When I first moved to Oakland, I lived in an enclosed porch. The space was so small that my double bed was only approachable from one side, and the walls were made of grated windows. My teeth were either sweating or chattering.
For this room (about 6x8), and access to the common spaces (black mold in the bathroom, creepy landlord “temporarily” living in the garage) I paid $350 a month, not including utilities. My flatmates and I were enrolled at a small, gated liberal arts school up the street, and during the first couple weeks one of them spent 5 minutes staying low in her car at the closest gas station, waiting out a shooting. Neither the gun violence nor the creepy landlord really deterred me from finding the sun room charming, or feeling lucky for having found an inhabitable space on short notice, and I probably would have stayed out my lease had my health not deteriorated so rapidly (read up on mold here, if you have questions about your own inexplicable decline). I only spent one semester at school – I couldn’t justify the frankly outrageous expense of a BA, and I was eager to start making, working – but it took me a lot longer to stop living in places like that.
The East Bay was a womb for me. It was a little generous with its splinters, spores, and thefts, but a womb nonetheless. When I arrived my art was only an inkling, a sort of inborn itch so far unscratchable, and I myself felt no more tangible than it. It was the first place that taught me anything about home and how it shores you up, and how many pleasures you may take in your simple vectors. When you find your places and your people each point of convergence is a warming light, and with enough time you can really back up and see them blinking softly in or out of existence: how parts of yourself live only in the attic venue that no longer exists, one evening walk home from BART, the coffee shop in the cursed retail space, and all the bands that broke from stress or sex or tech or just growing old. Other parts you build there and then take with you. And then again, sometimes you get lost in those places, or lose someone.
I had a good amount of family there to begin with, and a found a great deal more. A lot of that family lived and worked and played in marginal or occasionally magical spaces: rooms exposed to the scant California rain, roomy hatchbacks, rooms made of particle board and twelve types of paint, schoolbuses, shacks, shared rooms, and no kind of room at all, sometimes, for those down on their luck. Some did this by choice and many more by lack thereof, and most were very painfully aware of the hazard this posed to their welfare.
When faced with a tragedy like the Ghostship fire, in which so many of us lost friends and loved ones and family both born and found, and which has captured the attention of global media, it seems impossible to avoid conflict between one person’s real grief and another’s million mile projection thereof, with one person’s outrage and another’s condescension. Such tragedies should and must be avoided, but they cannot be, if we refuse to acknowledge the climate we’ve created for them.
That fire is a fire waiting to happen in so many spaces we love. I can’t count the number of shows I’ve attended or played in venues with one rickety exit and walls made of found or salvaged materials. I did not attend these shows because I’m reckless or high: I’m a totally sober, over-stimulated neurotic, and at times my anxiety prevents me from leaving the house. I attended these shows because there are so few places to see good art, and there are few things in this world that save me as I am saved in the wake of something truly shattering. These moments are worth braving crowds, knowing the risk of injury we always face leaving our homes. I know people who go to these places because they feel unsafe anywhere else, when gender and color and candor and age are all still so policed. People live in these places because the average apartment rent within the city of of Oakland, CA is $2778. One bedroom apartments in Oakland rent for $2420 a month on average and two bedroom apartment rents average $3075 (rentjungle). People die in these places partly because there is nowhere else to go.
I like to think of art as a good-faith attempt to meet the world. We don’t always succeed in communicating, but we’re trying, which is more than we can say for commerce. Some spend a couple hundred grand getting an arts degree for which they’ll likely be derided, and others could never hope to have the luck to finish high school and go to city college. They work 50 hours a week and paint instead of sleeping, or live in warehouses and get to work and paint and sleep. The message is not that artists are fancy, special people who deserve to work less. The message is that entire new languages are lost to an increasingly stratified economy. It withers what we do have, and it utterly destroys what we don’t yet know. We write that cities are “sterilized” by gentrification and by greed because that is the most appropriate language to use when the creative act is continually, almost ritually, aborted.
Once, my ex was mugged at gunpoint while walking to my place from MacArthur BART. He was relieved of his wallet and phone, but was allowed to keep his camera and the birthday present he had wrapped for me, unopened. I suppose you could interpret that in a variety of different ways, but to me it said something about the difference between what that person holding the gun might actually have valued, and what they might have believed to be worth stealing. They’re not always the same thing.
My thrice hand-me-down car was stolen three times in a month from in front of my last Oakland residence. I eventually found it on a Sunday night in an industrial lot near the coliseum, inoperable, beat to hell with a baseball bat, and before I could get it towed it had been stolen again, probably stripped for its parts. I understood part of that anger, and that desperation. When we moved, it was because our landlady wanted to rent our apartment for 3000/mo (we’d barely been able to pay the 2400 she’d been asking for the three bedroom). Thefts and violent crime were pretty common in our neighborhood, but we loved our place, and our neighbors, and our simple vectors. And we were lucky, by comparison. We’d be okay.
We sweep tents off the streets in time for the Superbowl, and deprive those of us with the least of the last few things they have. Every time I come back to the bay I’m struck by how many of our people are begging for a night of safety or a way to self-medicate at highway off-ramps and busy intersections. I would not be surprised if any one of them had the potential to reach me and you from a stage or a canvas or a page, but we make them reach for the barest of hopes instead.
This problem of inequity is one we’re facing everywhere, to greater or lesser extent, and people who flee the Bay Area’s economic crisis will find it alive in other cities all over the country. This problem isn’t going to be solved by a crackdown on unpermitted live/work spaces, and it’s also not going to be solved by grants and subsidies for artists (though we do desperately need those). The problem is in our institutions, and in our culture, and it’s rooted deep.
If you’re a homeowner, and you can afford to, offer your spaces for less than market rate and rent to folks you can like and trust. Market rate is not the true value of your home. The value is in the shelter it provides, and the community it can create. Many people who are reliable renters at one rate could not hope to be at another. This is not a reflection of their respectability, but a reflection of our lopsided economy.
If you can offer your services at a sliding scale, or do pro bono work, do. Everyone needs health care. Everybody is a stroke of very bad luck away from homelessness, and these days poverty is criminalized. Offer your legal aid, your mechanical genius, the spoils of your kitchen. Offer your expertise. Teaching someone gives them opportunities they might not otherwise have.
Understand that while we still work within this system, your artists are rendering services to you. Creative labor is labor, too. We cannot nourish without being nourished.
Open yourself to conversation with those you don’t yet understand. Make eye contact. Ask questions! Other people will have better and bigger ideas for how to help.
The first show I ever attended in Oakland was held in an unpermitted loft space. It was the last show ever held in that venue, and that evening I heard music and met people that decisively altered and elevated the course of my life.