BTMFBA: maintaining arts spaces in the face of rising real estate values | Seattle, New York City

BTMFBA is a series of articles about the need to control your real estate if you want to maintain arts uses.

-- "New form of BTMFBA in San Francisco," 2023
-- "A wrinkle on BTMFBA: let the city/county own the cultural facility, while you operate it (San Francisco and the Fillmore Heritage Center)," 2021
-- "BTMFBA: Baltimore and the Area 405 Studio," 2021
-- "BTMFBA: the best way to ward off artist or retail displacement is to buy the building," 2016
-- "Revisiting stories: cultural planning and the need for arts-based community development corporations as real estate operators," 2018
-- "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

 A couple of articles, "Equinox Studios in Georgetown: A thriving arts community designed to last," Seattle Times, and "Against All Odds, New York's Artist Buildings Have Survived," New York Times, shed light on the ability to maintain arts studios and spaces in the face of extrapolating real estate prices.

The Times article is more photo essay, but like the Equinox Studios article, has some kernels of wisdom on how properties have been able to remain comparatively low rent.  From the article:

What’s featured here is not definitive, and perhaps not even fully representative of what it looks like to have an artistic space of one’s own in the city. Artists can and will work anywhere and, like their work itself, they’re limited only by the extent of their imaginations — and their finances. To have a studio at all, one has either to be able to afford to buy or have a gracious and understanding landlord, both rarities in the current real estate market. As of 2024, it’s never been harder for artists to find a place to work. In Manhattan, average rent prices have risen 15 percent from their levels just before the Covid-19 shutdown, and things aren’t much better in the other boroughs. (In Brooklyn and parts of Queens, rent is at least 10 to 15 percent higher than it was in March 2020.) So artists have had to create a kind of whisper network to withstand New York’s unimpeachable forward march, which the art market has, ironically, enabled. Suitable spaces are passed down, sublet, shared in secret. Most of them are temporary fixes before an artist — who’s grown out, or been priced out, of their space — has to move on.

Some examples

• one floor devoted to arts uses in the old Brooklyn Army Terminal Building is rented by the City of New York, which in turn rents to artists at lower than market rates.
• A photographer shares his studio with five others.  He can afford it.  They can't.  Mycella Collective.
• 17-17 Troutman Street, Queens, former textile factory, 90 studios
• 64 Fulton Street, Financial District, Manhattan, mix of religious and nonprofit organizations and 20 studios

Equinox Studios, Seattle.  From the article:

THE TYPICAL TRAJECTORY for an urban arts community goes something like this: A couple of creative types set up shop in a neighborhood bypassed by development. The buildings might be run down, but rents are cheap, and more artists follow. Magic ensues for a few years. Then the dancers, sculptors and jewelry-makers get the boot when “progress” arrives, and landlords can cash in by selling to builders or remodeling for a more upscale market. 

It’s happened over and over in Seattle, pushing local artists out of Capitol Hill, Belltown and Pioneer Square. But one group has managed to hold off the forces of gentrification — and keep growing — for almost two decades.

... The organization calls itself Seattle’s Creative Industrial Complex, which sounds a bit over the top until you consider that the main complex now covers almost an entire block and houses nearly 150 photographers, printmakers, woodworkers, ceramists, stone carvers, blacksmiths and just about any other creative specialty you can imagine. Rents are half to two-thirds market rate and should stay that way because Equinox owns most of the property.

Buy the Mother F* Building already.

Equinox owns three buildings on the block and rents another, with the aim of purchasing it also.

The discussion of Equinox and Brooklyn Army Terminal also covers community building and camaraderie amongst the artists, sharing equipment and help depending on needs, organizing events, etc.

The next stage for Equinox is to become more of a nonprofit arts community development corporation, like Jubilee Housing of Baltimore, which does both studio development and housing.

Initially, he turned Equinox into a cooperative, with every tenant holding an ownership stake. More recently, tenants voted to give up those shares and go along with Farrazaino’s latest approach: forming an umbrella nonprofit called Watershed Community Development with the goal of heading off gentrification in Georgetown by building affordable housing for artists and others, and preserving the mix of industry and arts that gives the neighborhood its gritty vibe.