In December of 2016, a fire broke out during a show at Oakland's Ghost Ship, a DIY-venue located in a two-story warehouse. The incident tragically took the lives of 36 young concert-goers and prompted national discussions (including one on our podcast) of the safety and vitality of DIY venues and the long-term effects of such building code violations for gentrification and zoning. 

As Oakland-based activist and writer Jaime Omar Yassin explains in the following essay—featured here as part of Archinect’s recurring series Screen/Print—after the fire, the dominant narrative became centered around the concerns of the arts community. So too was the response by the city to the exclusion of Oakland's overwhelmingly black and brown population that had been there long before artists priced out of San Francisco began inhabiting Oakland's warehouses. Efforts and funds to ensure safety and bring existing live-work spaces up to code didn’t end up extending to the surrounding neighborhood. Another fire occurring a few months later at a transitional living situation in West Oakland, made the city's ineffectual response glaringly apparent. Almost a year after the Ghost Ship set aflame, Yassin concludes that "the city did little to focus the post–Ghost Ship energy into substantive changes in the city’s degraded code-inspection regimes, and the toxic substandard housing that Oakland’s dwindling black and brown populations [are] increasingly forced to live in.”

Yassin's essay, "No Place for Artists: Housing Policy in the Wake of Ghost Ship," is included in Take Shape, a new architecture and politics publication. The first issue focuses on loft housing in the context of affordable living and features historical essays, long-form journalism, and architectural proposals including an upcoming artist’s housing complex in DC by MOS Architects; a satirical proposal on converting vacant mansions into artist studios by Palacit; and a longform consideration of NYC’s Loft Law by Julia Goodman.

No Place For Artists
Housing Policy in the Wake of Ghost Ship

by Jaime Omar Yassin

Dozens of reporters, videographers, and photographers thronged around the yellow tape surrounding the block containing the Ghost Ship warehouse, the morning after the tragic fire that killed thirty-six people in the center of Fruitvale, California. As the hour approached noon, a group of thousands of Latinx Catholics began their scheduled annual procession for the Virgen de Guadalupe from St. Elizabeth’s Church, one of the largest Latinx Catholic parishes in the Bay Area, located just three short blocks from the site of the fire. Their normal route from the church to the diocese headquarters in downtown Oakland is down the length of International Boulevard until it rebounds off of Lake Merritt.

But on that morning, the procession was forced to reroute to Twelfth Street, as the City of Oakland had shut down International Boulevard for the three blocks from Thirty-Fourth Avenue to International Boulevard around Fruitvale Avenue, past Derby Street. The procession seemed never-ending, and the street was teeming with people. They were all Latinx, as the Fruitvale and San Antonio districts have for generations been an eclectic mix of Central American, Mexican, and African-American communities. Sunday is a big community day around the church, where any scheduled service is standing room only, with even the vestibules full of parishioners.

That Sunday, the day after the fire, I watched as wave after wave of the procession curved around the yellow hazard tape and onto Twelfth Street, but journalists and photographers alike shrugged at the spectacle. Nothing about the procession—its existence, its character, its juxtaposition with the disaster, nor most importantly, the fact that thousands of community members were available for comment—attracted the attention of the media.

This same lack of interest in the community was reflected in the way the City of Oakland handled its official disaster and cleanup operations in the aftermath of the fire. For over a week after the fire, the city kept the section of International Boulevard around the wreck of the Ghost Ship closed off. In the first few days, as damage assessment and recovery operations occurred, this was an arguably reasonable decision, especially in view of how critical it was to provide information for the families involved. But after there was any legitimate excuse, city officials kept this portion of the street at the intersection of Fruitvale Avenue and International—a main artery for the busy neighborhood—closed, because they had transformed it into their public relations stage.

City, police, and fire administrators gave updates and press conferences from the small stage they had constructed, so that the Ghost Ship ruin would be visible in the background as they gave speeches to the growing body of local and national media reporters. The rest of the blockaded area was reserved for mobile satellite-link trailers and news van parking. The official media pen became a fixture of the blockade for its duration of ten days, blocking off access to residences and businesses alike, as well as the local low-income clinic, Native American Health Center, which had to temporarily relocate some of its operations to a building outside of the media scrum, further down International.

The early establishment of a disinterest in the neighborhood residents became the template for the subsequent politicization of the disaster

Certainly, at first, it made sense that these inconveniences existed to provide information about the unfolding details of the disaster that had engulfed the off-the-books venue and residence at the Ghost Ship. But the early establishment of a disinterest in the neighborhood residents became the template for the subsequent politicization of the disaster that was not easily changed in the months that followed.

Some good local reporting in newspapers like the East Bay Express and the East Bay Times—the latter ultimately won a Pulitzer for its reporting on the city’s response—focused on how other city services were gut-ted in order to provide more funding for the Oakland Police Department. Subsequent whistleblowing reports and city records revealed a Potemkin fire department facing a myriad of serious failures: absent and powerless chiefs and officials, flagrant bypassing of protocols, and questionable budgetary expenses that had hobbled the department for years. The Oakland Fire Department failed at its minimal fire-prevention due diligence—even in the wealthy Oakland Hills area—a fact made even more alarming by the city’s hesitance and near-illegal attempts to keep the records from going public. However, most media focused on the personal life of Derick Almena—the master tenant and designated villain of the Ghost Ship fire media narrative. This made more complex reporting difficult to find, especially in national papers of record.

Substantive reporting on the politics of public safety surrounding the Ghost Ship was rare, and there was almost no coverage at all of the brick and mortar community where the disaster occurred. It was as if the Ghost Ship had existed on a floating island, connected to the affluent communities laying emotional and thematic claim to it by magical escalators placed around the city everywhere but Fruitvale and San Antonio. While the conspicuous absence of black and brown voices from the neighborhood should have been a sign of the ongoing displacement of Oakland’s historic communities and their eclipse from the Oakland narrative, most in the media failed to take notice. Discussions about gentrification and displacement appeared frequently in reporting about the fire’s impact, in Mayor Schaaf’s official statements, and in recorded commentary at city council meetings; yet they were focused not on the physical community where the fire occurred, but on fears of displacement of the self-proclaimed “warehouse and live-work” community.

Somewhere along the way, Oakland’s artist community failed to engage with displacement, even though their own lifestyle and habitus often jump-started processes that displace historically low-income communities and people of color. Affluent newcomers had become the favored protagonists in the city’s housing crisis. The indifference of mainstream media and government agencies toward the overwhelmingly black and brown population in the neighborhood around the Ghost Ship would negatively affect housing policy in the months that followed.

The transition of Oakland from a historically black and brown mecca to a new DIY art construct began over a decade ago, as a spillover effect from San Francisco’s rampaging rents and increasing affluence. It was a logical process: artists who had colonized San Francisco’s warehouses and industrial buildings naturally fled to Oakland with its then-cheap rents and nearly absent building-code enforcement. These spaces proliferated, and Oakland soon gained a reputation for being an off-the-grid urban playground, similar to places like Brooklyn and Portland, Oregon.

Oakland city officials fed into the narrative of the city as a reserve of housing for San Francisco rent refugees facing untenable costs. Plentiful live-work spaces were in large part responsible for the accelerated gentrification of the area just north of Oakland’s downtown (rechristened “Uptown”), and the subsequently developed monthly art walk known as Oakland First Fridays. The city used the event as a major draw for investments from developers and the tourism industry.

None of this was lost on Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf. As a city councilmember in 2012, she had helped high-profile developer American Steel gather political support and funding for the “Uptown Art Park” in the heart of downtown Oakland’s former commercial district. The project was a stark example of how Oakland’s political class worked with corporations to envision low-income neighborhoods as civic goods. Ten years earlier, the block or so surrounding the lot had been a site of affordable housing.

Community activists, with the help of Occupy Oakland, staged a political action at the lot, seeking to highlight the displacement of the area’s historically black community and the related problem of mounting homelessness. The action was short-lived, however, with the Oakland Police Department raiding and ejecting the camp within twenty-four hours.

As gentrification cascaded through North and West Oakland from the late 1990s onward, the City of Oakland rarely noted that there was any important cultural or artistic legacy to preserve.

Schaaf’s new plans for the lot refocused the conversation around affordable housing, positing the real problem as space unused for the benefit of the arts community, as the city’s rightful occupant. This was how the National Endowment for the Arts, a funder of the Art Park, described Oakland:

Economically less affluent than neighboring San Francisco, Oakland saw a surge of new artist residents when the dot-com boom brought sky-rocketing housing costs to the region. Today the city boasts of having one of the highest populations of artists per capita in the nation. Already home to many artistic and industrial fabricators, Oakland became home to a burgeoning community of industrial artists, and today a high percentage of the large-scale interactive artworks shown at the annual Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert are fabricated in Oakland.

Schaaf’s subsequent mayoral campaign advertised a full week of inaugural festivities, with “Made in Oakland” as its theme, and she held her inauguration party at American Steel. In 2015, Schaaf convened the Artist Housing and Workspace Taskforce, whose mandate was to explore methods of keeping Oakland affordable for artists. This included the city’s purchase of a land trust to provide housing specifically for self-identified makers.

Oakland’s reinvention as a city of artistic newcomers gilded the disappearance of 33,000 African-Americans from Oakland’s geographic and cultural landscape—nearly 25 percent of its historic population. The city’s long-standing reputation as a black political and cultural mecca began to fade. As Assata Olugbala, a retired educator and frequent commenter at Oakland City Council meetings, noted at a public forum following the Ghost Ship fire in January, black people, the true “heart and soul” of Oakland, were being erased with the encouragement of local government, overwritten by newly arrived artists eager to adopt and claim Oakland as their own construct.

As a conspicuous example, Olugbala lamented, local government had failed for fourteen years to hold the Oakland Police Department accountable for its violence against black communities—but the outcry from black communities generated little concern in city hall. Yet when a crisis occurred in the whiter, wealthier artistic community, as she noted, the city council immediately tried to address their concerns. Olugbala also noted that the city had rarely recognized Oakland’s native art forms, which were the product of Oakland’s black culture. Indeed, it’s notable that as gentrification cascaded through North and West Oakland from the late 1990s onward, the City of Oakland rarely noted that there was any important cultural or artistic legacy to preserve.

It’s not surprising that artistic venues and spaces didn’t feel as threatened by the Oakland Fire Department and Oakland Police Department (OPD). In its four years of operation, the Ghost Ship venue was a typical, or perhaps even extreme, example of local law enforcement turning a blind eye toward normatively illegal activity. Police reports that emerged after the Ghost Ship fire revealed that the off-the-books nightclub operated with the full knowledge of the OPD. One report describes an OPD officer who responded to a neighbor’s noise complaint. The officer was turned away by the Ghost Ship’s doorman and simply left. Other reports by OPD describe it as a “24-hour art gallery,” a rave club, and an artists’ warehouse. OPD knew that the space was being used illegally in a myriad of ways, yet it did nothing.

OPD’s laissez-faire attitude toward the Ghost Ship stands in sharp relief to its approach toward other residents in Fruitvale and San Antonio, who also use warehouses as unpermitted culture and entertainment businesses. Several weeks after the Ghost Ship fire, the Alameda County Sheriff sent an armed SWAT team to arrest and evict a group living and working in a storefront a mile or so from the Ghost Ship fire. According to the sheriff, the group was running an undocumented party venue in East Oakland, where gambling and drug use allegedly occurred.

Sergeant Ray Kelly, the sheriff’s spokesperson, claimed that the SWAT team raided the space as a safety precaution after the Ghost Ship tragedy. But it’s clear that violent, carceral action has been the boilerplate law enforcement response for Oakland’s “other” live-work spaces for years. In 2015, for example, several blocks from the Ghost Ship in the “Dubs” area of International Boulevard, there was an underground storefront speakeasy. It was shut down shortly after it began operating, and the police claimed that gambling, drug use, and drinking were occurring at the site. Another illegal gambling spot—described by law enforcement as a casino—was shut down not far from the Fruitvale bart station on a similar pretext around the same time, scant months after it began operating. The criminalization of off-the-grid venues run by black and brown Oakland residents is a regular part of life in East Oakland.

In terms of the potential for violence, even lethal violence, and harm to the surrounding community, the Ghost Ship posed no less of an ostensible threat than unsanctioned venues run by and for black and brown community residents. Public police records released after the fire show that the OPD was regularly called to the Ghost Ship with complaints of firearm threats, assaults, thefts, and open illegal drug sales. In hindsight, of course, the uncommonly high occupancy of the Ghost Ship made it a much graver threat to public safety than expected. The real difference in official response was not about public safety, but about public perception.

Not surprisingly, despite the fear of artists suddenly being evicted from their spaces by the Oakland Fire Department or other municipal officials after the Ghost Ship fire, there is no evidence that anything of the sort happened locally. Oakland media reported that there were only four red-tagged buildings citywide in the months following the Ghost Ship fire, somewhat less than in the same period a year earlier. But the narrative of a community of embattled warehouse residents facing stringent and unfair law enforcement became the dominant narrative of the arts community and its supporters around the Ghost Ship fire. In reality, the spaces that are most in danger of over-policing had already been facing that threat.

By June, Almena and his business partner were facing thirty-six counts of involuntary manslaughter for their role in the fire. The Alameda County District Attorney noted that the Ghost Ship was an atypical live-work space, crammed from “floor to ceiling” with extremely unsafe fixtures and decorations. Far from a simple arts and living space, Almena had turned the space into a functional nightclub with well-publicized shows that drew tourists and others from all around the Bay Area. As the indictment noted, given the space’s regular use as a public venue, its lack of exits, the large amount of flammable material, and bad management, the Ghost Ship was a tragedy waiting to happen. The live-work space was uniquely dangerous in the context of Oakland’s off-the-books venue scene.

This doesn’t mean that more policing is the solution, but rather that the fear of the response to the Ghost Ship fire impacting other wealthy, white artistic spaces is misplaced. The popular arts-community narrative bypassed more obvious takeaways from the fire, such as the need and potential for DIY solutions and self-enforcement of building and fire safety.

The city’s response and media reports misidentified Oakland’s displaced population. The community affected by the fire, i.e., the surrounding community that consists largely of working-class people of color with longstanding cultural roots in the area, was rarely defined in geographic terms. Media references to “community” obscured issues at the heart of Oakland’s housing crisis, such as race, class, and historical residence. The generally whiter and wealthier artistic community that has only recently begun to enter Oakland’s most economically challenged neighborhoods became the focus of the media’s displacement narrative.

The popular arts-community narrative bypassed more obvious takeaways from the fire, such as the need and potential for DIY solutions and self-enforcement

The prominent media narrative of publications like the Guardian and the New York Times insisted that the Ghost Ship’s community had been forced by the urgencies of the housing market to live in dangerous warehouses, and that instead of offering support, city agencies aided in their eviction and displacement. The aftermath of the fire included several fundraisers and benefits to increase safety in existing live-work spaces, and to bring sites up to code for the predicted storm of enforcement. Yet this effort was isolated—while it included other artistic communities, it didn’t extend to the neighborhood surrounding the Ghost Ship.

Over one million dollars was raised by independent crowd sourcing to support the victims of the fire and to fund DIY repairs and upgrades of other live-work spaces. But the welfare of similar spaces in the surrounding community never entered into the media discourse. The businesses in the adjacent building to the Ghost Ship venue were immediately closed in the aftermath of the fire, and within a week were yellow-tagged—shut down for business. One owner I spoke with, who wished to remain anonymous, told me that no one had ever approached her about fundraising for her shuttered business, and that she had, to date, received no funds from any source.

As I looked at the collapsing ceiling and the water-damaged furniture in her storefront, she told me the city had offered her a loan, which she would have little hope of paying back, given the damage to her and her family’s livelihood. The last surviving business adjacent to the Ghost Ship, La Moda, a woman’s clothing shop with Spanish-language signs, was forced to liquidate its entire inventory via sidewalk sales in front of the shuttered business in April. There were no fundraisers to combat the closure of these businesses.

The narrative around the Ghost Ship community, though falsely, placelessly defined, generated a political movement that culminated in the creation of an artists’ coalition called the Oakland Warehouse Coalition. It garnered an extraordinary amount of attention from local officials, including Mayor Schaaf. As a testament to her focus on this constituency, within one month of the fire she issued an executive order—designed to give the appearance that enforcement of live-work fire codes would not result in displacement.

Some argued that any focus on housing reform was beneficial in the current wildfire of displacement and sky-rocketing rents in Oakland. It’s true that the fire gave Councilmember At Large Kaplan an opportunity to revive a revamped red-tag relocation ordinance that had sat idly in the Community and Economic Development Committee for over a year. The ordinance increased the dollar amount of red-tag displacement payments and obligated the City of Oakland to provide the payments to displaced tenants when the owner hesitated and to recoup the payments later through legal means. But the quality and substance of the city’s responses were affected by its never-ending focus on the self-identified artist community in a way that warped Oakland’s long-standing issues around poverty, racism, displacement, and increasing gentrification.

Warehouses and industrial sites made into live-work spaces by newly arrived artists are, in Oakland’s vast terrain of off-the-books residences, a small minority. The disinterest in existing, struggling Oakland communities of color erased the reality of the vast numbers who live in hot-wired and unofficial domiciles—garages, in-law units, sheds, basements, and unpermitted additions. In many cases, last-resort dwellings of this type may be the only way poor and working-class people have remained in their Oakland communities, where official units require capital, contracts, and established credit. Even housing legislation such as Kaplan’s relocation ruling aren’t enough to ameliorate these living situations—Oakland’s poor and poorly housed hold onto bad living situations of their own accord, because there are few other options available.

Fire safety is by no means the only concern in such substandard housing. Fruitvale’s epidemic proportion of building-sourced lead contamination—with up to 7.57 percent of children exposed—made national news for a day or two around the same time as the Ghost Ship fire, following a study by Reuters. With the exception of some busywork by city council members, it was soon forgotten. Demanding building safety remained the tenants’ burden: without city action to force landlords into compliance, disproportionate responsibility is placed on those who have the most to lose. The city did little to focus the post–Ghost Ship energy into substantive changes in the city’s degraded code-inspection regimes, and the toxic substandard housing that Oakland’s dwindling black and brown populations were increasingly forced to live in—a reality that would soon become horrifyingly apparent.

Oakland government’s ineffectual response to the Ghost Ship fire became clear during another serious fire a few months later. Four residents in a West Oakland transitional living situation perished in the fire on San Pablo Avenue, and at least eighty were displaced.

The city’s newly revamped relocation legislation improved upon existing law that provided funds for displaced tenants to be reimbursed for damages via liens placed on the properties of the landlord. However, though the legislation was in place, the city hadn’t allocated funding toward so many precariously housed renters in a city as large as Oakland. What should have been a loud call to prepare for the relocation of dozens, if not hundreds, of poor and working-class tenants in the event of another fire went unheeded.

Weeks after this San Pablo fire, it was revealed that the relocation fund only had about $150,000 at the time of the disaster. Victims of the fire waited without answers, and some became homeless in the process. Relocation funds had not been a pressing issue for the few displaced tenants of the Ghost Ship months earlier, because they had personal resources and tens of thousands of dollars from various fundraisers. While the passage of the ordinance at the time was seen as a hard-won concession by the live-work community, the San Pablo fire revealed it to be little more than a cosmetic solution.

Eventually, council members took $600,000 from an unrelated housing program in a council session on April 18, 2017, to fill the fund for displaced San Pablo Avenue residents. The city had waited an astonishing three weeks before taking action, and it still has no ready source of funding for relocation for a future emergency of similar magnitude.

The Ghost Ship fire would also have been a perfect opportunity to revive policy proposals around proactive building code enforcement and rigorous renter protections. But such reforms were never brought up in public forums or city council meetings. Rather, the focus was on single-use solutions that required little real commitment from local politicians. Issues of poverty and racism rarely entered into the conversation, and the focus on live-work artists renovating their own spaces allowed the city to pass off responsibility for building safety to residents.

The focus was on single-use solutions that required little real commitment from local politicians. Issues of poverty and racism rarely entered into the conversation

In contrast to the city’s hasty response to the Ghost Ship disaster, the initial response to the San Pablo fire was ponderous. For most of the following day, Mayor Schaaf didn’t mention the fire publicly. There was no on-site stage for round-the-clock press conferences, and there was no vast migration of the nation’s news media. The surviving residents, numbering more than eighty, were crammed into a youth center, where they spent over a week sleeping on cots because there are so few low-income housing buildings left in Oakland for relocation. Despite the obvious implications of the Ghost Ship fire, Oakland had no designated emergency shelter put in place, and still does not.

Subsequently released public records show that Oakland Fire Department officials had called for closure of the San Pablo building as an imminent risk to the lives of the residents months before the fire, but nothing was done. It was also revealed that the owner of the building, Keith Kim, had cozy relationships with the city. In fact, one of Kim’s occult business ventures was voted up by the city council just one day after the fire. The San Pablo fire became a metaphorical stage where Oakland’s age-old institutional priorities, guided by institutional racism and the inescapable logic of gentrification, played out. The city’s corrupt and incompetent code enforcement failed Oakland’s most vulnerable. The San Pablo building’s residents were nearly one hundred percent African-American, the same demographic that had experienced an almost complete loss of available low-income housing and forced exodus during Oakland’s live-work renaissance.

Weeks later, the San Pablo fire has engendered no public forums, nor raucous city council meetings. While a handful of speakers appeared at the city council vote on the increase in relocation funds in April, most were victims of the fire or their family and friends. The fire survivors have moved to various other sites, and according to local reports, have dispersed throughout the city in precarious, often temporary housing. Some are homeless; some who had mental health needs are lost to the streets. Mayor Schaaf has stated that she will hire more inspectors, but no councilmember has introduced legislation to protect residents, nor to guarantee that there is a rigorous increase in inspections. The city has swept San Pablo under the carpet with another temporary solution.

Meanwhile, the former site of the Ghost Ship has virtually become a tourist attraction, with small crowds regularly taking selfies. No one knows what will become of the nearly block-long series of structures, though they will probably be converted to market-rate housing as soon as it’s feasible. The City of Oakland finally provided the relocation payments to survivors of the San Pablo fire, over a month after they had been displaced, but the fund has not been refreshed for future disasters. Fruitvale’s decades-old toxic lead contamination continues. The city council failed to introduce legislation to address Fruitvale’s lead problem when the issue made national headlines, and proposed policies seem to have died in committee. It makes no difference to Oakland’s new heart and soul, which have moved on regardless.

Screen/Print is an experiment in translation across media, featuring a close-up digital look at printed architectural writing. Divorcing content from the physical page, the series lends a new perspective to nuanced architectural thought.

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