In Oakland’s Lower Bottoms neighborhood, where old Southern Pacific rails still dissect the asphalt south of Grand Avenue, artists of the LoBot collective are scrambling since their landlord, after drastically increasing their rent, informed them their lease wouldn’t be renewed when it expires at the end of July.

The original LoBot crew spent four years building the warehouse out. Now, it has a print shop, a wood shop and a performance space. It is where a changing cast of about 30 artists work in different media.

The collective, though, isn’t going quietly. Its members have tried reaching out to owner Katy Harmon of Piedmont, said musician and LoBot spokeswoman Mya Byrne, but she “literally won’t pick up the phone.”

The Oakland Community Land Trust, too, has been looking into what can be done. The nonprofit has successfully rehabbed 18 vacant, foreclosed Oakland houses and made them permanently affordable. Helping preserve commercial and arts space, though, is a new but increasingly common challenge, said Steve King, the land trust’s executive director.

“We have a group of individuals that are willing to help them,” King said in an interview.

“A lot of people value what LoBot has meant in its 13 years. There is a lot of community support,” he said.

But time is running out, he said. LoBot’s collective organization lacks the official nonprofit standing that helps in arranging deals that would involve buying the place. It would take more time than LoBot seems to have or the landlord is willing to provide to raise the kind of money necessary to close a deal, King said.

“The landlord has said that the day after we vacate, she will come in with a wrecking crew and destroy the entire infrastructure,” Byrne said.

“They just put us in an awful position,” she added. “We’re complying, set to be out of here” and, in the meantime, continuing to pay rent.

Harmon has almost doubled that, to $10,000 monthly, in the past two years, LoBot’s website says. In May, Harmon informed the collective that its lease would not be renewed upon expiration 60 days later, at the end of July.

Harmon did not return repeated calls.

“Losing LoBot would be a major blow,” said Gilbert Guerrero, co-founder and curator of monthly film series Shapeshifters Cinema at Temescal Art Center.

“I can’t believe this is happening. Oakland is hemorrhaging its arts and cultural spaces,” he said.

“To sell the property to a land trust who pledges to keep this as affordable art space in perpetuity — which will both give the landowners a great buyout and help them with tax breaks, etc., is our goal,” a LoBot statement reads on its website. “But nothing can happen if the owners refuse to come to the table.”

Byrne said that Harmon, who also owns adjoining properties, told them she intends to build a storage facility on the LoBot site at 1800 Campbell St.

“But I suspect that it’ll be luxury housing,” said musician Jordan Stern, who has operated a studio there for the past 18 months.

“This is just life in the Bay Area,” added Stern, who was previously priced out of San Francisco.

LoBot, he said, “is on a long list of places that is not really able to cut it in Oakland’s market.”

In the wake of the loss last August of Rock, Paper Scissors on Telegraph Avenue — the last of the organizations behind the monthly Art Murmur and First Friday events — Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf convened a Mayor’s Task Force on Affordable Artist Housing and Work Spaces.

“Local artist communities have contributed to making Oakland a dynamic and vibrant city that is now attracting new interest and investment,” she said in a statement then. “We need to ensure that they are able to remain in Oakland as the city continues to grow and change.”

But Stern, for one, is skeptical. He said the mayor “has said a lot about supporting artists in West Oakland,” but only, in his view, “just enough to make it hip.”

LoBot began in 2003, and improvements to the space have continued.

“We just installed new art studios,” Byrne said.

Starline Social Club owner Adam Hatch, no longer part of the collective, was among the original LoBot participants.

“I came in as someone needing studio space,” he said. LoBot nurtured “a little bit of everything.”

“We were curating shows, making stuff, eating dinner together,” he said. “It was very interdisciplinary.”

“It’s such a big community,” Byrne said. “This is a space where people from marginalized identities and backgrounds can create art. … These kinds of spaces are rapidly disappearing.

“Our plea to everyone in the city is to stand behind us, and we hope that they do. We could set a wonderful precedent for the city of Oakland.” she said.

King said the owner’s representative cited a liability issue with some of the work the artists have done in the building over the years as cause for not wanting to extend the lease.

“I don’t think it’s going to go anywhere,” musician Ben Valis, 35, said of the collective’s efforts to negotiate with the owner.

But some of the best years of his life have been spent living on his boat and working at the LoBot’s recording studio, rehearsal rooms and stage.

“I’m packing everything up; it’s coming to an end. She’s raised the rent so much, it’s just not sustainable,” he said.