Across urban America, it’s an increasingly familiar scene:
Artists move into underinvested areas, taking advantage of low rents, renovating dilapidated homes and industrial spaces. Property values rise, rapid development follows, and art studios turn into restaurants turn into big-box stores, as increased housing costs displace the neighborhood’s longtime residents alongside arts pioneers.
Look at Ybor City, once home to artist studios and immigrant families, and similar changes are already apparent. A five-year plan to renovate the 600 Block of St. Pete’s Central Avenue brought artists in low, then raised rents high after the area improved. Even St. Petersburg’s tony Beach Drive, now thick with high-end restaurants and condos, once housed a string of galleries.
As areas such as the Warehouse Arts District gain traction, communities and policy makers search for ways to create sustainable districts that integrate existing residents, artists, new business, and visitors alike. Unfortunately, there are no easy answers.
“I don’t think anyone I’ve talked to has solved the issue of gentrification,” said Michael Spring, director of the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs. “There’s no reason to make light of it or act as though this is easy to deal with.”
During nearly three decades of supervising a public arts agency with an annual budget upwards of $30 million, Spring has helped build Miami-Dade’s cultural community into a more-than-$1 billion annual industry.
Pastor Ricky Fuentes has watched the process unfold from his church on Wynwood’s 29th Street, where the offices of Art Miami and the new Wynwood Yard popped up within the last year.
“When Art Basel came in and started taking roots, you could see the whole big change,” Fuentes said. “Property values are going up, sometimes four and five times what they were just a few years ago. A lot of people live on a set budget. They can’t afford all these taxes being levied on them.”
The dualities present a growing dilemma as affluent, trendy places to live spring up from predominately poor communities, fueling a widespread and controversial topic in urban planning.
In London, the cycle even has its own verb — Shoreditchification, so named for the inner-city Shoreditch district, where once-neglected brick warehouses now provide canvases for Banksy’s provocative street art, attracting hipsters and cultural tourists in droves.
“You see it in neighborhoods left, right, and center in [Washington] D.C.,” said Wayne Atherholt, Director of Cultural Affairs and International Relations for the City of St. Petersburg, who acknowledged the issue’s complexities.
While Miami’s size and international stature place it firmly in a different category from St. Petersburg, some corollaries can be drawn, and thus, perhaps, a few lessons.
“You aren’t going to be able to have an Art Basel here, but I think we have a niche,” Atherholt said. “We are looking for ideas that can stick.”
Elevating St. Petersburg as a place to discover emerging talent is one of those ideas. Making sure that talent can afford to stay here is another, said Mark Aeling, owner of MGA Sculpture Studio and president of the city’s Warehouse Arts District Association (WADA).
“If we want St. Pete to thrive as an arts community, you have to have artists living and surviving in that community, or else you have a hollow promise,” Aeling said. “The only way to do that is to keep some aspect of it affordable.”
That’s what the ArtsXchange is about. Nonprofit WADA closed on the former Ace Recycling property at 515 22nd St. S. in St. Petersburg at the end of 2014, with plans to develop the 50,000-square foot complex into artist studios, a small business incubator, a foundry, and other amenities. Backed by private donations and eventually seeking grants funding, it’s a project they believe will strengthen St. Petersburg’s status as a city of the arts into the future.
It’s no secret that art can increase the attractiveness of a district, and some investors actively utilize the creative community to make financial gains. Aeling calls it “art washing.”
“It’s a vehicle,” he said. “[Artists] don’t generally have economic resources, they have creativity. Their energies often get utilized and they, to be honest, get taken advantage of.”
While it may bring financial benefit to artists for a short period of time, it’s a grind in the long run. Aeling said they want to break the mold with the ArtsXchange, and Spring agreed with the concept.
“We firmly believe that having artists and arts groups buy their property is the way to have them not get pushed out of neighborhoods,” said Spring, pointing to projects like Miami’s http://www.bacfl.org/Bakehouse Art Complex, a nonprofit arts center, backed 30 years ago by Miami-Dade County funds and capital improvement grants, that is still operating in Wynwood today.
“Our solution is to own up to it and help arts groups buy their property, secure their future, and continue to develop their work,” he said.
As for incorporating surrounding disadvantaged communities, solutions once more are hard wrought. The ArtsXchange plan calls for accessible programming to follow the studio build-outs.
“The goal is to engage the community in that programming and use the arts as a vehicle to help bring everyone forward,” Aeling said. “There is a guarded interest, but also a lot of suspicion in disadvantaged or minority communities. They’ve seen this before. Talk doesn’t get you much — you’ve got to show action.”
This article appears in Dec 17-23, 2015.