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Former tenant: Oakland warehouse was unsafe makeshift space

 
Published Dec. 5, 2016

OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) — Shelley Mack, a onetime tenant of the converted warehouse dubbed the "Ghost Ship," found the rental in an ad on Facebook. She paid about $700 a month in rent, along with a security deposit of the same amount and a one-time contribution of about $700 to a fund meant to go toward improvements. She said none were ever made.

It was often freezing cold in the building. Water and power were sometimes stolen from neighbors, who would get angry and shut them off. Once, a generator blew up, and residents quickly doused the flames, she said.

Mack said she didn't know the ramshackle dwelling was illegal until after she moved in. She was instructed to tell visitors it was a 24-hour workspace for artists. When inspectors or other outsiders came to visit, she and other residents scurried to hide clothes, bedding and other evidence anyone was living there.

"It's a good example of people taking advantage of people because they had no other options," said Mack, a 58-year-old tech sales worker and jewelry maker who lived there for four or five months about two years ago. "People make businesses off scamming people online when they're looking for a place."

One doorway was blocked, she said, because it led to the property of a neighbor who'd been in a dispute with the operators, whom she and other former tenants and friends identified as 46-year-old Derick Ion and his 40-year-old wife, Micah Allison.

Public records show Ion's full name is Derick Ion Almena and that he has lived in California since at least 1990, mostly in Los Angeles, before moving to Oakland in 2006. Allison spent much of her life in Northern California.

Neither Almena nor Allison answered telephone calls placed to numbers associated with them. They did not respond to email messages from the Associated Press.

Danielle Boudreaux said she became fast friends with the couple when they met eight years ago before a falling-out about a year ago over conditions at the warehouse.

Access to the second floor — where there was a room for concerts and a home for the couple and their children — was a rickety, homemade staircase, she said.

"Calling it a staircase gives you the idea that it was a set of stairs. It was not," Boudreaux said. "It was random pieces of wood put together to create something that you could get up to the top floor on. But it was not what most people would consider a staircase. It was like a jimmy-rigged makeshift staircase. As soon as you stepped on it, it wobbled all over the place."

Boudreaux said the couple was constantly trying to keep enough tenants to cover the warehouse rent, renting out recreational vehicles that were parked on the first floor as well as other living spaces, and charging for the parties that were held there.