The growing list of victims of the Oakland Artist Collective fire includes teenagers as young as 17 and the son of a first responder. In a Facebook post, a musician who said he had performed there said such spaces were the product of artists across the country being "pushed to the periphery, if not wholly exiled, by real estate speculation...Artists will perform in the few spaces made available to us, and audiences will go to those spaces they feel comfortable, even if those are spaces are totally dangerous...If we don't want this to happen again, we ought to focus less on blaming the persons who operated this one particular warehouse, and more on how to carve out other types of alternative spaces in our cities, so (artists) don't have to hold our (events) in death traps," he wrote.
At www.nbcnews.com
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