Oakland Fire Underscores Urgent Need for Legit Art Spaces, Nonprofit Leaders Say

Amid shock in the Bay Area after a fire killed more than 35 people in an Oakland warehouse this weekend, nonprofit leaders who work in the arts were not surprised to learn that the building served as a makeshift, illegal home and work space for local artists unable to afford rent elsewhere.

In fact, just hours before the building was engulfed by flames Friday, the city of Oakland and two foundations in the region sent out an email saying they were readying a new grant opportunity to aid local artists and cultural organizations being displaced by soaring rents.

The $1.7 million fund, paid for by the Kenneth Rainin and the William and Flora Hewlett foundations, had been in the works for about a year, said Shelley Trott, director of arts strategy and ventures for the Rainin Foundation. The deadly fire, which started late Friday during a party and tore through the building, “does lend an urgency” to the effort, she said. The warehouse was not zoned by the city as a residence and had been under investigation for code violations.

It’s an urgency felt far beyond Oakland. Displacement of artists and arts nonprofits has plagued major cultural outposts like New York and San Francisco for decades, said Janet Brown, president of Grantmakers in the Arts, and the problem has spread as residential and commercial rents spike in other metropolitan areas.

“They’re both putting artists and art organizations in extreme states of duress,” said Jim Kelly, executive director at 4 Culture, a public development authority that supports cultural projects in Seattle and King County, Wash.

Driving Revitalization

Economic displacement is not a problem unique to artists, leaders say. They are just one of the many groups of people who suffer from an insufficient supply of low- and moderately priced housing.

“It’s not really an artist-housing problem, it’s an affordable-housing problem,” Mr. Kelly said. “Affordable housing affects everyone.”

But there is a certain irony in gentrification forcing artists, galleries, concert venues, and theaters out of neighborhoods they helped make “more attractive and more interesting,” Ms. Brown said.

“These pop-ups, almost squatters’ spaces, come up in distressed neighborhoods ripe for revitalization,” said Ruby Harper, director of local arts services for Americans for the Arts. “Artists tend to lead revitalization and are the first ones to get pushed out.”

Several nonprofits are tackling this issue across the country. One is Artspace, a national organization that develops affordable homes and studios for artists. The nonprofit, which now has properties in two dozen states and Washington, D.C., started its real-estate work more than 30 years ago to provide housing to artists illegally squatting in warehouses in St. Paul, Minn.

When Artspace proposed its first apartment project, “it was a real uphill battle to convince city leaders that this was a positive thing,” said Melodie Bahan, the organization’s vice president of communications. Today, urban leaders request the group’s help, she said: “They understand that artists are a contributing factor to growth, livability, and safety in neighborhoods.”

Philanthropy can help alleviate the problem of displacement by educating arts organizations about how to take advantage of tax credits and by creating nontraditional funding structures that enable groups to create permanent studios and galleries, Ms. Harper said.

Safer Solutions

That’s part of the plan in Oakland, where the new grant money will provide technical and financial support to arts organizations seeking to invest in affordable, permanent space. Through the nonprofit Community Arts Stabilization Trust, organizations will be eligible for grants of up to $75,000. Previously, CAST, as the trust is known, successfully secured two buildings to house community arts programs in San Francisco.

Although the new program is designed to help arts nonprofits — not individual artists — find homes, leaders believe doing the former will ease the burden on the latter.

“We’re going to listen closely and try to adapt elements of the program that serve as many arts organizations as possible in a meaningful way,” said Moy Eng, executive director of CAST. “One hopes that, as we’ve done before through our work with a variety of nonprofit organizations and fiscal sponsors, we’ll be able to reach every artist in that way.”

Arts-nonprofit leaders urged officials to summon the political will and funding to enable artists to live and work in cities with high costs of living. Otherwise, Ms. Bahan warned, “those who can’t leave will find solutions that are unsafe and lead to these kinds of tragic events.”