美国国家公共电台 NPR Deadly Fire In Oakland May Spur Crackdown On Off-The-Grid Artists' Spaces

Deadly Fire In Oakland May Spur Crackdown On Off-The-Grid Artists' Spaces

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST: 

In Oakland, Calif., authorities have stopped looking for victims of the fire that broke out Friday night in an old warehouse 1. The death toll 2 stands at 36. Artists were living and working in the building, a place that wasn't fit to live in. The Bay Area has some of the highest rents in the country. And now, as Sandhya Dirks of KQED reports, artists are afraid they'll be pushed out.

SANDHYA DIRKS, BYLINE 3: Smoke hung in the air for days in Oakland's largely Latino Fruitvale district. It's a neighborhood that is, like so much of the city, facing ripples 4 of gentrification created by the Bay Area's tech boom. Carmen Brito lived in the now-destroyed warehouse known as the Ghost Ship. She barely got out with her life.

CARMEN BRITO: You can go three blocks, and you can see rows of tents of people who are homeless, and nobody wants to talk about that. Nobody wants to talk about the people who've been forced further and further out. San Francisco can't house artists anymore because it's so expensive. And they're asking us, why did you live this way? What other choice did we have?

DIRKS: But the story of artists' warehouses 5 in Oakland is more complicated according to Adam Hatch. He has run off-the-grid spaces like this for years.

ADAM HATCH: The housing crisis did not kill these people. A lack of responsibility and oversight 6 killed these people.

DIRKS: And Hatch says artists, queer and trans people, those on the margins 7 gravitate towards these outsider housing situations by choice.

HATCH: We were in those spaces in the late '90s and in the 2000s.

DIRKS: Even though they may not be legal, Hatch says, they don't have to be dangerous. He says it's a beautiful, creative world, part of what makes Oakland special. But already, city officials like Councilman Noel Gallo in whose district the Ghost Ship was located are talking about cracking down.

NOEL GALLO: We recognize that we've - you know, should have been more assertive 8 in the past. We've talked about it, and - but now we'll expedite that action.

DIRKS: The city says it wants to be friendly to artists but also to prevent dangerous living conditions. That sentiment has left residents of these live-work spaces in Oakland united not just in grief but also in anxiety about being displaced.

DARREN: Anger and fear mostly.

DIRKS: That's what Darren says the people who live alongside him are feeling now in his cavernous warehouse not far from where the Ghost Ship was located. He asked that we not use his last name because he's living illegally and fears being evicted 9.

DARREN: They're going to twist what you say into something, you know, that's going to make it more difficult for us to stay in these spaces, that, you know - it could lead to a crackdown of these spaces.

DIRKS: The victims of the Ghost Ship fire have been made into scapegoats 10, Darren says, as if living in a warehouse made them complicit in their own deaths. Darren has lived here for 20 years, and in that time, there have been two fires. No one was hurt, and they didn't spread.

DARREN: Somebody had candles. And there was, like, a candelabra, and they fell asleep. And they probably had tapestries 11 and things like that on the wall, which you notice there's none of that kind of stuff here.

DIRKS: None of that and also a new sprinkler system, industrial-sized pipes better than you might find in your average apartment building in every corner, even the tiny bathroom off Darren's bedroom.

DARREN: So every single space, they managed to get a sprinkler into the space, which is, you know, quite impressive, so...

DIRKS: Does that make you feel safer?

DARREN: Oh, yeah.

DIRKS: And these safety measures caused rent to rise but only slightly. Darren says that shows these spaces can be made safe from fire. But for residents here, after the Ghost Ship, they don't feel safe from being kicked out. For NPR News, I'm Sandhya Dirks in Oakland.