OAKLAND — In the wake of Friday’s catastrophic
three-alarm fire that
ripped through an unpermitted live-work space and killed 36 people,
artists living in similarly nonconforming spaces feared a backlash from
city inspectors and rent-seeking property owners who would force them
from their homes.
With some tenants already receiving eviction notices, those fears are indeed coming to fruition, and sooner than many imagined.
Painter and photographer Angela Scrivani has 27 days to
vacate the West Oakland industrial warehouse space that she has lived in
and used as a painting studio for the better of the past decade. And,
some 13 blocks north, roughly a dozen tenants living in a converted
machine shop in Oakland were served with a 30-day eviction notice
Monday, according to four of the residents who spoke with the Bay Area
News Group. The tenants said the building owners told them they fear for
their safety.
The impact of the tragic fire at the Ghost Ship artists’
collective in the city’s Fruitvale district is reverberating far and
wide. In Baltimore, the city’s fire department red-tagged a DIY artist
space, according to the
Baltimore City Paper.
In Los Angeles, the city plans to address its own issue of unpermitted
warehouse conversions, and has charged the owner of one such illegal
warehouse, according to the Los Angeles Times.
In the Bay Area, inspectors in San Jose on Tuesday visited
Citadel Arts Studios, which does not allow artists to live there, to
make sure it was being used appropriately. And in Richmond, city
officials are looking to meet with the owner of an underground
performance space, called Burnt Ramen, which is located in a commercial
warehouse.
Not all interactions have been entirely civil. On Wednesday,
a shouting match erupted
in Oakland’s Jack London Square after a well-known restaurateur called a
news conference to accuse a nearby warehouse of putting her business at
risk by operating an unregulated and dangerous music venue. Artists at
the gathering, some who lost friends in the Ghost Ship fire, in turn
called the conference a “witch hunt” that would further marginalize and
displace them from scarce housing options.
But there’s a large gap between what could be considered an
unsafe space — such as the tangled menagerie of Balinese wood, furniture
and artwork that fueled the inferno that doomed Ghost Ship’s victims —
and buildings that are zoned one way but used in another and are
therefore technically “illegal,” said artist Jon Sarriugarte.
Sarriugarte has, over the past several days, been working to
recruit outside fire inspectors, architects and, in light of the recent
evictions, lawyers to survey spaces and provide advice without
residents of unpermitted spaces fearing backlash from the city or their
landlords. He’s teamed up with Michael Snook of NIMBY, a DIY maker-space
in East Oakland, and Max Allstadt, a carpenter and former audio
engineer who lived in West Oakland for 13 years.
Allstadt recently received a $5,000 donation for the
purchase of fire extinguishers, exit signage, smoke detectors and other
lifesaving equipment that becomes essential in the event of a
conflagration like the Ghost Ship fire.
But even with Sarriugarte’s legal support to stall an
eviction, residents of the converted machine shop in West Oakland have
little hope a lawyer could help. Their space is not zoned for
residential habitation, and now they are no longer welcome. There is not
much a lawyer could do without rezoning the land or receiving a
variance — a process that is costly and could take months or even years,
they said, adding that they need the city’s help to create a less
costly path toward compliance.
Ironically, a fire marshal did inspect their space in 2011
and required the then-inhabitants to make a number of changes, said
Tyler, a resident who declined to give his last name for fear it might
jeopardize attempts to work with the landlord to save their home. The
residents installed an extra door, affixed exit signs and removed an
interior dwelling space, among other things, Tyler said.
The fire marshal came back and approved of the changes, but a
city representative had not been back to the place until Monday, when a
fire inspector came to perform outreach in the wake of the Ghost Ship
tragedy, he said. They’re willing to make further life safety
improvements if the city says they need them, the housemates said.
At a news conference Wednesday, Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf
did not offer specific plans to help artists currently facing evictions
but said she would reconvene and expand a task force to address
affordable living and working spaces for artists. She promised the arts
community would be part of the discussions as the city addresses code
compliance and other issues.
Council members Lynette Gibson McElhaney, Noel Gallo and
Larry Reid are expected to ask staff on Thursday to look into how the
city could go about legalizing such spaces, said Alex Marqusee, an aide
to Gibson McElhaney.
“There’s definitely an appetite (for legalizing these
spaces),” he said. “Recognizing there is a housing crisis, we need to
think creatively.”
A half-dozen other artists who live in converted industrial
spaces acknowledge more could be done to make their own spaces safer.
Sara Huntley, a former resident of the Vulcan, a live-work warehouse in
East Oakland, said she frequented a number of converted industrial
spaces throughout the city.
“I’ve never felt as unsafe anywhere as I did (in the Ghost
Ship),” she said, echoing many artists’ words that the space was a
“worst-case scenario.”
When Huntley moved into the Vulcan, the property management
company that owns the warehouse had just finished installing sprinklers.
Ren Dodge, a photographer who has lived there for 10 years, said when
that happened, his rent rose by 10 percent, a significant increase in
part mitigated by the sheer number of people living in the more than 50
apartment units.
For smaller spaces, the cost of bringing a building up to
code can be insurmountable, said Cheryl Edison, a consultant who works
with cities to help them revamp older properties. Many Bay Area cities
have outdated zoning restrictions that make it both time-consuming and
incredibly costly to rezone properties, meaning only well-heeled
developers can afford to do it, she said.
“Every effort that individuals make to ask for permission
gets one very short answer — ‘No,'” Edison said. “People want to do the
right thing, but the level of collaboration is not there.”
The Oakland Noodle Factory in West Oakland is an example,
said Francis McIlveen of the Northern California Land Trust (NCLT). Dana
Harrison purchased the former noodle factory in 1999 with the hope of
converting it to a live-work space for her fellow Burning Man comrades —
and then spent years mired in a morass of permits, plans and red tape.
After draining her time and resources, she sought the help of the
community land trust, which purchases and rehabilitates affordable
housing.
NCLT secured a $4 million construction loan, gutted and
rehabbed the space with solar voltaic panels, concrete floors with
radiant heat, extra noise insulation for units that house drummers and
more, McIlveen said.
When the housing market crashed in 2008, it took the noodle
factory with it. McIlveen said the bank foreclosed on the property just
as they were starting to lease it out.
Time is of the essence, Sarriugarte said. He has a list of
lawyers ready to help slow down evictions, but he admits the underlying
problems extend beyond his capabilities alone.
“I don’t have millions of dollars to back this up to make
these changes, even if I wanted to,” he said. “I don’t have a staff here
to do this. I’m so busy answering the phone right now. Who is going to
help?”
For the artists facing evictions, it’s not just the homes
they are losing, it’s their community. The spaces are more than
buildings, they are fertile incubators for art forms credited with
putting Oakland on the map as an arts hub, and, more recently, as a
tourist destination.
“These places are not made by real estate developers or land
owners. They don’t exist because someone is looking to make a profit;
they are not profitable,” said Tanya, an architect and “flow artist” (or
dancer), who lives in the former machine shop in West Oakland. “We need
to be able to make them exist, and the Oakland planning (department)
needs to … allow spaces like this to exist safely.”
Staff writer Aaron Davis contributed to this story. 
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