OUR FUTURE CITY
Note: The Frisc’s Our Future City is a forum for the exploration of big, bold, and often controversial ideas to transform parts or all of San Francisco. We welcome ideas and submissions. You can find previous columns here, here, and here.
After a lifetime of dance and activism, choreographer Keith Hennessy doesn’t mince words. “San Francisco will never be what it once was,” he says. “It’s over. Without cheap rent, there won’t be new generations of artists.”
The city has big, glittering institutions — the symphony, ballet, a newly renovated Museum of Modern Art, and so on — but the grassroots arts have in large part been driven out of town by decades of housing crisis and gentrification.
San Francisco’s population is at an all-time high, but rents jumped 70% between 2010 and 2016, and the lack of affordable housing means artists and other low- to middle-income professionals haven’t been part of the boom. In a 2015 survey of almost 600 artists by the San Francisco Arts Commission, 70% of respondents had been or were being displaced from their workplace, home or both; the other 30% feared displacement in the future.
The good news is that the artists and art advocates who remain could hold the seeds of a better future for the arts in San Francisco.
Little victories, bigger problems
Hennessy is one of the people who helped plant those seeds. In 1991, he cofounded 848 Community Space, a studio on Divisadero Street that became known for a wide variety of radical dance and performance art.
Though Hennessey ultimately moved on, 848 persisted, rebranding as CounterPulse and finding a permanent home in a former adult theater at 80 Turk Street in the Tenderloin.
CounterPulse was able to make this move thanks to the Community Arts Stabilization Trust (CAST), a regional initiative that provides real estate assistance to local arts organizations. In partnership with the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, a local arts funder, CAST has positioned CounterPulse to become the sole proprietor of the three-floor Turk Street building.
CAST has already helped secure 1007 Market Street for the Luggage Store Gallery, a longtime music and art venue. Also in CAST’s sights is the Geneva Car Barn and Powerhouse, a massive old heap at the corner of Geneva and San Jose avenues that once housed Muni streetcars, and will be repurposed as a home for community arts, performance, education and youth programming.
Arts supporters have also made savvy use of the Small Sites Program of the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development, which subsidizes nonprofit developers to buy buildings on the market and preserve them for affordable housing and business needs.
Under Small Sites, the nonprofit developer Mission Economic Development Agency (MEDA) has preserved affordable housing in two buildings that also are homes for historic arts institutions: the Precita Eyes Mural Center on 24th Street, and El Rio, a Mission Street bar and music venue with a long history of support for the LGBTQ community.
MEDA’s new affordable housing projects also have room for the arts: 1990 Folsom Street will include exhibition space and offices for Galería de la Raza, and 2205 Mission Street will provide offices and a 200-seat theater for Dance Mission.
“The biggest thing that confronts me is that we have to raise $12 million,” says Dance Mission founder Krissy Keefer.
Keefer adds the prospect is daunting but doable. But it also highlights a major drawback to these subsidized real-estate programs: They only work for established organizations that can attract millions of investment dollars.
On the margins
The vast majority of working artists in San Francisco do not fit this profile, according to David Keenan of the Safer DIY Spaces Coalition, an advocacy group for artist collectives founded in the wake of the 2016 Ghost Ship fire.
Current grant programs focus on projects and products rather than the creative life that produces the work.
But as the fire reminds us, unregulated spaces, while appealing to artists who can save money by living, working and exhibiting all in the same space, are also vulnerable. “The artists understand that they live marginally in illegal spaces and don’t want to advocate for themselves,” Keenan says.
Housing programs and arts funding don’t do much for these folks living on the margins, he says. For example, San Francisco’s Cultural Equity grants and its Grants for the Arts program, which is financed by a percentage of the city’s hotel tax fund as well as private foundations, focus on projects and products rather than the creative life that produces the work.
“You’re never going to solve the problem with $5,000 one-off individual artist work grants,” notes Keenan, who says that for many artists this perpetuates a hand-to-mouth, precarious lifestyle.
His solution is a new twist on an old controversial idea: live-work space for artists. A previous attempt to ease the creation of these units in 1998 was a fiasco, when a modification to local zoning rules instead encouraged real-estate speculation and produced thousands of expensive lofts beyond the reach of working artists.
Developing live-work spaces has been illegal in San Francisco since 2001, but many artists continue to live where they work, despite the lack of protections.
To confront this, Keenan wants to convert entire buildings — say, 200 units or more — into live-work space, with changes in regulations and elimination of development fees that local governments have used to fill the revenue hole created by the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978. (It’s not just artists who see regulations and fees as a barrier to much-needed housing.)
“The public sector is not earmarking money for this,” Keenan says. He’s looking for social-impact investors willing to take a risk and who don’t care if artists are painting in their bedrooms.
Remixing innovations
The live-work dream might be one idea worth revisiting, remixing, and reviving to support local artists. There are many others, says Jeremy Liu, an analyst at the policy-reform nonprofit Policy Link.
For example, Liu says San Francisco could take a cue from Rhode Island and waive sales tax on the work of local artists.
Liu also says the federal Community Reinvestment Act, passed in 1977 to encourage banks to invest in black communities degraded by racist redlining policies, could be used to drive investment in buildings that include arts space.
Banks and lenders tend to be leery of arts real estate, Liu says, because it doesn’t always make as much money on the rental market. He says that developers of large, mixed-use buildings could help solve this problem with an “operating loss reserve” — putting aside cash to cover losses up to 10 years for arts space that rents for less than market rate.
(The SF Arts Commission’s Community Arts and Education program began in the 1970s through this sort of remixing, using funds from the federal Comprehensive Employment and Training Act to hire artists to work in schools and community centers.)
Thinking bigger
Many of the mechanisms and programs used by artists and their advocates, like CAST or MEDA’s involvement in Small Sites, require both public and private funding, but they’re drops in the bucket.
Some ideas in circulation extend potential benefits well beyond artists, like a Federal Jobs Guarantee (harkening back to the New Deal-era Works Progress Administration), and community land trusts, which acquire properties, take them off the market, and hold them permanently for their residents. Liu thinks land trusts, of which modest examples can already be found in San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley, could also extend to retail trusts for arts organizations and businesses of all sorts.
But the scale of these ideas are big and would require much larger, perhaps unprecedented subsidies and investments from government, private lenders, and philanthropy. (Some advocates see public banks as a critical new source of capital. California passed a law last year to allow municipalities to form them.)
Land trusts alone would require enormous capital infusions: Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has promised $50 billion to enable land trusts to purchase 1 million homes across the United States; those dollars wouldn’t go nearly as far in San Francisco.
Whatever the big and bold idea, SF artists and their advocates, with their history of activism, see an opportunity to leverage the political moment, as recent elections have shifted the city farther left.
“This is a moment to rewrite our social contract,” says Laura Poppiti, manager of the San Francisco branch of the Los Angeles-based Center for Cultural Innovation. “Artists and workers share a lot of economic circumstances with the rest of society—low wages, high debt.”
Successful innovations in the arts sector that address housing or worker protections, or that advance big ideas such as a government jobs guarantee, she adds, could serve as “a measure for the rest of society” and “affect generations to come.”
In San Francisco, Poppiti says, “we’ll never return to what we were. It’ll be something different, and that will have a lot to do with who’s here driving it.”
Josh Wilson, a journalist and editor in San Francisco, is also the publisher of newsdaylighter.com.
