Squatter’s dilemma: Hoping to prevent next Ghost Ship tragedy, Sacramento officials police vacant buildings as homeless residents seek refuge

Curtains of rain billow through downtown Sacramento on a Wednesday afternoon. Two women and two little girls huddle inside the vestibule of the Capitol Event Center, shivering in mismatched clothes inches from the downpour. On I Street, men wrapped in blankets shelter under the art deco overhang of a liquor store that barely protects them from the sweeping showers. Six bodies are sprawled across the face of City Hall, most tucked so deep into their sleeping bags they can’t see a massive pool of water creeping ever closer.

In four hours, one man sleeping here will be dead.

When storm conditions are this inescapable, people experiencing homelessness face the dilemma of getting wet at night with no way to dry off until businesses open again. The threat of hypothermia can compel many to seek sanctuary in old vacant buildings or long-abandoned houses.

But local officials worry this trend also creates potential for deadly misfortune—and they point to the ways an old, unmonitored warehouse that doubled as an illegal living space in Oakland erupted into flames during a secret concert last month. More than 30 people perished in the now-infamous Ghost Ship fire, that city’s deadliest. Ghost Ship has also become a terrible shorthand for what can happen when vacant, sometimes dilapidated buildings fly under the radar of code enforcers and fire authorities. But where’s the line between showing compassion to those so-called squatters with no other place to go and turning a blind eye to threats of run-down buildings—and has Sacramento found it?

“In the cases where we clear people out, it’s really for their own protection,” said Program Analyst Kelli Trapani, who works with the city’s code enforcement division. “We don’t want to have a major tragedy—we don’t want to have our own Ghost Ship.”

While the Bay Area continues to reel from the December 2 death toll, the potential danger posed by vacant dwellings isn’t lost on Sacramento city fire inspectors, who recently probed two blazes in large, local buildings that are older than the Ghost Ship.

The first happened in March 2015, when the historic Biltmore Hotel on J and 10th streets burst into flames. The bones of the Biltmore date back to the 1880s. For a time during the 1990s, the Biltmore shared similarities with the Ghost Ship in that 41 low-income residents called it home. The hotel’s owners eventually had every tenant in its single-occupancy dwelling evicted in 2000 over development dreams that never came true. The hotel’s been officially vacant ever since.

The same was the case for the 81,000-square-foot Crystal Ice plant on R and 16th streets—older than Ghost Ship by a decade and empty since the late ’90s. The ice plant was engulfed in flames in November 2015.

Fire inspectors still haven’t determined what caused the Biltmore or Crystal Ice plant to ignite, and may never solve those mysteries.

“The problem in those situations is that oftentimes our inspectors can’t work backwards because fires that size cause structural collapse, burying most of the evidence,” said Sacramento Fire Department spokesman Chris Harvey. “In the case of the ice plant, the building had a low basement and the walls and beams fell into it. … With the Biltmore, there wasn’t structural collapse, but the fire burned so hot that the evidence was totally consumed.”

Given that the ice plant and Biltmore long predate modern building codes, there are myriad possibilities involving their destruction; though one cause that hasn’t been ruled out is illegal squatting.

“Every year we do see a number of fires in vacant buildings,” Harvey said, adding that witnesses noticed people trespassing into both the Biltmore and ice plant in the days leading up to their fires.

Multiple city officials told SN&R that people taking refuge in vacant buildings is especially common during the winter.

Principal Building Inspector John Leno has seen the pitfalls that come from people desperately trying to get warm. From a fire safety perspective, the situation is often a nightmare waiting to happen.

“We find a lot of people living in structures without electricity huddled around all these candles,” Leno said. “In the larger buildings, sometimes they’ll have actual fires going. In houses without heat, it’s not uncommon for them to bring stoves inside. All of these are really big hazards … When it comes to our cases, our concern is the same whether it’s tenants or squatters—that they’re going to be locked inside and can’t escape when something happens.”

That’s reportedly the main factor that caused 36 people to die in the Ghost Ship fire.

According to a lawsuit filed by family members of two victims, managers of the Ghost Ship rented “makeshift rooms and alcoves” to 24 people as living spaces, while simultaneously offering the venue to party promoters for music and dance events, despite its lacking smoke detectors, working fire sprinklers, exterior fire escapes and proper exit routes.

The suit also charges that the entire building was powered by extension chords haphazardly snaked to a lone meter outside—a single source of electricity shared by two other structures. Finally, the suit alleges that Oakland building inspectors hadn’t been inside the Ghost Ship in 30 years.

The cause of the fire is still undetermined.

In Sacramento, city building inspectors generally only examine dangerous buildings when complaints come in from the public. Information obtained by SN&R through a public records request reveals that, in the last three years, city building inspectors checked on 4,275 different properties, mainly based on neighborhood tips and concerns. But in 13 of those cases, the investigations were triggered by actual fires that broke out in a structure, seven of which happened in buildings that were supposed to be vacant.

When local inspectors find people squatting in jeopardous buildings, they have police clear the grounds while they contact the owner to detail needed repairs and demand the premise be secured. If the owner won’t stop the trespassing, the city will. Authorities will also put a special lien on the property to try to recoup taxpayer money for securing it.

Absentee property owners get an initial 10-day notice to fix the threats in the building. If they don’t make the repairs, they get a final 30-day notice before the city begins leveling fines.

“We’re pretty successful at getting compliance at that point,” Leno observed.

The conditions that drive desperate people into vacant structures continue to be debated at City Hall.

The city of Sacramento’s emergency warming center only holds 40 people at a time; and while city and county leaders recently managed to open another on Garden Highway, that facility only holds another 25 people. Coupled with other programs, like Sacramento Steps Forward’s winter sanctuary for homeless adults at 30 rotating churches, the best scenario on a life-threatening night in the region is that 160 to 260 shelter spots will be available.

Officially, it’s believed there are at least 2,600 people living on Sacramento County’s streets on any given night, but nearly all local homeless experts believe the actual number to be much higher.

“I think the city, county and our local organizations have been clicking well together to work on this,” said First Step Communities Executive Director Stephen Watters, who is trying to lobby political support for transitional supportive housing communities, “but we could still use five times the amount of spots during the winter. There’s a ways to go, because it’s a big problem.”

North Sacramento Councilman Allen Warren recently acknowledged that existing resources aren’t enough. On January 10, he asked the city manager’s office to explore options for lifting the so-called anti-camping ordinance. He found no support from the mayor or other council members at that meeting.

In arguing his position, Warren cited statistics from the coroner that 705 homeless people died in Sacramento County between 2002 and 2015. Seven days after Warren’s comments, a man died sleeping in front of City Hall during a battering storm.

While Mayor Darrell Steinberg called last week’s opening of a second weather refuge at the Stanford Settlement Neighborhood Center a response to “unacceptable social conditions,” the West El Camino Avenue sanctuary might as well have been a world away for a young homeless woman who has been on a nonstop exodus with other members of the Southeast Asian community since county authorities raided their massive south county encampment in July.

Currently posted up behind a highway sound wall on a sliver of sodden ground that dips steeply toward roaring Highway 99, “May” and her neighbors are more than 10 miles away by car from the new weather refuge. (SN&R agreed to withhold her name due to concerns over privacy and law enforcement reprisal.)

On the worst night of the storms, May told SN&R she wrapped herself in three sleeping bags and crowded into a single blue-tarp tent with five other people and two dogs to weather the deluge.

The day before, she said, a sheriff’s deputy discovered their tents and told them they would need to leave the area. When one of her neighbors, who doesn’t speak English, didn’t respond to the warning, she says the deputy kicked over a pot of noodles the man was cooking.

“It was messed up,” May said.

Without delving into the outdoor camping debate, local firefighters and building inspectors stress that allowing people to congregate in perilous structures could have equally devastating consequences.

On September 26, 2015, a man squatting inside a historic building in Jackson, an hour east of Sacramento, lost control of a small, illegal stove and was burned to death in a raging fire.

On December 28, 2015, a man and woman seeking shelter from the cold in a boarded-up house in Oakland were killed by an inferno, one possibly sparked by their portable propane heater. Neighbors told ABC7 News that they had seen much larger groups of people taking refuge in the abandoned fourplex on winter nights.