Tenant rights attorney discusses housing crisis behind Oakland “Ghost Ship” tragedy
Tenant rights attorney discusses housing crisis behind Oakland “Ghost Ship” tragedy
By David Brown
12 December 2016
On December 2, a warehouse in Oakland, California that was being rented out as artist studios burned down, killing 36 people, making it the worst building fire in the US since 2003. The “Ghost Ship” warehouse was rented by an artist collective known as Satya Yuga that hosted music shows and sublet studios that artists would also live in.
The antiquated building only had a permit for use as a warehouse. Public records show it had not been inspected for building code violations in over 30 years. The building was not even listed in the fire safety inspector’s database, despite state law requiring yearly fire inspections for all commercial buildings.
Without basic safety measures, like sprinklers, exit signs, or even working fire extinguishers, the maze of informally built live/work studios quickly became a death trap when the fire broke out. Investigators have not yet determined the immediate cause of the fire, although they suspect electrical failure.
The broader cause of this tragedy is the economic crisis, which has resulted in the slashing of public funding for safety inspections. At the same time, housing prices have skyrocketed as part of a speculative real estate bubble while median incomes have declined. Increasingly working-class and lower middle-class residents in high rent regions like the San Francisco Bay Area, which includes Oakland, can only afford substandard, informal and, in many cases, unsafe shelter.
The World Socialist Web Site spoke with Laura Lane, the Housing Practice Director at the East Bay Community Law Center (EBCLC), which provides free legal work for low-income residents in Oakland and neighboring Berkeley. Lane has worked at the ECBLC since 1997 and has been a director there for almost 15 years.
While a lot of the media has focused on the issue of artists moving into old industrial spaces, Lane explained that the problems with informal housing were much broader. “There are a lot of low-income people living in converted basements, and converted garages, and converted storage units,” she said.
“The housing costs are so high, people with ordinary jobs can’t afford market-rate housing. They have to live close enough to public transportation to get to their jobs. They don’t have the choice to move out to the Central Valley, so they have to live where they can. We see a lot more people living in smaller units, a lot of 4-person families living in one or two bedroom units. Then the landlord at some point says it’s too many people in the household.”
While tenants may have an oral agreement with the landlord, Lane said, they put up with hazardous conditions “because they’re in a position where if they complain, if they try to get the landlord to make any repairs or do anything to make the unit safer or more habitable, then the landlord will turn around and say ‘Oh, you’re not supposed to be living there’ or maybe will stop accepting their rent.
“I have a case right now,” Lane explained “where it’s clearly a residential rental agreement and the landlord is trying to evict the tenant saying ‘it’s a storage unit.’ It is a converted storage unit but it has a kitchen and a bathroom in it so it’s clearly not rented out for storage. It’s typical for the landlord to turn around and say ‘I had no idea you were living there,’ even though it’s clearly been prepared for residential use. We see that a lot.”
These tenants are also unable to get the city to fix unsafe conditions. “They’re afraid to call Codes and Compliance because the building inspector could red-tag the property and then they would have to leave. But they can’t actually afford to leave so they’re in a very precarious situation.
“The clients I see, there’s no place for them to go. They’re either moving far out of the area, which if they’re employed at all they can’t do, or they’re going to be homeless. So every case is high-stakes because tenants have to fight to keep their tenancy because they’re not going to get another one. If they move out of that unit that’s been subject to rent control into a market-rate unit, they might be going from $800/month to $2000/month and that will be more than their family’s monthly income.”
In Oakland, the median monthly cost for a new rental is $3,000 a month, according to Zillow.com. That is equivalent to the median monthly income for households that rent in Oakland, which is also $3,000. A rental is generally considered “affordable” if it is a third or less of a tenant’s income.
“The majority of our work involves defending low income tenants who are being evicted. But it’s changed many times over the years. After the foreclosure crisis what we’re having is what I refer to as the ‘investor crisis.’ Investors have bought all of these properties and they are trying to push people out and get properties out from under rent control.
“What we’re seeing more and more is that they’re buying the properties and deliberately making them uninhabitable by doing a lot of demolition work in the property to force the tenants to vacate. Or they’re deliberately allowing the property to become red-tagged by the city so tenants will have to vacate.”
California law makes it illegal for cities to restrict the amount that rent can be increased for new tenants. Therefore landlords have a financial incentive to evict long-term tenants who are paying below market rates because of rent-control measures.
Lane described one of these cases. “I challenged an eviction of an elderly Cantonese man from an SRO (Single Room Occupancy residence) on 8th St. in Oakland. In June the case went to trial. The landlord bought the property, which had 40 units. In an SRO tenants share bathrooms and kitchens. So on each floor there were three bathrooms and one kitchen for 20 units and there were two residential floors.
“The landlord demolished one of the kitchens and four of the bathrooms, so then you had 40 households sharing one kitchen and two bathrooms. My client withheld his rent. He was the only tenant who did because everyone else was too scared. The landlord tried to evict him for nonpayment of rent and we won that case.”
Although the housing crisis is expressed sharply in cities like Oakland, it is a nationwide phenomenon. A study by Harvard University showed average rental prices in the US increased by seven percent between 2001 and 2014, while median household income declined by nine percent. That growing gap pushes more and more people into the housing gray market that produced the Ghost Ship fire.
Housing crisis and neglect at root of fatal Oakland fire, one of the deadliest in US history
Housing crisis and neglect at root of fatal Oakland fire, one of the deadliest in US history
By David Brown
6 December 2016
As the death toll mounts, the horrific fire that broke out at a dance party in East Oakland, California Friday night is now one of the worst such disasters in the recent history of the United States.
The City of Oakland announced early Monday that the number of bodies recovered from the 86-year-old Fruitvale warehouse called the Ghost Ship had risen to 36. The warehouse was being rented out to artists, and the studios were also used as informal housing by about 20 people.
According to survivors and neighbors, the fire spread quickly through ad hoc wooden rooms, cutting off any escape from the dilapidated building that lacked basic fire safety measures. Many were almost immediately trapped on the second floor, where a concert was being held, without any means of escape.
Recovery efforts were delayed Monday when one of the building’s walls threatened to collapse on firefighters. About 75 percent of the structure has been searched, but the Alameda County Sheriff told the Associated Press that he did not expect to find any more bodies.
Thirty-three of the victims have so far been identified. Many were in their 20s and 30s, but the youngest so far was 17. Three foreign nationals were identified, from Finland, South Korea and Guatemala.
According to one tally by “NBC News,” the Ghost Ship fire is the seventh-deadliest building fire in the past 50 years, a list that includes the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 and the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. It is the deadliest building fire in the US since a night club in Rhode Island burned down in 2003, killing 100 people.
While the precise causes remain to be
determined, indications are that the tragedy
was facilitated by city officials who ignored
unsafe conditions, a landlord who neglected
basic safety measures and a housing crisis
driving people to seek cheap rent in unsafe
conditions.
There was no shortage of dangerous flash points in the structure. Shelley Mack, a former tenant who lived in the warehouse for five months, told reporters that the building had no sprinklers or fire alarms and that it regularly went without utilities. Tenants used gas generators or propane stoves to heat their water, and stayed warm in the winter with space heaters. Wires crisscrossed the uninspected wooden partitions that turned the first floor into a maze of studios.
A neighbor, Danielle Boudreaux, described to the Washington Post the precarious makeshift stairs to the second floor where shows were held to help pay rent: “It only took two people on it at a time. .. when you stepped on it, it wobbled, and there were ropes holding it up. If you had three people on that it was falling down.” Once the fire started, she said, “there was no way you were getting out of that building.”
Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O’Malley spoke to reporters Monday afternoon, announcing that the fire was a “potential crime scene” and that her office would investigate whether there was any criminal liability. She said that it was too early to specify who might be implicated, but that charges could range from involuntary manslaughter to murder. Any serious investigation, however, would immediately turn to the city itself.
The unsafe conditions, as well as the warehouse’s role as an unlicensed apartment and music venue, was an open secret to the landlord and city officials. The Tumblr page for the Ghost Ship contains numerous advertisements for musical performances. Over the past two years, the city has received numerous complaints, including three this year, regarding construction without a permit and unsafe conditions.
Twice in 2014 and twice in 2016, building
inspectors were sent to the warehouse in
response to complaints. However, no action
was taken to improve the safety of the
building. The Oakland Police Department
records also show officers responding to
reports of a stolen phone at a 2014 New Year’s
Party where they “canvassed the area and
building.”
In 2007, Alameda County placed a lien on the property, owned by Chor Ng since 1988, for “substandard, hazardous or injurious conditions.” According to public records, Ng has four other properties that have been cited for blight in Oakland.
The conditions found in the Ghost Ship warehouse are far from unique and are well known by the city. Noel Gallo, a city councilor from the Fruitvale district, told CBS, “The reality is, there are many facilities being occupied without permits.” He estimated that there are about 200 warehouses “that have no papers, no permit, no fire code, nothing.”
The negligence of landlords and city officials is complemented by the broader housing crisis that drives poor people to seek out informal housing for cheap rent.
“What this tragedy really brings home is displacement and other impacts of gentrification: the high cost of housing and the lack of affordable housing,” Anyka Barber, co-founder of the Oakland Creative Neighborhoods Coalition, told the Wall Street Journal.
Rents have skyrocketed across the Bay Area in
recent years. Oakland, which was once a haven for
people avoiding San Francisco’s rent, is now the
fourth most expensive city for renting in the United
States.
The median cost of an available rental in Oakland in September 2016 was $3,000 a month, according to Zillow. This is up 71 percent from January 2013, when it was just $1,757. Median income for renters in Oakland remains just $3,000 a month, making most apartments wildly unaffordable to perspective tenants.
The Bay Area is riven with social inequality.
While workers in San Francisco and Oakland
can barely afford rent, massive new luxury
apartments are under construction in the
Rockridge and SoMa districts. Across the Bay
from the Fruitvale district where the
warehouse burned down is the home of Larry
Ellison, who has a personal net worth
of $51.6 billion.
The current spike in property prices is part of
a broader economic bubble driven by
financial speculation after the 2008 crash. In
2001, 41 percent of US renters spent 30
percent or more of their income on housing.
By 2014, this rose to 49 percent, with 26
percent of renters spending more than 50
percent of their income on housing.
A UBS report in 2015 drew a direct connection between the amount of cheap credit central banks, led by the US Federal Reserve and the Obama administration, were pouring into the financial market and increasing. The authors wrote, “Loose monetary policy has prevented a normalization of housing markets and encouraged local bubble risks to grow.”
The Oakland Ghost Ship fire is a horrific tragedy, but one with definite roots in the reality of American capitalism.
The Oakland fire tragedy and the housing crisis in America
7 December 2016
The death toll from last Friday’s fire at a warehouse in Oakland, California stands at 36, with 85 percent of the burnt-out structure having been searched. Among the dead, some of whom have yet to be identified, are young people and artists who made their home in the 86-year-old sprawling two-story structure known as the Ghost Ship. The building was leased to an artists’ collective in the Fruitvale district of the city.
It was the deadliest building fire in the US since a Rhode Island nightclub fire in 2003, which claimed 100 lives. The tragedy has horrified the San Francisco Bay Area and the world, leaving many asking how such an event could take place in 21st century America.
It is unclear at this point whether criminal
charges will be filed against the owner of the
building, Chor Nar Siu Ng, who owns several
other blighted properties in Oakland, or
against Derick Ion Almena, who leased
the property, lived there with his wife and
three children, and ran the artists’ collective.
Looking for an individual to blame, the media
has launched a campaign against Almena in
particular, who lost many people he knew in
the blaze.
Authorities have pointed to electrical problems and the lack of basic fire safety provisions in the dilapidated structure. At the root of the tragedy, however, lies the dysfunctional character of American capitalism, including a housing crisis born of poverty, social inequality, and years of neglect by government authorities.
The Bay Area, long known as a haven for artists and students, is now largely unaffordable for workers and young people. Along with the tech boom of the last six years, housing prices have skyrocketed. Warehouses and lofts in San Francisco’s former industrial areas have given way to high-end condos and workspaces to house tech start-ups and their employees. More than 2,000 people are evicted annually in the city.
This has pushed artists and others struggling to find affordable housing to Oakland, across the San Francisco Bay, and beyond. Now these areas are also increasingly unaffordable, with the median cost of available rentals in Oakland standing at $3,000 a month, far beyond what is affordable for most Americans. People living in buildings such as the Ghost Ship are faced with the choice of living in substandard housing or being homeless.
Speaking to CBS, a city councilor from Fruitvale estimated that there are some 200 warehouses in Oakland “that have no papers, no permit, no fire code, nothing.” If occupied, these structures are disasters waiting to happen. And while building inspectors apparently ignore these deathtraps, no measures are taken to alleviate the growing crisis that leads to their use as housing.
The Bay Area’s economy has spawned a small army of billionaires, with 50 of them making it onto the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans in 2016. Oakland itself is increasingly socially polarized, home to the fifth largest cluster of “elite zip codes” in the US, ranked by a combination of high income and education level attained. At the same time, more than 800,000 people in the region live below the poverty line.
The housing crisis in the Bay Area mirrors that of metropolitan areas across the country. The Los Angeles Times reports that more than 20,000 rent-controlled apartments in LA have been taken off the market since 2011 to make way for pricey homes and condos for the wealthy, leading to hundreds of evictions this year.
Evictions are taking place not only in thriving real estate markets like San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles, but also in places like Milwaukee and St. Louis, where deindustrialization and unemployment, combined with wages that do not keep pace with the cost of living, are driving people out of their homes.
According to a report released last year by Harvard University titled “Projecting Trends in Severely Cost-Burdened Renters,” by 2025 nearly 15 million US households will devote more than half of their income to rent. Those unable to keep pace with their rent or mortgage payments will find themselves evicted and possibly homeless.
The federal government has long since abandoned any responsibility for the provision of decent housing, leading to disasters like that in Oakland last week. According to the US Fire Administration, an organization that tracks fire deaths based on media reports, there were 2,290 fire deaths in the US in 2015, many of them in mobile homes or other substandard housing.
The first US national housing legislation, passed in 1937, went beyond providing low-cost public housing and was aimed at improving the lagging economy by funding jobs to build affordable housing. Public housing today has largely ceased to exist, with units sold off to developers to turn a quick profit, and those in need of housing waiting years if not decades for openings to use their Section 8 housing vouchers.
The Obama administration, following the Bush and Clinton administrations before it, has made no pretense of establishing a public works program to address the woeful state of infrastructure in the US—whether in housing, roads, bridges, energy grids or in other vital areas.
President-elect Donald Trump has made clear his attitude toward the housing crisis with his nomination of Ben Carson to run the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Carson, a retired neurosurgeon with no professional housing policy experience, has declared his hostility to the entire concept of public housing and social provision in general, stating: “It really is not compassionate to pat people on the head and say, ‘There you poor little thing, I’m going to take care of all your needs, your health care, your food and your housing, don’t you worry about anything’” (Conservative Political Action Conference, February 26, 2015).
The Socialist Equality Party calls for an immediate halt to foreclosures and evictions and for the provision of billions of dollars to provide decent, low-cost housing to those in need. Housing is a social right that can be assured only by placing the home construction and financing industry under public ownership.
For tragedies like that in Oakland to be averted in the future, public funds must be poured into the construction of new homes for working families. Such a project can be undertaken only under a workers government based on a socialist program, which treats affordable housing as a basic human right, not a privilege reserved for the wealthy.
Kate Randall
Fixing America’s Unemployment Crisis
Trump was elected in part on the promise of creating jobs, but how about those who stopped looking for work?
By Stephen Gregory, Epoch Times | December 2, 2016 | Last Updated: December 2, 2016 4:29 pm
What has been called a “quiet catastrophe” has been unfolding in America: the collapse of work for millions of America’s men, and, more recently, for America’s women as well.
Nicholas Eberstadt, the Henry Wendt Chair in political economy at the American Enterprise Institute, estimates there are 10 million men who are jobless and no longer looking for work. According to calculations using 2014 data, an estimated 3.6 million women are in the same situation.
President-elect Donald Trump has announced a raft of policies meant to spur economic growth and create jobs, but thought needs to be given to what specific measures might help this urgent situation.
How to address this crisis depends on what one understands the problem to be. A graph showing the prime-age employment rate for men provides a kind of Rorschach test for possible responses.
Jared Bernstein, senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, former economic adviser to Vice President Joe Biden, and author of, most recently, “The Reconnection Agenda: Reuniting Growth and Prosperity,” focuses on the cyclical upturns in the jagged line, on those periods of prosperity when workers regain jobs that had been lost.
Eberstadt focuses on the straight trend line, which has been going inexorably and disastrously downward for decades.
Bernstein and Eberstadt represent two typical and contrasting approaches to the unemployment problem.
*
If you look at the employment rate for prime-age workers, they have actually clawed back two-thirds of their losses since the great recession.
— Jared Bernstein
Bernstein published the graph in a chapter he contributed to Eberstadt’s book “Men Without Work,” in which he critiques Eberstadt’s diagnosis of the employment crisis.
For Bernstein, the key is a missing demand for labor.
“If you look at the employment rate for prime-age workers, they have actually clawed back two-thirds of their losses since the Great Recession,” Bernstein said in an interview. “That doesn’t sound to me like a group that has given up. It sounds to me like a group that is not facing ample opportunity.”
For Eberstadt, the problem is a detachment from work.
Using various government databases, Eberstadt gives a composite portrait of those men who are out of the workforce and not looking for work.
They don’t read newspapers, seem to have few familial responsibilities, and tend not to be involved in a church or their communities. They spend most of their time entertaining themselves with TV or hand-held devices; 31 percent admitted to survey takers that they used illegal drugs.
Bernstein counters this portrait by noting that the causal connection may go from a lack of employment opportunities to suffering from depression, which then leads to these men planting themselves on the couch.
As to the individual motives of the non-working, Bernstein said, “We just don’t know.” His advice to Trump is to aggressively pursue full employment, which involves the federal government using a number of different tools.
An officer waits to escort Harvey Lesser, an unemployed software developer, from his apartment after serving him with a court order for eviction in Boulder, Colo., on Dec. 11, 2009.
Stimulus and Subsidies
Bernstein believes the key to the downward trend his graph shows is the disappearance of manufacturing jobs. He favors trade policies that will reduce America’s chronic trade imbalances, which will create more demand for domestic manufacturing.
Bernstein also favors an infrastructure program, with the caveat that “you have to do it right,” he said.
He would like to see the federal government get involved in communities that “don’t have enough businesses, child care slots, supermarkets, and stores—these are a classic market failure.”
The federal government could subsidize private employers in these neighborhoods, giving them an incentive to move their businesses there.
Bernstein also favors special efforts to help those with a criminal record, and Eberstadt agrees finding ways to help this population is key to addressing the problem of non-working adults. He estimates that, by the end of 2016, there will be 20 million with a felony conviction in their past.
Source: Jared Bernstein’s analysis of Bureau of Labor statistics in “Men Without Work” by Nicholas Eberstadt
Bernstein supports the Ban the Box initiative, which calls for removing the box on employment applications that must be ticked by anyone with a criminal record.
He also would like to see direct job creation. The federal government would offer a heavily subsidized wage, and at the local level there would be training for specific jobs that would be available in that area.
He would also like to see the federal government fund an apprenticeship program, which would involve recruiting local businesses.
Finally, Bernstein wants to see the federal government get the macro economic policies right to support full employment. This means using monetary policy—primarily interest rates set by the Federal Reserve—and fiscal policy to stimulate the economy. In Bernstein’s view, we took our foot off the pedal of fiscal stimulus too soon—the United States should have carried larger deficits in the years following the Great Recession.
Eric Gilliam, an unemployed coal miner, in his garage at his home in Lynch, Ky., on Oct. 18, 2014. (AP Photo/David Goldman)
Small Business
Eberstadt said it is “small not big business that employs most Americans.” Over the last eight years, he said, there has been only marginally more small business births compared to small business deaths. A healthy labor market will be one with “many, many new businesses being formed,” he said. Part of the solution? Undo regulatory strangulation and rationalize the tax code.
While Eberstadt agrees that manufacturing jobs are important, he would urge the Trump administration not to “fetishize” manufacturing jobs. The percentage of manufacturing jobs in developed economies around the world has steadily dropped. “Jobs that employ people are good,” Eberstadt said, “whether they have the word manufacturing in them or not.”
In order to protect the manufacturing jobs we do have, Eberstadt urges that we not get into a trade war with China, Mexico, or other countries, saying that trade wars lose jobs, they don’t create jobs.
*
Clearly there has been a change in the way most people think about what is decent and appropriate for able-bodied, working-age men to do with their lives
— Nicholas Eberstadt, economist, American Enterprise Institute
Because our entitlement programs are administered locally, they tether people to the states in which they are receiving benefits. Finding a way to cut that tie will give people mobility, which will open up more job opportunities.
Eberstadt’s book is meant to initiate “a broad conversation on our ‘men without work’ problem, a conversation of many voices and differing perspectives.” One important solution is to bring this mostly invisible problem “into the public spotlight.”
Shortcomings in the data we have limit the kinds of conversations we have. The Bureau of Labor Statistics does not count the 13.6 million people who have stopped looking for work as unemployed. When the American public is given an unemployment rate of 4.9 percent, the crisis of the non-working is hidden from them.
The government surveys that are conducted do not reveal the mindsets of those men who are disconnected from work—vital information for anyone who wants to understand this crisis. The Social Security Disability Insurance program does not have an effective audit that would tell us whether it is being used as a substitute for employment insurance.
Butch Youshaw, an unemployed card dealer, with his girlfriend in Henderson, Nev., in 2008. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
Stigma
Eberstadt notes that relevant context for the crisis of the non-working is a change in our society’s “mores, and viewpoints, and motivations.”
“Clearly there has been a change in the way most people think about what is decent and appropriate for able-bodied, working-age men to do with their lives in their prime working ages,” Eberstadt said.
Over half of non-working men in their prime years are getting money from at least one government disability program, according to Eberstadt. These funds, Eberstadt writes, finance the non-working’s decision not to work.
He would like to see these programs have a work requirement, as was done 20 years ago with single mothers on welfare. Requiring work stigmatizes non-work and so provides a moral incentive for individuals to move off the couch and back into the workaday world.
Bernstein writes he sees “no good for making these programs less generous or further conditioning them on work.”
Stigma, Eberstadt said, “is often a kinder and gentler way of achieving social objectives than police power.”
Article printed from The Epoch Times: http://www.theepochtimes.com
ttp://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/2191996-fixing-americas-unemployment-crisis/
Damning Report on Illegal-Alien
Entries Now Available
WASHINGTON, DC (December 2, 2016) — In September the media reported that the Obama administration was sitting on a damning Department of Homeland Security (DHS) report that called into question the administration’s claim that as many as 81 percent of people attempting to cross the border illegally are apprehended.
This new report, whose full text the Center for Immigration Studies has now obtained, estimates that nearly half of illegal aliens slip through the southern border undetected.
The report was apparently completed in May, leading some to
suspect that the Obama administration did not want it released
for fear that it would bolster Donald Trump’s call for a border
wall.
Among other things, the report measures total level of illegal entry, the probability of apprehension, and the effect of law enforcement in deterring illegal entry. It relies on DHS databases of border apprehension records supplemented by Border Patrol observations, surveillance of illegal entries, and surveys of illegal aliens. The report was completed by the Institute for Defense Analyses, which played no role in the report’s release here.
For 2015, the estimated apprehension rate of illegal aliens between ports of entry on the southern border is only 54 percent. The report finds that although there has been a steep fall in total illegal entries over the past 15 years, there has not been a steep rise in the probability of apprehension over the same time period. Still, there has been so