In San Francisco, tenants in illegal units can call the Department of Building Inspection to report safety violations, allowing inspectors to enter their units while providing these tenants the peace of mind that they won't automatically be evicted from their living quarters and that citations will be given to their landlords. That's also true in New York City, whose Loft Law protects tenants living illegally in commercial buildings, giving them rights and protections that keep them safe and even stabilize their rent as the website NYCLoftTenants.org explains.
But as tenants' rights attorney Joe Tobener points out to San Francisco magazine, no such protection is provided by law in Oakland, "incentivizing [tenants] to live in dangerous situations, not call inspectors, and bar inspectors from the premises," according to that publication, which brings the difference to bear on the tragic Ghost Ship fire in Oakland.
Oakland and Alameda County agencies had knowledge of the illegal live-work warehouse that caught fire last Friday killing 36 people and had looked into complaints surrounding the space, "but none of the contacts resulted in a shutdown order," the Chronicle reported. At the time of the most recent inspection, on November 17, inspectors were unable to gain entry, though City Councilman Noel Gallo tells the Chronicle “There’s no real explanation why we could not get a response," and couldn't answer as to why no follow up inspection occurred.
Police, too, had knowledge of the space — they learned of a New Year's Eve party held there last year, for example. Shelley Mack, a former resident of the warehouse, even told the Chronicle that during her stay from October 2014 to February 2015, “Police were there every week for stolen goods, for fights, for crazy stuff... I called them three times and told them everything. And other people did, too.” Still, it's possible police never entered the space itself.
Meanwhile, a city agency that had the power to shut down the Ghost Ship warehouse, The Oakland Fire Marshal's Office, has been understaffed for years, as the Oakland firefighter's union tells Oakland Magazine. “The fire marshal’s position itself was open for three of the past four years,” said Zac Unger, an official with the Oakland firefighters’ union, told the magazine. It's not clear why Ghost ship wasn't inspected by that office, and the magazine speculates that "if the Ghost Ship had been inspected, it likely would have been ordered closed until its fire hazards were fixed," because that's within the powers of the fire marshal.
Per the magazine,
Part of Oakland’s problem is that the city council civilianized the fire marshal’s office a number of years ago in a cost-cutting move. That means that no sworn firefighters currently work in the office. The office is supposed to have one sworn officer—acting as the assistant fire marshal—but it hasn’t filled that position for years despite having the budget to do so, said Unger, who was speaking on behalf of the union and not the fire department or the city.
As Unger put it, “It’s valuable to have someone who has fought fires in Oakland in inspection... if we had seen a staircase made out of pallets, we would have said, ‘Somebody is going to get killed.’”
Another breakdown involves the Fire Department’s inspection bureau: An Alameda County civil grand jury argued two years ago that the city wasn't trying to inspect 4,000 of the 12,000 commercial properties that were supposed to undergo examination every year. As the Chronicle reports, "according to records that the Oakland Fire Department submitted to the civil grand jury for the watchdog panel’s 2014 report, fire inspectors were being sent to only 8,000 buildings a year — and couldn’t gain access to 2,000 of them."
