The eye of Sauron is now turned on all similar spaces. Never forget what Prudhon said. "Property is theft." Low interest rates and big money, including the Chinese trying to get assets out of China are driving a property bubble in the Bay Area and elsewhere on the West coast. It has only recently in the last few months seen a slight easing. Meanwhile the working poor are being pushed out of even many run down and cheap spaces.

We lived in Oakland, still work there and can see the space from the BART. My wife works with someone who had a space there, they were away at the time.

I see how gentrification is changing Oakland, since 2009 it has been dramatic. A look at Zillow prices should give non-locals an idea of just how insane it has become. Driven by San Francisco becoming a dormitory city. I was down on Clement at 5pm the other day and it was almost empty. 5 years ago the sidewalks would have been thronging at that time. My read was that all the residents in the buildings in the Inner Richmond are occupied by tech workers and they are still at work at 5pm.

And I agree with people saying the underlying cause is gentrification and the lack of affordable living and work spaces for artists.

I always wonder with all the shutdown bigbox stores dotting so many landscapes why some enterprising groups don't try working with a municipality and the owners from the getgo to get some live/work/retail/performance sites going that are safe. In some areas I bet the Kickstarter response would be pretty good.

does not thrive in a regimented and regulated milieu. It does best in somewhat chaotic, permissive environments -- on the fringes of, or just outside the purview of mainstream society. Preferably, such environments are in densely urban areas, near the centers of high culture. Spaces suitable for developing new art also need to be dirt cheap, because during its inception and often long afterwards, seriously adventurous art almost never makes any money. Obviously, places like this are becoming increasingly rare and hard to come by, as property speculation eats up the core of all our major cities.

These kinds of "underground" spaces have long needed be forged by artists themselves -- from the raw materials of an urban society and landscape that in most cases is either ignorant of, or hostile to their existence. They are transgressive by their very nature, it is unavoidable. Careless, absentee landlords like the Ngs have often been a godsend for artists needing cheap space with little or no supervision. I have spent the better part of fifty years living either in or around such spaces, by my own choice.

That being said, they do not need to be as irresponsible, slovenly, and chaotic as Derick Ion Almena's operation apparently was. Too many drugs, taken too often and too indiscriminately, combined with a total lack of self discipline and an utter disregard for the welfare of others, has little to do with the creation of art... attractive though it may be to much of today's alienated youth.

So sorry to hear of such a loss to the community and to you personally.

It's particularly heartbreaking to hear from an activist standpoint. The opportunities for such spaces are so few and practically non-existent today. In such a no holds barred capitalist environment in which the global financial elite Economic Terrorists have taken all their heisted money from the gov't bailout and just gorged themselves on gobbling up real estate there is hardly any place left for a community space to open and thrive.

It's the same here in NYC and the world over. Nothing but new, gleaming fucking banks on every corner, franchise food and grocery chains, corporate monopolies and upscale boutique food and frivolous trinkets. Retail space has been jacked up beyond its market value so that the only people who can afford them are the ones who don't care what the price is, especially the banks who just set up one empty husk after another with the strategy of it being free advertising in hopes that they'll soften their image with the public by mere attrition. Naturally, the only affordable places available are those that either have fallen into disrepair, fixer uppers, or some other not ideal situation. But because people are so hungry for such engagement these factors are often overlooked.

My heart goes out to everyone who was part of that collective. I know how difficult it is to even get something like that off the ground, let alone one that had become a thriving part of the community (as can be seen in the photos - thanks astral66). A group I started locally with two others inspired by Occupy tried here to do something similar. After a couple of years of sweat and toil, done with a lot of love and participation of so many who answered the call, the guy who offered the space got cold feet, made up an excuse and in the end we had nothing to show for all that work (we were ultimately able to at least get a home for the activist/counterculture book collection which was the catalyst for the space). In a different age there were many to be found all over the country (see the film "Sir, No Sir" about the huge proliferation of anti-war coffeeshops that cropped up in response to the war in Vietnam, in some cases started and in many cases patronized by vets). Because of the global financial conglomerate's stranglehold of even our local economies today they are far too few and far between these days.

Are there any decent stories of what Ghost Ship was and what just happened to which you could refer us?