On March 30 lease-termination notices arrived on the doorsteps of the two dozen people still living in the Tree Studios Building, the State Street complex that’s been home to artists for 107 years–longer than any other building in the country. The storefronts got the boot too. A few days later title to the Medinah Temple and Tree Studios complex, which had been owned by the Shriners fraternal organization since 1956, passed to a private investor group as part of a city-brokered $63.5-million deal that will save little more than the buildings’ skins. The Moorish-revival temple will house a four-level Bloomingdale’s home-furnishings store, and the adjacent Tree Studios will be rehabbed and opened to shops and arts-related businesses. The plan also calls for artists’ studios where people can work and perhaps live; a quarter of the work spaces are to be offered at below-market rents, but former residents fear that artists won’t be able to afford them.
She and other artists are disturbed that the city has done so little to stop the talent drain. “Chicago is home to the third-largest population of professional artists in the United States,” says Laura Weathered, executive director of Near Northwest Arts Council, an artists’ advocacy and resource organization that’s been on the front line of artists’ space issues for 15 years. “Yet it has the dubious distinction of being the largest city that lacks a public policy for artists’ housing. Cities with smaller artist populations have established affordable artist-housing programs linked with economic development and tourism.”
Some people hung on to the vision they’d had, but there was no longer a broad public effort. Earlier that year Weathered had helped found the Near Northwest Arts Council to promote local artists’ activities out of an office in Wicker Park, but she knew that the city had never decided on any policies that would encourage the creation of affordable art spaces and that gentrification was rapidly becoming a threat. She realized that her organization had to shift its focus. “We had to protect our own interests and develop our own project as an example,” she says. “It seemed, from our perspective, that affordable ownership was the issue. All low-income people are vulnerable to developers and displacement until you can buy some stability.”
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Well aware of the pressures on landlords, Weathered and the members of NNWAC wanted to create a model for affordable artists’ housing that the residents would have more control over. In 1991 they formed an advisory board made up of design, legal, affordable-housing, and community-development experts. They also got a grant from the city’s Department of Planning to conduct a feasibility study, and they used some of the money to send several board members to tour projects in other cities, including the Saint Paul facilities of Artspace Projects, which now creates and manages artists’ buildings all over the country. The board soon realized that Artspace didn’t offer quite the right model for their project, mostly because it didn’t offer equity to tenants. “We came back firmly believing that artists needed to own and to be part of making the decisions about how the space should be designed, how it should be used, and who it should serve,” says Weathered. In the end, they decided on a co-op, the Acme Artists Housing Cooperative.
The Acme board gradually found people who were willing to put up $3,000 for a share in the equity, and they secured state and federal predevelopment grants. They met with bankers and bid on buildings, mostly on the near northwest side, where many of the city’s artists lived. “But the loft-conversion thing was really taking off,” says Weathered. “We didn’t have a lot of cash–and there weren’t any financial resources for co-ops. It was a very competitive market. All a seller had to do was say, ‘A bunch of artists are looking at a building,’ and that made it even more valuable for another developer.”
Koenen, who was made the point person on artists’ housing, told the group about the work being done by Artspace, the developer Acme members had visited in 1991. Artspace had been founded in 1979 as a nonprofit advocate for the space needs of artists who were being forced out of Minneapolis’s historic warehouse district by rising rents. The organization soon realized that just running a referral service didn’t protect artists from gentrification, and by the late 1980s it had begun developing its own projects. At the invitation of Saint Paul city officials, it turned three warehouses into live-work buildings, one of which was intended exclusively for families. The city made interest-free loans to Artspace to acquire the buildings, on the condition that if they were ever sold to anyone besides the artists, the interest would come due–a condition that makes it unlikely that anyone else could ever afford to buy the buildings. Since then, Artspace has developed projects–all in unused or underutilized historic buildings, including schools–in Duluth, Pittsburgh, Portland, Galveston, and Reno. It’s now working on projects in Seattle; Houston; Fort Lauderdale; Poughkeepsie; Bridgeport; Hollywood, Florida; and Burnsville and Fergus Falls, both in Minnesota. Marketing director Sarah Parker says it gets 20 calls a week from city officials, arts organizations, and community-development agencies around the country.
Koenen accepted surveys long after the deadline had passed, and she says the 23 percent response rate–a tad over 1,000 artists–was adequate. The preliminary results were released last November. The west side, where Roentgen is located, didn’t register as one of the “preferred areas for artist live/work development”; 63 percent of the artists who responded preferred the “near north.” East Garfield’s zip code–60624–didn’t show up as one of the “top zip codes” where artists either lived or had studios; 60622–an area that includes Wicker Park, Ukrainian Village, and Humboldt Park–led in both categories. Fifty-six percent of the respondents rented living space; 49 percent didn’t have a separate studio work space. Sixty percent said they would “consider relocating to an artist live/work development in Chicago”; 35 percent said they wouldn’t. The statistic that most surprised Koenen was that 71 percent wanted to own single-family homes. She doesn’t think the task force can make that preference a priority, explaining that the city “already has an extensive array of affordable-housing programs, and many artists would qualify.”
