After losing friends and loved ones in the Oakland fire that killed 36 people, many artists living in the city’s warehouse communities fear a coming crackdown on the roll-your-own spaces that they call home — but may not be legal housing.

In Oakland and elsewhere, safety inspections have been scheduled and shutdowns by landlords are coming, according to those who live and work in spaces like the Ghost Ship, voluminous warehouses filled with artists and others who say they can’t afford to live anywhere else amidst the Bay Area’s continuing housing crisis.

David Keenan, the co-founder of North Oakland artists collective Omni Commons, said he’s heard of at least 10 warehouse landlords who have warned their tenants they’ll soon need to move out.

Because many of the makeshift residences aren’t up to code and are technically illegal as housing, that wouldn’t necessarily involve the city or trigger a legal notice of eviction. But the end result for their inhabitants would be the same.

“That is real,” said Keenan, who organized a Wednesday night meeting with more than 200 Oaklanders living in similar spaces to discuss their options. “That is super scary. Each one of these spaces, there usually is a hell of a lot of people who work there or live there and don’t know what to do, who don’t know what is going to happen to them.”

Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf — who has insisted she won’t preside over policies that would result in mass evictions — faces a delicate political problem in preventing another disaster like the Ghost Ship but not alienating those who inhabit them and their supporters.

But it’s so far been the property owners, and not city agencies, who have cracked down on their own accord, fearing either legal intervention or the loss of more lives. And those who inhabit the often-illegal spaces are scrambling to make their living situations safe or else figure out how to respond.

“We all know people that have been affected by this,” said Joshua, a man who asked that his last name not be used lest his landlord retaliate against him. Joshua, 27, lives in a commercial building that is not zoned for residential use. He received an informal eviction notice Wednesday and has no idea where he will go next. “How are we expected to function?” asked Joshua, who knew people who died in the Ghost Ship fire.

Former residents described the Ghost Ship as a dangerous environment full of jerry-rigged creations by artists who paid $500 to $1,500 a month to live there, featuring a hodgepodge of electrical hookups and exposed wiring.

In response, Keenan and others — including S. Surface of Seattle, who started a sprawling guide shared online on Google Docs with advice on how to improve do-it-yourself venues — are asking for the chance to bring their own spaces up to code. The Ghost Ship was an anomaly with tragic consequences, Surface said, one that shouldn’t shutter similar communities nationwide.

“There’s the immediate life and safety risk of something terrible happening to a building, as we saw in Oakland, but to evict and displace people is also a life and safety risk,” Surface said.

Angela Scrivani, 34, who lives in a sprawling Oakland warehouse with concrete floors and sturdy walls, said she’s tried to do her due diligence in making sure her place is up to code and not a fire hazard. But still, she said, her landlord told the leaseholder that she cannot live in the space anymore and must be out by Jan. 3.

“If it gets to the point where I have to move, I don’t have another place to go,” she said. “And now we’re talking about hundreds of people that will be competing with me to find a space in an already inflated” rental market.

In San Francisco, William Strawn, a spokesman for the city’s Department of Building Inspection, said his agency has historically relied on a complaint-driven system to investigate potentially illegal communal living arrangements.

Long a haven of tenants’ rights, San Francisco makes it especially difficult for landlords to evict people on their own — even if they want to, said Andrew Zacks, a landlord attorney based in San Francisco.

“It’s not as easy as you might think for someone to just make those people go away in these illegal warehouses and office buildings and garages where people are living without approval from the government,” Zacks said.

After the fire, though, the department and other city agencies are coordinating spot checks on 15 to 20 buildings identified since the Ghost Ship fire that may pose a threat to their inhabitants, Strawn said.

With more than 200,000 buildings under his department’s jurisdiction, there are only so many inspectors and only so much time, he said.

Strawn said people might not call to complain about their living conditions, given the city’s high housing costs.

In nearby Richmond, Mayor Tom Butt wrote in an email newsletter pledging to focus his city’s resources on shutting down or fixing up illegal buildings like the Ghost Ship, which he said served an “illegal and dangerous purpose.”

A spokesman for the mayor said similar properties in Richmond represent a “potentially catastrophic issue.”

Joe Tobener, a San Francisco tenants’ rights lawyer, said he has received upward of 20 calls since the Oakland fire from people concerned they will be evicted from their current homes. And it’s not just people from these warehouses, he said, but also others living in garages, in-law spaces or converted living rooms.

“There is a potential for a lot of tenants to be displaced that are living in safe units,” he said. “The strategy should not be get out the pitchfork, but make a safe harbor for units so that they have the Department of Building Inspection come in and look at the unit and figure out how they can make it safe.”

Trisha Thadani and Michael Bodley are San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: tthadani@sfchronicle.com, mbodley@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @trishathadani, @michael_bodley