A group of eight artists are facing eviction from a live-work warehouse in Bernal Heights, and last week they brought their case to the SF Rent Board, which will now have to decide whether or not the landlord knowingly allowed people to reside there. The case of 968 Peralta Avenue, a converted warehouse that by most accounts has been better kept inside than the Ghost Ship space in Oakland that claimed the lives of 36 people in a December 2 fire, was among the first to make headlines in the weeks after that fire as building inspectors and city officials on both sides of the Bay began to intensely scrutinize these sorts of illegal dwellings. As the Examiner reports, the eight tenants have stayed put since receiving their eviction notice in December — the same day as they received a notice from the city of an upcoming inspection — and they had a hearing at the Rent Board on Thursday that lasted six hours.

At issue for the Rent Board is deciding whether the tenants can receive protection under the 1979 rent control ordinance, or whether the landlord merely had a commercial lease agreement with them, which under state law can be terminated with 30 days notice. The landlord has claimed that he was not aware that people were living in the space, and complicating matters further, the landlord has submitted plans for a 49-unit residential building on the property, meaning that he's trying to find the easiest path to evict the tenants so that demolition can take place soon.

One of the tenants, 42-year-old ballet dancer Nathan Cottam, brought the case to the Chronicle's attention almost immediately after the eviction notice was served, telling them the warehouse was the only thing he could afford when he moved there in 2014. "If I have to leave, I won’t look in the city for a place to live," he told the paper at the time. "There’s no way I can afford it."

These kinds of dwellings, regardless of their sometimes slipshod interior construction, remain some of the most affordable options for many artists, and their existence has been no secret either to landlords or building inspectors, though most have turned a blind eye rather than enforce mass evictions.

Cottam told the Rent Board Thursday, "San Francisco is an important city of culture. The arts must be subsidized in some way or they will disappear. There are many different types of subsidies. This is just one of them."

The landlord has taken his case to San Francisco Superior Court, where he's suing the tenants for unlawful detainer for remaining in the warehouse, and a decision in favor of the tenants by the Rent Board — which may take a number of months to arrive — would help their case.

Meanwhile, in Oakland, the police department was given new orders two weeks ago to report any and all unpermitted parties they observe on beat patrols — a directive that some see as a euphemistically worded crackdown on live-work dwellings. That order came just as new police chief Anne Kirkpatrick was sworn in.

Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf has struggled so far to toe the line between enforcing building codes and avoiding another disaster, and encouraging landlords to summarily evict hundreds — or thousands — of people from inexpensive housing.

Related: As New Oakland Police Chief Is Sworn In, Officers Are Ordered To Report All Unpermitted Parties