Despite a sad lack of content, my blog appears to be (for the most part) working.

I spent part of yesterday afternoon in East Oakland touring a vacant pasta factory. It is part of the project I am working on at my office- eventually it is going to be renovated in to low-income studio apartments and art studios.

When I arrived at the site yesterday with two other people from my office, we were met by a woman from the Oakland Housing Authority at the chain link fence that is around the building. She informed us that the alarm had been deactivated and it was pretty obvious that the building had been occupied in the recent past. There were gang tags painted on the outside and all of the (formerly closed and latched) upstairs windows were open.

To make a long story short, the housing authority police never showed up so eventually we just went inside anyway and found the scene below. Thanks to Daniel Simons for the photographs (oops, I forgot my camera).