Artist spaces, from Boston to Lowell, are disappearing in Massachusetts. Advocates estimate more than 2 million square feet of artist studio, rehearsal and production space have been lost in Greater Boston over the last decade.
Somerville, a longtime haven for artists, wants to change that by buying and protecting spaces for artists to live and work through a land trust. This would allow the city to buy properties to prevent displacement.
Right now, municipalities cannot legally establish a trust by right, WBUR reported last week, and while arts advocates are pushing for legislation to loosen restrictions, that could take years.
But nonprofits, like the Arts & Business Council of Greater Boston, can create these kinds of trusts.
Executive Director Jim Grace runs the organization’s creative land trust. He said they’re needed solutions, as there are steep challenges facing artists in an expensive state with high rental prices and a housing shortage.
“We’re gonna continue to lose space,” he said. “The forces of gentrification, increased prices are never really gonna slow down in that context.”
He pointed out that space is “imperative” for many art forms.
“If there’s no space to make art,” he said, “it is going to impact the entire ecosystem of the arts.”
Grace discussed how his trust works and what ways communities can be thinking about protecting creative spaces.
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
On why his organization is building a creative land trust…
“We’ve always been an art service organization. We’ve been around for almost 40 years. We basically started as a legal service organization, so we run volunteer lawyers for the arts and still do.
“In many ways, our entry point into this world of preservation of artist space was our experience in seeing it all go away. We’re the first call when artists get displaced. We’re kind of the ambulance drivers for the arts. We always see the crash after. So how do we get in front of that? How do we get ahead and start thinking more of a systems approach?”
On how the creative land trust model works…
“At its core, it’s really the preservation of community space, of third spaces, and these are really kind of lending on the idea of a traditional land trust, which we’ve had in Boston and New England for 200-plus years … so we’re not technically a developer. We’re not looking for empty buildings, per se, to develop them like a traditional landlord would. We’re not buying land and doing new construction.
“We are looking to preserve existing community spaces that are focused on where art is made, not simply where it’s seen.”
On what he learned from a worldwide conference of other creative land trust experts last month…
“There’s an interesting group called the Music Venue Trust in England, and they have a way in which you can kind of donate into this kind of parent trust, and that parent trust then goes out and acquires properties.
“That is in line with our thinking, too. We definitely wanna create our own fund … because that would allow people to donate into a fund, then for us to be able to accumulate that money, and then as properties come up for sale or at risk of loss, then we can quickly respond.
Part of the issue is the speed at which — not just us but that was a theme around the world, too – you must be able to respond. And without ready access to capital, that speed is just slowed down. I can’t compete with a for-profit developer if I’m going head-to-head on a property. So these mechanisms, these other tools that other groups are using, we definitely wanna implement.”
On other ways he thinks we can save or protect creative spaces…
“You’re seeing the conversion of spaces … maybe smaller liberal arts schools, as you see them start to close, there’s incredible opportunities for those spaces to become creative spaces. They already are in many cases. So I think you’re gonna see a movement for the repurposing of some of those spaces.
“Cities and towns, they have old armories, schools that are being decommissioned. Those are some of the best places to kind of recenter arts and culture in a community, in previously existing community spaces. …
“This is the very beginning of the creative space kind of movement, and I think the more that owners and cities and towns begin to support this work, the more opportunities there will be. … . I think there’s an opportunity to partner with large developers as they create new spaces.”
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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