Hellarity Burns
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
In one corner of North Oakland, California, a cauldron of squatters and property owners, stirred by green dreams and the bursting housing bubble, set an unusual Oakland house ablaze.
The house called Hellarity was originally part of a green property owner’s attempt to create a network of sustainable, affordable housing. When his project floundered, the residence was slowly taken over by his tenants, a group of people who one-upped his radicalism. Both sides claimed to be avowed anticapitalists, but their strategies were at odds; his was to produce an alternative to the local housing market by creating a nonprofit that would help tenants own their homes as a collective. Theirs was to make space for themselves in a rent-based housing market by seizing property from investors and absentee landlords.
The owner eventually went bankrupt — drowned in the early stages of the deflating housing market — and the property fell into the hands of a small-time real estate investor, despite the tenants’ attempts to buy it themselves. The tenants refused to leave, transforming themselves into squatters, and fought it out with the buyer in court for three years. As the court case bogged down, housing values plummeted, making the landlord’s investment lose value by the day.
Then, just after the squatters gave up their fight and agreed to turn the house over to the landlord, a new group of squatters moved in to reoccupied it. Two weeks later, the house went up in flames.
For months, I poured through court records, interviewed current and former occupants, the former landlord, and pieced together the story leading up to arson, which I found to have started before the house even started ten years ago. To read the 5,000 word feature I wrote for the San Francisco Bay Guardian this week, click here.
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