The fire broke out early in the morning of Sept. 19, 2023. Flames rose from the unoccupied Victorian-turned-duplex and painted the black sky orange as engines sped to Mead Avenue in West Oakland. About two dozen firefighters unrolled hoses and quickly doused the burning structure. The building was badly damaged but still standing by the time the last embers were extinguished.
Later that day, the fire department put up an Instagram post acknowledging just how close neighbors had come to disaster: “An aggressive fire attack successfully prevented the fire from extending to the occupied home next door, just feet away.”
Over the next six months, the same building—located half a block from San Pablo Avenue in one of Oakland’s most densely populated areas—would burn two more times. Recognizing the potentially deadly situation, in between fires, city staff tried contacting the property’s owners and pressuring them to secure the building. Fines have been issued and orders made, but the house remains a hazard, according to neighbors and city officials. People who live on the street are on high alert and frustrated at the city’s seeming inability to quickly act.
Ahmed Ali owns and rents out an apartment building next-door to the vacant duplex. He said his building houses about 25 tenants.
“A bunch of people have complained,” he said. “It’s very scary when you have families waking up at four in the morning with a big old fire right next door.”
A support home for people with mental illnesses is also next-door. It has seven units. In total, over 30 people live within feet of the vacant, charred duplex.
The house has been a problem for decades. Records show that the city has gotten dozens of complaints and performed dozens of inspections since 2005. The city has ordered the building’s owners over 10 times to take actions that would decrease fire risk, like securing it so people and critters can’t enter, and clearing debris. Although some of these notices included fines, city records show few of the orders were complied with. One such order was sent in December, after the second fire occurred.
Jeffrey and Mildred Crear own the property, according to real estate records. The Oaklandside contacted the Crears but were unable to interview them for this story. The couple, however, has a history of operating nuisance properties which the city has gotten involved with through inspections and legal action.
Ali thinks the city should do a lot more about the house on Mead Avenue. “Maybe they should take it over,” he said.
“Dodging a bullet” with each new fire
On Oct. 1, the building caught fire after a candle was knocked over. Someone had been taking shelter inside the building.
Michael Hunt, the Oakland Fire Department’s chief of staff, was concerned about this second fire. “What are the appropriate next steps to secure this building in order to prevent additional fires?” he wrote in an email to other city officials. “Do you know if there has been any contact with the owner?”
Building inspector Travis Ha responded that an inspection was planned for the next day.
On Feb. 28, the vacant building was ablaze once again. A mattress caught fire nearby and flames spread to the home. Again the fire department successfully put out the flames, preventing it from spreading to other homes or injuring anyone. Afterward, Hunt wrote to other city officials asking what could be done.
“What are the next steps?” Hunt asked. “The space between these neighboring buildings is very small and each fire feels like we’re dodging a bullet when it doesn’t catch the adjacent structures.”
In March, the city declared the building a public nuisance due largely to smoke, fire, and water damage and red-tagged it, meaning it’s unsafe for anyone to inhabit, or even enter. Firefighters intend to proceed with extreme caution if they have to extinguish a fire there again. According to OFD Fire Battalion Chief Anthony Sanders, firefighters will only enter the building if it’s absolutely necessary.
“If there’s a life hazard that is known,” said Sanders,“that’s about the only thing that would get us to go inside.”
In April the city issued a $5,000 fine against the Crears for not fixing the damage and securing the property. Then starting on Apr. 6, the city began issuing $1,000 per day fines against the Crears for their failure to comply.
City spokesperson Jean Walsh told The Oaklandside the Crears still haven’t fixed any issues the city told them to address back in December. “To date there has been no subsequent compliance, and no response has yet been received from the owner,” she wrote in an email.
According to Sanders, the fires have had a cumulative effect on the structure’s integrity, causing increasing damage with each burn. It’s now more dangerous than ever.
“The roof is not intact, the walls aren’t intact; it’s all just the sticks and frame and there’s no protection anymore,” said Sanders. “Fire is going to burn much faster if it can completely engulf what it’s trying to burn. At this point it’s almost like a box of kindling.”
Hunt said that it “doesn’t help that Oakland has this homelessness crisis.” City records show that people have been breaking into the building and taking shelter there on and off since at least 2006. Hunt said squatting is common in Oakland, and when people shelter in buildings lacking electricity and gas they often use candles, portable stoves, or warming fires—all of which are fire hazards.
Fires in buildings that are not up to code or used improperly have been deadly in recent Oakland history. In December 2016, 36 people died in the Ghost Ship fire, the city’s deadliest, when people were living and partying in an industrial building that had a dangerous electrical system that the building’s owners were aware of. A few months later, in March 2017, residents living in a large transitional housing apartment building on San Pablo Avenue experienced a deadly fire. At least three people died because a candle was knocked over. Fire inspectors had found 11 safety violations at the property three days before it burned. That building, now vacant, is located two doors down from the Crear’s duplex at 820-822 Mead Avenue.
Sanders says he and other firefighters are “absolutely concerned” about the duplex as it poses risks to residents and firefighters. But the fire department “can’t tell owners what to do with their property.”
“We’re willing to protect life and property,” Sanders said. “If the property owners can do their part to make sure that the buildings are as safe as they can be and up to fire and building code then that helps tremendously.”
“A magnet for public nuisances”
The Oaklandside contacted the Crears, who are in their mid-80s, by phone, hoping to learn about the house on Mead Avenue, any safety measures they’ve taken, and why they’ve kept the building vacant for decades. During the call, Jeffrey Crear agreed to answer questions, but only if we mailed them in a letter. We sent him questions through the mail but never heard back. Follow-up calls made in April and May showed the phone number we’d used to contact the Crears had been disconnected. We have been unable to contact them since.
According to a 2013 Marketplace story, Jeffrey Crear boarded up the house in the early 2000s, along with other buildings the couple own in the area, after evicting tenants he said were hard drug users.
“Part of the reason I board up buildings is to make a point,” Crear told Marketplace. “I will sacrifice financially to get across a point that I’m only interested in the right type of tenants.”
The Crears live in the Upper Rockridge neighborhood of the Oakland Hills. Property records show that in addition to their own home and the vacant duplex, they own at least two other properties near the duplex, and two mixed use properties in San Francisco. All the West Oakland properties are boarded up, and tax records show they owe at least $189,000 in delinquent taxes, including at least $26,000 for the duplex. Of the unpaid taxes, $12,000 come from Oakland’s Vacant Property Tax, which voters approved in 2018 in an effort to incentivize landlords to rent, sell or use empty buildings and lots.
Crear told Marketplace he wouldn’t sell the duplex, even though “there’s constantly people attempting to buy” it. One of these people was, and still is, Ali—the landlord who owns the property next-door. Ali said he’s repeatedly asked Crear if he can buy the building over the years, and that the last time he asked was about two years ago.
“He said ‘I’m not ready to sell. When I am, you’ll be the first one to know because I see you trying to take care of the block,’” said Ali. “And that’s all I’ve heard since.”
Ali said that he has put work into the duplex—painting it, boarding up holes fires have caused, installing fences—since the Crears “abandoned” it in the early 2000s.
“People smoke crystal meth, crack, and drink alcohol right on the steps of the place,” Ali said about the house. “It has a very bad effect.”
The Crears own other problem properties in the neighborhood. In 2018, the city sued them over conditions at the Moor Hotel, which is located a few blocks away from their Mead Avenue property. The hotel closed sometime before 2003 and had over 40 units. In court filings, lawyers with the city attorney’s office called the building and its parking lot “a magnet for public nuisances” such as drug dealing, sex work, and illegal dumping, as well as “a grave fire risk to the entire neighborhood.”
In 2022, a superior court judge ordered the Crears to pay the city $10,000, clear debris from the property, keep the building boarded up, and install a security system, smoke alarms, and lights and fencing for the parking lot.
According to notes from inspections conducted in February 2023 and April 2024, the back of the property was unsecured and posed “a huge fire hazard for the entire block.” An inspector found “a lot of code violations” and “illegal water and electricity hook ups.” The Oaklandside visited the site in May and found open windows and debris in the parking lot. A handmade cardboard sign outside an entrance read “We see you! Don’t violate premises.”
What can the city do to force landlords to secure nuisance properties?
The city’s abatement orders and fines levied against the Crears haven’t caused them to make safety improvements at the Mead Avenue duplex. Even a court order hasn’t fixed issues at the old Moor Hotel building, according to city records.
According to Ryan Griffith, there might be another option available to the city that could help prevent a large fire from breaking out.
Griffith, a lawyer, says cities in California can use the law to take control of nuisance properties by asking courts to put the land and buildings into a health and safety receivership. This process allows courts to appoint a receiver who is authorized to fix code violations and other problems. The court allows the receiver to be paid for their work, raising this money by selling the property. If there are remaining funds left over from the sale, after back taxes, fines, and the receiver is paid, the property owner is also paid.
Health and safety receiverships have been around since 1988, but receivers got a lot more power in 2008 when a state supreme court ruling began allowing them to demolish buildings. At that time, California’s Supreme Court recognized the process as “the ultimate remedy cites can use to abate nuisance properties that substantially endanger public health and safety.”
The receivership process is slow, however. Griffith says cities have to extensively prove that property owners are “unable or unwilling to comply” with orders to abate issues that put the public’s health and safety at risk. According to Griffith, often the threat of receivership pressures owners to comply with city orders after years of ignoring them.
“Voluntary compliance is better than a receivership if it can happen,” Griffith said. “It’s the final option and last resort that has to be used in some situations.”
Griffith said he thinks the Mead Avenue property is a good example of something that could be placed with a receiver.
“This is a textbook definition of a health and safety receivership,” Griffith said. “There’s no water and electricity and it’s literally burning to the ground.”
Griffith’s company, Bay Area Receivership Group, has completed four health and safety receiverships in Oakland over about the last five years. The most recent one involved a property on Fruitvale Avenue and in the Oakland Hills that, according the Griffith, was being used as “an illegal industrial recycling center in the middle of a residential neighborhood” that involved “drilling and working at all hours of the night” and “illegal dumping strewn about [the] streets every morning.” One neighbor said in a court declaration that the lighting and noise from the site made it “difficult for me to sleep through the night.”
Bay Area Receivership Group fixed up the property, sold it in 2022, and paid the former owner about half of the money received from the sale. The property is no longer garnering complaints.
When asked if the city is pursuing receivership for the Mead Avenue house, city spokesperson Walsh said “the city will not be providing comment on this.”
In the meantime, firefighters are worried and neighbors remain on edge.
“There’s nothing that’s stopping people from going into the building,” said Sanders. “The major concern here is another fire could spread to surrounding buildings.”
Sanders also stresses the Mead Street property is not an isolated incident. City records show that as of May, there are 22 red-tagged buildings in Oakland, the majority of which are fire damaged.
“We’re putting our citizens and firefighters at risk due to properties like this,” said Sanders.
On June 3 around 4:45 a.m. another fire—the fourth in the past nine months—started in the back corner of the Mead Avenue property, consuming the fence of a neighboring home. Firefighters were once again able to put the fire out before it spread to occupied buildings. But they cannot promise they’ll be there fast enough next time.
