BTMFBA: San Francisco's The Lab and the Mission Economic Development Agency are trying to do the smart thing

BTMFBA = Buy the M* F* Building Already

The point of BTMFBA has been laid out in a series of entries about the need for arts organizations to buy their buildings, especially in hyper strong real estate markets. It's based on my learnings from DC, which has a strong real estate market, a limited number of the kinds of buildings that in other cities tend to be captured for arts uses, and a stunted ecosystem when it comes to local arts and culture (as opposed to federal institutions like the National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Museums, and the Kennedy Center).

The basic recommendation is the creation of an arts-related community development corporation as the lead rather than expecting each arts organization to do this on their own. One model being SEMAEST in Paris, which operates at the scale of the city, while other examples of arts-based CDCs in the US, like Playhouse Square Development Corporation in Cleveland and the Brooklyn Academy of Music CDC in NYC tend to focus on a much smaller geographic footprint, more like at the scale of an "arts district."

-- "Arts, culture districts and revitalization," 2009
-- "Revisiting stories: cultural planning and the need for arts-based community development corporations as real estate operators," 2018
-- "BTMFBA: the best way to ward off artist or retail displacement is to buy the building," 2016
-- "When BTMFBA isn't enough: keeping civic assets public through cy pres review," 2016
-- "BMFBTA revisited: nonprofits and facilities planning and acquisition," 2016
-- "BTMFBA: artists and Los Angeles," 2017
-- "BTMFBA Chronicles: Seattle coffee shop raises money to buy its building," 2018
-- "Dateline Los Angeles: BTMFBA & Transformational Projects Action Planning & arts-related community development corporation as an implementation mechanism to own property," 2018

The Redstone Labor Temple building in San Francisco’s Mission District (photo by Robert Divers Herrick, courtesy the Lab)

The arts website Hyperallergic reports that The Lab, in San Francisco, is faced with a situation where if they don't buy their building, they will be displaced, with few alternatives ("A San Francisco Art Nonprofit Is Trying to Save Its Building From Developers"). From the article:

The San Francisco art scene, once a sizzling hub for radical artists and independent galleries, is rapidly fading away as artists and noncommercial spaces are being priced out of the city. The Lab, an experimental art space in the city’s trendy Mission District, is now in danger of becoming the next culture organization to fall victim to San Francisco’s accelerated, tech-driven gentrification.

The Lab is fighting to keep hold of its space in the Redstone Labor Temple, a San Franciscan historical landmark eyed by real-estate developers with plans to repurpose the building as office spaces. To take matters into its own hands, the nonprofit has launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise the needed seed money to buy its part of the building, worth an estimated $2 million, before the sale closes on August 1.

In the SF case, I can't claim to know the ins and outs, but there is one area arts support organization called Northern California Grantmakers, which has an interesting initiative, a working capital loan fund, the Arts Loan Fund, to help groups ward off financial troubles.

It would be logical for the same group to create a real estate portfolio development program.

The reason I moved from writing about planning and the need for facilities/real estate elements in cultural plans to stating the obvious: BTMFBA; is because I got tired of reading articles like the one about The Lab.

Although to be fair, a CDC in The Mission district has stepped up.  From the article:

The Lab’s fundraiser is a part of a larger capital campaign to purchase the entire building, which houses other nonprofits like Mojo Theatre and Wonder Dog Rescue. The Mission Economic Development Agency (MEDA), an anti-gentrification nonprofit that partners with socially aware real-estate developers to counter the negative implications of the tech boom has held a yearlong negotiation to buy the building from its current owner David Lucchesi. In May of this year, MEDA signed a $15 million contract with Lucchesi to purchase the Redstone Labor Temple by August 1 and maintain the property as “a center for social and economic justice and the arts,” the nonprofit told Hyperallergic.

More importantly, this is a systemic-structural problem.

It requires systemic-structural responses.

And given the real estate market in San Francisco, the response should be at the city-wide and regional scale, not sub-district by sub-district, although MEDA should be commended for what they are trying to do.

At the same time, buying the building isn't the only issue.  It's maintaining it.  From the article:

But the future of this deal is uncertain. “Appraisals have indicated that there would be $7 million needed for rehabilitation, including a seismic retrofit,” MEDA told Hyperallergic in an email. “Therefore, MEDA is seeking by July 15 a commitment of $1 million from the City of San Francisco so that our investors can rest assured that our organization can make the numbers work.”

And:

And things are only getting worse, according to Beard. “Of the 500 organizations that existed in San Francisco just five to eight years ago, there [are] less than 200 left,” she said. “Those who are left will probably be closed or evicted in the next two years if we don’t do something.”

Similarly, my writing about cultural planning matters started because of the failure of so many organizations in DC, and my trying to figure out the underlying issues.

-- "Cultural resources planning in DC: In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king," 2007
-- "What would be a "Transformational Projects Action Plan" for DC's cultural ecosystem," 2019

All the more reason to have a pan-city and regional fund, especially since such buildings usually house organizations providing services beyond the immediate area.