Tag: apartments

Wanted: Affordable Art Space

  • Back in 2000, Laura Weathered and fellow artists were drafting what their artist community would look like. (Photo by Lester Graham)

When artists make a check-list for the ideal place to live – they add things the average family
might not, like plenty of work space and being close to other artists and galleries. Big cities
usually offer all the things on that list – but there’s a problem. Big-city real estate prices have a
habit of rising quickly – and pricing artists out. Shawn Allee found artists who’ve tried to stay
put:

Transcript

When artists make a check-list for the ideal place to live – they add things the average family
might not, like plenty of work space and being close to other artists and galleries. Big cities
usually offer all the things on that list – but there’s a problem. Big-city real estate prices have a
habit of rising quickly – and pricing artists out. Shawn Allee found artists who’ve tried to stay
put:

Laura Weathered began her career in painting in Los Angeles.

It was tough enough finding her muse – but it was also tough finding places to live that stayed
affordable.

“This kind of history of settling into a space and then the neighborhood going through
gentrification was chasing me all over L.A.”

Fed up, Weathered left for Chicago.

Before long, she found some Chicago artists had the same problem – rents and home prices just
weren’t stable.

Weathered and fellow artists got tired of toughing it – so about thirty of them put their heads
together and looked into buying property – to live in, to work – and maybe share with artist
groups, too.

“And someone’s comment was, You know, this is going to cost more than a million
dollars – who’s going to rent a bunch of flaky artists a million dollars?”

But then they did some back-of the napkin kinda math.

“We had a everyone go around the room and, What are you paying for rent? And that
was the Aha moment – collectively we could afford much more than a million dollars,
because that’s what we’d been paying all along.”

It took almost ten years to dig up funding and expertise, but eventually – they transformed a
former metal-stamping factory into artist housing, studio and office space.

People have been living in the artists’ community for five years now.

When you walk around, you see paintings in some loft windows and sculptures near the front
step.

Weathered shows off some shared gallery space.

“So, this is really important. You can bring test audiences in and see how it plays and get
feedback and the like without taking huge risks.”

All this is great – but the big idea was to make the space stay affordable for artists and artist
groups. So far, it’s worked.

“We can stay here a long time.”

This is Denise Zaccardi.

Zaccardi runs the Community TV Network. It has offices at the Bloomingdale Arts Building.

The network teaches low-income teens how to produce news, TV and documentaries. Zaccardi
says arts organizations like hers can benefit from this stability.

“Kids can tell their brothers and sisters down the line we’re here – we’re not moving
every three years, which is a common thing for people who rent, especially for artists.”

So, sounds like everything is an artist’ dream, right?

Well, like in other condo-associations, members have fought over repair costs. And artists who
own their units can only sell them to other artists. Plus, if they do sell … their profits are
capped. That’s made the units much lower in value compared to their neighbors’.

Laura Weathered says there’ve been second thoughts.

“I think some people are saying, ‘Did I agree to this too quickly?’ because it’s restrictive,
but the agreement originally was that we wanted an artist community and not just for one
generation for the future.”

Weathered says the idea was to keep units affordable for artists – and that’s been the case for
five years.

She says it’s not perfect, but if it works for a decade or two more, it might be a model for other
artists to follow.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

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Lofts Attract Urban Renewal

  • Lofts are no longer just structures with large windows and exposed brick. Lofts are quickly becoming a symbol of the lifestyle of the young, urban professional. (Photo by Lester Graham)

In cities across the nation, old warehouses, factories and other buildings are being turned into brand new luxury loft apartments, and for many urban areas, those apartments are a big part of trying to get people to move back to cities from the suburbs. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Nora Flaherty has this report:

Transcript

In cities across the nation, old warehouses, factories and other buildings are being turned into brand new luxury loft apartments. And for many urban areas, those apartments are a big part of trying get people to move back to cities from the suburbs. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Nora Flaherty has that story:


Abby Cook is taking a tour of the Union Square Condos.


“…finished the dining area, old basketball hoops and signs throughout the building, so…”


The condos are being built in what used to be a high school, and when they’re finished, the apartments will have a lot of the things that lofts are known for. They’ll have high ceilings, hardwood floors, big windows and exposed brick.


“It’s a great use of the building, it’s a neat idea and just the uniqueness, I think of it.”


Cook is excited about the idea of moving to downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan. She lives in the suburbs now.


“Location is key, I think. Being that I am a young person, and I go out a lot, being close to downtown, just being close and the convenience is huge, just huge.”


Developers all over are building these kinds of lofts in empty city centers. That’s because lofts are thought to attract a group that’s become kind of a holy grail to urban planners: young, educated, professionals like Abby Cook. They’re often willing to live in neighborhoods that other affluent people shun, and it seems, they love lofts. Julie Hale Smith is with Michigan’s housing development authority.


“Our main target goal was to increase population in our urban centers. When we looked around at other cities in the country that we were emulating, we noted that one of their linchpins of revitalization was the redevelopment of historic buildings or the kind of faux-lofting of new, or newer buildings to provide that kind of lifestyle, that kind of urbanist lifestyle for folks that chose to live in those kinds of dwellings.”


You hear the word “lifestyle” a lot when you talk about lofts. In fact, they’ve become almost synonymous with a certain lifestyle, and not just in the minds of developers and urban planners.


FLAHERTY: “When you think of loft apartments, what words do you think of?”


PERSON 1: “Urban living.”


PERSON 2: “Maybe urban contemporary types, younger…”


PERSON 3: “Young, urban, hip.”


PERSON 4: “Maybe en vogue for city living, kind of stylish…”

But what is it about lofts? Doug Kelbaugh’s the dean of architecture and urban planning at the University of Michigan.


“Lofts have a certain cache… they started in London and New York, where older manufacturing buildings or warehouses, in the case of London, were converted by urban pioneers, often artists, into large, open spaces, typically without separate rooms, and now it’s become sort of a lifestyle issue.”


But luxury lofts like Union Square are a far cry from the gritty artists’ lofts of 1970’s New York. They often have amenities like pools, gyms and game rooms.


“What will happen, is you’ll come up this stairway – there’ll be a landing here – and then there’ll be a second stairway that goes up through the roof to your private rooftop deck…”


Developers often like to call any apartment with big windows and exposed brick a “loft.” University of Illinois Geographer, David Wilson, says it’s all a matter of marketing, that developers aren’t just selling an apartment, they’re selling an identity.


“Developers and builders look at them and they see certain physical attributes: high ceilings, large, expansive windows, and so forth, and they seize upon the idea of marketing these physical attributes. And the marketing process hooks up to the notion of, ‘Let’s play to the identity of these people. Let’s make them appealing, let’s make them attractive.'”


So when people see apartments that look like lofts, they don’t think about washing those big windows, they think of having the hip, urban lifestyle that the windows imply. Take Hannah Thurston. She’s a 23-year-old student. She and her husband are putting down a deposit on one of the Union Square apartments.


“I’m hoping that the other people moving in will be great neighbors. Obviously, we’ll have a lot in common being young professionals, obviously there are a lot of nice perks.”


But whatever developers’ motivations, and whatever people might think of them, lofts are succeeding at one thing: they’re bringing at least some new people many of the nation’s abandoned city centers.


For the GLRC, I’m Nora Flaherty.

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