OAKLAND — The deadly fire at an Oakland warehouse last month exposed more than the charred steel structure inside the burned-out building. It ripped off the veil shrouding underground and DIY spaces from the public’s eye, serving as a wake-up call for property owners and tenants alike.

Now Oakland officials are considering solutions to a complicated problem: How to create a pathway for legalizing unpermitted residential units in commercial and industrial spaces while ensuring residents are not displaced in the process. The answer may lie, at least in part, in the examples of other cities.

Last month, council members Lynette Gibson McElhaney, Larry Reid and Noel Gallo asked staff to review potential policy responses, including existing models in New York City, Los Angeles and Colorado. It’s unclear just how many warehouses in Oakland are being used as unpermitted housing, but in an executive order issued earlier this month designed to improve building safety while stemming evictions, Mayor Libby Schaaf asked staff for a “census of buildings and structures,” as well as an assessment of the buildings’ fire safety risk.

The Oakland Warehouse Coalition, a group that formed in the wake of the Ghost Ship fire, has been pushing city officials to adopt an emergency tenant protection ordinance, which would impose a temporary moratorium on evictions while allowing city officials time to draft a long-term solution. That solution could include some sort of pathway for legalizing unpermitted dwellings, similar to New York City’s Loft Law, which Gibson McElhaney, Reid and Gallo specifically highlighted in their request.

Originally adopted in 1982, the law established a Loft Board tasked with overseeing property owners’ compliance with the conversion of formerly commercial or industrial spaces to live/work use. Under the law, property owners are allowed to raise tenants’ rents up to 10 percent in specific increments tied to milestones in the conversion process.

Although that process can be cumbersome and quite lengthy — sometimes taking years or decades to complete — New York City loft dweller Eve Sussman said the bureaucratic hurdles are minuscule compared with the benefits.

“‘Ease’ has nothing to do with it,” Sussman said. “The Loft Law makes an impossible situation possible.”

Because most property owners have little incentive to make costly upgrades to buildings, the conversion process tends to be driven by tenants, said Heather Troy, an organizer and volunteer with the advocacy group, New York City Loft Tenants. But the law has some built-in protections, such as allowing renters to discuss the building plan with the property owner before it is submitted to the Loft Board, or to submit an alternate plan if the landlord refuses to work with tenants, Troy said.

An important component of the law is that the building does not get rezoned as a result of the conversion process, she said. Rather, the Loft Law created a distinct classification for formerly commercial buildings turned live/work spaces called “interim multiple dwellings.”

That’s crucial because in California, a change of use forces the building to come up to modern building codes, unless local jurisdictions have exceptions. Under Oakland’s Conversion to Joint Living and Working Quarters law, which allows formerly commercial or industrial spaces to be converted to live/work use, property owners are allowed some leniency in meeting modern codes, said architect Tom Dolan, who helped write the 1996 law. But the changes can still be quite costly.

As Oakland officials consider updating the city’s zoning regulations to accommodate more conversions of commercial properties to residential use, Dolan wondered whether a new “work-live” category could be established that would not change the building’s primary use but allow residential habitation as an “accessory” use — a process that would not force property owners to meet the high bar of modern seismic, energy efficiency and other building codes.

“It’s possible, but I don’t know if we will be able to do it,” Dolan said.

In Los Angeles, meanwhile, city officials are considering adopting a policy to legalize what staff described as “bootlegged” apartments, similar to the legalization process San Francisco officials approved in 2014 for in-law or granny units. Under the proposed ordinance, which has not yet been approved, property owners must demonstrate the unit existed before Dec. 10, 2015, and it also would mandate that the property owner provide at least one affordable housing unit for 55 years.

But Gallo said he’s also interested in other ways to support artists and pointed to Colorado’s Creative Districts, which the state enacted in 2011 as a way to drive economic growth.

Those districts may have succeeded in stimulating jobs and revenue in areas that have them, but they have done little to help artists grapple with the housing-affordability crisis many face, said Bree Davies, a writer for the Denver alternative weekly newspaper, Westword.

And, in the wake of the Ghost Ship fire that killed 36 people, it was the DIY spaces that took the heat, she said. Denver shuttered two converted warehouses in that city’s River North (RiNO) Arts District, prompting the formation of the DIY space advocacy group, Amplify Arts Denver, of which Davies is a member.

The loss of their spaces put the DIY community at a crossroads, she said, with artists in the city debating whether to work with the city — which may mean limitations to the unregulated nature of their spaces — or burrowing further underground.

“There is pre-Ghost Ship DIY and post-Ghost Ship DIY,” Davies said. “We cannot be regulated, but we can be safe.”

But, in Oakland, where the scorched exterior of the Ghost Ship warehouse still sits like an open wound, the question is not “if” but “how.” At the Jan. 23 council meeting, Katherine Quinn of the Oakland Warehouse Coalition said the DIY community in Oakland was looking for ways to ensure another tragedy is never repeated.

“What we are talking about tonight is how do we move forward,” she said. “How do we honor those who were lost? How do we prevent these things from happening in the future?”