Post-Ghost Ship: Despite mayor’s promises, Oakland city inspectors are telling residents to leave unpermitted spaces
June 12, 2017
http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/06/18/in-post-ghost-ship-oakland-city-tells-artists-to-leave-livework-spaces-despite-mayors-promises/
OAKLAND — Just over a month after a horrific fire ripped through an East Oakland warehouse, killing 36 people, Mayor Libby Schaaf made a promise that city staff would work cooperatively with property owners to make their buildings safe without evicting the artists who live there.
The artists received an eviction notice in the immediate aftermath of the deadly Ghost Ship fire on December 2, 2016. Aric Crabb/Bay Area News Group)
Instead, it appears city inspectors are doing just the opposite. In the months since the fire, they have issued inspection reports explicitly stating tenants cannot reside in the buildings, while offering only vague instructions on what violations the owners or tenants need to correct, or throwing up bureaucratic road blocks to getting work done. At the same time, tenants of cultural and entertainment venues have complained about a heavy-handed approach that has made it difficult to stay in business.
On Feb. 21, city staff identified 18 properties in a report to the City Council, saying it had already begun the process of reaching out to property owners to craft compliance plans — a list of work that needs to be done and a timeline in which to do — so the city could bring the spaces up to code. But Darin Ranelletti, the city’s interim director of planning and building, admitted this week that the city had not in fact entered into a compliance plan with the owners of any of those properties.
Schaaf said she was “disappointed” more property owners have decided not to cooperate with the city.
“The city can’t force that choice,” she said. “It can only make it easier.”
At the Castle Von Trapp, a live/work space in West Oakland identified in the February report, a city inspector wrote in an April 20 report: “Discontinue residential occupancy and obtain commercial tenant improvement zoning approval and permits.”
It was a de facto eviction order, although the building was not red-tagged as an immediate risk to the residents. The inspection report was a direct contradiction to Schaaf’s Jan. 11 order, which states city inspectors should “avoid displacement of any individuals residing or working in the property if that can be accomplished without imminent life safety risk.”
“They’ve done everything but make it easy,” said Tom Dolan, the architect who wrote the city’s live/work conversion ordinance in 1999 and who has been volunteering his time with Safer DIY Spaces. The nascent group emerged in the wake of the Dec. 2 fire to help people make immediate safety improvements to unpermitted live/work buildings.
“The city has not actually explicitly red-tagged spaces, they’ve just made it very difficult for them to be lived in,” Dolan said. “There really has been very little cooperation.”
frustrating for Chris Spiteri, one of the tenants in the Castle Von Trapp. Along with her housemates, Spiteri had been working for several months to assuage the fears of their landlords, who were waiting for guidance from the city. A building inspector walked through the space in January but didn’t send an official report back on the violations until April. In March, the tenants said their landlords gave them an ultimatum: Buy the building or leave. One of the landlords, Yeon Lee, did not respond to a request for comment.
“In that time, we very much tried to keep open communication with our landlords to figure out if there was a path for us to move forward that didn’t result in us vacating the building,” she said. “So, it was frustrating, I’m sure on their part as much as ours, to be waiting so long for direction from the city only to find out the result is, because it’s an unpermitted residence, they want us to leave.”
Ranelletti said the onus is on building owners to enter into a compliance plan with the city, and the delays in issuing an inspection report were not an excuse because the property owners were informed of the executive order at the time of the inspection, he said, and can get information on what needs to be done in other ways.
“The information is … often communicated at the site, in the office; they can come in, in person,” he said. “Ultimately, it’s the responsibility of the property owner.”
SiteA (Todd) redacted p2of13Since the council’s report, inspectors have visited other live/work spaces that aren’t on the list of 18. At one live/work space in the city’s Brooklyn Basin neighborhood that is home to about dozen people, an official inspection report read: “Improper occupancy — All residential and non-residential buildings or structure or portion thereof … shall be considered ‘Substandard and a Public Nuisance.'”
The report continues, “Obtain permits, inspections and approvals and restore to original usage.”
The last line is worrisome, said Todd, a tenant whose last name this newspaper is not using because it would identify the building and increase his risk of eviction. Reverting to the original usage would mean people can’t live there. Even if a change of use was granted, the building would have to be upgraded to comply with modern earthquake and building codes, which could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“That’s a real problem,” Todd said. “That’s when things get expensive.”
When she went to the city to see what needed to be done, Sinuba said she felt as though she were talking to a wall.
“For people who are still grieving, just being given this paper that (says) everything is wrong and we won’t tell you what to do … it’s scary,” she said. “We don’t know what this means. We could be kicked out, but there is no where else to live anymore. Everything is too expensive.”
Schaaf admits the city’s work is not done. She meets with staff regularly to discuss ways to make the process better, she said.
“Every two weeks, we work on something new to make the spirit of this order more effective,” she said.
That includes providing inspection reports to tenants, when, in the past, they were only given to landlords. And, staff is working on ways to red tag only part of the building, if that can be done safely, where inspectors would have ordered the entire building shut down before the executive order was issued.
But the Ghost Ship fire’s fallout is affecting permitted spaces, too. At Qilombo, a legal community space in West Oakland, David Keenan, another member of the Safer DIY Spaces group, said he had to fight an invalid inspector’s report that said the space had people living in it, despite the fact there was no evidence of habitation. The inspector based his report on a complaint and verified it when he couldn’t access one room during an inspection.
After a lengthy email exchange, the inspector, Wing Loo, agreed to change the report, but he still cited them for a missing structural support pole for an interior loft structure, as well as problems with a rear staircase that was built before Qilombo occupied the space. When Keenan tried to pull a building permit to fix the staircase, he couldn’t, because of the existing violation.
“You admit that nobody lives there but verified (the habitability complaint) because of some other structural condition that needed to be repaired and because you did, you actually blocked me from fixing the thing you are citing,” Keenan said of his interaction with Loo. “I don’t know how much more Kafkaesque you can get.”
In an email, Loo wrote to Keenan, “I am surprised you are applying logics [sic] to the City Of Oakland. I will reply within the next day or so. Have a good evening and continue to dream.”
