Dreshner Ensemble Studios, a seemingly endless building, takes up an entire block on Poplar Street in West Oakland. Within its white, unlabeled exterior and massive multipanelled windows lies a rehearsal space dedicated to performing artists.
Matt Ingalls uses the warehouse for the West Oakland Sound Series, a weekly experimental music performance that platforms artists who step outside the boundaries of traditional composition. Ingalls moved from San Francisco to Oakland in the ’90s, when most artists still lived in the city.
“Now it seems like it’s flipped,” he said.
With most of the artists he knew now living in the East Bay, Ingalls decided to start the series in Oakland. The concert space feels like a little world of its own within the larger, office-like building. Sound equipment crowds the area behind the seats in what is otherwise a completely dark room where colorful lights illuminate the experimental artists, creating an almost mystical experience—all within a warehouse.
Rapid industrialization in the late 1800s and early 1900s left Oakland strewn with warehouses. West Oakland holds a majority of these spaces, making a walk through the neighborhood quiet, almost eerie, as large, unassuming buildings dominate the scenery. In contrast to their exterior, these warehouses serve as refuge for artists fleeing San Francisco for the East Bay due to shrinking studio availability and lack of protections for artists.
“It’s not if but when you get evicted from your art space,” said Britt Henze, a muralist and fine artist who moved to the East Bay around four years ago, after getting evicted from her studio in San Francisco.
Henze previously made art in what used to be a baby furniture store that the landlord rented out to artists. When he passed away, the tenants immediately received eviction notices, giving them little time to scramble and find other places to work. At the time Henze, in the middle of a series, had to make a decision fast: either commute from San Francisco every day, or move to the East Bay where studio spaces were more available. She decided to start working in an artist warehouse space called The Loom in East Oakland.
“Finding a space to work privately in San Francisco is incredibly difficult—that’s a known quantifier,” Henze said.
When looking for warehouse spaces in San Francisco, Henze and her fellow artists noticed many of them had been converted into office spaces for startups and tech companies. In her view, one of the main problems is that commercial leases don’t provide enough protections for tenants.
Residential leases in the state of California require protections such as rent caps and just-cause eviction requirements. Though the Commercial Tenant Protection Act requires landlords to provide notice before evicting commercial tenants, they are not required to give a justifiable reason in the same way that is required in the Residential Tenant Protection Act. Additionally, this act requires landlords to provide relocation assistance for no-fault evictions, something not required by state law for commercial leases.
Due to this lack of protections, Sean Newport is currently homeless. In 2010, Newport moved into Engine Works, a warehouse space with a long history of housing artists on Capp and 17th streets in San Francisco’s Mission District. For years, Newport and his artist friends and colleagues threw gallery showings and block parties, and built the space into a home.
In 2024, the building sold to Kent Putnam of Putnam GMC. After that, Newport started a movement in an attempt to save the warehouse. He spray painted “Artists Live Here” on the side of the building, while starting a petition that garnered over 300 signatures, all to no avail.
“Every part of our warehouse told a story; everything on the wall had history,” Newport said as he emotionally recounted losing the creative space he called home for over a decade. “I wanted to start the conversation with the city and with my landlord about, well, we do live here and you guys continue to take advantage of this paradigm where you’ll let a neighborhood kind of dilapidate, you’ll let artists come in and bring commerce again and more people, and then when property values go up, you’ll kick the artists out first.”
According to Newport, no incentive exists for artists to stay in San Francisco anymore, due to loss of creative institutions and the recent wave of tech companies, whose employees do not seem to spend money on the arts.
San Francisco hosted the oldest arts school west of the Mississippi River until 2022, when the San Francisco Art Institute permanently closed. The California College of the Arts is next, set to close after the coming school year. Galleries in the city also struggle to pay rent, making the closure of at least five prominent spaces in the last four years a point of cultural uncertainty.
“It’s the old clothes it used to wear—now it wears a Patagonia jacket and the world knows it,” said Timothy Williams, a photographer who grew up in San Francisco and watched it evolve from an epicenter for literature, music and counterculture to what he now describes as the tech mecca of the world.
Williams now works out of a studio in Oakland; he doesn’t feel like San Francisco supports art anymore. Much like Newport, Williams remembers a San Francisco before the “Twitter tax break,” a 2011 payroll tax exclusion implemented by former mayor Ed Lee to exempt qualifying tech companies from San Francisco’s 1.5% payroll tax for relocating and hiring in specific, economically depressed neighborhoods. The tax exclusion began to stop what was then called Twitter from leaving the city, and as a result brought an influx of tech companies to the area.
“It was like a party, you know what I mean? Like there was a scene,” Williams said of the art shows and gallery events that previously defined the city.
Though Williams still makes art out of his studio in the East Bay, he holds little hope for a revival of the vibrant arts community he once belonged to, either in Oakland or in San Francisco.
Nimisha Doongarwal had a different experience: She moved to the East Bay looking for space. She didn’t just want a larger studio, but a place to grow her practice and become part of a creative community. This felt more accessible in the East Bay than it had in San Francisco, giving Doongarwal the freedom to focus on making art rather than focusing on where she would be able to make it.
The East Bay arts community welcomed and supported her, offering not only encouragement but also a network of opportunities that leave her feeling like she belongs. In the three years she’s lived here, Doongarwal had the chance to do solo exhibitions at the Oakland Asian Cultural Center and at the Berkeley Public Library, received a Berkeley Civic Arts Individual Artist Grant and had her work displayed in the Mayor of Berkeley’s Office.
“I still enjoy exhibiting in San Francisco and value its incredible museums and galleries,” Doongarwal said, “but the East Bay has given me the space to create, experiment and grow. It truly feels like a place where artists are supported, and I’m grateful to be part of it.”
