After the postwar purge of manufacturing jobs, Oakland’s industrial zones became a playground for squatters and vagrants.

They stripped vacated buildings of valuable materials like copper and steel, running through empty warehouses faster than streakers in a mall.

The city advocated for people to inhabit the buildings with steel frames, brick facades, metal windows and wooden roofs.

When David Ruth moved into a warehouse on 57th Avenue in East Oakland 27 years ago, all the street lamps had been busted by rocks or bullets. The avenue was a garbage dump for anyone too lazy to go to the garbage dump.

But Ruth, known for studio glass, the artistic movement of creating sculptures and three-dimensional art from glass, envisioned creating a home in a former metal stamping shop that had been vacant for two years before he moved in.

“It was a great thing for artists,” Ruth, 65, said as we walked around plaster and rubber molds of road cuts, patterns created when roads were carved into the Berkeley hills. “We could come in and rent spaces for really cheap and do our art in these great spaces.

“You have to imagine a really different time.”

In almost three decades since first promoting industrial zones to artists, Oakland has only paid sporadic attention to warehouses. But since the fire at a converted warehouse claimed 36 lives, warehouses are the talk of the town. Artists who work and live in the warehouses that once produced transformers and various machine parts are on edge about their housing and studio situations. And rightfully so.

But the biggest threat might not be from city inspectors. It could be from the pot growers who have heated up the competition for buildings nobody but artists wanted. In Denver, the model for how a blooming legalized pot industry can change a city, warehouse space is in high demand.

East Oakland was already popular for pot growers long before the city began crafting medical cannabis laws. The deep-pocketed growers can afford premium lease rates.

Or they can just buy a building and kick tenants out. That’s what happened to Ruth when the warehouse he was living and working in was purchased in April.

The building, valued at about $630,000, was purchased for $1.5 million. Ruth had attempted to buy the building, but he was outbid by hundreds of thousands dollars. The selling price is indicative of a neighborhood inside Oakland’s green zone, a designated area for marijuana cultivation.

The new owner wanted him out immediately, but Ruth resisted. He was in the middle of a complex glass commission that required using his furnace to melt 40,000 pounds of defective tube glass with nickel and cobalt to create a new color. The colored glass is placed into a kiln with a road-cut mold, resulting in a translucent gold ridged panel.

It’s a project Ruth’s been working on for almost two years. Without a furnace, though, he can’t make glass.

Ruth asked the new owner to give him until July to move. Instead, they took him to court and began construction on other areas of the 19,000-square-foot building, which is shaped like a lowercase “h.”

“If I don’t have enough glass, I am screwed,” said Ruth, whose furnace is now in pieces, stored underneath a tarp in a shed across the street.

He was evicted Oct. 5.

But fortunately for Ruth, he owns the warehouse across the street where his work continues. He bought it in 1999, a prescient investment. But he can’t live there, so he rents a studio apartment in Alameda. And he’s had a few offers to buy it.

Boxes labeled with their contents — tea, Tupperware, crackers — are stacked on pallets. The garden that once thrived outside his former home is on pallets in the back lot. It often smells like marijuana there, because of the steamed plants put into the trash bin by another of one his neighbors, a cannabis extract company.

We walked to the old warehouse, which now has its windows painted over. Ruth showed me where he had envisioned expanding a neighbor’s garden. He pointed out the planned outdoor work area for the artists who would be renting studio space from him.

Ruth has had a hard time moving on.

“It just would’ve been heaven,” he wistfully said. “It would’ve been a dream come true. And it would’ve provided for my retirement, because I would’ve had an income stream.”