I live in Oakland, in live/work warehouse, in a light industrial zone far from downtown. Generally boring except for late night drag races. Past 4 years, area has turned into a deserted Mad Max wonderland with RVs, junked cars on sidewalks, which I had to climb over twice a day in order to commute to my job.
But now… apparently the entire county of Alameda has a curfew tonight, our landlords sent us a note that they were putting the building on lockdown and nobody would be allowed to enter or leave after 6pm tonight. They they advised us to evacuate. But we have no place safer to go, really.
Plus I don’t want to abandon my home to looters or arsonists who haven’t yet materialized. We have a private security service who seems to think this is a real thing and they’ll be the ones stuck dealing with it first.
Building is actually now a cannabis building, too. Businesses in most of it except for our little artist colony, whom our landlords tried unsuccessfully to evict 3 years ago. I don’t know what I will do yet, it’s 4pm and still daylight. Thus far no rioters have been seen by any building residents.
Have you considered making a backpack with survival items, flashlight, important papers, pepper spray, basic first aid, valuables, etc. and keeping it ready to go at a moment’s notice? Good luck!
Yes I’m thinking about the fire stuff. I don’t necessarily have a “bug out bag” packed but I’ve thought about it enough that for this situation I could leave fast and take what I need right away. My papers are at a friend’s house already. Probably have to sleep in my clothes tonight assuming I feel OK about taking rest later. Might all be a lot of fuss over nothing at all.
Not meaning to sound too conspiratorial, but what are the chances that this is the landlord’s attempt to finally get everyone out (you mention unsuccessful eviction in the past)? Using the pretense of the unrest, one could make the case that getting everyone out, and then making it impossible to return could accomplish a nefarious goal.
We thought of that. I think that the LL is not competent enough to try something that clever. If they’d been smart, we would have been out of there long ago. The Godfather they ain’t.
Listen, I’m in the pretty wealthy seattle suburb of Bellevue. Yesterday, criminal gangs hit about 5 places simultaneously under cover of George Floyd protests. It was either outnumbered police shoot the looters, or let them rampage. So, let them rampage. I’m not going to argue if that was the right thing right now. BUT, there are plenty of criminal elements out there now that are thinking they can get away with all sorts of shit, so stay safe.
Holy shit, the OP is frightening. If rioters and looters start breaking into homes, attacking people, and burning them down, they will be set upon with great fury. You’d have a HumVee on every street.
I’ll be interested to hear what the OP did, and how things turned out. While this might not be especially practical advice, I have an observation to make about this situation.
If you are explicitly renting a live/work space, and this is your home, I would be very surprised if it is even legal for the landlord to lock you in or out of your building. California, and plenty of Bay-Area cities, have pretty strong tenant protections, and if you have a lease saying that this is your place of residence, then the landlord can’t order you to stay home, or to leave and not come back. The place where you live is effectively your property, for the purposes of ingress and egress, for the duration of your lease. If there’s a curfew, it’s your responsibility as an individual to follow the law, and not the landlord’s responsibility to tell you what to do.
I guess there’s a possibility that your lease has some sort of force majeure clause that would allow the landlord to make this decision. It’s also possible that the law allows landlords to do this type of thing under certain circumstances, but I’d be asking the landlord under what authority he is locking me out of the home that I’m paying for.
So it ended up relatively quiet. Several folks from my building stayed outside within our gated lot, including myself. I was the only female outside, though; these were the lads of my building. I think most of the warehouses surrounding are now various cannabis businesses, all of which subscribe to the same private security service. In addition to the security personnel, I could see people outside those warehouses keeping watch, or just having a presence. The security is pretty good, as private firms go. Professional and unfazed. I had a few conversations with them in the past so they know me. Last night a few loud cars rolled by, one stopped briefly and then moved on. This was when we were still inside, just chilling it and sitting on concrete side deck. I heard sirens and choppers.
Regarding our landlords, we’ve been in an ongoing feud with them for 2 years and they haven’t yet pushed us out. mhendo is right about all those legalities.
And why is this in the pit? I had no idea which forum to put this under. It’s not mundane pointless stuff. I figured a list mod would move it if it was in the wrong place.
Contrary to the name (and 100% counter-intuitively) the mundane pointless forum is where we usually put (in addition to actual mundane pointless stuff) REALLY important serious stuff like death in the family, natural disasters, and other catastrophes. Yeah, I know. :rolleyes: The Pit is for stuff we want to curse and insult and use the f-word on.
So glad you’re okay. Having reps from private security companies around was probably a good thing, eh?
Like Art Before Science, it crossed my mind that the LL might be up to something. Like burning the place down for insurance money and blaming it on the riots. Glad that wasn’t the case for you. The same thing occurred to me with the odd Autozone vandalism - white guy wearing gas mask and carrying an open umbrella breaking the windows out with a hammer and then just walking away. Owner/employee who already looted the building and looking to put the blame elsewhere? Very odd, in any case.
When they first bought the place in late 2017 all we knew was they were cannabis investors from Colorado. We thought cannabis business people would be gangsters and we’d find horse’s heads in our beds. Or I’d wake up one night to the sharp smell of smoke. I hardly slept at all for two months. I was out of work and rents were sky-high.
Turns out they’re empty shirts, two-faced and possibly swindling their own investors, which is apparently standard practice amongst this type of “developer”. Fairly cowardly. Unfortunately stupid as well so any chances of an actual negotiated solution are off the table.
The worst thing they did, apart from trying to evict us, was to stop paying all utilities because they “forgot” to switch over the utilities when they closed on the sale. We have sub metering here so there’s only one consolidated water and power bill for the entire 100,000 SF. Residents only live in 30% of that. We got water shutoff notices and power warnings right around Christmastime that year. Ho ho ho