[mulmen]

Hmm, when I hear “artist housing” I always assumed they meant “interesting people who make music and maybe paint”. But “interesting” is too subjective to be real. Freestyle watercolor is no foundation of an economy.

We should not judge other humans by their ability to make rent. Some of my best friends struggle to do that.

But for a city making rent is all that really matters. They don’t care if you literally create art. They care if you buy coffee and pay sales tax.

So, do city planners look at “artists” as a revenue stream?

This is the same demographic that stereotypically spends the better part of a million bucks on an undergraduate education with no expectation of return.

Does “artist” mean “liberal artist”? As in “willing and able to buy in to and comply with a middle class lifestyle?”

[roughly]

There's always a funny tension on the city trying to draw in artists to make a downtown area more palatable, too, in that good artists and good art is often intended as a challenge to the status quo - the goal is to make people uncomfortable.

I say this as a Berkeley-living lefty: the left often seems to espouse policies whose practical outcomes far exceed their actual appetite for discomfort or willingness to engage with real diversity.

(Standard HN disclaimer: if the above doesn't apply to you, it doesn't apply to you - but look me in the eye and tell me you don't know what I'm talking about.)

[noirbot]

This does strike me as an innate tension to all of this. I grew up in a really diverse neighborhood, and at this point, as a decently successful person, if I moved back into that neighborhood, folks at the orgs I used to volunteer with would probably decry me as gentrifying the area. I've seen this with my own family, who have lived in the neighborhood for decades, but because it's now a majority minority neighborhood, they're seen with skepticism, even by people who moved there recently and are often more well-off than them.

I'm unsure at this point if I'm supposed to want to live in a diverse area, or if doing so would mean I'm ruining the area and driving out the diversity. What is the amount I'm supposed to want to engage in another culture without imposing on an "authentic" space for that community or appropriating it. It's a really tight line to walk.

Is it reasonable to try to have a community of people who make 100k+, and people who think it's generally unhealthy for anyone to make that much money?

[mulmen]

I suspect the art itself is a red herring. When a city planner says "artist" what do they mean?

[noirbot]

Isn't the classic example of this something like NYC's Hells Kitchen or East Village or Meatpacking District that was, at some point, the cheap neighborhood that artists and musicians could live in on their irregular low salaries, but then when some of them inevitably get famous, that mystique turns it from the bad/cheap part of town into the hip part of town that rich people go to for underground clubs and wild art shows, and in 10 years none of those people that made the area cool still live there because it's now the most expensive place in the city.

I think city marketers see "artist" in the same way that a nightclub sees women, but with less power or follow through on giving them anything free that would attract or keep them there to attract the other people.

Everyone wants to live in a city with good live music _and_ listen to Spotify all day in their 1k/month apartment.

[seanmcdirmid]

Artist housing usually happens accidentally. Like some city overbuilds and suffers a real estate crash, or Detroit. It could also be a shutdown factory complex that doesn’t make for very good housing but works for artists (like 798 in Beijing)…until it becomes popular enough to gentrify and prices the artists out again.

[lukas099]

Is Detroit currently an artist city? It makes sense because of what you said, but I just haven't heard that before.

[seanmcdirmid]

You can definitely find articles on the web that think so, eg https://i-d.vice.com/en/article/9ke5p7/why-artists-are-movin...

Starving artists thrive anywhere that has cheap rent and some economy to survive with a day job.

[lukas099]

> So, do city planners look at “artists” as a revenue stream?

Absolutely, especially if you include tourism, which you should. Look at Asheville, NC.