The site of the Oakland fire had not been inspected…
…for three decades, despite plenty of complaints.
Completely disgraceful:
Right. Budget cuts are to explain why a building hadn’t been inspected in thirty years. Here is more nonsense:
There weren’t any inspections because “we had no applications for permits in the last 30 years, and there were no violations that were submitted for interior work within the main building attributed to that street address,” said Darin Ranelletti, the city’s interim director of planning and building.
Right. Meanwhile, people were apparently complaining about the building continuously:
On Friday night, the warehouse became the scene of one of Oakland’s deadliest building fires as an electronic dance party was underway. The cause of the blaze remains under investigation.
Nevertheless, the city received repeated complaints over the years about the warehouse-turned-art space, a dilapidated two-story structure at 1315 31st Ave., and its adjacent lot.
The site had become cluttered with old cars, oil containers, pests and trash, according to those complaints.
Many of the complaints were directed at the lot, pointing to a “ton of garbage piling up on the property” as well as the “illegal interior building structure” at the warehouse, according to city records released this week.
The most recent complaints were filed three weeks before Friday’s fire.
The notion that the city couldn’t send somebody over there to check property because of budget cuts is complete garbage.
I would imagine there are many other structures like this in the city. I hope the city starts paying attention, and doing something about potential disasters waiting to happen.
City of Oakland taxpayers will pay millions.
Maybe voters will wake up and kick out all of the incumbents.
It’s you government in action or inaction.
I thought in his time as mayor of Oakland that Gov. Jerry Brown worked wonders with the place. Or so a lot of articles at the time said. What happened?
Too bad Calexit has no chance to secede.
This is an example of what happens to a city run by Republicans for decades. That also had the misfortune to be located in a state with a Republican Governor and a Republican dominated state legislature.
Or am I missing something here?
/sarc off
“Budget cuts are to explain why a building hadn’t been inspected in thirty years. Here is more nonsense: [snip] Right. Meanwhile, people were apparently complaining about the building continuously: [snip]”
And Oakland is/was ruled by what political party? (According to my reading of wikipedia, the answer to that question is the Democrat Party since the 1960s or so.)
” Oakland has the highest percentage of registered Democrats of any of the incorporated cities in Alameda County, with Berkeley coming in a close second. As of 2009, Oakland has 204,646 registered voters. 140,858 (68.8%) are registered Democrats, 12,248 (5.9%) are registered Republicans, 10,431 (5.2%) are members of other parties and 41,109 (20.1%) decline to state a political affiliation.[129] Oakland is widely regarded as being one of the most liberal major cities in the nation. The Cook Partisan Voting Index of Congressional District 13, which includes Oakland and Berkeley, is D+37, making it the most Democratic congressional district in California and the fourth most Democratic district in the US.[130]”
From what’s been reported, the landlord didn’t have enough money to bribe a self-respecting inspector. Unless they come really, really cheap.
What happened?
Having some knowledge of building inspections protocol, the failure is not only on the local level but the levels above. Where was the state building inspector? Most states, if you aren’t getting satisfaction at the city level you can go to the state level for complaints, while it can be time consuming, repeated requests for action will get action. BTW, am in the process of getting a building inspector certification to go with my other inspector qualifications.
Read from 2011: Oakland has been bleeding black residents for a couple of decades, people voting with their feet. Oakland now has no more blacks than lots of places in the Deep South. It now has as many Latinos as whites, though. But note the paeans in this story:
http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/25-drop-in-African-American-population-in-Oakland-2471925.php
Who’s shedding tears for the Black Panthers or for Ron Dellums?
According to Wiki, whites are not an “ethnic group”:
“In the 2010 census African Americans maintained their status as Oakland’s single largest ethnic group, with 27% of the population, followed by non-Hispanic whites at 25.9%, and Hispanics of any race at 25.4%.[82] Ethnic Asians constitute 17%, followed by smaller minority groups.”
I know I’m late to this (moving from the Bay Area to Denver and just landed and still sorting things out) but this fire was just horrifying. I actually know people who know people who perished. Thankfully I did not know any of these folks but they all look so familiar to me. It is unbelievable that these inspections never happened and that the city was so derelict but then, it is Oakland. That city is run totally incompetently. The head tenant was also taking advantage of the other tenants and threatening them, extorting money for repairs that never happened. He was a bit of a Charles Manson type by his own admission. Just a tragedy all around.