The Neighbor Below

I'd been a zoning enforcement officer for the city of Oakland for eleven years, and I still got a little kick out of writing up a citation. Not the paperwork, which was death, but the moment when I got to walk into some developer's shiny new project and point at a wall and say, that's not what your permit says. I know that sounds petty. It's a petty job and I'm okay with that.

The Marchetti building on Franklin had been on my list for two months. Someone had converted commercial units to residential without approval, which is the kind of thing you can't let slide even if you secretly think the apartments are nice. I know, because I'd looked at the listings online. Fourth floor, one bedroom, exposed brick. I'd thought about it more than I should have, given that I was also the person about to cite it.

I filed the notice of violation on a Tuesday. Then came the hearing, then the appeal, and that's where Corinne Higgins entered my life.

She was the lawyer for the developer, Meridian Partners. I'd dealt with plenty of their lawyers before. Most of them send an associate who sends a paralegal who sends a letter. Higgins showed up in person, in a gray suit, and looked around the hearing room like she was measuring it for curtains.

"You're Gomez," she said. "You wrote this up."

"I did."

"On a Tuesday."

"Most days are Tuesdays."

She sat down across from me and opened a binder as big as a phone book. "I've read every citation you've issued in the last three years. You're very thorough. It's almost artistic."

"Thank you."

"It wasn't a compliment. Meridian is going to cure the violation, but I want the record to show the cure date is within the original window, which means I need your inspection notes to show the violation existed on the date you claim."

"The violation existed. The units were occupied. People were living in them, cooking dinner, the whole thing."

"Occupied by tenants who are now paying residential rents the city didn't approve, which the city benefits from, but sure, cite it."

"You're not going to charm me into dropping it."

"I wasn't trying to charm you. I was trying to bore you. It usually works."

It didn't work. We went back and forth for forty minutes in front of a hearing officer who mostly wanted his lunch. At one point she said something about my interpretation of the setbacks ordinance being "creative," and I said her client's floor plans were "fiction," and the hearing officer told us both to take a breath. I walked out of there annoyed and also weirdly energized, which I didn't examine too closely on the way back to the office.

The re-inspection was scheduled for a Thursday in October. I was forty-two that year. I'd been doing this long enough that a re-inspection should have been boring. Go in, verify the unpermitted units were vacated or permitted, sign the form, leave.

The re-inspection took an hour because Corinne Higgins insisted on being there.

"You don't have to walk me through your own building," I told her in the lobby.

"My client asked for a representative. I'm the representative. Also I've never seen the fourth floor and I'm curious."

"You're curious about a one bedroom apartment."

"I'm curious about everything you people do in these buildings. It's like watching a slow documentary."

The inspection itself went fine. The units were vacated, the walls were coming down, the paperwork matched. I signed my form in the lobby and she signed hers and we shook hands, actual professional adults, and then we both got in the elevator and the elevator made a terrible grinding sound and stopped between the third and fourth floors.

"That's not supposed to happen," she said.

"No, it's not."

We stood there in the dark for a second. Then the emergency button did nothing, the alarm bell didn't ring, and the phone in the panel was dead. The building was pre-war and half its systems were held together with optimism.

I called building maintenance from my cell. Then I called the fire department non-emergency line. Then I called building maintenance again. The short version was this: the elevator was dead, and while we were stuck waiting for the elevator guy, someone jimmied the front door of the building, and the lock, which was already on its last legs, jammed shut with the deadbolt thrown. The locksmith couldn't come until morning. The building super had pried the elevator doors open an hour in and hauled us up onto the fourth floor landing, which is the only reason we weren't still standing in the dark.

"So we're trapped," Corinne said. We were back in the fourth floor apartment by then, sitting on the floor of an empty unit because there were no chairs.

"Trapped is strong. We're... delayed."

"I have a deposition tomorrow at nine."

"I have a site visit at eight."

"Wonderful. We'll both be terrible at our jobs."

The empty unit was cold and smelled like drywall dust. I'll be honest, the first twenty minutes were not fun. We sat against opposite walls and she made calls and I made calls and neither of us could fix anything. Around seven the building super, a very apologetic man named Gus, climbed the stairs with two folding chairs, a blanket, and his apologies.

"Miss, ma'am, I'm so sorry," he said. "Locksmith first thing tomorrow. Eight sharp."

"Eight sharp," Corinne repeated after he left. "I'm starting to hate that phrase."

I had my car keys but my car was parked on the street, useless behind the jammed front door. She'd taken BART. We were, technically, stuck in a vacant apartment in a building I'd cited, overnight.

That's when I remembered the wine.

"Wait here," I said.

"Where would I go?"

I went across the hall, because I still had the master key, and the unit over there was the one I'd been quietly coveting online, the same one I'd cited. Nobody was in it, of course. But sitting on the windowsill, because tenants leave things behind when they get evicted for unpermitted conversion, was an unopened bottle of red wine that had been there long enough to gather dust.

I brought it down.

"You're giving me evidence?" Corinne said. "Abandoned property from a cited unit? Isn't that some kind of ethics violation?"

"The city has no claim on a bottle of sangiovese. Also I don't have a corkscrew, so if you have one in that giant purse, now's the time."

She dug through her bag and produced a corkscrew, a folding knife, and a phone charger. "Lawyers travel prepared."

We opened the wine with no glasses, so we passed the bottle, which she declared "barbaric" and then did anyway. We sat in the folding chairs facing each other in the empty unit, streetlight coming through the big windows, buses hissing on Franklin below.

"So," she said. "You've been waiting years to trap me in a room."

"I didn't trap you. The building trapped you."

"The building you cited."

"Pre-existing conditions. The building was like this before I got to it."

She took a pull off the bottle and handed it back. "You know what I don't get? You clearly hate this stuff. The citations, the hearings, the reading of floor plans."

"I don't hate it."

"Then why do you look like every hearing is a root canal? I've watched you. You sit there like the whole process personally offends you."

"It does, a little. Not the process. The clients."

"Meridian."

"Meridian. And the four other companies that do the same trick. Buy a building, convert it on paper, rent it out, wait for the citation, cure it, pocket the difference. It's a business model. The tenants are the part that gets cured."

She was quiet for a second. "That's fair."

"That's it? That's all I get? No rebuttal, no binder?"

"I'm not going to defend the conversion. I defend the process. Somebody has to make the city follow its own rules, even when the city is right, especially when the city is right, because if you let sloppy citations stand, the good ones fall too."

"That's the most honest thing a Meridian lawyer has ever said to me."

"Don't put it in your notes."

I laughed, and she looked surprised at herself for making me laugh. We passed the bottle again. Her suit jacket was off and draped over one folding chair, and her shirt sleeves were rolled up, and at some point I realized I'd been looking at her forearms instead of listening, and I made myself stop.

"Your turn," she said. "Why zoning? Of all the jobs."

"I wanted to be an architect."

"Really?"

"Failed out of the drafting part. Turns out I can read a floor plan better than I can draw one. So I read other people's floor plans and tell them what's wrong with them. It's architecture for spiteful people."

"That's the best job description I've ever heard."

"What about you? Corporate law for spiteful people?"

"Corporate law because it pays. I had a whole different plan when I started out. Environmental law. I was going to save wetlands."

"What happened to the wetlands?"

"The wetlands lost. Money won. I decided to be on the money side because losing on principle doesn't pay my student loans." She reached for the bottle and I gave it to her. "You think less of me for that."

"I think that's the most common story in this city."

"Most people say something nice. You just agree with me like it's a fact."

"It is a fact. I read floor plans, you read contracts, the wetlands lose. We're all just cogs."

She looked out the window at the street. "You ever do anything that isn't a cog thing? Anything at all?"

"I go to the farmers market on Saturdays."

"Wow. Riveting."

"And I cook. And I have a cat named Permit."

"You named your cat Permit."

"He followed me home from a site inspection. It was meant to be."

She laughed, a real one, not the hearing room laugh. The bottle was about half gone and the apartment was getting darker and my back hurt from the folding chair and none of it was bothering me the way it should have.

"So," she said, passing the bottle back. "Eight sharp."

We sat there in the quiet, and I caught myself thinking that I couldn't remember the last time I'd talked to anyone this long without wanting to leave.

She got up at some point to stretch her legs and wandered over to the far wall, where the last tenant had left behind a few bent nails and a couple of old pushpins with photos still stuck under them. Hiking photos, from the look of them. Whoever lived here took pictures of ridgelines and then moved out in a hurry.

"You hike?" She tapped one pin, a ridgeline in gold light with a trail winding up toward it.

"I used to. More than I do now."

"You say that like you miss it." She