BTMFBA: London edition

The Buy the Mother Fucking Building Already series of articles about how arts groups (independent retail and nonprofits) should buy their own buildings to protect their interests.  The premier example is SEMAEST of Paris, which focuses on buying and holding retail space and making it available to independent retailers.

-- "BTMFBA: the best way to ward off artist or retail displacement is to buy the building," 2016

-- "BTMFBA: maintaining arts spaces in the face of rising real estate values | Seattle, New York City," 2024
-- "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
-- "Revisiting stories: cultural planning and the need for arts-based community development corporations as real estate operators," 2018
-- "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
-- "From BTMFBA to 'community right to buy,'" (2024)

although sometimes nonprofits can't be trusted either.

-- "Lack of a system breeds more of the same: Source Theater, Washington DC, up for sale 2006, 2024," 2024
-- "When BTMFBA isn't enough: keeping civic assets public through cy pres review," 2016

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It turns out that London has a similar organization, focused on the arts, called the Creative Land Trust ("Mayor launches groundbreaking Creative Land Trust").  Starting in 2019, it aimed to get 1,000 spaces, recognizing that there is demand for 14,000 such spaces across the city.  I don't think they've come anywhere near to that amount of space under control as of yet, while SEMAEST, much older, has more than 700,000 s.f. under control.

-- Creative Places Create Value: The Impact of Creative Workspace on Local Residential Property
-- Urban Precarity: Affordable Art Studios and Creative Flight in the Post Covid City, Kings College, London

One of their projects, small at 4,600 s.f., is in a new build residential complex.  And two floors in a building in Hackney Wick (a cool district I stayed in in 2018).

Sydney, Australia is modeling a similar program ("Sydney launches cultural strategy with plans for a new Creative Land Trust to boost affordable artist workspace Creative Land Trusts: a proven solution for growing affordable creative workspace in cities," World Cities Creative Forum, "The radical property plan to bring artists back to Sydney," "The plan to use White Bay Power Station to fix Sydney’s live music crisis," Sydney Morning Herald).

Sydney’s proposed Creative Land Trust is closely modelled on the same-name scheme launched by the City of London in 2019 to fix its acute shortage of rehearsal and studio spaces. The scheme involves allowing properties gifted or transferred by public or private landowners to working artists, musicians and writers at a subsidised rate.

Council analysis of the 2021 census found the number of artists, musicians, writers in greater Sydney fell by 11.6 per cent when in every other capital city the population of creatives had increased, showing the impact of rising property prices on the creative sector.

... Over the last decade, Sydney’s cultural infrastructure has shrunk by the equivalent of three Sydney Opera Houses, Lord Mayor Clover Moore will tell cultural leaders. Of that lost space, 14,400 square metres was once production space occupied by artists, musicians, writers and performers, a decline of 28 per cent over that time.

... The council identified the need to help the “missing middle” in its updated cultural strategy that is to be voted on by councillors on June 24. “There is a notable lack of midsized venues, mid-sized organisations and opportunities for mid-career artists,” it noted.

To this end, Moore said city council would boost cultural funding by $20 million over the next 10 years. Out of this, 50 individual fellowships per year, start-up grants and artist residencies would be funded with writers to be given space to work in City of Sydney libraries and community centres.

The difference between these programs and DC is that DC doesn't want to be on the hook for creating, buying, and holding such spaces.