Do Art Scenes Lead to Gentrification? (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Do Art Scenes Lead to Gentrification? (2018)

bloomberg.com

20 pointsdakial132 comments

I think there are actually two art scenes. The pre-gentrified art scene and the post-gentrified art scene. The post-gentrified scene almost always completely supplants the pre-gentrified scene. Leaving only scattered remnants of what came before and sometimes leaving no trace at all.

An example of this can be seen in NYC, particularly in the gentrification of Brooklyn.

There’s this wannabe poetry Banksy artist that graffiti’s their handle with a corny, cheesy “deep” sentence all around NYC. These corny one-liners of his shows in galleries too. It feels so commercialized. Whenever I see them, I know this area has completed gentrification.

Koons is a multimillionaire from selling scaled up kitsch cranked out by his staff. Being commercial works if you can play the game right.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Koons

lol I already know you're talking about that 8soulsdeep dork

Yes, and I have yet to meet another New Yorker who finds it appealing. Apparently, from what I've gathered, tourists love it. I guess that's how it works: tourists take pictures of the graffiti, spread it over social media, artist writes the same corny words on an object you can put in your home, profit.

I’m a less happy having been made aware of 7soulsdeep. It’s so fundamentally commercial in nature that it’s quite different from what graffiti used to be. Clearly street artists have been monetizing using social media for a while but this is both hyper cringe yet more successful than I’ve seen before.

I was really excited to read this, but I think the methodology is lacking. True art scenes are not defined by galleries, or fine art institutions, but people who occupy a space who do art. Which is totally different. it’s the low income individual who is a starving artist. It’s graffiti on the walls (wynwood Miami). I once lived in a shoddily converted warehouse with a bunch of artists, there were no galleries near us, there was a granite mill though.

I feel like the art scene is where the artists go to get a drink, meet one another, and then go back to their places to collaborate. It seems like a lot of the most accessible venues are places that are not explicitly arts venues. I've seen a number of cases where artistically inclined bar tenders at dives, who have their friends come in to hang out, thus creating a scene, work to convince the artistically indifferent owners that allowing them to have shows, open mics or something more interesting than a photo of some used up sports star on the walls will draw customers. What begins as a quirky place to sing karaoke and pay bargain prices for beers are where people who build careers often begin communicating and collaborating.

My intuition is that art scenes don't cause gentrification so much as they are one of many signals that a neighborhood is "safe" enough for people to begin displacing the incumbent community. It's possible - maybe even likely - that the neighborhood was suitable for investment before that point, but no one noticed until they were forced to visit it while attending a gallery showing or something.

You could have saved the people doing this study a lot of time and money. The artistic types have definitely just found the cheapest place to live that is also the best place to live out of all of the cheap options.

The other take is that a neighborhood that has a vibrant art scene is one that people want to live in not that they want to supplant the current population living there. Theres a natural draw to live there.

The real cause of gentrification is failing to build enough housing, which means people can't move in without displacing others. It causes a zero sum mentality.

Build. More. Housing.

Yes, build more housing, but, art scenes don’t happen in housing, they happen in spaces that people can turn into their community spaces.

Also build more community spaces.

If you think about "art walks" or "artist open studios tours" (I like those) the art scenes need to be close enough to the wealthier zip codes that people with some money can get there. They also need to be at least somewhat safe to visit, safer than living there given that they usually take place in daylight.

> enough for people to begin displacing the incumbent community.

This means... what, that when someone moves out now the household that buys their old house has enough money that they choose that neighborhood by choice rather than necessity?

Typically gentrification at its simplest and most “popular” descriptive level is when people with more wealth move in and so property rates climb, and cost of living rises, and existing people in the community are no longer able to afford rent or other aspects of living there.

Wynwood in Miami had that plan. a few developers bought pretty much everything and gave artists and cool concepts/restaurants cheap rent to build there. Once it became popular they jacked up the rents and built condos on it. It’s a completely different animal now

Artists have taste, a need for space at a low price, a tolerance for breaking the law (in particular zoning, building inspections, workplace health), some measure of community (to form groups, help each other, take on larger rehab projects).

That makes them perfect scouts for neighborhoods and buildings that are ripe for redeveloping. They don't lead to it, but they hold the door wide open.

Elsewhere the original article looks for "museums or performing arts venues", and it's ridiculous to equate that with "artists". These places need patrons and customers, not makers.

>> a tolerance for breaking the law

I think in most of the neighborhoods that I have seen and lived through being art-gentrified the existing residents had a far higher tolerance for breaking the law than the artists.

Funny. And yet many will try and find someone to sue their landlord because their buildings are sub-standard, while the artist communities will seek buildings that could not even be permitted for human habitation, and build up from there.

The Ghost Ship owners got sued eventually.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Ship_warehouse_fire

Only after it burned to the ground. And everybody in sight got sued, even the power company.

So that I have heard "since that building in Oakland..." but that's just because it's a recent case. The pattern of which administration said what and who got sued is more indicative that things will be just business as usual in a few years. To be fair also, "that building" was compounding many of the possible options for killing people by fire: terrible wiring, floorplan, floorplan construction materials, decor materials, and escape routes ... in which it was running a music event (dark, crowded, people unfamiliar with the venue and to the venue)... upstairs.

> In most places, artists and arts establishments have little to do with gentrification. It is gentrification that draws the arts, and not the other way around.

This reminds me of one of the most profound statistics about the US I have ever seen:

> Those from households with an annual income of $1 million are 10 times more likely to become artists than those from families with a $100,000 income. [0]

The implications of that fact are wild and deep.

0 - https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/wealth-strong-pred...

Intuitively, artists aren’t super wealthy so tend to congregate in less expensive areas. The question is then about their effect on gentrification.

I guess a counterexample would be a situation where artists entered an area and it didn’t gentrify, or maybe even the reverse happened.

This is an interesting topic that I've noticed in different cities I've lived/visited but didn't know others had researched it.

My hypothesis was that artists will go to cheap neighborhoods that are satellites to Gentrified ones (their consumers). With time, they will attract affluent "artsy" people and will slowly gentrified that neighborhood, forcing new artists to move to the next cheap neighborhood close by...

This research claims that it is not like this, but it seems that they are using some concept of "commercial art establishments" that might not be representative of the initial inflow of artists (which I imagine would operate more informally). Sadly the research is paywalled for me to confirm.

Do artists need to live and prepare their work near their audience?

My guesses: Artists making durable physical artwork, such as painters, probably don't. Performing artists maybe can rehearse and train within a work commute of the performance locations (e.g., someone who performs on Broadway doesn't have to live around Times Square - they can do all that in Harlem or Brooklyn, etc.).

I'd also guess that they benefit from living within commuting range of their community, including other artists, managers, gallery owners, etc. And I can imagine it's probably good to live in the community, especially for people on their way up, so you can grab a coffee with someone and run into someone else while you're there, and go to the ad hoc jam session upstairs - just like IT people in SV.

Artists who can talk to their audience have an easier path to success, and having a lived experience of the customer's environment helps tremendously (even knowing just what fashon is standard in that part of town is useful, wether they follow it or not)

There's also the more mundane part of it that makes proximity a big advantage: for a painter asked to decorate a new appartment, the hurddle will be lower if they live 15min from there, can bring anything from their atelier in a quick trip, or show up when the client comes unscheduled to have a quick look.

A lot of artists will do smallish commission work to make ends meet.

It helps to have ongoing foot traffic. But otherwise Open Studio days can drag in customers into artist ghettos from quite a distance, and into neighborhoods were nobody goes.

Seems rather bold to assume artsy people have such a draw on rich people. It seems more likely that most artist neighborhoods disappear without notice, or that the rich neighborhood would have grown regardless.

We need proper causation links here, maybe one day we will see a study with it. Until then all we have are theories....

To quote Lin-Manuel Miranda,

> There's nothing rich folks love more than going downtown and slummin' it with the poor

So he did what… made a boom bap, cat-in-the-hat rap musical and put it in midtown to save them the drive?

Lin-Manuel Miranda loves letting people think he came from the streets when his Dad is a political consultant that worked for multiple mayors and presidential campaigns and his mom is a psychologist. Lin Manuel went to one of the most prestigious magnet schools in the Upper East Side and then went Wesleyan, which is one of the most prestigious private liberal arts colleges.

He shouldn’t talk about his customers like that.

Guess he should know about that, then.

My criticism of Hamilton is usually that the premise, setting the story of the founding of the US to <gasp>rap</gasp> feels like something an edgy high school teacher would do on a 90's family sitcom.

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