Inviting disaster

Echoes of the Ghost Ship disaster at the site of the latest fatal Oakland blaze don’t seem to have escaped the building’s owner. Shortly after the infamous December fire killed 36 in an illegally converted warehouse, Keith Kim tried to evict a nonprofit overseeing marginal housing at his own West Oakland property.

But an ensuing standoff dragged on until this week, when four tenants of the building died in the fire. A lawyer for Urojas Community Services, the nonprofit bitterly at odds with the landlord, sounded as primed for disaster as the Ghost Ship tenants had been, comparing the rat-infested San Pablo Avenue property to Dante’s hell. Displaced tenants offered similarly bleak assessments of the building, the subject of complaints going back a decade.

As with the warehouse, however, the city was slow to recognize the urgency of the situation. Councilwoman Lynette Gibson McElhaney had been attempting to mediate between Kim and Urojas but told The Chronicle that the property needed only “a hug.” It wasn’t until three days before the blaze that inspectors cited missing smoke detectors and fire sprinklers, dangerous wiring, and other violations, allowing 30 days for repairs.

Mayor Libby Schaaf said Wednesday that the inspection showed better communication among officials but acknowledged “much more work to do,” vowing to boost inspection capacity. She also noted the difficulty of code enforcement in an acute housing crisis, saying, “We are trying to do the hard job government has of balancing housing security with safety.”

The city was indeed more engaged in the problems at the West Oakland property than in its laissez-faire approach to the Ghost Ship, but the ultimate result is indistinguishable. For the second time in a few months, Oakland’s unsafe housing has contributed to a loss of homes and, worse, lives.