Got this in my inbox today from my good friend in Kingston, NY. Funny because it was written in Williamsburg, Brooklyn by the director of the Galapagos Art Space.

Recently
two developers walked into the Brooklyn apartment of my friend and told
him he had nothing to worry about – they weren’t going to tear down the
building he was living in for at least another year. My friend, a
filmmaker, thinks he can’t possibly afford to stay in New York, and
he’s not alone.

The canaries in New
York City’s real estate gold mine – the emerging arts – are no longer
talking about the next show they hope to land, they’re talking about
the next city they think they can land in once their current lease runs
out.

But for many that lease on life
has already run out. Affordable habitat in the cultural ecosystem is
becoming hard to find. For everyone.

Within the next few months, ten off-Broadway theaters will  permanently close *.

The
price of real estate has risen so far that, from a cultural point of
view, in three to five years we’ll be experiencing a fundamentally
different idea of what it means to live in New York City and be a New
Yorker. City Hall must find ways to incentivize rebuilding the emerging
arts infrastructure that’s evaporating in our white-hot real estate
market, or it won’t be built.

---

The  past:

For  the last fifty years the emerging arts in New    York City have attracted the one smartest kid from  everywhere.
These young cultural migrants scratched out a two or three-day-a-week
freelance career, lived cheaply and brazenly and learned the street
smarts that would one day transform their art or adopted industry. Not
everyone who begins as an artist ends up with a career as an artist,
and the result for New York City has been a significant contribution
from the arts to the culture of aggressive and intelligent management
that helped make New York the leader in the arts, finance and media
industries.

The present:

In
a New York too expensive to incubate young artists many of these best
young minds will fly right past our exploding real-estate market and
rezoned artistic neighborhoods to cultivate and grow cultural and
economic opportunities in other, less expensive cities. It’s important
to remember that these young artists have no loyalty to New York;
they’re from places like Des Moines after all.

Many
in New York City believe that the vital underground of emerging
artists’ environments is here to stay ‘just because’. This is wrong. New York doesn’t have to be
the cultural capital of the emerging arts, or of the financial or the
media industries for that matter, New York needs to continue to earn
its place and it can easily price itself out of that role **. London is
only one of many capable cities who are very busy trying to beat us at
our best industries.

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(To read about our need to  expand Galapagos Art Space click here)

       

The Future:

       

As
more and more cities begin to understand the advantage they can place
in their populations by proactively attracting the emerging arts and
either establishing or buttressing their own creative economies, the
bidding for our young cultural participants will begin.

       

Smart
cities will soon make New York based artists offers they’d be foolish
to refuse, and cities like (gasp!) Philadelphia, Berlin, Pittsburg or
London will get the most adventurous of them – the ones our meritocracy would obviously miss the most – if we  can’t find effective ways to continue pooling them here, in our city.

       

Maybe
one can’t live and work speaking only English in a city like Berlin
this year, but in 5 to 7 years it will be possible. English is fast
becoming the lingua franca of cultural Europe and the danger for New
York is that if cities like Berlin or Amsterdam can by policy one day
show that they want our young artists more than we, they’ll get them if
we can’t be either relevant in opportunity or affordable enough to pool
them here. And we must pool them here. If we can’t find ways to continue incubating young artists in our city  then our entire cultural ecosystem begins to calcify.

       

 

       

What we need to do:

       

The
cost of real estate is crushing the emerging arts. We’re about to see a
huge exodus of emerging artists leaving new York for other, less
expensive cities. To even think about retaining them we have to
incentivize the creation of opportunity at the emergent level. And we
have to create lots of it.
          Why?

       

If
emerging artists and the best young cultural thinkers can’t see
themselves possibly affording to live here then we’d better find ways
to make them think they can’t possibly afford to live anywhere else.

       

In
the end only one-thing matters: good artists and the best young
cultural thinkers follow ideas, and ideas flourish when and where there
is opportunity to realize them. .

       

No one
can roll back the cost of real estate or prevent small performance
spaces from becoming chic little clothing stores, but to create so much
opportunity in this real estate climate that we remain an effective
cultural capital and not simply a wonderful museum city where art isn’t
made, there are a number of questions that must be asked.

       

What can our City  government do?
          What can the  largest cultural institutions do?
          What can the  foundation and funding community do?
          What can the business community do?
        What can our next  Governor do?
        What can you, the audience, do?

       

Robert Elmes
          Director, Galapagos Art  Space