Can helping artists stay put spur development?

by Sandy Ikeda
Sat, 8 Mar 2008 at 1:16 AM

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One typical pattern of economic development, in New York and other cities, is when artists move into a run-down district that has lots of cheap space and turn the place hip. Hipness then attracts galleries, funky performance spaces, and quirky shops, eventually luring in high-income users — residential and commercial — who increase the demand for space but over time price out the artists who started the whole thing. It's a version of what Jane Jacobs calls the "self-destruction of diversity" — in which expensive, standard uses crowd out small, innovatative ones — which we've seen in Greenwich Village, Soho, and now Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

(So strong is the idea that artists can jump-start revitalization that city governments everywhere have invested large sums in grand arts centers, when subsidizing the artists themselves might be a more successful strategy.)

"The Lords of Dumbo Make Room for the Arts, at Least for the Moment," in yesterday's New York Times, suggests a different model: Doing what you can to keep artists in the neighborhood.

Some 1,000 artists and arts organizations are now working in the Dumbo section of Brooklyn, courtesy of the developers David Walentas and his son, Jed, partners in Two Trees Management. Operating on the principle that cultural ferment makes a neighborhood hot, Two Trees has offered creative people rents that they cannot refuse.

These range from zero (for Saint Ann's Warehouse and Smack Mellon) to about $15 per square foot, depending on the Walentases' fancy.

While some object to "using" artists to speed development — which goes to show that you can always find someone who will complain about anything — others see this as the boon to artists that it is.

But it's not going to last forever:

The Two Trees developers, who own about three million square feet of property in Dumbo, tell their tenants that they will try to find other places for them in the area if their spaces are sold or developed. But they make no guarantees…The developers are up front with the tenants about the short-term nature of their leases.

Apart from helping some local artists, however, are there any long-term benefits to this practice? One is a new and profitable way to perhaps reduce the riskiness of developing hip neighborhoods that others could follow. Another would be less reliance on subsidies from government, with its bureaucracy and politics, to help artists. Choosing artists and rents does seem to depend on the whims of the Walentases of the world, although the more the competition for artists among developers, the less arbitrary the latter can be.

If New York is pricing itself out of the "creativity industry" in favor of Lille, France, or elsewhere, I'm not sure there's anything that can or even should be done, in the private or public sector, to stop it. No city can sustain a golden age indefinitely, and trying to do so usually produces more fossils than Fosses. So while this may not be a solution for those who see losing artists as a long-term problem, it's a fresh approach with little downside that I can see.

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My last post discussed the scaling back of mega-projects.

Here's more in the New York Times on the mess that has been made of the good idea of relocating part of Penn Station to the Farley Post Office. What began as a $3-billion plan — to move Amtrak across Eighth Avenue to the west —ballooned in nine years into a $14-billion mega-project involving tearing down and re-building Madison Square Garden, adding 1 million square feet of retail space, and erecting two Empire-State-Building-sized structures on the site.

It's a study in just how volatile public-private partnerships can be, not in the sense the article tries to spin it — that of private benefits dominating the public good — but in what happens when political power becomes a tool of greedy private and political entrepreneurs. Cost explosions like this aren't because of jumps in input prices or bureaucratic miscalculations (as in my post on "Our costs runneth over"). Instead, it's what happens when entrepreneurs from the hard-budget-constraint private sector are set loose in the soft-budget-constraint world of public-private partnerships.

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