Gentrification with or without Exploitation
Just read this from Cool News. It used to be that artists were invited into neighborhoods as a way to speed gentrification, pushing out current residents and eventually, as the developers got involved, pushing out the artists too. Hopefully we are seeing some change in that process. Can't we all live together? Maybe this is the change we need:
"Artists have become the occupiers of last resort ... The worse things get, the more creative you have to become," says Robert McNulty in a Wall Street Journal piece by Alexandra Alter (4/17/09). Robert is president of Partners for Livable Communities, and he's commenting on what's happening in Cleveland and Detroit, where painters, sculptors and musicians are emerging as unlikely heroes amid the housing crisis, turning abandoned homes into studios and vacant storefronts into galleries.
The creative class has a long tradition of "gentrifying" shabby neighborhoods, but its latest push is being embraced by some urban planners as "a tool to revive neighborhoods reeling from vacancies and home foreclosures." Cleveland is investing $500,000 "to fund 50 citizen-led pilot projects to reclaim vacant property." Projects include "Pop Up City ... which brings performance artists into empty lots, vacant buildings and unused urban infrastructure." There's also a "$30 million drive" to rebrand a "former factory hub as entertainment and arts district."
Bob Brown, a Cleveland city planner, comments: "The next phase is capitalizing on the presence of artist and art-related businesses and using it as a lever for high-density development." Skeptics note that artists have a habit of displacing poor people and creating neighborhoods in which they themselves cannot afford to live. However, developer Brian Friedman says that won't happen if projects help artists buy the spaces they occupy. "Our chief goal is ownership," he says. "We don't want the neighborhood to gentrify them out."
Here is a great book on New York City on the subject: The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City
"Artists have become the occupiers of last resort ... The worse things get, the more creative you have to become," says Robert McNulty in a Wall Street Journal piece by Alexandra Alter (4/17/09). Robert is president of Partners for Livable Communities, and he's commenting on what's happening in Cleveland and Detroit, where painters, sculptors and musicians are emerging as unlikely heroes amid the housing crisis, turning abandoned homes into studios and vacant storefronts into galleries.
The creative class has a long tradition of "gentrifying" shabby neighborhoods, but its latest push is being embraced by some urban planners as "a tool to revive neighborhoods reeling from vacancies and home foreclosures." Cleveland is investing $500,000 "to fund 50 citizen-led pilot projects to reclaim vacant property." Projects include "Pop Up City ... which brings performance artists into empty lots, vacant buildings and unused urban infrastructure." There's also a "$30 million drive" to rebrand a "former factory hub as entertainment and arts district."
Bob Brown, a Cleveland city planner, comments: "The next phase is capitalizing on the presence of artist and art-related businesses and using it as a lever for high-density development." Skeptics note that artists have a habit of displacing poor people and creating neighborhoods in which they themselves cannot afford to live. However, developer Brian Friedman says that won't happen if projects help artists buy the spaces they occupy. "Our chief goal is ownership," he says. "We don't want the neighborhood to gentrify them out."
Here is a great book on New York City on the subject: The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City
Labels: Artists, Gentrification, urban revitalization
posted by Charlene at
5/13/2009 11:57:00 AM
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