The New York Times: Can Artists Help Shape American Cities Again?

By Zachary Small

Artists have played a vital role in defining the American city only to be forced out when rents rise. A novel approach in San Francisco seeks to break the cycle.

The small house on Russell Street where Jack Kerouac worked on “On the Road” in the 1950s now has an estimated value of more than $1.7 million — far beyond what any respectable Beat poet could have paid for two bedrooms in San Francisco.

Not far away, Janis Joplin’s one-bedroom pad in Haight-Ashbury would rent for some 20 times what it most likely went for in the late 1960s, according to property records.

And the studio where the photographer Dorothea Lange worked near San Francisco’s Union Square now has a price tag higher than what most artists these days can afford. In 2017, the space sold for nearly $2.7 million.

If these artists were around today, it’s unlikely that they would recognize the neighborhoods they helped to define. In the years since the tech industry moved into the area, the demand for property has soared. The artists who turned downtrodden streets into desirable enclaves have been priced out of their neighborhoods.

But to produce their best work, many artists depend on cities as arenas of creative cross-pollination. And cities, it turns out, need artists, who give them cultural cachet, heighten the quality of living on offer and promote economic growth.

So in a region where many young artists struggle to afford rent, much less purchase property, nonprofit leaders have pursued a potentially transformative idea: What if they could curb gentrification by subverting the traditional rhythms of the real estate industry? Trading financial gain for lasting impact, several older artists have donated the houses they bought decades ago to community land trusts, legal entities that can break the cycle of displacement by ensuring properties are handed down from one artist to another at affordable prices.

Last year, for instance, a 79-year-old artist in Oakland, Calif., bequeathed the bungalow she purchased in 1978 for $22,700 to a program called Artist Space Trust run by the nonprofits Northern California Land Trust and Vital Arts. When the artist dies or moves out, the home, which is now estimated to be worth more than $1 million, will be converted into a so-called split title, allowing the trust to hold onto the underlying land as it sells the house to another artist at a below-market price. Artist Space Trust will put the proceeds from the sale toward buying additional properties.

“These properties are permanently removed from the speculative market for real estate and will never return,” said Meg Shiffler, the director of Artist Space Trust, which was founded in 2023. “When one of our homeowners decides to leave, the property returns to the trust, and through a selection process, we can place another artist or family.”

Similar programs are unfolding across the Bay Area, and not only for housing. The Community Art Stabilization Trust, for instance, is purchasing buildings abandoned by tech companies during the coronavirus pandemic and, following the land trust model, is converting them into low-rent work spaces for arts groups.

“This is about the economic success of San Francisco,” said Shiffler, who worked at the city’s arts commission for 16 years. “Because if all our artists leave, then we lose our cultural identity.”

A Devastating Pattern

Cities have inspired artists for centuries and gained a place in history because of them. There would be no Impressionism without the renegade salons of Paris in the late 1800s; no modernist literature without the gatherings of Bloomsbury Group authors like Virginia Woolf in their London homes in the early 1900s; and no Harlem Renaissance without the migration of Black artists and intellectuals to the Upper Manhattan neighborhood in the 1920s.

In the 1960s, it was SoHo, the formerly industrial neighborhood south of Houston Street where artists illegally squatted in lofts, which had been vacated by factories leaving Manhattan to be closer to modern ports.

The lofts’ high ceilings and reinforced floors suited early residents like the video artist Nam June Paik and the painter Chuck Close, whose works could reach monumental scales. The artists could pay meager rents — between $50 and $125 a month — to landlords who otherwise had empty buildings. They beautified their spaces; many outfitted them with basic plumbing and lighting. Major art dealers, including Leo Castelli, Ileana Sonnabend and John Weber, set up shop around the corner at 420 West Broadway.

“Economic revival historically starts with artists,” said Rafael Mandelman, the president of San Francisco’s board of supervisors. “The challenge is that if they are successful, it leads to increases in cost and prices for the people who made that happen.”

In SoHo, artists began to push officials to legalize lofts, and in 1982, New York State enacted its Loft Law, providing rent stabilization to existing tenants and guidelines to landlords for bringing the retrofitted apartments up to code.

It was only amid the fallout of the Loft Law, after landlords had passed renovation costs on to tenants, or bought out their leases, that many artists realized they had been priced out of SoHo. A month’s rent for a 1,500-square-foot loft in the neighborhood had shot up to between $1,000 and $2,500 — some 25 times higher than what artists were paying in the 1960s. Only a small number of long-term residents were able to keep their spots. The SoHo Grand Hotel opened. Prada moved in.

“The story of SoHo’s brief success is that it functioned well as an artist’s colony because of how the illegality repressed the functioning of the commercial market,” said Aaron Shkuda, a Princeton University professor who wrote a book on the gentrification of SoHo.

The pattern has repeated itself in other New York areas. A recent report from the Center for an Urban Future, a public policy research group, found that since 2019, Harlem has lost 17 percent of its artists; the Upper West Side has lost nearly 32 percent; and the Lower East Side has lost more than 55 percent. Scholars have identified similar trends taking hold in cities like Chicago, Portland, Ore., and, to be sure, San Francisco.

“The benefit of regulated and permanently affordable artist housing,” Mandelman said, “is that it will not be subject to those vicissitudes.”

‘A Unique Moment’

What is happening in San Francisco suggests that artists have learned from the history of gentrification. And many of the nonprofit organizations helping artists acquire properties through land trusts or below-market deals have plans to expand nationwide.

“This is a unique moment where we could be the most active player in the real estate market,” Ken Ikeda, the chief executive of the Community Arts Stabilization Trust, said recently, as he walked through a downtown building on Market Street.

The building, which the nonprofit has purchased for $7.3 million, was in the middle of a renovation and retained touches from when the tech start-up Zendesk and other firms occupied it. Conference rooms with names like “Curly Fries” and “Shark Tooth” looked down on Sixth Street, one of the city’s most troubled corridors, marked by overdose treatment centers, homeless encampments and, frequently, armed police officers.

If everything goes as planned, the arts organizations set to work in the building will help revitalize Market Street and then benefit from the downtown resurgence without fear of skyrocketing rents. The Community Arts Stabilization Trust will see the value of its portfolio increase and continue to develop affordable spaces for arts groups.

The trust has already announced that its anchor tenant, KALW, a public radio station, will occupy the top two floors of the Market Street building. It has made deals on other properties in the neighborhood for an art gallery and a performance space.

Ikeda said the model that the nonprofit was establishing in San Francisco was being replicated in cities like Denver, Minneapolis, Tacoma, Wash., and Austin, Texas. Recently, the trust extended its work to property and asset management for affordable artist housing in Colorado.

“We have to look at artists as economic contributors,” Ikeda said, “because it’s been an uphill battle for us to shift the cultural perspective around how arts add value to a city.”

Studies commissioned by nonprofit organizations, including the National League of Cities, have repeatedly shown that the arts meaningfully contribute to tax revenue and provide employment to hundreds of thousands of workers in cities like Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco. A recent study by the National Endowment for the Arts found that between 2022 and 2023 the cultural sector in the United States grew at more than twice the rate of the total economy. Cities with vibrant arts scenes often earn a prestige that attracts visitors — who, in turn, bring economic rewards.

More obvious, perhaps, are the benefits that cities offer artists. A concentration of wealth can mean a prospective art buyer is around the corner; a museum down the block can provide inspiration; and a nearby art supply store can hold the resources needed to make the work.

Shiffler, the director of Artist Space Trust, said change in San Francisco was mostly coming from older artists who wanted to help their younger counterparts. They recognized that low mortgage payments had given them a sense of security that allowed them to take vital creative risks. And the moment has felt even more urgent as the city loses its private art schools. In January, the last one standing, the California College of the Arts, announced that it was closing.

Artist Space Trust’s portfolio includes a duplex valued at $2.6 million. The two units will be sold for a total of less than $1 million, and the trust will offer buyers nearly a third of the price in down payment assistance.

“None of our donor-artists have stopped working. Many are low-income themselves,” Shiffler said. “But they know the only reason they could stay in the Bay Area was housing security, and they want that for future generations, too.”

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