he said, “Oh, he was super helpful about that. Once he offered her $4000 and to help her with a deposit. A few years ago he tried to give her a voucher to move to Pittsburgh, but there’s no way. My auntie is in her 60 s and doesn’t even have a car. She’s been taking the same bus route to work every day for 25 years. How is she going to move to Pittsburgh?”

“Have you reported him?”

“Of course, I’ve tried. I’ve been begging the whole family about it, but they are terrified about what that would mean. If we reported him for not fixing it, he might report us for having too many people in one apartment or something crazy. On top of that, her unit is rent-controlled. So she can’t even move anywhere. Right now she’s paying 1600 for her one-bedroom apartment. We can’t even find studios at that price in Oakland anymore. At this point, she’s normalized it. But I keep telling her she can’t be around all those chemicals all of the time. It’s not sustainable”.

2. Conclusions

As the housing crisis continues to forcibly remove Oakland residents, those who are Black immigrants have faced particularized forms of violence as they resist being displaced from their homes and navigate the forced renegotiation of spatial norms in their local communities. The Black Geographies literature situates this struggle within the larger historical tensions between Black-diasporic ethics of survival and state-led processes for structuring space. For Habesha immigrants and their children, these state-led processes were unresponsive or inaccessible to the specific violence enacted by landlords and fellow residents. Moreover, the destabilization of their communities through large-scale dispossession in Oakland’s housing crisis dismantled spatial norms that previously allowed more vulnerable residents to find solidarity and support among their neighbors. A lack of coherence in the amalgamation that is housing policy has contributed to participants’ frustration with and fear of legal processes that would purportedly bring accountability and protection.

In these geographic stories, the tensions of dispossession by fellow residents, landlords, and state processes cannot be adequately summarized as supply and demand problems in need of market solutions. These experiences help advocates for equitable housing redefine the crisis in Oakland away from a discussion of housing property and towards a communal struggle. At the micro level, authoritarianism forces a future in which housing is defined by an economic framework and tenants’ fears are rendered invisible if they do not abide by the state’s prescribed course for advocacy. Thus, the way to address crises is through market-based solutions with little analysis of power or geographic dynamics. To stoke anti-immigrant fears is to threaten communities that are already vulnerable and targets of the state. The access to protections is dependent on how immigrant families can access institutions that will protect them from landlords who attempt to abuse tenants and target their documentation status. Former President Trump’s immigration policy furthered legacies of anti-immigrant, white supremacy, reinforcing the urgency of accurately defining the housing crisis and centering Black migrant voices in identifying strategies of resistance, including but not limited to legal and legislative remedies. In order to address the housing crisis, we have to reckon with the fact that housing policy is an incoherent conglomeration of laws that sometimes help and sometimes work against their intended purpose. In reassessing the best way to address the housing crisis, the clear answer lies in the historical knowledges that Black migrants and immigrants brought with them to Oakland and infused into communal norms and expectations for the use of space. These foundations have time and time again forged pathways of resistance and community building that have allowed the Black diaspora in America to rebuild community following targeted and systematic attacks on their communities.

The myth of the benevolent state will only steer us in the opposite direction of addressing asymmetrical violence in Black spaces. Policy and reform are never enough. As we refocus and allow residents’ lived experiences to point us toward serious engagement with the goals of Black liberation, we must consider the most vulnerable. This includes an analysis of how to protect Black immigrants who are also experiencing threats to wield punitive state processes by those who have power over them. To align with traditions of Black radicals, this means folks leaning into politics of fugitivity and migration as a message of refusal. The ethic and logic of community formation that Black Americans inherit and share with immigrants who move to their communities are inherently diasporic and have deep traditions about how to navigate and renegotiate spatial norms after a community is targeted or forcibly destabilized in a given area. While these battles are always local, the stakes are more than national—they are global. Divesting from nationalism and authoritarian regimes is critical to drawing connections across Black spaces globally, especially considering histories of targeted oppression and strategic, if unrecognized, resistance.