Alistair Monroe paced through the busy decor of the cavernous warehouse space which in a previous incarnation, housed workers stuffing vegetables into metal cans. His late father’s giant abstract paintings faced out from every wall of the industrial building-turned-art studio, and even six years after his dad’s death, his cluttered desk was still perfectly cluttered.
“I protected and preserved everything just as he left it,” said Monroe, extracting old photos of his father from the piles of paint brushes and letters.
The densely decorated room stood in contrast to the rest of the now mostly barren Cannery Building, the East Oakland industrial space his father Arthur Monroe converted into artist live-work studios nearly a half-century ago. The majority of the building’s 32 live-work tenants had steadily trickled out over the last few years, as the marijuana growing company that once owned and co-occupied the building began to pressure people to leave.
Now, it’s the Canadian real estate investment company Romspen employing California’s Ellis Act to take the building off the rental market and remove its last two tenants, having already struck buyout deals with other residents. The building that became the city’s first sanctioned live-work space was now a ghost town - Monroe and artist Douglas Stewart its last ghosts.
“So we’re the last men standing,” Monroe said, flanked by a wall-size painting by his father.
Monroe walked into an adjacent large white room vacated by another artist. The dwelling stood mostly empty - save for a few of Monroe’s paintings, a drum set, a keyboard and a kitchen. With his neighbor gone, Monroe was using the room as a gallery and place to host gatherings in his long campaign to protect the building.
Down hallways and stairs, he pointed out another empty ground floor room where the recent owners, the Denver-based marijuana company Green Sage had grown its marijuana, the result of Oakland’s move to create a 10 mile Green Zone to support the burgeoning legal marijuana industry. The plan backfired for live-work buildings like the Cannery as commercial marijuana companies bought up them up and booted out the tenants.
In 2018, as Green Sage began to evict the Cannery’s tenants, Monroe and other activists persuaded the city to rewrite the plan — resulting in the prohibition of marijuana cultivation in live-work buildings, though allowing the cannabis companies to continue to operate in those buildings.
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The next battle for Cannery tenants came when a PG&E transformer on the building blew and Green Sage brought in a generator the size of a diesel truck to power its operation. The pollution left buildings blackened and tenants complaining about the fumes. It took two years of lawsuits and protests before the Bay Area Air Management District finally forced the company to shut the generators down.
“We had to go through the proper channels of the air district to prove they were using these diesel generators within a horrible context,” Monroe said, “that were harming people’s lives.”
When Green Sage defaulted on its $55 million loan from Romspen in 2022, the company foreclosed on the property and then turned to the Ellis Act to remove the tenants.
Kevin Saavedra of Seventh Wave Investment Partners, a Bay Area-based consultant for Romspen, said in a statement the company “exercised their rights under the Ellis Act to decommission the residential units — then worked with Patricia Brooks, Chief of Staff to now-interim Mayor Kevin Jenkins to negotiate a buyout of the residents. That buyout offer was accepted by the vast majority of the building’s residents, except for two holdouts who are still at the property.”
Monroe and Stewart have so far declined the company’s buyout offers. Monroe is asking the company to relocate him to a place where he and his father’s giant of outpouring of art can remain together. Monroe said his father, who died in 2019, had a noble vision for the Cannery Building as a place to support the arts, especially at a time when artists have gotten priced out of many Bay Area cities.
“He wanted homes for African-American artists and, or artists alike,” Monroe said.
Monroe said the story of the Cannery is a familiar story to many major cities; where artists bring energy and creativity to forlorn spaces, only to be forced out by investors who are attracted to what they’ve created. As the last occupant of one of those buildings, Monroe fretted over what the future would hold for other grass roots artists.
“This is a cultural arts institution within itself,” he said. “When you erase history it goes away - it never comes back.”
