How a failed Cannabis startup led to evictions
Alistair Monroe can still remember how “barren” the Oakland warehouse looked when he first walked inside.
It was 1976, and a then-6-year-old Monroe had no idea why his father would rent a windowless room in a forgotten warehouse on the edge of the city.
However, Alistair’s father, Arthur, a world-renowned painter who died in 2019, knew exactly what he was doing. Over the next four decades, the elder Monroe turned the building — later dubbed the Oakland Cannery — into Oakland’s first officially recognized live-work art studio, providing both housing and creative space for hundreds of Bay Area artists.
But those studios might soon be a thing of the past. Last month, Romspen, a Canadian investment firm that owns the building, sent eviction notices to the 11 remaining artists in the building, including Alistair Monroe.
The eviction notices were the latest turn in a bitter fight over the Cannery that started in 2016 when a pot startup purchased the building. That weed company ultimately failed, and the executives have since fled the Bay Area — leaving behind dozens of lawsuits, $51.5 million in debt and a toxic legacy of polluting the area with diesel fumes.
This has left Monroe furious. His father was not only a pioneer in the Bay Area’s art scene but also one of the only recognized African American painters in the abstract expressionist art movement. Now, both his father’s legacy at the Cannery and affordable housing for working artists appear to soon be a thing of the past.
“These studios are the last of its kind. They do not build on this scale anymore. … This should remain a historic landmark and recognized for the importance of my father’s legacy,” Monroe said in an email to SFGATE. “… To erase this history should be considered criminal to the African American Community at large!”
From New York to the East Bay
The real story behind the Cannery started decades before 1976, when the elder Monroe was a teenage painting prodigy living in New York City.
Arthur, born in Brooklyn in 1935, was already working alongside abstract expressionist painters like Willem de Kooning and Hans Hofmann by the time he was a teenager in the early 1950s. He quickly adopted the art movement’s laborious abstract style — think Jackson Pollock dripping paint across a 20-foot-long canvas — which required large studio spaces. Many of those spaces were New York’s derelict warehouses transformed into spaces artists could both live and work in.
Twenty years later, Arthur was living in San Francisco but getting priced out of his art studio. He saw an ad for rental space inside a mostly vacant warehouse in Oakland and asked the building’s owners if he could use an empty windowless room on the top floor.
The building’s owners gave Arthur a lease for one unit — a windowless room originally used as a mess hall for factory workers — so he built walls and turned it into a space he could live and work in. Other artists soon followed Arthur’s lead, renting rooms and converting them into studios using Arthur’s space as a blueprint.
For more than 40 years, the building would become home to hundreds of working artists.
The stability of cheap housing allowed Arthur to continue producing his abstract expressionist paintings while also working as the chief registrar at the Oakland Museum for over 30 years and as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His papers are now stored in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, and his paintings are in a permanent collection in Norway.
By the time he was 80 years old, Monroe had created both a thriving artist space and a celebrated artistic career. But just before he died in 2019, he watched as the artist space he had created ran headfirst into California’s booming cannabis industry.
The Green Zone
In 2016, California voters legalized cannabis, and the city of Oakland rezoned a 10-mile stretch of the city to make it more favorable to pot businesses. This so-called “green zone” included the Cannery — as well as 25 other live-work spaces — and the 162,500-square-foot building was quickly bought by Green Sage, a Colorado-based pot startup.
Green Sage immediately told the artist residents they planned to evict them and turn their artist studios into rooms for growing indoor pot, kicking off a yearslong battle over the property. The Oakland City Council retroactively tried to protect the housing, passing legislation in 2018 that banned cannabis companies from operating within any live-work units like the Cannery. But the law still allowed the company to use the lower floors of the building to grow pot, and Green Sage continued to antagonize the resident artists, including an unsuccessful attempt to evict them from the building’s parking garage.
In 2019, Green Sage secured more funding for its project, signing a $54.5 million loan with Romspen, increasing residents’ concerns. In July 2020, the building’s power transformer exploded and started a fire, likely because of the energy-intensive pot-growing operations. Green Sage responded by installing a diesel generator the size of a semitruck outside the building, which would operate for two years, pumping diesel fumes into the air until the fall of 2022, despite multiple attempts by federal and state regulators to shut the generator down.
By the end of 2022, Green Sage collapsed under the weight of an economic bust in the cannabis market and a string of legal carnage. The company’s executives and related companies were sued at least 32 times for unpaid bills and violating environmental laws, according to KQED-TV. Romspen foreclosed on the Cannery property in September 2022, eventually suing Green Sage’s investors for failure to repay $51.5 million of the loan. Two of Green Sage’s top managers, Bruce Miller and Kenneth Greer, have since disappeared, failing to respond to Romspen’s lawsuit despite 23 attempts to serve the executives. SFGATE was unable to contact Miller; Greer did not return SFGATE’s multiple requests for comment.
‘We just continue to be punished’
Despite Green Sage’s disappearance, Romspen continued the eviction fight in September. This time, Monroe had very few ways to fight it — Romspen is using an Ellis Act eviction, which allows landlords to evict residential tenants as long as they plan on changing the building from residential to nonresidential uses. Monroe said the eviction gave him until Jan. 11, 2024, to vacate the building.
Monroe and his neighbors are now facing an uphill battle. Greg Miner, the deputy director of Economic and Workforce Development at the city of Oakland, told SFGATE in an email that “local legislation cannot prevent property owners from removing residential units from the rental market under the State Ellis Act.” Monroe said he plans to stay in the building, vowing to “fight this tooth and nail.”
Romspen appears to be unmoved by Arthur Monroe’s artist history at the Cannery. “[Arthur Monroe’s] past history or personal history has nothing to do with business decisions that are being made,” said Mark Mersel, an attorney representing Romspen.
Monroe and other developers have tried to get Romspen to sell the building to someone else, but those attempts have failed, according to Miner.
“Several real estate development entities interested in preserving the live-work have looked at the building and at least one made an offer — which was not accepted,” Monroe said.
Mersel, the attorney for Romspen, said the buyers never offered enough money for the building. “They weren’t serious offers,” Mersel told SFGATE.
If Romspen is allowed to evict Monroe and his fellow tenants, it won’t be able to use the former art studios for cannabis businesses, due to the Oakland legislation, but it can still rent the units to commercial tenants. Mersel said he did not know if the company had prospective tenants.
That’s left Monroe pleading for help but realizing that the Cannery’s time as an art space, as well as the imprint his father left on the building, might soon be coming to an end.
“Where’s the philanthropic support in the community? It doesn’t exist,” Monroe said. “We’ve done everything we can to protect and preserve African American history, and to save homes for artists, and it’s like we just continue to be punished.”
