Bohemian Retrofit Ownership may be the key to saving Berkeley artists' community

A For the past 30 years, the building at 2750 Adeline St. in Berkeley has been a breeding ground for eccentric whimsy and creativity. Home to a motley collection of culture makers spanning three generations and myriad media, the residents have maintained a threadbare bohemian existence even as the world around them obsessively upgraded. Now that the 1906 converted warehouse is in serious need of retrofitting and the new owner wants to convert it into nonresidential space, the community is on a one-way road toward change. The only question is, will change mean extinction, or reincarnation?

Most of the building's 20 or so tenants were evicted in January 2001, when new owner Sasha Shamszad Ellis Act-ed it in the hopes of turning it into a commercial space. (Shamszad says he wants to convert it into a collection of artists' studios and an art-therapy center; the residents maintain that his intention is to create office space.) But the remaining five residents, ages 4 to 68, are "fighting" the eviction with all the usual rhetoric displaced artists typically employ, asking the public and the government to see them as especially deserving because they are artists with few resources. Dubbing their home "The Building of Art," they circulated a flyer recently that read, "Help us to preserve a Building of Art, PeaceMusicRecylcing [sic] Alliance for Children and Artists from all over the world."

This is pretty high-flown language for four adults and a child, whose most public work is selling art from a gallery. It's true, though: Without support -- family money, a high-paying day job, government grants -- most artists can survive only by the skin of their teeth (and by paying dirt-cheap rent). And if there's no dirt-cheap rent to be had in a community, well, then, soon enough there will be no artists. On the other hand, many such campaigns mounted by displaced artists in recent years smack of self-preservation in the guise of societal good. Are many artists good and productive members of society? Sure. Do they deserve publicly subsidized housing more than, say, nurses or schoolteachers or the guy who picks up the garbage? Maybe -- but only if their art is really in the service of community, or if it's brilliantly executed.

Unlike many of the self-inflated and ultimately doomed protests artists have mounted against their landlords over the last few years, this one deserves to succeed and actually has a chance of working. Why? Because the residents want to buy the building and turn part of it into a community art center. And one of the only ways for arts to survive in the real estate boom cycles of the Bay Area is to have more artists and arts organizations emerge from their antimaterialistic fogs and own their own property.

With the help of the Berkeley City Council and the financial backing of the Northern California Land Trust, the group is taking a crash course in nonprofit real estate. It formed a nonprofit called the Berkeley Arts Project, and it hopes to make an offer the landlord can't refuse before the evictions come due Sept. 24.

Recently, I took a tour of the old warehouse and glimpsed inside a world that is destined for change -- one way or another.

Arty Diorama

Under wood rafters with rough drywall divisions and exposed pipes, the place unfolds like a sort of museum of late 20th-century bohemia, when most urban artists lived in recycled buildings with recycled possessions, when they traded the luxury of money and nice commodities for time and community. Each resident has his or her own studio/bedroom, and they share one kitchen. The juxtaposition of art, collectibles and trash crashes together in an aesthetic in which nothing is excluded, where there is time, for instance, to make a collage of tea packaging above the kitchen sink. In the studios, where the people sleep and make art, there is evidence only of the art, not the sleeping. Canvases -- mounted on the walls or stacked on the floor, some with colorful completed paintings, others half painted, others blank -- are everywhere.

And then there are the occupants, who climb up and down ladders to get to sleeping lofts, roof gardens, basement studios, who survive in a Robinson Crusoe world of urban invention.

At 60, with a graying beard and a shuffling, mild-mannered intensity, Don Donahue, original publisher of the groundbreaking Zap Comics, which made R. Crumb famous, is the oldest member of the collective, having lived 26 years in the converted warehouse. One of the first things he shares with me, after he catches me eyeing his little black elf shoes, is his method for making slippers out of duct tape. 

"You take an old sock and put it on your foot and wrap tape around it," he says with a slight smile. "It's the perfect slipper, because it conforms to your foot. After a month or so, they get ratty and smelly, but that's fine, because you just make another pair. It only takes about 20 minutes."

"I always wondered what those were," neighbor Natasha Shawver says without a trace of teasing. The preternaturally young-looking 41-year-old girl-nerd with heavy bangs and spectacles moved into the building 20 years ago after dropping out of art school. It strikes me that the fact that, during the 20 years she has lived under the same roof as Donahue, Shawver has never asked about his duct-tape slippers is every bit as quirky as the shoes themselves. Evidently, this is a place where the freedom to act on one's impulses is not only accepted but also evinces no commentary.

Shawver ran a vintage toy shop on the ground floor until 1995, selling things like rare lunch boxes. Then, 10 years ago, she moved her father into the building from Houston, Texas, to take care of him after an aneurysm caused him to become aphasic, which means it is difficult for him to understand speech. Now Earnest Shawver, a 68-year-old, wide-eyed Rip Van Winkle, lives in the studio next to hers, where he paints canvases packed with expressive faces. Natasha pays $1,000 a month for their two spaces. 

Live and Let Rot

Past occupants have included several other visual artists and some musicians who used a space for band practice. The residents tell me that for years, the previous owner, Tim Baker, had taken a live-and-let-rot attitude toward the building that both suited the artists and worried them. 

"He was a great guy," says Rozita Fogelman, a 38-year-old graphic and fine artist from Israel who moved in four years ago, just after the birth of her son, Primo. "Very supportive of the arts.

"He was an expert bow maker for archery," she adds as evidence of his artistic sensibilities.

At the same time, Shawver was growing increasingly concerned about living in an unsafe building. "There was no heat in the winter," says Shawver. "There were leaky pipes, and the breakers broke during storms, and there was the smell of gas and burning electrical wires so often, we were calling the fire department all the time."

The vine-covered, unreinforced-masonry building has 11,400 square feet of floor space and sits next to a swank little bakery-café in south Berkeley, so it would seem to have been a prime target for those looking to create high-end office space during the dot-com property frenzy. But residents say the building languished on the market for years and in the end sold for a little over $400,000 in early 2001, long after the stock-market bloom had lost its blush.

The reasons that other developers steered clear of this particular property aren't hard to guess. Not only is the almost windowless building in serious disrepair, but it has plenty of historic value. It's the last of the ornamental concrete-block buildings built by Frederick Dakin, and developers would be hard-pressed to change the facade without citizen objections. On the other hand, the outside of the building has unreinforced-concrete molding that could easily fall down in an earthquake and injure passersby (though the interior is earthquake safe).

Therefore, it would have to be replicated in another material to be both preserved and quake-proof. All this would make earthquake retrofitting (required by the city of Berkeley with any property transfer) extremely expensive, and in the end, the owner might still end up with a building with almost no windows! 

Because of such expensive repairs, when the artists first heard that the building was for sale, they assumed they couldn't afford it. Then, when the new owner (who also owns Ziba Photo) invoked the Ellis Act, a state law that allows landlords to quit the business of being landlords and remove their property from the residential rental market, the residents were not optimistic. 

They got a lawyer and played the delay-and-not-pay game, but Donahue was evicted with the majority of tenants in January 2002. However, on behalf of Shawver and Fogelman's kin -- Shawver's father and Fogelman's son (who has speech delays) -- they invoked laws that require landlords to give a full year for disabled residents to find new homes. 

Finally, in April, they approached the city council with their plight and presented their desire to try to buy the building. 

"It was amazing," says Shawver. "They kept on saying, 'If only you had brought this to our attention earlier.'"

Soon after, the city council voted unanimously to temporarily waive both the retrofitting timeline and thousands of dollars in fees to the city. They were also offered staff support for wading through the morass of bureaucracy they will have to deal with. The Northern California Land Trust, a nonprofit organization that buys land for limited-equity cooperative housing, will hold title to the land, and the artists will buy the building and slowly fix it up, effectively removing the building from the speculative market. The artists will be able to sell their units or pass them on to their children, but the selling price will be limited to the amount they originally paid, plus any improvements; their investment will never appreciate. 

All this suits Shawver fine. "We're just artists," she says. "We don't care about making a profit." 

"But it's made me seriously think about having a baby," deadpans Donahue. 

Development Berkeley Style 

But now Shamszad, a product photographer and developer who holds an architecture degree from the University of California Berkeley, is experiencing hardship.

"They had an option to buy like everyone else when the property was on the market," he says. "In the meantime, they aren't paying rent, and I'm going broke. My lawyer just told me to wait until next month [when the residents are scheduled to be evicted] and see what happens." As a developer for 30 years in Berkeley who owns several commercial buildings, he is used to dealing with complicated demands made on property owners and developers in the highly progressive city. "It's just the way it is," he says. "Some [laws] are very good. The masses need to live somewhere."

Ironically, his vision for the building sounds strangely like the residents', except that it would not be a residential property. His wife, a painter who has cancer, has done a lot of art therapy, and she encouraged him to take on the project of creating an art-therapy center. "I just want to do something nice," he says. "It isn't all monetary. It's for love of the city, if you will."

By his estimate, the building's retrofit and remodel would cost about $800,000 to $900,000. He declined to either endorse or rule out the possibility of selling to the residents. 

"What's a reasonable offer? That's too vague," he says a little wearily. "I really can't be specific. It's not like they can throw a little money at me and buy a building. It has to work financially."

Shamszad also questions the philosophy that certain people should receive housing subsidies just because they are artists. "It's very complicated," he says. "Do you privilege certain individuals because they can use a paint brush?"

Ironically, if the artists of 2750 Adeline manage to buy their building, they may owe a debt of gratitude to the man who tried to evict them. And whatever the outcome, this experience has obviously pushed them to envision a future beyond being isolated tenants in a deteriorating building. Now there is a vision for an artists' building owned by artists that could involve many more artists and serve the wider community. (If the sale goes through, the group plans to accept applications from interested artists who want to buy in to the building, and to reserve the ground floor as a gallery / performance / meeting space for the public.) 

"This has been a wake-up call for us that we have a responsibility," says Shawver. "I've always been kind of a hermit, but now I really want to make something for the community, do workshops for people who can't afford it. I've begun to appreciate the social connection of art."

By Carol Lloyd, special to SF Gate 8.14.02