Give Artists Real Estate Developers

Great Article on alternative development.  Is Artspace a replicable example of responsable development?   I suspect that recreating Artspace requires a mix of discipline and passion, rather than a "hub" or "space" to incubate.  


http://www.fastcompany.com/3000312/key-thriving-creative-class-give-artists-their-own-real-estate-developers

The Key To A Thriving Creative Class? Give Artists Their Own Real Estate Developers

BY EMILY BADGER

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AUGUST 9, 2012

The process whereby artists cycle through the rundown neighborhoods of American cities has become so entrenched it even has a dirty name: the SoHo effect. Artists venture into an area where no else will. They help make it desirable, chic even. Then, as rents go up, they’re forced to move out. Neighborhoods appreciate over time. But artist income seldom does.

“I remember that very deeply in my soul back in 1986, we felt that was unfair,” says Kelley Lindquist, who became the president of a nonprofit called Artspace in 1987. “It was insulting for people to sometimes say, ‘Oh, artists like to move, they’re bohemians!’ Who likes to be on the street and renegotiate a lease and carry all their equipment and try to create a new community and basically start all over?”

Artspace has intertwined missions serving artists and small arts organizations and leveraging the properties that house them for “creative placemaking.” In its most literal sense, the term refers to building communities around arts and cultural activities. But “creative placemaking” has also become shorthand for the more ambitious--and harder to measure--idea that the arts can also lead to economic development. Over the last decade, many cities have fallen in love with the idea that if they can just lure artists and other creative types, economic vitality will follow. The tricky part is proving that an influx of artists actually causes everything that comes afterward: the higher property values, the new restaurants, the middle-class families.

“In a lot of ways, I think Lowertown is perhaps the most cut-and-dried example you’ll ever get of artists who really created a tipping point,” says Laura Zabel, the executive director ofSpringboard for the Arts, a long-running tenant of the Northern Warehouse. “Because there was such a vacuum here before.”

...Artspace converted the building into 52 live/work loft spaces for artists, with complimentary commercial space on the first two floors. The project was financed with a mix of historic and low-income housing credits, private investment and philanthropy grants. As a result, the building’s mortgage is so low that Artspace can charge tenants well below market rate. To qualify to live and work here, artists must make less than 60% of the area median income. Rents range from about $500 to $1,000, depending on income, for spaces as large as 1,600 square feet. When Artspace recently commissioned a study of the area, market rate for a two-bedroom in now-booming Lowertown was $1,300 a month.

“I’m not sure [Springboard] would still be around if we didn’t have this space,” Zabel says. Her organization, which is about to expand, pays $1,100 a month for 2,200 square feet. This is a common refrain throughout the building. “I’d probably be nowhere,” says painter Matthew Rucker, who estimates that he makes 90% of his annual income during the two weekends a year when the Northern Warehouse hosts an art crawl. “I can honestly say that I owe almost all of my current success to living in this building.”

...This, of course, has the artists on edge, being attuned as they are to the fear that artists will always fall victim to their own success in a redeveloping neighborhood. The artists who live in Artspace’s properties will at least be safe in perpetuity. Artspace recently refinanced the Northern Warehouse, and it remains on stable financial footing as a permanent space for artists for decades to come. One might hope that its permanent presence might keep some of the neighborhood’s character intact, regardless of whatever else happens.

If that’s the case, the Northern Warehouse model suggests that it’s possible to break the SoHo effect but still leverage the urban pioneering instinct of artists. Artspace doesn’t prove that artists can power the economy of whole cities. Its success–born out of an intricate model that emphasizes the long-term stability of an arts community–hardly translates to a blanket endorsement of the equation that artists = urban prosperity. But it seems to be doing something pretty effective in the Twin Cities.

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Charleston's mega-urban renewal scheme to be dismantled for parts

The struggles of urban revitalization and mission based development.  Heart-breaking and important to wrap one's head around.
For rumination:  is this specific to South Carolina, which has also been financially challenged in its Innovista project in Columbia, or a larger symbol that Mega-projects are should be re-thought to provide a platform for smaller actors/entrepreneurs, rather than taking on massive urban revitalizations on their own?

http://www.postandcourier.com/article/20100624/PC1602/306249876

North Charleston's grand urban renewal project is on track to be dismantled and sold for parts.

Noisette's lenders, who began foreclosing on 240 acres of the former Navy base land a year ago, have proposed splitting the land into more than half a dozen parcels. The request jeopardizes Noisette's long-standing plan for an innovative mix of thousands of homes, offices and shops.

Now, the development's top lender, Pennsylvania-based Capmark Finance Inc., is in salvage mode, trying to figure out how to group together segments of the land to raise enough money to pay off a portion of the $23.8 million that Noisette owes.

"The goal is to sell enough property that you satisfy the debt," said Charleston County master in equity Judge Mikell Scarborough, who gave Capmark and Noisette officials several weeks to map out a sale proposal.

Meanwhile, Noisette officials continue to say they're discussing a possible sale of the loan to outside investors. Attorney Andy Gowder said between five and 10 groups are conducting what he characterized as "serious due diligence."

"They are spending significant time and resources in evaluating this opportunity, so we take from that level of activity that they are serious," he said in an e-mail.

The city of North Charleston, once considered a viable buyer, no longer is one of those groups, and time is running out. The court could accept bids on the parcels as early as September...[continued in article]

How to start a housing co-op by Mira Luna

http://energybulletin.net/stories/2012-07-27/how-start-housing-co-op

How to start a housing co-op
by Mira Luna


The Comunidad Cambria Coop (photo by Allan Heskin).
During college, I lived at a 32-member student housing cooperative where I had more fun there than I did in all my other years of college combined and met lifelong friends. I saved money by living there so I didn’t need to work through school, as the coop was owned by a nonprofit (consequently rent would get cheaper relative to inflation). The activists, artists and thinkers who lived there brewed new ideas which planted seeds in me that sprouted years later. We seized the opportunity to use common spaces for political and arts events that as regular tenants we would have never been able to host. The house created a vessel for whatever passion we wanted to manifest.
On the downside, I found it incredibly difficult to study there. The work of being a contributing coop member was a drain on my work time and there was too much drama to focus on school. The coop had structure and rules but with little follow through, meaning chores and maintenance didn’t get done and conflict was common. We had an application process, but let everyone in regardless of their ability to cooperate, as well as people with drug and other mental health problems that needed more support than we could offer. New members weren’t trained in consensus decision-making, creating heated and way-too-long meetings over trivial issues. I learned a lot about what not to do.
Years later, volunteering for a nonprofit that develops cooperative (coop) housing, I discovered that when done properly, resident-owned coops can offer an affordable and more convivial alternative to single family housing. Coops save money by cutting out landlords’ profits, sharing common spaces, lowering operating costs, and receiving public subsidies for affordable housing. Studies show that coops provide other benefits, like greater social cohesion and support, reduced crime, increased civic engagement & sustainability, better quality and maintenance of housing, and resident stability.Housing cooperatives are defined primarily by their legal structure: coop members own the housing collectively through shares in an organization, rather than individually, as with a condo. Residents also govern the housing democratically, either directly or through elected representatives. Not just for students, coops can be home to support groups of low income families, artists, elderly, disabled, and people with a common purpose. Over 1.5 million homes in the US are part of a cooperative housing organization.There are several different kinds of coops:
·         Rental or leasehold coops are democratically run organizations of tenants that equitably share costs of renting or leasing a building owned by someone else. Rental coops may share part of the management responsibility and often have more power collectively than single renters leasing from a conventional landlord. Nonprofits can also buy a building and rent it out to lower income folks who might not be able to afford shares. Sharing a house can offer big savings and can help people avoid foreclosure.
·         Market rate coops are houses, apartment buildings or other groups of housing units that are organized under a democratically managed corporation in which residents purchase shares at a market rate. Shares cover the costs of a blanket mortgage, rainy day reserves, maintenance and other operating costs, insurance, tax, etc. Units are resold at market rate.
·         Limited- or zero-equity affordable housing coops receive grants and government subsidies to make coop shares more affordable to low-income people. They keep the housing permanently affordable through legal restrictions on the amount of gain on a future sale of the coop share. Often these are organized groups of low-income tenants that agree to collectively buy the building they already rent through a nonprofit, usually a land trust that holds title to the land and takes it off the speculative market. It’s a great way to make permanent gains in the fight against gentrification.


The Columbus United Cooperative (photo by SF Community Land Trust)
A successful limited-equity model is Columbus United Cooperative, a 21-unit apartment building in San Francisco. The San Francisco Community Land Trust (SFCLT) worked closely with the low-income, Chinese-American family tenants who were fighting eviction and demolition. With public subsidy, tenants purchased their units as part of a coop for little more than their controlled rent in an area where home ownership is half the national average due to cost. In Los Angeles, Comunidad Cambria went from a gang war zone and drug supermarket slum to a model of peaceful, affordable cooperative housing with the help of coop housing activist Allan Heskin and several Latina women in the complex. The community rallied to protect its new coop against threats from gangs and drug dealers to burn the building down, remediated a toxic dump in its basement, and created a vibrant community center. Sunwise Coop is a rental cooperative, owned by Solar Community Housing Association, with a mission to provide eco-friendly, low-income housing in Davis, CA. The house uses solar water heating, photovoltaic panels, passive solar design, and composting to reduce their ecological footprint. They also grow their own veggies for shared vegetarian/vegan dinners and raise chickens and bees. Monthly shares or rental costs at affordable housing coops are often half or less of the market cost.
Coop housing rentals are a relatively easy first step to implement. Coop ownership can sometimes be a long, difficult process, but with much more substantial and long-term benefits. If you are thinking about starting your own housing cooperative, here is a basic plan for coop ownership, much of which applies to rentals as well:
·         Find a potentially willing community of people who want to live together long-term. Some community cohesion and individual social skills are very helpful. If there isn’t already a community, holding dinners or other regular bonding events can lay a good foundation.
·         Find a mentor through another successful coop, a nonprofit that helps develop housing coops (like a local land trust or theCalifornia Center for Coop Development), and/or a coop-friendly lawyer. Read the Coop Housing Toolkit.
·         Educate community members about the entire process. Do an assessment to see if your community has the motivation, finances and skills needed to follow through. (If they don’t, you may want to recruit or train people that can help, especially with accounting, legal, organizing and maintenance tasks.) Make a decision whether or not to move forward.
·         Work with a nonprofit or form an independent housing corporation. Form a Board of Directors from the residents’ community with membership, finance, maintenance and operations/management committees. Create bylaws for organizational procedure, including new member selection, orientations, decision-making, Board and committee elections, regular communication/meetings and conflict resolution processes. You can use another coop’s bylaws as a model.
·         Develop a realistic budget with reserves, then research financing options. If your community is low income, it may be eligible for foundation grants, public subsidies from HUD or municipal affordable housing programs, and loans from Community Development Financial Institutions. Try working with banks that have already funded coops, it will be a much easier pitch and process.
·         Select the dwelling that you want to buy, convert or construct and make sure the seller is willing to sell to a coop.
·         Secure a loan and buy the building with the community through a blanket mortgage. This is much easier to secure when working with a nonprofit that has a track record of successful coop development.
·         Complete any rehabilitation or upgrades that are needed in advance of moving in. This can be a fun way to build group cohesion in advance of all living under the same roof.
·         Find ways to build community feeling through shared common space, childcare, dinners, group projects or other regular events. Develop relationships with the surrounding community through volunteering programs.
Although problems can come up as in any housing situation, the issue most likely to destroy the coop is internal conflict. Finding the right people and teaching others willing to learn how to get along is key.
For more info on how to share housing and other stuff as part of a cooperative, see The Sharing Solution, a book by Janelle Orsi and Emily Doskow, visit the National Association of Housing Cooperatives website and any of the linked websites above.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304299304577347890053618010.html

By ELIOT BROWN

Co-op City, the nation's largest cooperative housing complex, is in discussions with federal, state and city housing officials to secure a new $600 million, low-interest mortgage that would likely keep Co-op City as part of a middle-income housing program for years to come.

Built in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the sprawling 15,000-unit Co-op City complex in the northeast Bronx has been known as a middle-class stronghold. Moderate- and middle-income families can buy units at discounts to market rates through a state program known as Mitchell-Lama.

But after properties have been in the Mitchell-Lama program for around two decades, their residents can decide to leave the income-restricted program and open their doors to anyone. That allows co-op members in neighborhoods with high property values to cash in through the sales of their apartments.

A new $600 million mortgage for Co-op City in the Bronx, above, could keep the complex as part of the Mitchell-Lama middle-income program.

Such moves became common at other Mitchell-Lama co-ops during the real-estate boom years, which caused government housing officials to worry about the shrinking number of apartments in the city earmarked for middle-income families.

At Co-op City, residents considered exiting from Mitchell-Lama in 2002, a move requiring a two-thirds approval vote. But residents shelved discussions when there wasn't strong backing, and Bronx real-estate values made the economics difficult. Advocates of Co-op City's exiting from Mitchell-Lama—an act known as privatization—have been unable to rally widespread support since.

But should the $600 million refinancing plan now being discussed go forward, it would likely quell such talk from making a return for years. The terms being discussed with federal and local officials call for requiring the property to stay in Mitchell-Lama, says Alan Wiener, a managing director at Wells Fargo & Co., which would issue and oversee the mortgage.

"During this loan, Co-op City has to stay affordable, so you're going to preserve the affordability," Mr. Wiener says.

The management company that runs the day-to-day operations on behalf of the Co-op City residents is recommending the loan, in part because the new financing would be expected to lower interest payments by around $4 million a year, says Herbert Freedman, a principal at Marion Scott Real Estate Inc. His company manages the property and is involved in the discussions about the loan.

Still, the possible new financing has attracted criticism from some co-op members who support privatization and don't want their hands tied. "I would be against it," says Gary Geleski, a public-school teacher and seven-year resident who has urged leaving the program. "They shouldn't have that much power to lock us into that type of agreement."

The loan under discussion is part of a program from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development aimed at multifamily properties—one that was extended to cooperatives in 2010.

Under the terms being discussed, HUD would back $530 million of the loan, while city and state agencies would back $70 million that would be the first to be lost if the loan defaulted, according to multiple people involved with discussions.

It would be a 35-year self-amortizing loan, they said.

Drought expands throughout USA

Notice,
not drought in Western NC.



http://www.usatoday.com/weather/drought/story/2012-04-11/mild-winter-expands-usa-drought/54225018/1

Still reeling from devastating drought that led to at least $10 billion in agricultural losses across Texas and the South in 2011, the nation is enduring more unusually parched weather.

A mostly dry, mild winter has put nearly 61% of the lower 48 states in "abnormally dry" or drought conditions, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, a weekly federal tracking of drought. That's the highest percentage of dry or drought conditions since September 2007, when 61.5% of the country was listed in those categories.

Only two states — Ohio and Alaska — are entirely free of abnormally dry or drought conditions, according to the Drought Monitor.

The drought is expanding into some areas where dryness is rare, such as New England.

"Conditions are starting to worry us now," said Keith Eggleston , a climatologist with the Northeast Regional Climate Center in Ithaca, N.Y.

According to the U.S. Geological Survey, stream flow levels are at record or near-record lows in much of New England. The Drought Monitor lists all of Vermont as "abnormally dry," just six months after the state's wettest August on record that stemmed mainly from disastrous flooding by the remnants of Hurricane Irene.

So far this year, Connecticut has endured its driest January-March period ever, Weather Channelmeteorologist Jonathan Erdman reports. This followed the state's wettest year on record.

The drought is mainly an agricultural concern in the Northeast at this point, says Eggleston. While agricultural conditions in the Northeast could be perilous if the dry weather continues as the growing season kicks off, water shortages for the public shouldn't be an issue, as most reservoirs were near or at capacity due to the early-season snowmelt and thaw, and to wetter conditions in the past, the Drought Monitor reported.

The rest of the East is also very dry. "We expanded the drought intensity and coverage in the Southeast and up and down the East Coast," said meteorologist David Miskus of the Climate Prediction Center in Camp Springs, Md., who prepared this week's update of the Monitor. "Georgia is one area we'll really have to watch," says Miskus. More than 63% of the state is now in the worst two levels of drought, the highest percentage of any state.

Wildfires and brush fires have been common along the East Coast from New England to Florida in recent weeks because of wind and the dryness and windy conditions.

As water levels continue to decline in bone-dry southern Florida, the South Florida Water Management District has issued a water shortage warning from Key West to Orlando.

One of the causes of the winter dryness was a weak La Niña, a climate pattern in the Pacific that affects weather in the USA and around the world, Miskus reports. La Niña tends to bring dry conditions to the southern tier of the nation.

The Southwest and Southeast had a very dry winter, but the southern Plains had a much wetter winter than expected, Miskus says. The rain eased drought conditions in eastern Texas. The state dropped from 100% in the four categories of drought in late September to 64% this week. Much of western Texas remains in extreme to exceptional drought.

Trouble also looms for water-dependent California. The state Department of Water Resources said last week that water content in California's mountain snowpack is 45% below normal.

"An unusually wet March improved conditions, but did not make up for the previous dry months," said DWR Director Mark Cowin. "The take-home message is that we've had a dry winter and although good reservoir storage will lessen impacts this summer, we need to be prepared for a potentially dry 2013."

California has above-average reservoir storage as the summer approaches, thanks to runoff from last winter's storms, the DWR reports.

Lastly, other areas that bear watching, according to Miskus, are the northern Plains and upper Midwest, due to the lack of snow this past winter. He says that while farmers there are welcoming the dry conditions to aid in spring planting, they will be hoping for rain later on in spring and summer.