Who’s Burning Down Oakland?
After a fire destroyed the only place I could afford to live, I knew it was time to leave for good
My wife and I were sleeping when the fire began. We were startled awake by the muffled sound of our neighbor, Jake, banging on our door. “Everybody out!” he shouted. I stumbled downstairs and could see the hallway outside was filled with thick white smoke. The alarms, which had been too quiet to wake us, were audible now. As sleepy tenants headed toward the exit, I climbed back up the stairs to our loft where Julie was getting dressed. I grabbed a backpack, and filled it with my computer and hard drives, keys, wallet, and cellphone. Together, we joined our neighbors outside on the street. It was 3 a.m. in West Oakland, and the warehouse we called home was on fire.
I wasn’t totally surprised. It was 2015, and the former armory was full of people living in customized wooden lofts, which were well-built and impeccably cared for, but not exactly zoned for residential living. Most of us were artists with day jobs, and our live-work units made it possible to maintain a practice without the overhead of renting a separate studio. In addition to its tenant painters, writers, butchers, and barkeeps, the building also housed two local businesses — AK Press, a respected anarchist publisher, and the worker-owned 1984…
