174 Oakland's Soft Story Death Traps - will retrofitting requirements push out more low income renters?

Fixing Oakland’s Death Traps 
After years of delay, the city is finally taking action to retrofit thousands of seismically unsafe soft-story apartments.

https://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/fixing-oaklands-death-traps/Content?oid=24636682

Under the new law, property owners must retrofit soft-story buildings.

When the next big earthquake strikes the Hayward fault, up to 22,000 “soft-story” apartment units in Oakland may flatten like pancakes, potentially causing hundreds of deaths and unprecedented displacement. The Town would never be the same.

City officials mulled over this problem for years but took little-to-no action, even as surrounding cities did so. San Francisco, Berkeley, Alameda, Fremont, and San Leandro have all mandated the retrofitting of unsafe apartments. Now, Oakland is finally addressing the issue, too.

Last week, the Oakland City Council voted to move forward with an ordinance that requires landlords to seismically retrofit the most dangerous soft-story apartment and condo buildings. Soft-story structures lack adequate foundation support, most typically because they were built over garages or commercial uses. Experts say they’re the most likely to collapse in a strong earthquake. 

“The bottom line is that we want to save lives and reduce red-tag buildings and therefore displacement,” said Councilmember Dan Kalb of North Oakland, who has pushed for legislation on soft-story buildings for several years. “We’re not going to eliminate the damage a major earthquake will cause, but we can significantly reduce it.”

The city plans to kick off a six-year process: first, by sending a notice to owners of buildings identified in a 2008 screening evaluation, which found 24,273 units in 1,479 multiunit residential buildings as being especially vulnerable to damage or collapse.

Kalb’s ordinance, which was co-sponsored by Mayor Libby Schaaf, targets wood-framed residential buildings that have five or more units, were built before 1991, and have parking or commercial uses on the ground floor and lack adequate strength to withstand an earthquake. They are largely concentrated near Lake Merritt and in West Oakland but are spread throughout the city.

Landlords who believe their buildings don’t need to be lawfully retrofitted would have a year to prove their case. But for buildings that are mandated, owners will have four to six years to perform the structural evaluation and complete the needed work, depending on which of three tiers they fall into (based on occupancy numbers).

One of the biggest setbacks in addressing the issue came down to the cost to get the job done — and who would pay for it. Retrofits for these types of buildings are estimated to cost about $60,000 to $130,000 per building, depending on the size and amount of work needed. 

Under Kalb’s legislation, the responsibility falls on property owners, but because the work is considered “capital improvement,” landlords could — under current city law — pass through up to 70 percent of costs to tenants over a 25-year period. 

The plan, which came as a result of evaluating what has worked in other cities and hearing from concerned parties, is designed to make it possible for property owners to finance repairs while attempting to mitigate the impact on tenants. The end result is an ordinance that received widespread support, with tenants, owners, engineers, and experts applauding the measure at the recent city council meeting.

James Vann, co-founder of the Oakland Tenants Union, said the group made several requests throughout the process — like requiring that city officials notify tenants rather than relying on owners to do so — and, for the most part, feels that their concerns were taken into account.

“We’re largely OK with this ordinance,” he said. “We made a number of demands that have been incorporated to make sure to reduce the impact on tenants.”

Most owners will need to get a loan to complete the retrofit. And in order to increase rents, they must go through the Oakland rent board and provide proof of all costs and grants received.

Most of the work would be completed on lower levels — parking garages and lobbies — so city officials don’t expect many residents to be displaced by the construction, though if they were, tenants would be entitled to relocation payments to cover temporary housing.

Tom C. Hui, director of San Francisco’s Department of Building Inspection, said that looking at the initial list of 5,000 buildings that needed work in San Francisco was overwhelming at first, but the vast majority have complied. “I was nervous with that many buildings, but outreach efforts were huge, and we’re getting it done,” said Hui, who started in the department the day before the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake and became director the year before San Francisco’s mandated soft-story program went into effect in 2013. Numerous soft-story apartment buildings collapsed in San Francisco’s Marina district during the ’89 quake.

Under San Francisco’s soft-story program, the city placed buildings into tiers based on occupancy numbers, each with individual deadlines. Each of the four deadlines to submit work plans have passed, and the soft-story work is supposed to be finished in 2020. Overall, out of 4,901 buildings, just 365 have failed to submit their plans.

San Francisco handles noncompliance by first sending landlords a warning letter, and if they don’t follow through, a notice is posted on the building. Eventually, if still no action is taken, the city attorney can take up the case. Oakland’s ordinance also includes procedures in case of noncompliance, including fines, penalties, and posted notices.

“The goal isn’t to fine landlords — it’s to work with them so they actually get it done,” Hui said.

Now that the Oakland ordinance is going into effect, it begs the question about why it took so long for the city to address this threat while other cities did so earlier?

Kalb, who has been on the Oakland City Council for six years, first took up this issue in 2014: creating a working group with stakeholders, getting input from seismic experts, and even drafting an ordinance. But the plan was put on hold as a slew of other issues consumed city officials’ energy, including housing pressures and tenant protections.

“It got put on the back burner,” Kalb said. “It’s the kind of thing most everyone understands we should do, but because it’s in the future, there’s a tendency to just kick it down the road and say ‘We’ll get to it eventually.’”

Kalb said he’s pleased that the ordinance is finally moving forward and, like everyone, hopes a major earthquake doesn’t strike before the work is done. After this initial project is complete, Kalb would also like to look at smaller, two- to four-unit buildings, as well as those made of concrete, and to create a better emergency response plan for the city at large. “If we don’t prepare, we’re going to have our own Katrina here,” Kalb said. “No one disagrees with that.”

173 Oakland Building Dept does nothing to enforce the Lead Paint Laws - and children suffer

Oakland’s Lead Paint Problem Persists 
The city has yet to launch a program to check older homes for lead paint, even though children are still being poisoned. Funds from a recent lawsuit, however, could jumpstart the effort.

https://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/oaklands-lead-paint-problem-persists/Content?oid=24550906

Irina Dessaint’s 18-month-old daughter, Teddy, turned around and looked at her with a mouth full of paint chips. Teddy liked to hang out by the window of their Oakland apartment to wave at people on the street. Standing on the couch to peer over the windowsill, she took a bite out of the frame.

The next day, Dessaint asked Teddy’s pediatrician for a lead test, knowing that their cramped North Oakland apartment building was constructed in 1906, seven decades before lead paint was banned nationwide. When the results came back, Dessaint and her husband rushed Teddy to the emergency room.

Teddy’s blood lead level was 59 micrograms per deciliter, well above the toxicity level of 5 micrograms set by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The following day, in the ER, it dropped to 33, and for the past several months it has hovered at 8. “I didn’t realize how much of an effect a little bit can have,” Dessaint said.

Teddy was one of the lucky ones. Her doctors think it was a one-time exposure to lead because the levels dropped so quickly, but each year dozens of Oakland children are poisoned by lead. Up to 7.5 percent of children under the age of 6 in eight Oakland zip codes were lead poisoned in 2012, according to a housing report published by the Alameda County Department of Public Health in April. This is five times greater than the state lead poisoning rate and 2½ times greater than the county average in the same year. The California Department of Public Health has not released more recent numbers.

Lead paint toxicity is a long-standing issue in Oakland, and one that’s well-known to local officials. But critics say the city has been too slow to tackle the problem, despite studies showing lead poisoning is one of the most common and preventable childhood ailments. There’s an easy solution on the table, advocates say, but the city staff has yet to move it forward. Meanwhile, substandard housing conditions, increased poverty, and lack of oversight have sentenced Oakland children to high rates of lead in their blood.

Larry Brooks, director of the Alameda County Healthy Homes Department, said multiple factors contribute to the problem, including property owners unwilling to pay for repairs and unlicensed contractors unwittingly spreading the contaminant in a home by not taking proper precautions. 

The Oakland Planning and Building Department, meanwhile, doesn’t have the financial resources to undertake the lead-paint issue right away, said city spokesperson Karen Boyd. In October, Oakland and nine other cities and counties won a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against large paint companies who advertised lead paint use despite its known toxicity in the 1950s, but the money has yet to be doled out.

As a result, “people are getting away with creating lead hazards because no one is policing them,” Brooks said. “Unfortunately, we’re the ones that end up dealing with the tragic results.” 

The effects of lead poisoning are serious and permanent. Children with a blood-lead level as low as 5 micrograms per deciliter can have learning and developmental disabilities, decreased IQ, behavioral problems, stunted growth, and kidney problems, among a host of other complications. Lead levels higher than 45 micrograms per deciliter can cause severe neurological problems and death.

“The normal lead level is zero, because lead serves no functional purpose in the human body,” said Carl Baum, pediatrician and an expert on environmental health for the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Bay Area children aren’t ingesting lead through drinking water like in Flint, Mich., where improperly treated water caused the corrosion of lead pipes in 2015. Instead, like Teddy, kids are most commonly exposed to it through old paint in and around their homes.

“The water issue in Flint was a double-edged sword. It got a lot of attention, but people ignored the housing problem,” Baum said.

More than 80 percent of Oakland housing was built before 1978, the year lead-based paint was banned from residential use. With each passing year, that paint becomes more of a hazard as normal wear and tear and weathering takes its toll. Children under the age of 6 are most at risk of inhaling dust that contains lead, playing in lead contaminated soil, or ingesting lead paint chips.

“Their behavior is different than adults,” said Jerry Paulson, chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ environmental health committee. “Think of a 2- or 3-year-old. Those kids are down on the ground, they’re playing on the floor, crawling, and then they put their hands in their mouth.”

Teddy’s case isn’t unusual, but Dessaint’s quick reaction was. Typically, lead poisoning is an inconspicuous disease with few obvious symptoms, Paulson said. At low levels, lead toxicity shows no symptoms, and at higher levels, many of the behavioral and developmental signs — difficulty learning, irritability, loss of appetite — are mistaken for common child behavior.

But the effects are lasting.

“I wondered for a long time after, when she screams is it normal toddler behavior, or is it lead?” Dessaint said.

Tram Nguyen, policy coordinator for the county health department and lead author on the Housing Habitability and Health report said there’s a clear connection between dilapidated housing and decreased health. Pests, mold, poor ventilation, dirty carpet, and cracks in the walls or roof increase the incidence of respiratory diseases like asthma, while peeling, damp, or chipped lead-based paint increases the risk of lead poisoning.

“We know homes that are not well-maintained are more of a risk,” healthy homes director Brooks said.

Historically, Oakland has relied on code violation complaints or Rent Adjustment Program petitions, which can include health and safety violations, to force landlords to repair run-down homes. But renters, especially those who live in or near poverty in Oakland, are often afraid of complaining about rental unit issues, said Sophia DeWitt, program director for East Bay Housing Organizations. Consequently, many tenants put up with dilapidated conditions like peeling lead paint because they don’t want to risk losing housing.

“That family could easily face retaliation for making the complaint in the form of a rent increase or eviction,” DeWitt said. “Both of those things are illegal, but they’re very hard to prove.”

It’s clear to housing advocates the self-policing system isn’t working. Between 1996 and 2018, fewer than 600 health and safety RAP petitions were filed, according to city data, representing little more than half a percent of all rental properties in the past two decades.

There is a potential solution, advocates say, one that has been pending before the city for decades. “As a matter of fact, 2019 will be 30 years that I’ve been doing this,” said Gwen Hardy, founder of People United for a Better Life in Oakland and a board member of the county Lead Poisoning Prevention Program.

Three decades ago, Hardy’s work led to the creation of the lead poisoning prevention program, part of the Alameda County Healthy Homes Department. The program’s staffers help families with lead-poisoned children, check homes to find sources of lead, and in some cases provide grants to help property owners remediate the problem. Their work is recognized as a model by the Environmental Protection Agency and has contributed to the steady decline in lead poisoning across the county — even though rates in Oakland remain high.

According to experts and local residents, the ideal solution would be to prevent lead poisoning before it happens. “We need to switch to a system where we screen buildings instead of screening kids,” said Paulson of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

But the most recent push to get the city council to address the issue has taken nearly seven years to make it to committee and has yet to be presented before the full council. Margaretta Lin, executive director of the Dellums Institute for Social Justice, first introduced the idea of a proactive rental inspection program in 2011 when she worked for Oakland as deputy city administrator. She left the city in 2015, but in 2017, a working group composed of Lin, the Healthy Homes Department, the Oakland Tenants Union, real estate agents, city staff, and other stakeholders developed a pilot program and presented it to the council’s Community and Economic Development committee.

Their proposal was to take the burden of reporting code violations off renters and allow city inspectors to do routine checks on properties, particularly those built before 1978. A similar program implemented in Rochester, N.Y., reduced childhood lead poisoning by 60 percent.

In June 2017, the economic development committee recommended the program be put before the full council, but that has yet to happen.

City officials say the program hasn’t moved forward because the building department doesn’t have enough staff or funds. City spokesperson Autumn King said the building department will ask for program funding in the next budget cycle. “The city is committed to developing a program that is effective, efficient, and sustainable for the benefit of all Oakland residents,” King said.

Oakland can also expect an influx of cash soon to clean up lead around the city. In October, the U.S. Supreme Court turned down an appeal from three major paint companies, letting stand a lower court ruling that held them responsible for $409 million in abatement funds. The decision brought to a close nearly two decades of litigation wherein Oakland, San Francisco, and eight other California cities and counties argued that paint companies created a hazard by knowingly marketing a toxic product for home use.

“It is long past time for these companies to be held accountable for the harm their products have caused and continue to cause in homes throughout Oakland and California,” city attorney Barbara Parker said in a statement.

It’s too late for families like Katherine De Pooter’s. Her son, Robbie, was the picture of a healthy, happy infant when he was born. But between the ages of 1 and 2, things changed.

“He used to love the camera. He loved to look at me and play with me,” De Pooter said. “And then as he started getting older, he wouldn’t look you in the eye. He would play with his toys but in slow motion, kind of like he wasn’t all there.”

Robbie was diagnosed with severe autism before his second birthday. He had temper tantrums and never slept. He wouldn’t respond to his name no matter how loudly De Pooter screamed it.

“We didn’t know what was wrong with him,” she said.

Six months later, during his annual checkup, Robbie’s doctor screened him for lead. The results came back positive: 12.9 micrograms per deciliter.

A year ago, the Healthy Homes Department inspected the East Oakland home and found lead in every room. There was one wall where the paint was peeling from water damage from a leaking roof. The department provided De Pooter’s landlord with a grant to make the property safe. She in turn tried to get the family to sign a paper saying they wouldn’t sue, De Pooter said.

Slowly, Robbie’s lead levels have been dropping. His doctors won’t correlate his autism to the lead exposure, De Pooter said, but he has been reclassified with mild autism.

“Now look at him,” De Pooter said, while Robbie, now nearly 4, played with a train set on their living room floor. “He’s calm. That’s how I know the lead is going down.”

This report was originally published by our sister publication, Oakland Magazine.

172 City of Oakland Bldg Inspector Espinosa - Bribery, Corruption, Extortion, Sex Trafficking, Exploitation of women and girls..

November 17, 2018
The Corrupt Oakland Official Who Wanted to be a Cannabis Kingpin
Thomas Espinosa is accused of taking bribes and extorting property owners in his job as a city building inspector. In his spare time, he was assembling a cannabis real estate empire.

https://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/the-corrupt-oakland-official-who-wanted-to-be-a-cannabis-kingpin/Content?oid=23229940

Thomas Espinosa noticed that there was something about the property at 4136 Rifle Lane in the Oakland hills that didn't match city records. Behind a single-family home was a small backyard cottage that the owner never obtained permits to build. So Espinosa opened a case file with the city for unpermitted construction.

It was November 2013, and it was one of the first instances in which investigators from Oakland's Public Ethics Commission concluded that Espinosa had been involved in wrongdoing. Espinosa may have previously accepted bribes or kickbacks or illegally mixed his personal contracting business with his work for the city, but under Oakland's Government Ethics Act, PEC investigators don't have the authority to examine his earlier dealings.

The case that Espinosa filed for 4136 Rifle Lane remained open until February 2016 when a prospective homebuyer noticed it and called Espinosa for details. According to PEC investigators, Espinosa visited the property again and warned the buyer of "significant potential fines." As a result, the buyer backed out of the sale.

That same month, according to PEC investigators, the broker who was trying to sell the house, Bill Charman of Gimme Shelter, Inc., agreed to meet with Espinosa outside of Oakland City Hall to discuss the problem. It's unclear what exactly Charman expected of this meeting, but what Espinosa allegedly proposed was simple: a bribe.

Espinosa told Charman to write him a $1,500 personal check. According to PEC investigators, Charman did just that, and Espinosa deposited the money into his personal bank account.

Then, Espinosa went into the planning and building department's computer system and waived the building code violation fees and a required field check. He then allowed Charman to obtain over-the-counter permits for additional work that needed to be done at the house. The next day, Espinosa closed the unpermitted construction case.

Charman didn't respond to an email from the Express seeking comment for this story, but according to city records, a new code enforcement case at the Rifle Lane house was reopened this month because the inspections that Espinosa conducted at the property after Charman allegedly paid him off might have been "improper."

The alleged payoff at Rifle Lane was one of dozens of instances of illegal wrongdoing that PEC investigators have alleged against Espinosa. The two-year investigation, led by Milad Dalju, the chief inspector of the PEC, uncovered more than 47 alleged violations of Oakland's government ethics rules by Espinosa. Most of the charges involve alleged bribes Espinosa took from property owners to fast-track their permits or improper private business deals with a landlord whose buildings he'd also worked on as a city inspector. Espinosa now faces fines in excess of $1 million if the Public Ethics Commission sustains the case.

And the case is still expanding. "Since these allegations were published a week ago, we've received additional allegations against Thomas Espinosa," Dalju told the ethics commission on Nov. 5.

One of the additional cases not detailed in the PEC's allegations against Espinosa involves an alleged payoff and the red-tagging of a live-work loft in West Oakland that resulted in seven families being evicted from their homes in 2016. Residents of the building and city officials believe Espinosa colluded with the building's landlord to displace the families.

The FBI has also been investigating Espinosa. And the PEC is examining the activities of another city code enforcement officer.

But whatever Espinosa did on the job with the city is only part of the story. For the past several years, Espinosa has also operated a large cannabis real estate company that at one point controlled up to half-a-million square feet of industrial space in Oakland and Sacramento, and possibly other cities. According to sources with first-hand knowledge of Espinosa's dealings, as well as real estate and court records, at the same time in 2016 he was being pushed out of the city by his superiors who suspected him of corruption, Espinosa was also boldly attempting to become a kingpin of "green zone" properties. And he was allegedly drawing on his city job and contacts to do it, while buying expensive gifts and trinkets for his new bride.

But Espinosa's grandiose dreams of fortune ultimately came crashing down. His business partners, including a network of Chinese cannabis investors, have sued him, alleging that he defrauded them out of millions of dollars. And last summer, he went bankrupt.

Darker allegations have also surfaced against him. An anonymous letter sent to multiple city officials in October 2016 alleged that Espinosa was not only using city resources to pursue his fortune in cannabis real estate but was also involved in the "sex trafficking and exploitation of women and girls."

During a recent phone interview with the Express, Espinosa acknowledged his involvement in the cannabis industry, but he maintained his innocence in the face of multiple criminal accusations and ethics violations. He blamed the city for driving him to quit and the FBI for financially ruining him.

"These guys took me through complete hell," he said about the city. "I had a million-dollar business. They had the FBI following me and every person I did business with, so I had to file for bankruptcy recently."

Espinosa said he's been scapegoated for the building inspection division, a city department that has a history of corruption and gross mismanagement. "I'm the guy they kicked out," he said.

True enough, he was kicked out. But the way he was pushed out of the city quietly, and the tangle of crimes he's accused of, raises questions about who else inside City Hall might have acted with Espinosa, or who looked the other way for years while he exploited his position as a code enforcement officer.

In 2005, when he was first hired as a specialty combination inspector in the building services division, Espinosa roamed Oakland in search of code violations and blight. In this role, he played a part in some of the building services division's previous scandals and controversies.

One such controversy began in 2009 when Espinosa was driving around Fruitvale looking for something he could make a case out of. He noticed a triplex on Galindo Street in Fruitvale where there were weeds growing amid the front hedges. He stopped, took some pictures, and issued a notice to abate, mailing it to the property's owner, Thomas Lippman.

Lippman subsequently cut the weeds, but then he received a second notice to abate a week later. Confident he'd addressed the problem, Lippman contacted another inspector who came out, took a look, and closed the cases.

Nevertheless, Lippman got a $1,394 fine in the mail. The city also initiated the process of hiring a contractor to abate the problem, which would cost even more.

Frustrated, Lippman drove downtown to meet with Espinosa. Espinosa presented Lippman with a picture of a single weed growing from a crack in the pavement behind the apartment building, according to court records. Espinosa also informed Lippman that he'd have to pay $2,395 to clear the cases, even if he wanted to file an appeal.

Lippman complained all the way to the top of the building services division, but to no avail. Later, several other code enforcement officers conducted another inspection of his building and found additional violations and repairs that had been done without the proper building permits. They issued another notice of violation. Lippman's fines ultimately grew to about $10,000, an excessive figure for some uncut weeds and minor unpermitted construction.

Unable to find a single person in the entire building services division who he felt would give him a fair hearing, Lippman asked for an appeal before a neutral hearing officer. The hearing was held in June 2012, but in yet another twist that Lippman felt was rigged, the "neutral" hearing officer turned out to be an attorney employed by the city and appointed by the building services division. Unsurprisingly, Lippman lost.

So, he sued. His case went all the way to the California Supreme Court, and just this year, he finally won, forcing the city to reform its appeals process. But he might have never pushed so far had it not been for the fact that another government watchdog had intervened earlier and exposed the building services division's tangle of conflicts and corruption.

In 2010, the Alameda County Civil Grand Jury received dozens of complaints from angry tenants, landlords, and homeowners about Oakland's building services. It was the second time in roughly a decade that the grand jury was asked to investigate the city department and its inspectors. In 1999, a similar spate of complaints led the grand jury to issue a highly critical report about Oakland's poorly run code enforcement system.

What grand jurors found on their second examination in 2010 was an agency still suffering from badly trained inspectors who applied inconsistent criteria to cases and made seemingly arbitrary decisions about whether to issue fines. The grand jury observed that inspectors were all too ready to levy costly abatement orders and notices of violation, often based on dubious evidence. They found a fundamentally unfair appeals process and noted that property owners feared speaking up because of the division's reputation for retaliation.

The agency also did a poor job of keeping records, and the city even failed to turn over documents to the grand jury, despite being subpoenaed. Often, noted the grand jury, code enforcement officers issued notices of violation that were never sent to the current property owner, resulting in compounding fines and exorbitant liens filed on homes and apartment buildings.

And the grand jury exposed corruption. A handful of private contractors hired by the building services division — sometimes hand-picked by inspectors in the field — were receiving lucrative abatement contracts. "The Grand Jury consistently heard that one contractor had inappropriate access to the office of the former inspection manager," noted the investigators' final report, issued in 2011. "This particular contractor appeared to receive a disproportionately large percentage of contracts" and would often bid low and later submit change orders to increase their payout.

The contractor was Arthur Young, the former brother in law and close friend of Antoinette Renwick, the inspection services manager for the building services division. Not only was Renwick steering lucrative contracts to Young, she also accepted a $50,000 loan from Young and lived in a property that he owned, none of which she ever disclosed. In an understatement, the grand jury said this all "contributed to a perception of impropriety."

In 2013, the state Fair Political Practices Commission fined Renwick $6,500 for steering contracts to Young and hiding these deals. Under a cloud of suspicion, Renwick quit in 2010.

Since it was published seven years ago, the grand jury report has become Exhibit A for landlords and tenants who have suffered abuse at the hands of Oakland's code enforcement officers. It continues to confirm suspicions that some inspectors are corrupt and that the city's code enforcement system needs to be reformed.

Since 2011, Oakland city council members, mayors, the city attorney, and city administrators have promised to address the severe management problems the grand jury exposed and to root out corruption. But ultimately, opportunities for bribery and collusions remained. Apparently, so did corrupt employees. While Renwick was forced out, Thomas Espinosa, one of her underlings, stayed on.

If what the Public Ethics Commission's investigators allege about Espinosa is true, then not much has changed in Oakland's building services division since the scandal of 2011. Some inspectors continue to use their positions of authority to enrich themselves at the expense of the public.

Still, the timeline of misconduct pieced together by Dalju and his investigators is jaw-dropping. In addition to the alleged bribery case involving the Rifle Lane property, PEC investigators say Espinosa accepted $24,600 from Vivian Tang, who hired Espinosa to repair a property she owned on Lawlor Street in East Oakland. Espinosa improperly inspected his own work and signed off on it in the city's permit system, investigators alleged.

In another similar case uncovered by PEC staff, property owner Ana Siu paid Espinosa $66,277 for general contracting work related to the abatement of several code violations while he was also inspecting her single-family home in Temescal in his official capacity.

And investigators say that from February to May 2016, Espinosa allegedly coerced Alexandre Machado to pay him $12,850 to clear enforcement cases, including stop-work orders, on an Oakland hills home that Machado was renovating for resale.

In an interview with the Express, Espinosa said he was just trying to help people navigate a needlessly bureaucratic system. "I was not a part of the problem," he said. "I was a part of the city, of the people. I would help them. Somebody would call me and say they had a problem or a question, and I would look in the record and give them information."

Asked to respond to the specific allegations against him in the PEC's report, Espinosa accused several of his bosses and colleagues of misconduct. "They have one guy there who is horrible, who has been screwing them over for a long time," he said about another code enforcement officer. He declined to name the person, however.

Espinosa acknowledged that he has his own private business interests, but he said, "what other moneys [deals] I did with people didn't have anything to do with city business."

The PEC's investigation concluded otherwise.

The most glaring example involved $176,000 in payments made by Elizabeth Williams, a West Oakland landlord, to Espinosa for working as a contractor on her properties. Williams was previously investigated by the city attorney for operating substandard and dangerous rental housing, and in 2009 the city obtained an injunction against her, requiring that she make safety improvements. Espinosa was assigned by building services as the inspector to ensure she reached compliance, but according to the PEC, he saw it as a way to personally enrich himself. He allegedly carried out improper and incomplete inspections on his own work and closed various code enforcement cases against Williams after she paid him bribes. Williams also hired Espinosa as a contractor to carry out work at her properties, despite the obvious conflict of interest. As with all of his other source of income, including outside contracting and alleged bribes, Espinosa never reported receiving this money on his mandatory financial disclosure forms. In fact, he simply stopped filing the forms in 2015.

Another building inspector, Anthony Harbaugh appears to have helped Espinosa either extort Williams, or accept bribes from her. (The Express was unable to reach Williams for comment, and it's unclear whether she knew her payments to Espinosa were improper or if they were coerced or voluntary.)

According to PEC investigators, Harbaugh conducted several inspections of Williams' rentals to check on work and permits that Espinosa had facilitated. Harbaugh also did the final inspections for the house on Rifle Lane. Other unnamed inspectors also appear to have played roles in issuing violations and clearing cases in which Espinosa was allegedly paid bribes or hired as a contractor.

Harbaugh didn't respond to emails and telephone calls seeking comment for this report, but his city telephone extension still forwards to his voicemail. The city administrator's office didn't respond to questions about whether Harbaugh is still employed. But according to PEC investigators, Harbaugh is now also under investigation, as first reported by the Express on its website.

The PEC's report on Espinosa isn't the first time that city officials noticed Espinosa was mixing his personal business with his official city duties and misusing city resources. In 2015, Espinosa's supervisor Ed Labayog and Marie Taylor reprimanded him for using office resources and city time to print numerous emails on several occasions that were related to his "travel arrangements, hotel reservations and personal property information." He also ran up the bill on his city-issued cellphone by hundreds of dollars by allegedly making calls related to his personal business, and his supervisors suspected him on multiple occasions of lying to them about these matters.

By the time Espinosa was forced out of his city job in November 2016, he was already deeply embedded in Northern California's cannabis industry carving out a role for himself as a real estate broker with the contacts in government to quickly obtain building permits and cannabis licenses. At least that was what he promised the landlords he was leasing warehouse space from, as well as the mostly Chinese cannabis growers he recruited.

Real estate records and court documents show that in 2016, Espinosa controlled at least two large warehouse spaces in Oakland and another large warehouse in Sacramento. It's unclear how much Oakland city officials knew about Espinosa's cannabis ventures, but in October of that year, an anonymous tipster sent a letter to Mayor Libby Schaaf, City Attorney Barbara Parker, then-Interim Planning and Building Director Darin Ranelletti, and the Public Ethics Commission warning them about Espinosa.

The tipster's letter alleged that Espinosa was "using city time, connections and resources to facilitate the establishment of numerous marijuana dispensary businesses, and brokering deals to lease properties for marijuana dispensaries, all of which Mr. Espinosa is profiting from greatly."

The tipster further alleged that other city officials were working with Espinosa to set up lucrative cannabis businesses, but the letter writer didn't name anyone else.

The letter's author also claimed that Espinosa is somehow linked to a "club" in South San Francisco "where Asian women will come into the private rooms and do whatever is negotiated and paid for," and that some of these women were "slaves from China."

The Public Ethics Commission confirmed to the Express that it received a copy of the letter in 2016, around the same time the agency opened its investigation into Espinosa. The mayor's office said it could not find a copy of the letter, however.

While it's unclear whether the sex slave allegations have any merit, public records confirm the letter writer's allegations about Espinosa's efforts to control real estate in areas zoned for cannabis production.

In fall 2016, Espinosa leased approximately 75,000 square feet in a warehouse owned by Brenden McEntee on Frederick Street Oakland's Jingletown. McEntee previously used the warehouse for his organic flour business, but when Oakland created its geographic "green zones," where cannabis cultivation and other marijuana businesses are permitted, the value of the warehouse increased dramatically.

"I ended up downsizing my business, and I moved it to San Leandro in a smaller space," said McEntee in an interview. "The property in Oakland is more valuable because of the green phenomenon."

McEntee said two real estate brokers connected him with Espinosa and that he rented the warehouse to Espinosa for several months before evicting him in spring 2017. "I feel extremely fortunate that my involvement was brief, and maybe I was lucky I was able to move quickly and disassociate myself from Espinosa," said McEntee about the ill-fated deal.

According to lease documents, the brokers who connected Espinosa to McEntee were Richard Sutherland of the Sutherland Company and Jay Hagglund of Cushman and Wakefield. In addition to connecting Espinosa with McEntee, Hagglund also leased part of a building that he owned on 37th Avenue near I-880 to Espinosa's company, D&G Investment Development.

Sutherland didn't respond to a phone call and email from the Express, but Hagglund wrote in an email to the newspaper that he has since terminated his 37th Avenue lease with Espinosa. "He just seemed to be getting more unstable at the end with all his failures at all his locations," wrote Hagglund.

At McEntee's Frederick Street warehouse, Espinosa brought in a group of Chinese investors with plans of setting up an enormous cannabis grow operation. But according to court records, Espinosa pocketed almost $1 million in payments from the investors and then failed to deliver on his promises.

The investors were led by ZhongJian Enterprises of Fremont. On Dec. 29, 2016, Espinosa signed a sublease agreement with Qi Chen, a representative of ZhongJian. Under the terms of the deal, Espinosa's D&G Investment Development company would be paid $815,000 extra to upgrade the building's electrical system and completely remodel the interior so that it would be suitable for growing cannabis. Furthermore, according to the lawsuit, Espinosa promised to secure four cannabis cultivation permits from the city of Oakland and the state in exchange for a payment of $680,000 from ZhongJian.

But the deal collapsed. In August 2017, ZhongJian filed a lawsuit asserting that Espinosa broke his contract and made off with $935,000.

Espinosa responded to ZhongJian's lawsuit in October 2017 asserting in a court filing that he'd done everything required under the contract, including finishing the PG&E upgrade, and that ZhongJian's investors had failed to provide him with enough money to complete other parts of the build out.

Espinosa also alleged that the investors tried to pay him to bribe various officials to fast-track the project. "Two members [of ZhongJian], Ricky and Kai [...] tried to hire me to bribe city officials and PG&E employees," wrote Espinosa in his official response to the lawsuit.

According to city records, no person or company associated with the Frederick Street warehouse applied for a cannabis cultivation license until after Espinosa had been evicted by McEntee in May 2017.

The Express repeatedly, but unsuccessfully tried contacting Guangming Zhang and Qi Chen, two of the individuals behind the cannabis company ZhongJian. Zhang and Chen's attorney James Cai didn't return two phone calls and an email seeking comment.

But McEntee said some of the same cannabis growers are still moving ahead with new leases on the property. In October, a company called ZJ Enterprises applied for cannabis cultivation permits with the city. Guangming Zhang is the president of ZJ Enterprises.

At the same time Espinosa was being evicted from the Frederick Street warehouse, he was busy signing up another cannabis grower for a warehouse he had taken over in a north Sacramento industrial park. In May 2017, Espinosa signed a lease with Jue Wang for approximately 15,000 square feet of space at a price of $30,000 a month. Wang ran a cannabis cultivation company called Huamei, Inc., which translates into English as "gorgeous" and according to city of Sacramento records was leasing space in other warehouses for similar purposes.

But according to a lawsuit filed by Wang in August 2017, Espinosa lost control of the warehouse and was unable to hand over the keys and permits. Wang alleges his company paid a total of $86,448 in rent plus a security deposit but got nothing in return.

Attempts to reach Wang were unsuccessful. Wang's attorney Patricia Wolfe declined to comment. The owner of the warehouse, Todd Sperber, also declined to comment because he's been named in the lawsuit filed by Wang against Espinosa.

Back in Oakland, Espinosa was sued again in another collapsed cannabis deal. According to court records, in March 2017, Espinosa recruited yet another grower to rent a space in a warehouse located at 301 Adeline St. He also allegedly promised the grower, Diane Huang, that he could secure the necessary state and local permits to get the grow operation up and running in exchange for $250,000.

According to Huang, she gave Espinosa a quarter-million dollars, but then he suddenly disappeared. Huang later discovered that 301 Adeline St. doesn't exist. She filed a lawsuit against Espinosa in August 2017 alleging fraud.

Michael Taylor is one of the additional alleged victims whose encounter with Espinosa wasn't documented in the PEC's corruption probe.

Taylor used to live in the Union Bakery building at 661 27th St. in West Oakland, but in April 2016, Espinosa conducted a supposedly random inspection and deemed the live/work space "unsafe." He red-tagged it and ordered the tenants to vacate immediately or be arrested. Seven households were forcibly displaced.

Taylor believes his landlord Patrick MacIntyre paid Espinosa to red tag the building in order to accomplish what seven previously attempted eviction lawsuits hadn't: emptying renters from a valuable space in a gentrifying neighborhood.

Officials in Oakland's planning and building department also think MacIntyre and Espinosa colluded. In November 2016, Espinosa's superiors notified him that he was about to be fired. Laying out a damning case in a six-page, single-spaced letter, Darin Ranelletti, then the interim director of Oakland's Planning and Building Department, wrote "these facts strongly suggest collusion with the owner and that your inspection of the 27th Street building was outside the scope of your job as a City employee and quite possibly for personal gain."

"Had your action gone undiscovered, you would have caused the indefinite displacement of multiple families," concluded Ranelletti.

But even though city officials discovered Espinosa's alleged plot, the tenants were still indefinitely displaced.

The tenants and their attorney Kevin Greenquist also didn't find out about the city's investigation of Espinosa and its findings that he likely colluded with MacIntyre until a year later when Espinosa's personnel file was obtained by San Francisco Chronicle reporter Kimberly Veklerov, who requested it under the Public Records Act. Veklerov's story in early 2018 was the first public mention of the episode.

Meanwhile, Taylor and the other tenants' court battle with MacIntyre has proceeded at a snail's pace. And it has progressed as though the red-tagging of the Union Bakery was a legitimate government enforcement action. For example, one of the judges who previously oversaw the case actually relied on a declaration from Espinosa supporting MacIntyre that, according to Oakland officials, "contained negative information" about the building's condition. Espinosa, however, hadn't included this information — which damaged the tenants' case — in his official reports he filed with the city. In other words, Espinosa's court declaration likely contained false information.

Greenquist told the Express that he's hesitant to comment about the case because it's likely headed to trial. But he criticized the city not fully disclosing Espinosa's alleged collusion with the landlord.

"I would be more harshly prosecuted for stealing a candy bar from a 7-11 than this landlord has been for bribing a city official," said Greenquist. "And the city knew about what happened all along, and yet they allowed the tenants of this building to be wrongfully displaced."

MacIntyre's attorney David Sternfeld declined to be interviewed, but he wrote in an email that "Mr. MacIntyre continues to maintain that he has done nothing illegal concerning his ownership of the building at issue in the litigation. He has not colluded with Mr. Espinoza [sic] or anyone else at any time."

A jury won't decide whether Espinosa and MacIntyre colluded unless it's argued at trial next year in the eviction and counter-eviction lawsuit. And a final decision about whether or not Espinosa engaged in the spree of corruption outlined in the PEC's recent report won't be made until his case is heard before the state Office of Administrative Hearings, also possibly next year.

Espinosa's behavior also has caught the attention of the FBI. In October 2017, a federal criminal grand jury subpoenaed the city of Oakland for Espinosa's employment records. The FBI won't say whether their investigation of Espinosa is still underway, or if they're looking into other city officials or players in the cannabis industry linked to Espinosa.

In July 2018, Espinosa filed for bankruptcy. Among his listed debts is the rent he still owes to McEntee for the Frederick Street warehouse in Oakland, along with potential judgements in six lawsuits filed against him by cannabis investors and others alleging fraud and breach of contract. He also included the $1 million in "administrative penalties" that he's facing before the Public Ethics Commission.

The only property Espinosa owns now, according to his bankruptcy petition, is his car, $50 worth of clothing, another $50 in cash, plus his cellphone. In short, he's lost virtually everything.

Several of the cannabis investors suing him in civil court, including ZhongJian and Wong, have also intervened in his bankruptcy case arguing that Espinosa is trying to absolve himself not of debts, but of "fraudulent conduct."

Espinosa's marriage has also unraveled. His wife, Yanyi Chen, whom he married in December 2016, filed for divorce in May 2018. The filing came shortly after Espinosa and Chen were evicted from their apartment in San Mateo. According to court records, after they wed, Espinosa gave Chen a $41,000 Tiffany ring, a $50,000 Cartier watch, and brand new Tesla Model S6 worth $85,000. Espinosa also claimed in a court filing in the divorce case that Chen removed $700,000 from a safe he maintained at an undisclosed location. Chen didn't return a phone call seeking comment for this report.

Asked what he thinks caused his downfall, Espinosa blamed city politics concerning live/work housing. He claims he was unfairly punished for red tagging the Union Bakery in 2016 and pursuing other enforcement cases too aggressively.

Despite evidence he colluded with MacIntyre to red tag the Union Bakery, Espinosa maintains he did it to prevent harm from coming to the tenants. In response, he said his supervisors bowed to political pressures from tenants activists and elected officials, and so they reversed his decision.

"I was definitely the scapegoat. I got rooted out because I cited a building just like the one that burned down," he said, referring to the Ghost Ship fire in which 36 people died during a December 2016 party.

Espinosa intends to defend himself against the PEC's case. He's also contesting the multiple lawsuits brought against him by cannabis investors. And he blames the FBI for allegedly spooking his business partners.

"I had 500,000 square feet leased in several buildings — Oakland, Sacramento, all over," he boasted. "I ran into financial problems because they made it so hard for me. Every one of my customers then went to. They sent the FBI, and all these people thought, 'Wow, what's going on?'"

The cannabis investors who tried leasing property from Espinosa don't appear to agree with this take, however. None of them mentioned the FBI in the lawsuits they've filed, and several people involved in real estate deals with Espinosa who spoke to the Express said they were not aware that the FBI was watching him.

Bitterly, Espinosa declined to say anything more about the city's troubled building services division for which he worked for 13 years. "Here's the deal," he said, "I'm not willing to give my life to taking down the city. They have to organize and get right somehow. "I just don't want to get into it."