The Lost Lofts

With Rising Rents, Where Will Artists End Up?

For hundreds of years, New York City has served as a home and as inspiration for many artists. With a history of living on the fringes of the city, where rent is cheap and space is open, artists have lived in the places that no one else wanted to. From Soho, Chelsea, the Bowery and to Brooklyn, in abandoned factories and warehouses, artists have taken ownership of the undesirable until those neighborhoods have gentrified with the move-in of the suits-and-stroller crowd.

Affordable artist spaces in Manhattan have faded away, and Brooklyn is now the creative hub for much of the city. Still, even Brooklyn has begun pushing artists further east with its continuously rising rents. East Williamsburg’s 3rd Ward, which opened in 2006, provided its local community with classes and space for artists to create and show their work. On October 11, after seven years of business, the space was closed. “With the costs of running and operating our two locations in Brooklyn and Philadelphia, we are sadly no longer able to remain in business,” said Jason Goodman, in an open letter to the instructors of 3rd Ward.

Large creative business ventures like 3rd Ward and individual artists are struggling to survive. The New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), an organization that serves these artists, said on its website that it’s launched a program to provide affordable workspace in response to what they call “the current economic downturn.” Artists must apply for this high-demand space, which the NYFA said they created to serve “as a temporary stop-gap for artists and organizations to stabilize and garner their own permanent workspace.”  The development of this initiative alone speaks to the hardship that artists face in finding places to work. 3rd Ward’s closing is another indication of how difficult it is to be an artist in an expensive city like New York, where the cost of living is 29.8 percent higher than the national average, according to a report released by Forbes in 2012.

Because of a lack of shared space and the expense of gallery space, some end up showing their work in unconventional spaces. Freddie Wyss, an aspiring artist currently living in Queens, just showed his most recent collection inside the Williamsburg Japanese restaurant Supercore. “My roommate works at the restaurant, so he set me up with it,” Wyss said. “I’m happy to show my stuff anywhere at this point.”

From difficulties in getting affordable show space to maintaining a consistent income, the closing of art studios indicates an increasing difficulty for artists to make ends meet. Some are even wondering if they’ve exhausted their potential. “I’m just starting to wonder if it’s worth it, New York and everything. I could easily make my art somewhere else,” said Wyss.

In 2011, the National Endowment for the Arts released a study stating the average median salary for artists to be $43,230 a year. An unlimited-ride monthly MetroCard added up for an entire year costs $1,344, according to the rates on the MTA’s website. That alone is over three percent of an artist’s yearly income, merely for one of the most inexpensive forms of daily transportation. According to a report released by the New York City Comptroller’s office, titled *Rents Through the Roof*, the percentage of New Yorkers living in unaffordable apartments has increased from 39 percent in 1990 to 49 percent in 2010.

One way that artists in New York attempt to diffuse these costs is through sharing living spaces. This is not only cheaper for artists, but provides them with a sense of community. For people like Angelica Soria, a thirty-year-old tattoo artist and oil painter who lives in a shared loft space in Bushwick, her space provides the platform for such an environment. “I’ve met so many people, it’s a community here,” she said.

Soria’s work features a dark color scheme, loose, abstract brushstrokes, and often contains political commentary. She says her building is an exciting space to be and that there is significantly more room available in her loft than in most New York City apartments.

“Most apartments in Manhattan are closet-sized,” she says. Her own apartment building used to be a knitting factory, but recently began to rent spaces out to new artists moving in to the area.

Despite the sense of community that comes with sharing a loft with multiple artists, some say splitting the rent for the space is becoming difficult, just as it is to pay for rising apartment rents. Isabela Raygoza, a music journalist who lives with Soria, helps ease the burden of the increasing rent in their building. She nostalgically described her loft’s old energy as a “hipster frat-house,” where ideas were shared openly, and now, she says the space has become more competitive and less open and friendly.

“People with more money are bringing a new energy to the building,” Raygoza said. “Before, the building was totally DIY. Now, more people have moved in, and rates have gone up.”

Maintaining a sense of sodality is important to any community, but it’s difficult to do so when financial pressure begins to fracture the neighborhood, determining the types of people who can afford to live there. This competition for overpriced spaces in trendy areas is steadily rearing its head into these once affordable creative communities. But for now, artists like Raygoza, who are seeing the first of the stroller crowd rolling in, are simply trying to avoid being run over.

With reporting by: Sienna Fekete