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
|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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