Can Commercial Real Estate Keep Propping Up Artists?
When the developer David Walentas started buying old warehouses and factories along the Brooklyn waterfront in the 1980s, the tenants included artists. He let some stay at low rates, even as he became the biggest landlord in the neighborhood that would eventually be named Dumbo. Some even paid rent with paintings. “We want to maintain artists in the neighborhood,” Walentas said in 2002. And when asked whether he planned to kick them out, he explained: “I don’t need the money.” But since 2020, the commercial real-estate market that propped up this generosity has fizzled out, and the Walentas family is raising rents on some of the artists who once gave the neighborhood its marketing edge.
On Thursday, the painter Sharon Butler was packing up her third-floor studio at 20 Jay Street, folding the cardboard tabs on bankers’ boxes and carefully filling them up with what she calls her “archive” — decades of artist catalogues, some marked with personal notes from friends, colleagues, and students who participated in the arts organization she founded in 2007, Two Coats of Paint. Butler first moved into a Two Trees building in 2014, when the family company created what it called the Cultural Space Subsidy. The program asked artists and nonprofits to submit portfolios to win a three-year lease for studio space and gave an initial cohort of 17 artists and nonprofits studios for $1 per square foot per month, a price Butler described as “unheard of, impossible” and which she estimated has saved her about $250,000 over a decade. “I was really lucky to get this place,” she says. Like a few other artists who joined, she never moved out — instead reapplying without issue and getting one year tacked onto their lease in 2020. But this spring, the cohort got hard news. No one was being renewed, and anyone who wanted to stay had one option: Negotiate with a commercial broker, who quoted them rates between $2 and $3 a square foot, or double or triple their rent. That might have been below market for Dumbo, but it was tough to face for artists: A 1,000-square-foot studio that might have cost $1,000 per month plus $300 in taxes and fees a month was suddenly as expensive as a one-bedroom apartment. Artists who join the program in January will apparently be charged $1.50 per square foot per month — or $1,500 for that 1,000-square-foot studio.