Project "Row Houses"

Exerpt from New Your Times.

ON a strangely balmy late autumn afternoon, while the art world busied itself in Miami with beachfront reservations and limo drivers, Rick Lowe was, as he generally is, on Holman Street in southeast Houston’s predominantly black Third Ward, greeting another out-of-towner.

In the gloaming, decrepit houses and weedy lots dotted some surrounding blocks, on the edges of which were new double-garage brick homes — signs of encroaching gentrification, an unwanted side effect of Mr. Lowe’s work.

Although it’s hard to tell at a glance, this stretch of Holman may be the most impressive and visionary public art project in the country — a project that is miles away, geographically and philosophically, from Chelsea and Art Basel and the whole money-besotted paper-thin art scene.

Mr. Lowe, a lanky, amiable, remarkably youthful-looking 45-year-old artist from Alabama, moved to Houston 21 years ago and lives here in the Third Ward, where he founded Project Row Houses. In 1990, “a group of high school students came over to my studio,” he recalled. “I was doing big, billboard-size paintings and cutout sculptures dealing with social issues, and one of the students told me that, sure, the work reflected what was going on in his community, but it wasn’t what the community needed. If I was an artist, he said, why didn’t I come up with some kind of creative solution to issues instead of just telling people like him what they already knew. That was the defining moment that pushed me out of the studio.”

He tried to think afresh what it meant to be a truly political artist, beyond devising the familiar agitprop, gallery decoration and plop-art-style public sculpture. He considered what the German artist Joseph Beuys once described as “the enlarged conception of Art,” which includes, as Beuys put it, “every human action.” Life itself might be a work of art, Mr. Lowe realized: art can be the way people live.

And the Third Ward could be his canvas. He was inspired by John Biggers, the late African-American muralist who painted black neighborhoods of shotgun houses like the ones on Holman Street and showed them to be places of pride and community, not poverty and crime. “It hit me,” Mr. Lowe recalled, “that we should find an area like the one that Biggers painted that was historically significant and bring it to life.”

Behind him as he spoke, a phalanx of 22 gleaming shotgun houses stretched across two blocks. Built in 1930 as tenant shacks, derelict by the early ’90s, they were bought by Mr. Lowe and a coalition of artists and others. To Mr. Lowe they were like “found objects.”

Seed money came from the National Endowment for the Arts and from the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation. The director of the Menil Collection gave his staff Mondays off to help renovate. Chevron redid the outside of a dozen buildings. Hundreds of volunteers pitched in to clear trash and sweep up used needles, hang wallboard and fortify porches. A local church adopted a house, and so did people and families from the neighborhood.

Fruitvale: Challanged TOD

from New Urban News

Fruitvale Village in Oakland, California, has become a reluctant symbol of the difficulties that transit-oriented development (TOD) can encounter.

Three years after the $100 million collection of apartments, retail, and community and professional services opened next to a Bay Area Rapid Transit station in the Fruitvale neighborhood, four of its 23 retail spaces remain empty. Slowness in filling the stores has been a source of frustration for the Unity Council, which sponsored the project.

The slowness has given developers and transit specialists yet another case to cite when cautioning about putting large volumes of retail space in TOD projects — at least in unproven locations. Dan Parolek, a principal at Opticos Design in Berkeley, says a developer at the Pleasant Hill BART station in Contra Costa County tried to use the example of Fruitvale “as the reason why they should do very little retail within the project plan.”

Fruitvale’s problems do not seem insurmountable — the vacancies are now on the way to being filled, says Jeff Pace, Unity Council’s vice president of finance and business opportunities. But they have sparked discussion about how much spending commuters can be counted on to do in TOD projects. They have also highlighted the need for effective parking strategies.

Pace, who joined Unity Council in 2004, after the retail problems emerged, says Fruitvale Village has been a huge success in most respects. The 3.7-acre development is now a vital center for its predominantly Latino section of Oakland. The Village’s 114,000 square feet of office, professional, and community space include a public library, a Head Start program, a community-based medical clinic, a children’s counseling clinic, and a senior center, as well as the Council’s headquarters. The project’s 47 apartments, ten of them designated “affordable,” rented quickly and have remained in demand.

Jeff Ordway, manager of property development for BART, credits the Council with helping to strengthen International Boulevard, an old commercial corridor nearby. Retail buildings on International “went from 40 percent vacancy in 2000 to less than 5 percent in 2004,” he notes.The one blot on Fruitvale’s achievement is the tortoise-like progress in filling the 40,000 square feet of retail. Some observers fault the design, pointing out that the stores are arranged along a pedestrian plaza — one that the station’s 6,500 daily commuters have no need to traverse. BART more or less mandated that the main commuter parking garage be built where it would create a short and direct route between commuters’ cars and the station, says Pace, noting, “Pedestrians getting out of their cars have no natural incentive to walk through the retail.”

Parolek says that placing the retail along a pedestrian-only plaza and then converting a city street between the plaza and International Boulevard into a pedestrian-only passage probably harmed the retail by making it harder for motorists to become familiar with the Village’s offerings.

Unity Council, like many nonprofit organizations with a social mission, was inexperienced at managing a retail center, and made mistakes in signing up merchants. National retailers were turned away while independent local merchants were favored. A locals-first policy can, of course, enhance local character. In Fruitvale, though, it led to selecting some merchants who were inexperienced and undercapitalized — unable to survive when pedestrian traffic fell short of expectations. “We turned away Starbucks twice,” says Pace. “That’s a really stupid thing to do.”

The Council did not obtain adequate legal protections. Its standard lease lacked a “going dark” clause, which would have stipulated that if a tenant did not get its business operating by a certain date, the agreement would terminate. “We have someone who has been paying rent for 21 months and is still not open,” Pace acknowledges. That business is now expected to open late this year. Leases contained no ban on retailers having other locations close by. “A record store had one store a block and a half away; they couldn’t make them both work,” says Pace, who is articulate and candid on what to do and what not to do.

FINDING REMEDIES
The Council has sharpened its leasing strategy in the past two years, and is now giving people more reasons for exploring the plaza. “We’ve been running a farmers’ market right in front of the BART patrons,” Pace says. “Our plan is to extend it through the main Fruitvale plaza.” In the summer, an outdoor cinema operates on Friday evenings in the plaza. “First Thursdays,” an event featuring food and mariachi music, operated until early October and will return in the spring.

The Council has introduced seating, better lighting, and other improvements to the passage from the plaza to International Boulevard. A public market will soon occupy one of the buildings along the passage, and there will be places for permanent outdoor stalls as well as stalls that can be assembled and disassembled each day, Pace says. Small merchants will sell arts and crafts and handmade foods such as tortillas.

At the end of October, negotiations were under way to fill the plaza’s four remaining vacancies. “We think we’re really turning the corner,” he says. Architect Ernesto Vasquez, a principal in McLarand, Vasquez, Emsiek & Partners, involved in the project for years, says Fruitvale Village is becoming a destination for people seeking Latino products and services. He urges developers: “Be patient; you need to avoid being rushed into getting tenants, and not getting the right tenants.” Delaying the retail component of a project or building it in phases may reduce the risk of its failing. Vasquez thinks conditions at Fruitvale will improve when the project’s second phase, containing approximately 300 to 450 housing units, is built.

“Retail is the Achilles’ heel of TODs,” warns Richard Cervero, a transportation specialist who teaches at Berkeley. “If not done right, it can really stigmatize a development as a loser.” Richard Willson, a Cal Poly Pomona planning professor who has advised BART on parking policy, says, “Among developers, I find a bit of naiveté about how people use transit facilities.” They often don’t realize that many commuters rush through, not buying much, Willson says. Ordway says commuters generally constitute a tertiary market — less important than the people who live in the surrounding community and individuals who live or work in the project area.Ordway says developers would be wise to study a TOD project that Calthorpe Associates was involved in planning next to a BART station in Richmond, north of Berkeley. There, buildings along a pathway to the station were constructed so they could start as wholly residential and be converted to live/work — with street-level offices or retail — after the location proves itself.

RECONSIDERING PARKING
BART has abandoned its policy of providing free parking at many of its East Bay stations. BART has also modified its requirement that when parking lots at a station are built upon, an equal number of new parking spaces must be provided, typically in garages or decks. The changes bode well for future TOD, by eliminating major financial hurdles.

Patrick Siegman at Nelson\Nygaard consultants in San Francisco, says the next step should be the establishment, by municipalities, of “parking benefit districts” in neighborhoods around transit stations. Commuters could pay to use designated on-street spaces. The revenue would be devoted to public improvements desired by the neighborhood, such as better sidewalks, lighting, and landscaping. “At $4 each for 250 cars, you’d have $1,000 a day in revenue to spruce up the neighborhood,” Siegman calculates. Parking benefit districts are being considered at two Oakland stations, Ordway says.Despite challenges, TOD is gaining momentum. On land owned by BART, nearly $2 billion of capital has already been invested in TOD or is in process or in negotiations, according to Ordway. At Pleasant Hill, which contains substantial housing and employment, approximately 40,000 square feet of space is expected to be available for retail. “It’s not just pure retail,” Parolek emphasizes. “It’s allowed to be used for professional services such as a dentist or optometrist.”

Bohemian today, high-rent tomorrow

Excerpts from BusinessWeek online By Maya Roney

Want to know where a great place to invest in real estate will be five or 10 years from now? Look at where artists are living now.

Sociologists and policymakers have long been touting art and culture as the cure-all to economically depressed neighborhoods, cities, and regions. The reason? It has been proven that artists—defined as self-employed visual artists, actors, musicians, writers, etc.—can stimulate local economies in a number of ways.

Artists are often an early sign of neighborhood gentrification. "Artists are the advance guard of what's hip and cool," says Bert Sperling, founder and president of Portland (Ore.)-based Sperling's Best Places and compiler of BusinessWeek.com's list of the Best Places for Artists in America.

Creativity Leads to Growth
Artists, because of their typically lower incomes, usually need to seek out less expensive, developing neighborhoods where they can afford the rent. But because of their creativity they are able to fix up these areas, eventually attracting hip boutiques, galleries, and restaurants. Not all artists are starving. While some are able to achieve success writing, acting, painting, or dancing, others get tired of scraping by as waiters or bartenders and sometimes apply their abilities in more entrepreneurial ways.

Anne Markusen, an economist and professor at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs and a leading researcher on the effects of the arts on regional economics, once profiled an abstract painter whose work is now displayed on ceilings and in MRI machines in hospitals across the country. In Markusen's research, artists have also been found to stimulate innovation on the part of their suppliers. A painter may need a certain type of frame that is not manufactured, forcing the frame maker to create a new design that happens to also work well for other artists.

But Markusen also maintains that artists bring more than culture to a community. "Businesses don't often understand the extent to which art affects them," Markusen says. "[Artists] are just as important as science and technology companies."

Nonarts businesses also use artist contractors to improve product design, help with marketing, or even use dramatic theory to solve employee relationship issues. Being a cultural center also helps local businesses attract employees who want to be able to regularly go to the ballet or the theater, hear authors read from their latest books, or attend art gallery openings.

Follow the Money
Due to the individual nature and economics of their work, artists are also some of the most itinerant professionals out there. When relocating, they often look for cities and towns that already have high concentrations of artists and a young, racially and ethnically diverse population. The presence of a nurturing art community in the form of art societies and centers is also essential, especially to young artists.

A low cost of living is important, but many artists make financial sacrifices to live near an art-rich urban center or live in a cheaper neighborhood. Few struggling artists can afford to live in neighborhoods like New York's SoHo and Greenwich Village, or even Williamsburg, which once were artistic havens before attracting wealthier residents. Now you are more likely to find New York-based artists in the Bronx, Brooklyn, or even Philadelphia.

In addition to the presence of like-minded individuals, proximity to wealth is also important. The fact of the matter is that artists can seldom earn a living, let alone become rich, selling to other artists. They need wealthy benefactors to buy their paintings or support their local symphony, which explains why each of the places in the U.S. that we found to be the best for artists are in or located near centers of wealth. Los Angeles, No. 1 on our list, is most commonly associated with the film industry. While the city provides great opportunities for actors and directors, there are equally rich prospects for musicians, artists, writers, and dancers. Of course, the majority of these people can't afford to live in Beverly Hills—at least not until they get their big break—and instead opt for more affordable digs in areas like Echo Park.