Artists Transform Urban Blight

The creative economy at work, according to the Wall Street Journal:

Artists have long been leaders of an urban vanguard that colonizes blighted areas. Now, the current housing crisis has created a new class of urban pioneer. Nationwide, home foreclosure proceedings increased 81% in 2008 from the previous year, rising to 2.3 million, according to California-based foreclosure listing firm RealtyTrac. Homes in hard-hit cities such as Detroit and Cleveland are selling for as little as $1.

Drawn by available spaces and cheap rents, artists are filling in some of the neighborhoods being emptied by foreclosures. City officials and community groups seeking ways to stop the rash of vacancies are offering them incentives to move in, from low rents and mortgages to creative control over renovation projects.

“Artists have become the occupiers of last resort,” said Robert McNulty, president of Partners for Livable Communities, a Washington-based nonprofit organization. “The worse things get, the more creative you have to become.”

Artists and architects are buying foreclosed homes in Detroit for as little as $100. In St. Louis, artists are moving into vacant retail spaces in a shopping mall, turning stores that stood empty for more than a year into studios and event spaces for rents of $100 a month. Artspace Projects Inc., a national nonprofit development corporation, plans to create 35 live/work spaces for artists on vacant property in Hamilton, Ohio, after converting an empty car factory and an adjacent lot in Buffalo, N.Y., into 60 artists’ lofts last year.

Cleveland is emerging as a testing ground for the strategy. With the collapse of the manufacturing industry, the city’s population has plummeted to around 430,000 residents today from nearly a million in 1950. A wave of home foreclosures has accelerated the slide. The Cuyahoga County treasurer estimates that 15,000 homes sit vacant — roughly one in 10. City officials tore down 1,000 homes last year, and more than 12,000 buildings await demolition.

In neighborhoods pocked by vacancies, artists have started filling the void. Last November, Katherine Chilcote, a local painter, bought a boarded-up, bank-owned house for $5,000 in Cleveland’s Detroit-Shoreway neighborhood, where one in four family homes has gone into foreclosure in the last three years. Thieves had stolen the doors, punched out windows and ripped out all the pipes, sinks and electrical wiring. Eight cats had moved in.

The 29-year-old artist and four friends spent months ripping up moldy carpet, laying down new tiles and hardwood floors, repairing walls and stripping peeling paint. She bought the empty, weed-filled lot next door for $500. She plans to build a sculpture garden there, with large, whimsical mobiles that twist in the breeze. She’s applying for grant money from the Cleveland Foundation to turn four more vacant houses in the neighborhood into artist residences and studios.

Through her nonprofit public art organization, Building Bridges, Ms. Chilcote is also working to turn vacant storefronts in Cleveland’s Westown neighborhood into artists’ exhibition spaces. Four storefronts are now filled with hand-painted pottery, landscapes of trees and fields, and large, spray-painted scenes of the city’s abandoned steel mills and factories.

Ms. Chilcote plans to expand to seven storefronts this summer, and is working with the Westown Community Development Corp. to create nine permanent artist residences and studios in an old theater that’s been vacant since the mid-1980s. In the meantime, Ms. Chilcote and other artists are hatching creative, temporary uses for buildings that are scheduled to be demolished. This summer, she plans to transform an empty ice cream parlor into a giant sculpture of a cake.

Even in good economies, having a high concentration of artists in an area boosts the property values of the surrounding area because people seek out hip and happening places because their cool.

Artists have flocked to, and improved, blighted areas for decades — for example, New York’s SoHo and Williamsburg, parts of Baltimore and Berlin, Germany. They often get displaced once gentrification begins. But now, since real estate has hit rock bottom in many places, artists with little equity and sometimes spotty credit history have a chance to become stakeholders, economists and urban planners say.

There’s controversy in that though. Advocates for low income housing claim that it forces low income residents out.

The strategy is controversial. Some urban planners warn against treating the arts as a cure-all for urban development, particularly since low-income residents are often forced out when artists move in. “Artists have had the effect of gentrifying neighborhoods that were working for the existing communities,” says Dana Cuff, an architecture professor at UCLA and founder of cityLAB, an urban-design think tank.

Some artists are also wary of being branded as agents of development. “I could never afford the neighborhoods that I’ve helped contribute to,” says Bridget Ginley, a 38-year-old painter, who says she was priced out of Cleveland’s trendy Tremont and Ohio City neighborhoods once the galleries and restaurants arrived.

In Collinwood, where Mr. Di Liberto and Ms. Boneham moved last month, the Northeast Shores Development Corp. has bought nine vacant properties, and so far has renovated five as artists’ residences. Executive director Brian Friedman says the group plans to expand the project to 25 or 30 homes, using funds from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s $4 billion Neighborhood Stabilization Program.

But the dilemma persists. If an area is blighted, because residents allow that to happen, and new people come in to renovate, who start off in the same low income category yet add value to the area, is that such a bad thing?

Parts of South Norwalk fit that dilemma still. The 80′s saw Washington Street change from desolate to trendy. The surrounding area is depressed. The controversy over Ryan Park is quite illustrative of the challenge. Does the trendy part of South Norwalk expand, providing affordable housing for artists and other creative economy types who will add value to the neighbourhood? Or will the forces of poverty-politics keep the area segregated and impoverished?

The gentrification cycle does not end with the creation of trendy art hangouts. Once the area changes, then the artists become the next set of people who get priced out of the neighbourhood that they created. Which is what happened in South Norwalk in the 90s. Where once there was a high concentration of artists, now there’s not. Perhaps the empty storefronts and condos attest to that.

But cities are living environments. There’s no permanent fix to urban development, just constant work, that need strong residential support to be sustained.

Check out the Art scene from the WSJ article:
Upcoming tours, exhibits and events in Cleveland, Detroit and Buffalo.

Cleveland

DanceWorks 09, through May 24
The Cleveland Public Theater in Detroit-Shoreway hosts six weekends of dance performances, featuring new works from six local dance companies. cptonline.org

78th Street Studios Experience, April 17-18
Visitors can wander through three stories of recording studios, art studios and galleries at this studio space in a former factory warehouse in Cleveland’s Detroit Shoreway neighborhood. 78streetstudios.com

ArtMart 09, April 17-May 1
More than 100 regional artists will exhibit and sell their work at this show at Spaces Gallery. spacesgallery.org

‘There Goes the Neighborhood,’ June 5-Aug. 16
This exhibit at Cleveland’s Museum of Contemporary Art will showcase artists from such places as Cleveland, New Orleans, Brazil, Vietnam and Brooklyn, N.Y., whose work explores cities in transition. mocacleveland.org

ArtSpace Studio Tour, June 27
ArtSpace Cleveland, a group that helps artists find affordable housing, will lead a trolley tour of 13 artists’ live/work studios, three urban gardens and five galleries around the St. Clair Superior neighborhood, where a design district is taking shape. artspacecleveland.org

Waterloo Arts Festival, June 27
An annual summer festival on Waterloo Road, an emerging art destination, features open galleries, music and family events. artscollinwood.org

Ingenuity Fest, July 10-12
Cleveland’s “Ingenuity Fest,” a festival for arts and technology, brings performance artists from the region and around the world to 25 or 30 spaces, including vacant storefronts and unused parking lots. ingenuitycleveland.com

Detroit

‘I Repeat Myself When Under Stress,’ through May 3
An exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Arts Detroit showcases three artists who use visual and narrative repetition, including Tris Vonna-Michell, who projects slides of Detroit’s urban landscape onto fragmented walls. mocadetroit.org.

Scott Hocking, May 29
Detroit artist Scott Hocking builds massive sculptures out of recycled materials in abandoned auto factories and empty neighborhoods, taking photographs before the structures get torn down. His photographs will be shown at 2739 Edwin Gallery in Hamtramck. http://2739edwin.com/index.html
Buffalo, N.Y.

ArtSpace Buffalo Lofts, May 1-31
Sixty artists’ live/work spaces in a former factory in downtown Buffalo will host a month-long, curated show of residents’ work. artspacebuffalo.org.

source: Wall Street Journal, Artists vs. Blight, By ALEXANDRA ALTER, April 17, 2009