#piven

I’ll never forget the first time I met Frances Fox Piven. I had just arrived to Chicago for the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association to moderate a roundtable discussion. I got to the conference room 5 minutes early and to my surprise, there was sitting Frances Fox Piven at my table with a friend of hers. At a conference where even the regular sessions are often poorly attended, the roundtables are sort of like poster sessions - it’s not uncommon that there are more presenters than participants. But she was there to hear a handful of papers being discussed on housing justice.  The three of us dove right into discussion, and it quickly moved from research to organizing and political tactics. We skipped over the entire professional niceties to both of our delights. I’ll never forget she just asked some real blunt question about the tension between increasing housing codes, conditions, or quality vs. availability, accessibility, affordable housing, or quality of housing for the poor. Something I thought about the lots in my research on the legalization of homeless camps, but also with respect to some deplorable “permanent” “supportive” housing in San Francisco I’d been researching for my dissertation. The presenters arrived, other professors and students, likely all drawn to participating in a discussion with Frances. It was a great session. The highlight of that conference for me.

In 2016 I convinced our cohort of Berkeley Social Justice Fellows to invite her to be our keynote speaker. I couldn’t make her evening talk, I was participating in a protest I’d helped organize with the SF Coalition on Homelessness on the Embarcadero against Mayor Ed Lee’s intensified sweeps of encampments to “cleanse” the downtown for that year’s Superbowl festivities. But I made the lunch. What struck me most was her discussion of her personal experiences in the welfare rights movement, and her laser-focused questions about our analysis of the organizing activities each of us were involved in. This article captures this spirit.

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“Working on any political project is enormously fun,” she said. “You don’t have to win for it to be really terribly satisfying. You get good friends. You do the right thing. You test your courage.”