Long before deadly fire, Oakland halfway house was hive of trouble

Oakland Fire personnel look at the remains of an apartment complex which was destroyed in a four-alarm fire yesterday on San Pablo Avenue in Oakland, California, on Tuesday, March 28, 2017. Oakland Fire personnel look at the remains of an apartment complex which was destroyed in a four-alarm fire yesterday on San Pablo Avenue in Oakland, California, on Tuesday, March 28, 2017. Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, The Chronicle Buy photo Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 34 Caption Close Long before deadly fire, Oakland halfway house was hive of trouble 1 / 34 Back to Gallery

The owner of the West Oakland halfway house where four people died Monday in a fire was a high-flying entrepreneur who once ran the Granny Goose potato chip company before he was convicted of lying to stock-market regulators and filed for bankruptcy.

The building’s main tenant was a nonprofit group with an ambitious mission to help homeless veterans, ex-cons and addicts, but it had sketchy finances and was fighting eviction from the property.

And the Oakland city agencies that were alerted to the building’s problems — including filth, busted plumbing and a lack of smoke detectors — did not take decisive action despite being under pressure to deal with unsafe housing in the wake of December’s Ghost Ship fire, which killed 36 people at an unsanctioned music event.

As local and federal investigators dig into Monday’s fire on San Pablo Avenue, they will also have to sort through the three-story building’s colorful and chaotic past, and whether that history was a factor in the inferno.

By Tuesday, authorities had identified two victims as Edwarn Anderson, 64, and Cassandra Robertson, 50. While aid workers sought to help more than 80 displaced residents, the cause of the fire remained under investigation. Residents said it was started by an unattended candle, but that was not confirmed by authorities.

Among the central questions going forward is whether the city could have helped avert the tragedy.

A city councilwoman was acting as a mediator in the eviction fight, and three days before the blaze, fire inspectors ordered the landlord to correct 11 violations, including a lack of smoke detectors and fire extinguishers. Extension cords were strung between rooms, and the fire alarm and sprinkler system needed servicing and testing, the city said.

The owner was given 30 days to comply. While the city could have legally cleared the building, Mayor Libby Schaaf said the problems discovered during an inspection Friday, while bad, did not warrant more severe action.

“Those violations did not support what we would call red-tagging,” she said. “They did not amount to an imminent life safety threat.”

What is clear is that the building — like the underground Ghost Ship warehouse — was both a cherished source of housing and an unusual trouble spot in Oakland well before the fire.

The building has been owned since 1991 by Mead Avenue Housing Associates, a limited partnership run by Keith Joon Kim, 55. He lives in a multimillion-dollar home in Piedmont, records show, but a man who answered the door Tuesday afternoon said he was not Keith Kim.

Born in South Korea, Kim attended Stanford before launching a career as a real estate developer, according to an article in Stanford Magazine. In the late 1980s, he moved to Oakland and began building homes and developing apartments. When Oakland’s iconic Merritt Bakery, with 100 workers, was threatened with bankruptcy in 1994, Kim bought it.

“There’s no bad business,” the article quoted Kim as saying. “There’s just bad management.”

In 1995, Kim stepped in to rescue another floundering local business, Granny Goose, paying $5 million that included a $2.25 million city loan. But the company folded in 2000, and Kim soon ran into legal and financial troubles.

In 2001, he was accused of unlawfully making more than $830,000 by buying shares of a company based on information he had learned about during a retreat for corporate presidents. He was cleared of insider trading after a judge ruled that his actions were not illegal at the time, but he was convicted of lying to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

In 2011, Kim and his wife filed for bankruptcy and faced about $25 million in claims, including more than $5 million in unpaid federal and state income tax assessments, records show.

Kim invested over the years in apartment buildings and other projects, though his current holdings were not immediately clear. At the San Pablo Avenue property, he was accused for many years of allowing the building to fall into squalor.

From 1994 to 2011, the building was home to the East Bay Community Recovery Project, which houses women in recovery with their children. The organization struggled to get Kim to respond to maintenance issues ranging from mold to rodents to fire safety, and often was forced to pay for property upkeep itself, according to officials.

At one point, they said, the group spent tens of thousands of dollars installing fire sprinklers after unsuccessfully asking the landlord to do so. In 2011, the group was able to obtain federal money to buy a neighboring building.

“The building had many problems we were unable to solve, and when the opportunity arose to build a new facility next door, of course we took advantage of it,” said Joan Zweben, the executive director.

In 2012, Kim’s building was taken over by Urojas Community Services, a nonprofit founded in 1996 by the Rev. Jasper Lowery. It offered transitional housing and a variety of services, including mental health and substance abuse counseling. At one point it entered into a contract to house 40 men and women.

Urojas’ operations are a bit of a mystery. In a 2010 tax filing, the latest available, the group claimed total revenues of $5,000. In the 2012 fiscal year, the group received $25,000 in funding from an Alameda County sales-tax measure, records show.

In 2014, Lowery’s work with “society’s most vulnerable” was celebrated in a proclamation by the Alameda County Board of Supervisors. By the next year, Urojas was in trouble with its landlord.

Soon after the Dec. 2 Ghost Ship fire heightened scrutiny of Oakland buildings, Kim moved to evict dozens of residents. An eviction notice from January of this year states that Urojas owed $118,000 in rent.

Attorney James Cook, who represented Urojas in the eviction, said the group had been trying to pay rent but that the property owner would not accept it. He said Kim and Oakland Councilwoman Lynette Gibson McElhaney, who stepped in as a mediator, both seemed intent on bringing in a different nonprofit group to lease the property.

In December, Dignity Housing West was brought in, though Urojas was still there. Tenants were notified that the building was under new management and needed to enter into new rental agreements. Cook offered a deal in which Urojas would leave within 90 days for $180,000, but it was not accepted.

McElhaney said she hoped to improve the conditions in the building while heading off evictions. She said she didn’t recall what led her to get involved, and that she didn’t notice blatant fire-safety problems during a tour of the property. But Cook called the building “the ninth level of hell.”

Records from the city’s building department show a history of complaints about conditions at the building. Twenty code enforcement complaints were lodged in the past 10 years over leaky pipes, holes in the walls, rodents and lack of heat. The most recent complaint, on Feb. 23, described trash and discarded furniture outside the building.

Most of the problems were addressed by the property owner, city officials said, though seven complaints remained open.

The building recently came to the attention of fire inspectors, city officials said, when an engine company referred the property to them after a Feb. 25 service call. Inspectors did not immediately review the structure because, they said, they couldn’t reach the landlord to get the required permission.

On March 18, fire inspectors got another referral, city officials said, which resulted in last week’s visit and the discovery of a litany of urgent safety hazards. The Fire Department, officials said, planned to schedule a follow-up visit after imposing a 30-day deadline for the owner to make the necessary corrections.

Whether similar concerns had been found in past fire inspections was not clear. City officials did not immediately provide those records.

San Francisco Chronicle staff writers Michael Cabanatuan, Kimberly Veklerov and Joaquin Palomino contributed to this story.

Cynthia Dizikes, J.K. Dineen and Kurtis Alexander are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: cdizikes@sfchronicle.com, jdineen@sfchronicle.com, kalexander@sfchronicle.com. Twitter: @cdizikes @sfjkdineen @kurtisalexander