Artists' Housing: Promise or Threat?
In New York, the art capital of the world, where artists locate, high rents are not far behind. Can city programs to promote artist lofts in low income neighborhoods avoid that trend? Are they meant to?
Over the past 30 years, New York City has become the acknowledged center of the art world. Despite the recent drop in sales at fine art galleries and auction houses after years of steady growth, the city remains a focal point for all types of artistic endeavors. A portion of everything Western culture currently produces that can be called art is “made in New York.”
New York is also the home for a large number of art manufacturers—artists. For all but the lucky few, the high cost of housing and studio space presents a tremendous challenge. Now, artists’ housing threatens to become a problem for other New Yorkers as well, because artists often appear to play a role in the process that causes various city neighborhoods to rebound.
In certain instances, such as the early loft settlements in Lower Manhattan, this has been a positive undertaking—the artistic knack of making order out of chaos has resulted in the rejuvenation of struggling neighborhoods, principally commercial and manufacturing areas fallen on hard times.
Today, artists seeking housing are more often involved in competition for space in neighborhoods that aren’t primarily vacant, but rather home to the city’s low and middle income residents. In these situations the artists are often condemned as the harbingers of gentrification: suddenly there’s a gallery where there used to be a warehouse, a fern bar for the local painters, and then a neighborhood open-studio art show with tourists and perhaps even a scout for New York Magazine.
It’s understandable that both artists and neighborhood residents feel threatened. Displacement has cost many families their homes while property values soar. Professional types visit the neighborhood, find it “safe” and “nice” and buy in. It’s an ironic twist that frequently the original artist pioneers are among the eventual victims of the displacement which their arrival helped trigger.
The situation has reached crisis proportions. The artist population in several Brooklyn neighborhoods is growing rapidly; and as one Brooklyn activist explained, “The old people who live in some neighborhoods won’t put up with much of a fuss. They’ll be glad to see young people moving in right up until the moment they’re evicted; but in other areas, they might start stomping artists.”
On Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the issue has crystallized around the city Housing Department’s Artist Homeownership Program. The plan, announced over a year ago, promises the creation of 120 loft-style co-ops on two of that neighborhood’s battered blocks. The program, opposed by the local community board, is being advanced by the city with no heed to alternative suggestions made by representatives of the local community. Some area residents now vow to use every avenue of resistance to thwart the plan.
Can these forces be reconciled? Can artists move into a neighborhood in numbers without destroying it? Can city programs provide constructive help?
Further, are artists an essential part of the gentrification disease or merely a symptom of its arrival? Can locals chase the first artists to arrive out of the neighborhood, burn their moving vans and expect to be left alone? Will artists start to leave New York, forced to the Diaspora by the juggernaut of escalating rents and upscale development? New York wasn’t always the art center of the entire world; could its days be numbered?
