Two of PianoFight’s new neighbors also merit special attention as models of community arts development. The 950-974 Market project is by far the most ambitious—and a complex story that can only be touched on here. Birthed by the Tenderloin Economic Development Project, and led by former TEDP executive director Elvin Padilla, it envisions a mixed-use, high-rise center on the block of 950-974 Market and Turk Streets, containing a hotel, mixed-income housing and retail businesses as well as the 950 Center for Arts & Education. The latter will include performance spaces, administrative offices, rehearsal space, studios and classrooms. Among the theatre companies currently considering residence at 950 are the Magic, Lorraine Hansberry and Crowded Fire. Choreographer Alonzo King (whose LINES Ballet currently resides in a building at 7th and Market) is also part of the conversation.
Having acquired the property, Padilla and the developer, Group I (Joy Ou, president), are working closely with the city to create (through legislation affecting the city’s planning code) a Special Use District that will incentivize the development of the arts component. The project has received pre-development assistance from major foundations. While still some way from construction (projected to start in 2016), the 950 Project has survived the recent vicissitudes of the real estate market and moved steadily forward, recently unveiling stunning plans developed by Danish architectural firm Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG).
The second venue, the new CounterPULSE space at 80 Turk, comes with a promising story of its own. On Nov. 13, 2013, Mayor Lee announced the formation of CAST, the Community Arts Stabilization Trust. A partnership between NCCLF and the Kenneth Rainin Foundation—a relative newcomer to the local arts funding scene and a major mover-and-shaker, which is providing $5 million in seed money to the venture over the next five years—CAST aims to support the City’s Central Market Economic Strategy by providing long-term security to arts groups in the neighborhood. In its first act, CAST stepped in to purchase two buildings on behalf of two vital arts organizations who will eventually pay it back: the Luggage Store Gallery (at 1007 Market) and CounterPULSE, the latter a sharp and vital dance and performance incubator currently running out its lease on Mission Street near 9th, just a block off mid-Market.
For CounterPULSE, the purchase of the building (another old porn theatre, as it happens) fulfilled many needs in terms of space and long-term security, but the arrangement goes even further.
“Part of the CAST structure is that we agreed to put deed restriction on our property,” explains executive and artistic director Jessica Robinson Love of the momentous deal. “So when we own it outright, which we will in seven years, if we ever want to sell it, we have to sell it at a lower rate to another nonprofit arts organization. I imagine that CounterPULSE will be there forever, but even if we aren’t, 50 years from now there will be this space for risk-taking emerging artists. It’s permanently secured.” The point bears emphasizing. “This doesn’t happen,” Love stresses. “It’s a radical idea that a grassroots arts organization would own its own building and have guaranteed security. None of the other spaces our size is owned. It’s a really big deal.”
Deborah Cullinan, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ new executive director, sits on CAST’s five-member board. As the former longtime executive director of Intersection for the Arts, Cullinan led that organization’s 2011 move into the San Francisco Chronicle Building, on the edge of the mid-Market district, bringing Intersection into the 5M Project, a major development project of Cleveland-based real estate developer Forest City Enterprises that claims to be building “a synergistic community of artists, makers and entrepreneurs” on 4.5 acres at 5th and Mission. She is a persuasive advocate for having arts organizations at the table when it comes to development, and expands on how CAST is approaching its task.
“We believe it’s going to take a textured approach to come up with a new model for how we stabilize arts organizations as cities change,” she says. “It’s going to be a combination of buying buildings and recycling financial resources, and utilizing things like New Markets Tax Credits. It’s also going to probably include us coming up with some kind of master leasing program, and also building capacity in these organizations to manage real estate. The idea is, you put all that together, and you create enough density where it actually makes a difference, where you are actually impacting gentrification. You’re working with artists and organizations that are maybe indigenous, or that are working in community. It’s really about trying to come up with a solution to this thing everyone’s fighting about.”
But bridging for-profit development and nonprofit community-based arts is already proving an ambiguous strategy. As this article was going to press, Intersection announced a drastic downsizing of its activities. As of June 1, the city’s oldest alternative arts space would lay off most of its staff and suspend its own work as well as that of all four resident companies in favor of a fiscal sponsorship and space rental model. Intersection’s board chair Yancy Widmer and interim executive director Arthur Combs said in a press release that the “restructuring” was necessary in light of serious financial challenges.
In her office at CounterPULSE, Love maintains a skeptical view of the more inflated rhetoric around arts-based development. Having moved CounterPULSE to Mission Street in 2005 after its former incarnation, 848 Community Space, was priced out of the gentrifying Western Addition, she remembers sitting in this very room listening to someone relate a plan to revitalize mid-Market. “At that time it was a bunch of developers who wanted to basically sell billboards and make it like Times Square,” she recalls. “That was just one of the many iterations of this. It’s been a long time coming.”
Still, CAST is something else, a model for maintaining community-based arts in an otherwise hostile real estate market. “We can go to other organizations, and other cities, and say, ‘Look, there is a way to preserve affordability, and this is how you can do it,’” explains Love, who says she will be consulting with CAST on its future projects. “I’m a systems thinker,” she adds. “I love what I produce in my theatre, but it’s 15,000 people a year. I have my sights set on a much bigger impact.”
Having worked hard to secure a seemingly permanent space amid a wildly volatile landscape, Love expresses measured confidence about the possibilities for community arts development in mid-Market and beyond.
“Being part of this has made me so much more optimistic about the future of San Francisco than I would be otherwise,” she says. “A lot of my friends are living in that anger and frustration [over gentrification]. I have lots of critiques of how this change is happening—but also a lot more hope.”
She pauses before adding a crucial caveat. “But if we can’t also solve affordable housing, and keep artists living in this city,” she warns, “it will be for naught.”
San Francisco-based arts journalist Robert Avila writes regularly for this magazine.
