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Comment by pmorici | Hacker News Reader

I feel like the desired reaction to this is that gentrification or whatever you want to call this is bad but I think that is the wrong conclusion to draw. It is better to view this as a historical retrospective. Otherwise why not pine for the days when there were factories, or brothels or fields for that matter.

The whole reason the artists came there in the first place was because rent was cheap since it was a dilapidated dump not because it has some inherent attribute that made for better art. It isn't like artists have been wiped out as a profession they have just moved to places that are what SOHO used to be. A place with cheap rent.

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It wasn't just that rent was cheap; rent was cheap in many other places as well.

It's that rent was cheap in close proximity to the buyers and dealers artists needed to make a living, with a subway to get around on nearby, and (eventually) a critical mass of like-minded creators to hang around with.

This basically doesn't exist nowadays. You can move to western New Jersey to lower your bills, but it's a long haul to New York when you need to do business, and unless you get others to move with you, you'll be working in isolation or with a small handful of peers.

It's true. In my experience of talking to artists...they work very differently, but most don't work alone and need a community to function. Sharing the Atelier, contacts to the business side of the art-world etc.

Another very big factor: A (suprisingly) large amount of artists don't really make most of their money through the selling of their art. They do art workshops with adults and children and therefore absolutely need the proximity to their clientel.

Yes, I guess one solution to this could also be to create nodes outside of Manhattan. Who cares if SoHo, Chelsea and the West Village are large malls if the soul of the city moves somewhere else?

But that would require sustained public infrastructure development at a scale America hasn't done since the immediate post WWII era.

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