Note to Self: If you can’t get promised arts district legislation passed or implement a local tax-capture finance district, get out of the way and let four brilliant women make magic happen.  In this case, the magic is the Magic Theater, which is coming to Turk Street as part of the 950 Market Street project.

This wonderful new addition to the Tenderloin’s local arts ecosystem was made possible by Loretta Greco, Magic Theater’s Artistic Director; Jaimie Mayer, Magic Theater’s interim Managing Director; Ellen Richard, former executive director at Magic and A.C.T., and Joy Ou, President of Group i and trustee at the venerable San Francisco Arts Institute and Global Heritage Fund.  After several years of a great TL arts and education coalition’s struggle for an arts presence at the site I can’t think of a more fitting name for our new neighbor than Magic. Group i and the Magic worked hard on crafting a community benefits program. The arts & eds groups are reuniting this week to celebrate the good news and welcome their soon-to-be new neighbor. 

The idea of 950 arts on the south side and a renovated 80 Turk Street – the new home of CounterPulse – directly across on the north side, was always thought of as a powerful way to draw lots of diverse people traffic to a long-devastated and particularly problematic block in the Tenderloin.  I’ve spent a lot of time on Turk Street over the past 7 years, have seen a lot of human misery and have listened to many stories.  Perhaps most memorable were tearful testimonies from Dalt Hotel residents about how difficult life on the block has been.  The people traffic 950 will bring, especially now with the addition of the Magic, will help the many who for years have felt trapped by fear and dread of walking out their front door.

Equally important, in my admittedly biased opinion, will be the powerful new addition to the built arts and education environment that our youth will know, feel at home in, be a part of, in their neighborhood.  Some day-trippers with a M – F, 9 – 5 understanding of the TL have difficulty appreciating what this means, but our youth and families who spend 24/7 in the ‘hood understand.

By the way, congratulations to all those who worked to make the Bayview Opera House possible. Fantastic.  It bears repeating: Developing bridge-building cultural resources in our neighborhoods is the ultimate creative placemaking.

But let’s not celebrate just yet. If you value the arts, and think the arts merit equal consideration as a valuable community benefit – a position that still comes under attack by those who see the arts as superfluous to the needs of poor people – then you should strongly consider signing-on as a supporter of the 950 project.

Please contact the Magic and Group i to support this important project.  For more information please contact Jessica Berg: jberg@bergdavis.com.

This is a technical report assessing the economics of the 950 Project as a real estate development. It outlines the public subsidies necessary and various strategies to achieve them.  The analysis and conclusions are based on industry standard affordable space economics, something the city of San Francisco chooses to ignore.  The choice to ignore this report’s recommendations, specifically and generally, resulted in 950’s demise and the city’s now famous scarcity of protected, affordable space.

This report on the economics of providing affordable arts space was also withheld – by the mayor’s office – from the city’s two arts departments: Grants for the Arts and the SF Arts Commission.

Keyser Marston arts space economics report

The wonderful ensemble of the Tenderloin Arts Advisory & Friends, hosted by our friends at LINES Ballet.  January, 2015.

I hosted my last TL Arts Advisory & Friends on January 16th.  Whether the advisory continues or folds into Arts for a Better Bay Area (ABBA, see below!),  it’s time the arts advisory and advocacy builds an organizational infrastructure.   We heard from several dynamic speakers including Steven Anthony Jones of Lorraine Hansberry Theater, Terrance Alan of the California Music and Culture Association and Richard Livingston of the EXIT Theatre.  From Steven Anthony Jones we heard a charismatic call to organize, arguing that “the time is now.”  From Terrance Alan we heard an impassioned plea for San Francisco not to become one mega museum – an amusement park of charming cultural relics of yesteryear.  From Richard Livingston we heard a blunt testimony about the arts community being “ill prepared” to respond to the upcoming city budget negotiations.  Livingston went so far as to say the arts will never achieve an equitable outcome should they have to annually jostle for a place in the city’s general fund budget.  On this very important topic we discussed the decoupling of hotel tax revenues and Grants for the Arts, historically the city’s main source of operating funding for arts organizations.  We were advised by Tom DeCaigny, Director of Cultural Affairs, that the city’s attorney moved to decouple the hotel tax revenue from arts funding out of concern of potential legal exposure.

A lawsuit to challenge a percentage of hotel tax revenue going to the arts?  Really?  I suppose it’s possible – anyone can sue for anything in our system.  Years ago I worked with the Los Angeles Redevelopment Agency.  I tried to get more of the agency’s massive resources into the hands of small arts organizations, like the wonderful Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural in the San Fernando Valley.  The pushback came quickly: I was told that funding arts groups directly was illegal under redevelopment law.

But hold on!  Not too long after, the Ford Foundation asked me to do a site visit to the fantastic MACLA – Movimento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana.  MACLA received Ford Foundation funding for its outstanding work in bridging different groups and cultures in their neighborhood in San Jose, i.e. community building through the arts.  At the time MACLA was working closely with the San Jose Redevelopment Agency on a new facilities project.  I spent some time with SJRA officials to learn of their plans, and was very surprised that they involved significant operational support, the very kind the LA agency told me was “illegal.”

I asked the San Jose officials about this.  They responded “there’s always a chance we’ll get sued for any of our work by some tax-payer association of some sort.  That’s what we have lawyers for. We think the arts are important to invest in.”  Wow.  So the takeaway here, for me at least, is to keep a healthy skepticism when government officials offer quick dismals of proposals and programs being “illegal.”  There is often room for interpretation in the “law,” and what is truly the decisive factor is our leadership’s willingness, or lack thereof, to push the envelope.

In retrospect, it’s too bad there indeed wasn’t a lawsuit, one that came from the arts community when the link between the hotel tax fund and arts funding in San Francisco was severed.  The arts community was probably, as Richard Livingston said, ill-prepared to respond.   Note to ABBA: don’t readily accept “we can’t do that,” or “that’s illegal,” or, especially, “we’ve always done it this way” as answers.  Push our leadership to push the envelope.

Jammin’ with ABBA

On to good news! Arts for a Better Bay Area is here! Under the very capable leadership of Ebony McKinney and Lex Leifheit, organizing meetings are off to a great start.   To the extent my work has garnered support from many wonderful people in the arts and arts education community I ask that we all get behind ABBA’s efforts and give them a chance.  It will be a difficult, messy, confusing, imperfect process, but that’s the price we have to pay so we can’t be so easily dismissed by mayors and supervisors.  With perseverance we will get to a much better place as a community.

Judging from the diverse representation of people and groups I have seen in the organizing meetings held to-date, I see a great deal of promise in ABBA, and if they win, so will the arts community.

Want to learn more?  ABBA’s hosting its next meeting on Tuesday, March 24th.

Many of us in the community saw the tech-fueled tsunami coming.   While many individuals and organizations sought to stop and protest against tech companies settling in San Francisco, a collaborative of over 20 community based organizations chose to support Mayor Ed Lee and Supervisor Jane Kim in their actions to attract investment to mid-Market.  That said, we also were very clear in communicating our hope that this investment would be leveraged to the benefit of the community at large.  These letters describe this hope.  They were summarily ignored by Supervisor Kim and the mayor, both of whom have completely failed to capitalize on the city’s historic boom to the benefit of its marginalized citizens living in intensely concentrated poverty in the Tenderloin.   We were instead told: “Talk to Twitter.”

CBOs Mayor & Supervisor letter re facilities financing.

St. Anthony public finance support letter

NCCLFlettertoEdwinLee

Mercy Housing letter of support

Intersection for Arts support letter Lee

Intersection for Arts support letter Jane

Hastings public finance support letter

Dinafinancesupportletter

Mami always railed about the neighborhood doctors wanting to prescribe her anti-anxiety medication.  In bombed-out, famously violent East New York Brooklyn it seemed like everyone was on meds of some sort, prescribed and otherwise.

Whenever the doctors wanted to write her a prescription for some chill pills she would, talking to no one in particular in the kitchen, say “Quieren darme pastillas , pero no voy a tomarlos!”    Maybe she should have – she certainly had a lot on her mind. Raising her kids in a very dangerous neighborhood that was burning down all around us, living in a substandard apartment that eventually got condemned by the city as “unfit for human habitation” (that’s what the big orange poster outside read in big block letters when I came home from school one day).  And even that nice lady who came with the clipboard from time to time, which always curiously caused us to hide the mini toaster oven – and papi’s shoes – in the closet; something about her made mami nervous. As kids we all took it in and still went out in the street to play, but for her life must have been very stressful.

But no to those damn pills! mami would say.   Instead she would put on her music from the island, and sing, every day, every night, for as long as I can remember.  Music was her therapy.  Music was her social service.

I’ve been thinking about the arts and social services ever since last fall’s supervisorial candidates forum on the arts, which was a bummer.  With the exception of one there were uninspiring presentations all around, and candidates arriving late and leaving early – clearly arts organizations are not a constituency to contend with.

I heard two points from District 6 Supervisor Kim.  First, city hall doesn’t know what the arts community wants as there is no advocacy voice presenting a coherent message.  In regards to the annual city budget process this is indeed true, and an exciting new movement – Arts for a Better Bay Area – is in the works to address that.

The second point Supervisor Kim made was that displacement of arts groups is a cyclical phenomenon, and that most groups eventually land somewhere.  This is arguably also true, though of course it begs several questions: What about the groups that don’t land on their feet?  Are we okay with cyclical displacement of arts organizations?  What if they’re displaced out of our neighborhood?  Should supervisors do everything they can to work against losing neighborhood arts organizations, capacity and resources to other districts?

Here’s another question: Would we casually accept this dynamic of cyclical displacement if we were talking about social service organizations?  That seems highly unlikely.  Maybe the arts advocacy community should think of embracing a new tagline: Arts, the original social service.   I bet that would score the arts more respect.   (I know mami would dig that!)

Candidate Tony Kelly offered what, to me, was the only inspiring comment of the evening when he said “yes the arts are notoriously difficult to organize, but that doesn’t mean we, as city leaders, should not look after their interests.”

It is my hope the 950 Journey will be instructive to all current and future arts and arts eduction advocacy efforts.  It is a remarkable story that has involved many twists and turns.  Undoubtedly the media will only touch the surface, as in the recent JK Dineen article in the Chronicle.   The summary that follows is to help clarify what happened, with some commentary on my part.  After all, I was invited by this city to do community development through the arts.  Six years later I do have a few things to say.

The arts organization’s (950 Center) development team, the SF Foundation (previous top leadership, not the program officer) and Group i had several project development meetings in 2013 that led to a simple agreement: the SF Foundation would 1) keep up with quarterly development expenses related to the arts space, and 2) take point on raising the funds to build the building/get the campaign going. Group I would take point on project management and endowing an operating fund that would subsidize small-budget groups to ensure access to the Center. Group i would create this endowment based on the incentives the mayor’s office promised, i.e. additional value from additional height. We all knew that a debt free space wasn’t good enough – we would also need an operating subsidy. Group i retained a highly respected local philanthropy advisory firm to begin the process of structuring this endowment.

At the conclusion of these meetings, contrary to JK’s reporting, there was total clarity and agreement between the arts organization and Group i.   Group i never “insisted that the arts nonprofits pay 50 percent of construction costs.” It didn’t have to – the SF Foundation pledged to take leadership on this since the project – in addition to landing ACT’s great drama school for the Tenderloin – was conceived to serve groups that did not have that capacity.   For this same reason, i.e. the SF Foundation’s commitments, the arts groups never were “pushing for the developer to bankroll construction.” In fact there was just one “art group” – the 950 Center group – not “arts groups” at all.

I can’t explain why the promised support did not materialize. Not one agreed-to quarterly funding milestone for the arts program was met. I can report, however, that the arts group learned much later that the SF Foundation (previous senior brass, not the program officer) and the mayor’s office were engaged in talks that the arts group was not aware of. I was stunned (20 years of working with foundations, big and small, local and national, I’ve never experienced anything like this) and should have jammed on the brakes right then, one of the many times I should have. The deal we had with the SF Foundation slowly and mysteriously vanished, though the arts group team didn’t realize it at the time. Or perhaps refused to believe it. It seemed impossible this would happen. Years after the foundation said it was going to buy the properties, but then didn’t, while subsequently not returning emails or phone calls, I refused to believe there could be a second astonishing disappointment.  Not twice.

In the absence of special use legislation for the arts being introduced and passed, JK is inaccurate in his reporting that the city was willing to rezone the property. In fact, in June, 2014, Tom DeCaigny, Director of Cultural Affairs, reported to over 40 arts organizations that the mayor and Supervisor Kim were going to co-introduce the legislation last fall. This did not happen.

Perhaps rather than going by what city officials “felt,” (JK’s term) we all should have gone by what Keyser Marston, an objective third party economics/feasibility analysis firm highly experienced in real estate development, proposed in their September 13, 2013 report to the mayor’s office.   Their “Preliminary Draft Assessment of Arts Incentives Options,” provides a detailed, well, assessment of options to the city.

As it turns out Keyser Marston’s analysis of the economics validated Group i’s analysis. In fact, it calls for options that went far beyond what Group i proposed the city could do to help build the project. Unfortunately neither the arts group nor Group i knew that since the report was not made available until more than a year later.   It was lost, misplaced, forgotten, who knows.

It is also notable that Tom DeCaigny, one of the city’s two highest level arts leaders who had been participating in the city’s project meetings, was also unaware of the existence of this report. (I’m certain Kary Schulman, Director of Grants for the Arts, was also kept in the dark, though I was told she, along with DeCaigny, were closely involved in discussions.) This report could have been the ultimate blueprint for how to make projects like 950 possible.   The catch? The missing report called on the city to do much, much more than what it has done historically to support the development of affordable space.

The report also validates the advocacy letter from over twenty community based organizations that called, nearly three years ago, for Mayor Ed Lee and Supervisor Kim to utilize a tax increment strategy to help make projects like 950, CounterPulse and Luggage Store pencil.   The letter was ignored.

The mayor’s development director claims the project died “despite their best efforts.”  It is very troubling to think that misplacing or losing or ignoring the one third-party objective analysis that could have fixed everything constitutes the city’s “best effort.”   You best check on that best effort Mayor Ed Lee.

I can’t say if Keyser Martson’s analysis validated the city’s analysis because, it appears, the city goes by what it “feels.”   That famous breakfast meeting the mayor hosted, over two years ago, to tell the development community his shop was going to develop incentives for arts space development seems to have translated into “feelings.”

I collaborated a while back with a city hall veteran who shed some light on these municipal moods.  He told me the city looks at the St. Regis super luxury hotel and MoAD as its reference model, i.e. find a high-end/luxury project and tack on a cultural facility (whether the location makes sense for the cultural facility or not, and is a complete afterthought, or even sucks, design-wise). That is not “creative placemaking” Mayor Ed Lee, that is expedient mall making. In contrast, Group i positioned the 950 Center in a highly integral and prominent way. And it was going to go up in the ‘hood, not in a super high-end/luxury residential and commercial district.  In fact, Group i was pressured by city hall spokespersons to go super uber-luxury on both the 950 residential and hotel components to follow the St. Regis and Millenium Partners models. This, while Group i has been struggling at each step of the design and cost engineering process to keep residential price points well below the median home price and introduce a moderate price point hotel that would match well with the local fringe oriented arts scene.

Some outsiders (none in the Tenderloin) have questioned my allegiance since I’m close to Group i and its president.   To them I say my allegiance lies with Keyser Marston’s report.   (To my knowledge I don’t know anyone at Keyser Marston.)   If the city had adopted its recommendations 950 would have been well on its way and a new, fantastic and successful model would have been established to build additional cultural facilities, or affordable housing, or community facilities assets period, arts or otherwise.

A word from Banksy: “The most dangerous phrase in language is “we’ve always done it this way.” (Don’t know if Banksy really said that. No matter, it applies here big time.)

Speaking of a new successful model, there’s another developer with a prominent site along mid-Market (he asked not to be identified) that took keen interest in doing an arts facilities or artist housing project after learning about 950.  They approached Group i over a year ago.  Group i brought this developer to the city in the interest of working together to truly build a mid-Market arts district (remember those days?).  The mayor’s people wouldn’t agree to meet with them together (We all wondered, huh? But now I understand why). This other developer concluded that there wasn’t any proof – or even signs of proof – of legitimate incentives from city hall that would justify taking on the huge additional risk inherent in incorporating an arts project, so he’s going forward with an as-of-right project sans the arts.  Bummer…we could have been a contender.

As for Supervisor Kim, if she’s “disappointed” as she claims to be she should have showed up with legislation to help make it happen. The Tenderloin just lost $24 million (and this is the figure that was already committed before the capital campaign started) for thousands of feet of permanently protected arts space and a landmark arts education school that would have been at our kids’ front door. This happened under her and Mayor Ed Lee’s watch. And for that matter Grants for the Arts and the SF Arts Commission, though they, as has been explained, were effectively lost.

Another JK error, the SF Foundation did not file the paperwork necessary to establish a nonprofit to oversee the project.   This was done on the recommendation of a consultant who concluded the project was going nowhere until it had autonomy from the foundation. Group i, as did I, parted ways from this group once it became clear it was taken over by de facto city hall spokespersons and legacy ambassadors of “but we’ve always done it this way.” These spokespersons failed to name a successful case study when asked.  Despite this fact, the mayor’s office mandated Group i work with Team Status Quo, who were, in addition to their devotion to said status quo, too calcified to realize they were in fact arguing against years of arts/cultural equity advocacy and the most important how-to-build affordable arts facilities policy paper in the city’s history, or at least mid-Market’s history.  The city hall appointed spokespersons began to advocate that Group i go high-end luxury (like the aforementioned St. Regis/MoAD and Millennium Partners/Mexican Museum.) Group i, again, committed to make the project as affordable as possible with zero subsidy to work with, refused.

Team Status Quo clearly felt Turk & Taylor is comparable to the site for the future super-luxury Millennium Partners Tower/Mexican Museum, which will be surrounded by the Four Seasons Hotel, the St. Regis Hotel, the Paramount, the new $800 million (give or take) SFMOMA and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.  (All that luxury surrounding the new museum – my fellow Latinos, we have arrived!)

On height. Everyone should understand 950 could only pencil if the project went over the existing decades-old height limit. The local TL arts groups knew that. That was always the case, barring significant public subsidy which we all know is not a possibility in this town. It’s nice to read my old crew at TEDP chiming in as arts promoters. Now, are they willing to back a project when it gets challenged for going above the zoning limit? If not it’s a meaningless, rhetorical promotion. There were already threats being made against the project going above 120 feet, regardless if the additional height bought affordable arts space or affordable housing.  Are we as a city willing to go taller to get affordable arts space or affordable housing?   Signs are mixed at best.  In the Tenderloin, signs are unequivocally bad.

This is one of the great errors I’m personally guilty of. When I began work on 950 back in 2010 I just did not know this town is aggressively anti-height, anti-density, regardless if that buys affordability. After hearing some of the static – and realizing the promised help with the campaign would not come – I thought perhaps we should proceed with a shorter project: a) A.C.T.’s landmark drama school, b) a black box – primarily for Lorraine Hansberry Theater, which I had been trying to land in the neighborhood for years – and c) some rehearsal and classroom space. But then I heard talk from a senior city hall official that the “temperature” wasn’t right for passing legislation that would help a “wealthy and white” institution, regardless of its plans to build an amazing school that would benefit thousands of underprivileged kids and adults.   Okay, how about small people of color organizations?  Not so fast, the little guys don’t have the requisite operating reserves and make funders nervous.

So, no to height, no to density, please no to poor people of color and no to wealthy white people willing to invest millions in building an arts school our residents can go to in their neighborhood (there is no higher “creative placemaking” than putting it in our neighborhoods). I mean, I confess, I didn’t know all this back when we started.  For real.

Something about this whole episode reminds me of the way city hall dealt with the payroll tax break. The community got duped into going after Twitter and their brethren for Community Benefit Agreements to fix terrible conditions resultant from decades of neglect – or systems intentionally designed and maintained – when the real focus should have been placed squarely on the city.   But corporations – good ones, slacker ones, it doesn’t matter – are easy targets for supervisors and city hall to hide behind with easily digestible rhetoric offered to the masses.

Back in 2013, when the 950 properties were up for sale, the mayor’s director of development told a 950 arts consultant “the winning bid had better not include an arts component.”   How odd, given that the mayor had just broadly announced to the development community his office would incentivize a major arts program at the site.  Now, with the media inquiring, he’s heralding the success of the “arts district” by pointing out a few groups, though failing to mention all but one he lists have a lease time-bomb ticking.   Just a few meetings ago – with a major arts organization sitting across from him bringing millions of dollars to the table – he inexplicably and unilaterally announced he’s stopping the 950 project and that the arts group is forbidden to raise funds.  I mean, what is this?

Well I guess we should have listened, city of San Francisco.  At its core 950 was about disrupting the intense concentration of extreme poverty in the Tenderloin.  As it turns out there is no interest – on the part of the city and the major nonprofits that systematically maintain it – in disrupting the intense concentration of extreme poverty in the Tenderloin.  The mayor is satisfied with it.  Supervisor Kim celebrates it.  Changing this status quo is, clearly, the kind of non-algorithmic, disruptive innovation San Francisco is profoundly uncomfortable with.

This summer I got looped in the fighting over cultural equity funding for the arts – or the lack of it from the perspective of some – in San Francisco. Angry testimonies swirled on the ethersphere, arising out of a perfect storm of a very rough summer of arts groups’ displacement, shocking collapse, confusion, fear and anxiety. I also listened to angry testimonies at an emergency focus group meeting called after the dire announcement from Intersection for the Arts’ board of directors.  Shortly into the focus group I had the thought that I had attended this same meeting before.  That in fact I’ve been attending variations of these meetings for nearly thirty years now and that the testimonies of injustice, sadly, were somehow the same.

My first introduction to arts politics took place in Houston in spring, 2006. The wonderful Project Row Houses hosted a national conference on arts and community development. The Ford Foundation’s community development program director sponsored and asked me to address the assembly of mostly arts professionals on the basics of real estate development. Ford’s program director was trying to get the groups to understand basic real estate development principles so they weren’t constantly at the mercy of ever-changing market forces.

But a fight broke out almost immediately during the opening plenary session.  Several attendees stood up and spoke angrily about the inequity of funding in the arts community.  “The issue is not real estate related,” one participant declared, “the issue is the big houses (symphony, opera, ballet, big museums) always being entitled to the lion’s share of the money while the rest of us have to constantly justify and fight for our existence.”

What a welcome!  My initiation to the politics of arts funding had begun.  Her statement triggered other declarations of injustice that spread like wildfire throughout the room.   There was barely time left to get in a word about arts and real estate development.

I can understand the frustration. Did anyone see the recent 60 Minutes segment on the Metropolitan Opera in NYC?   General Manager Peter Gelb has embraced new entrepreneurial approaches to generating revenue, like broadcasting in HD in cinemas throughout the world.  These broadcasts have grossed nearly $60 million for the Met.

Still, the Met is one hundred million dollars in debt!  I can imagine the calamity if I tried to set up the chronically in debt Metropolitan Opera at the 950 Center for Arts & Education (soon to be reprogrammed and renamed – stay tuned!).   Perhaps we should send them to the Northern California Community Loan Fund for a financial work-up. On the opera’s shocking debt, Gelb offers:

Opera’s always in debt. From a business point of view, opera shouldn’t exist. I mean, it only exists because there are enough people who love opera and my job is to try to persuade them that it is necessary to change in order to keep the art form alive. Otherwise it will die with them.

A pretty sober and refreshingly candid response. Cultural equity follows cultural values, i.e. society digs opera and still finds it worthwhile to keep it afloat even though it is deep in an ocean of red ink and altogether not a sustainable business.

This is, of course, a bit simplistic.  And to be fair, the Met employs 3000 people while generating big tax bucks as an important part of NYC’s vital arts-based hospitality economy.  And maybe they’re providing great educational programs to thousands of youth like the SF Symphony does.  (Also, on a personal note, while I’m not an opera person I don’t mind some of my tax dollars going to support it if I know that a portion of that money is going to benefit company carpenters, set designers, writers and the line cooks and dishwashers at the restaurants across the street, i.e. my peeps.)

That said, it would be nice if we stop stomping on the little guys and asking them to hold to standards a major institution like the Met itself can’t meet. The 950 Center, as one example among many, has been subjected to many lectures about the necessity of being in the black and not requiring subsidy. (Nip and tuck here and there and we’re now doing better than the Met!)  The Tenderloin’s rich arts ecosystem of Luggage Store Gallery, EXIT Theatre, LINES Ballet, Cutting Ball Theater, Center for New Music, CounterPulse, and others are also critically important to the city’s arts-based hospitality economy and should be treated as such on equitable terms.

Yet here we are again. (And again.  And again.)  As usual there is no shortage of bomb throwers while rational conversation remains elusive.  I do know there are several smart and thoughtful individuals in the Bay Area arts community who are saying something structural is broken.  The arts community must take this up.  Maybe we should start with what Tom DeCaigny, Director of Cultural Affairs, SF Arts Commission, suggested – a data driven approach.  Whatever we do our goal should be to stop sniping at each other and start generating new dollars for the arts.

City tosses beleaguered nonprofits $4.5 million. That was the headline on the front page of June’s edition of Central City Extra, our community newspaper. In response to this temporary-fix measure, Brien Cheu, director of community development at the Mayor’s Office of Community and Housing Development, was quoted as saying:

Is it possible, if we came up with some creative financing, to create a substantial, multitenant space, along commercial corridors where transportation is easy, especially by low-income individuals? Rather than focus on rent subsidies we want to create as many structural fixes as we can, so we’re not back here in another five years.

Well, Mr. Cheu, many of us in the Tenderloin and arts community have been wondering the same for years now. In fact, if we approached you with an opportunity to help us build exactly such a multitenant space for several cherished arts and education groups along a very prominent commercial corridor with very easy public transit access, what kinds of creative financing might you have in mind?

In the article Supervisor London Breed noted that the ADA-compliance work needed at the African American Cultural Center on Fulton could alone absorb nearly the entire $2 million (thank you Supervisor Avalos!) of the allocation earmarked for the arts. The same could be said for work needed to get CounterPulse up and running at 80 Turk, or the Luggage Store Gallery on Market.  I know LINES Ballet was absolutely thrilled just to get hot water heaters installed; my goodness maybe we can do better by one of the world’s most renowned dance companies in our own hometown.  There are many examples.

Still, the appropriation is a start. Two years ago, over twenty community-based arts, education, service organizations (and one affordable housing developer!) signed a letter requesting that the city capitalize on the boom in property taxes and create a fund to reinvest in the neighborhood for long-term structural stabilization solutions.  We got a “no,” with the rationale being improving the neighborhood would gentrify it. (We should all take pause and think hard about what we’re saying here.  Think about what we’re saying to poor people.)  Ironically, our failure to be creative, as Mr. Cheu is now calling for, left us in a weakened position to respond to the displacement of nonprofits resulting in the very gentrification those advocates who opposed creative public measures claimed they were concerned about. A self-defeating, self-fulfilling prophecy.

City Hall was for a local “capture and reinvest the property tax boom” mechanism before it was against it.  In spring, 2012, at a breakfast hosted by farmerbrown, Mayor Ed Lee addressed a prominent group of Tenderloin/mid-Market arts & education stakeholders and local foundations and announced he would get behind the formation of a local property tax capture district to invest in neighborhood projects.

From the March 27^th, 2012 memo the Office of Economic and Workforce Development staff prepared for the Mayor to prep him for the breakfast:

NOMNIC’s Board feels very strongly that for complicated, ambitious projects like 950 Market and others to come to fruition, the City needs to find a financing source.  Your Central Market Economic Strategy agrees and calls for the pursuit of an Infrastructure Finance District (IFD).  IFDs would arguably be an achievable city funding strategy given its utilization would help underwrite the development of cultural/educational facilities at 950 Market, the Strand and Market Street Cinema.  NOMNIC is also looking into other finance mechanisms such as a cultural/educational facilities bond to take on mid-Markets derelict properties.

A blast from the not-too-distant past!  At that time my old crew NOMNIC (better known as the Tenderloin Economic Development Project) and I were fighting to make 950 Center for the Arts happen and were also advocating for repurposing other major derelict assets like the Market Street Cinema, Crazy Horse and the Strand.   We envisioned a multi-tenant 950 Center for Arts & Education, a new landmark home for the beloved Alonzo King LINES Ballet Dance Center up the block, and a mid-Market destination for the annual SF International Film Festival at the new home of the San Francisco Film Society. (Initially very skeptical, SFFS’s visionary Graham Leggat was warming up to mid-Market before he tragically passed.)

Going back earlier, to summer 2011, I collaborated with the mayor’s staff on my article for SPUR: Four Ways to Transform Mid-Market.   

The mayor hasn’t acted on the finance district yet.  Word is some in city hall got concerned about communities all through the city wanting their own tax capture districts, creating a chaotic situation for the city.  Also, some key local affordable housing developers declined to support it because there wasn’t money for new construction affordable housing through the readily available post-redevelopment tax capture mechanism (IFD).

While we haven’t heard back from the mayor and some on his staff is now reportedly hostile to reinvesting local tax dollars in the Tenderloin, Supervisor Kim took a very modest initiative to create a fund based on property tax revenues so the precedent has been set.  Maybe we don’t need to form a district after all and can just add more to Supervisor Kim’s recently created fund.  We can call it the “After Decades of Neglect, Exploitation, and Extreme Socio-Economic Segregation We’re Going to Reinvest the Gains from the Tech-Fueled Real Estate Boom for the Benefit of Equitable Development for Tenderloin Residents Fund.  (We’ll worry about the acronym later.)

And, also very encouraging, director Brian Cheu is calling on city hall to get creative.  So maybe the door is still open.  Maybe there’s still time.  I of course have to think so with so much at stake.  If not, let’s at least have the integrity to be straight-up with our arts community and tell them we’re cool with their moving elsewhere if they can’t make it in San Francisco.  Unless, of course, that would result in big empty dark spaces on Van Ness, in which case we might finally get inspired and float a bond measure for the arts.

The arts community, once it gets itself organized, should do what Rocco Landesman did and buddy up with the team that always gets the big bucks: affordable housing.  In 2012 we voted for Proposition C to create a $1.5 billion dollar trust fund for affordable housing.  There will very likely be another bond measure in 2015 for another half billion dollars.   That’s $2 billion approved for affordable housing in a span of three years, and the given the desperate need for affordable housing the number should go higher. I know I’ll vote for it. The arts community should advocate for it.

I would argue that bond money for inclusionary affordable housing should also include money for inclusionary arts, inclusionary education, inclusionary recreation. We can’t live by rooms and sandwiches and meds alone.

Isn’t this the driving principal behind HOPE SF?  Healthy, balanced communities?  Five percent of $2 billion would provide $100 million for a real war chest that Brian Cheu and Tom DeCaigny can use to get past endless triage-oriented approaches and invest in truly long-term solutions toward healthy, balanced communities.

And wouldn’t affordable housing developers who speak all the time about neighborhood development (even use the term in their organization’s name) support this?

I recently had lunch with a big name public finance guy to ask for his help with 950.  He scoffed and said the city shouldn’t be investing in the arts for the Tenderloin/mid-Market. “What the neighborhood needs is more cops and fire stations.”  Yeah, okay.  I’ve also advocated for more cops for public safety, so no argument there.  But why does it have to be at the expense of the arts? (In fact, in light of recent events, if any group could use a heavy dose of human development through the arts, it’s cops.)

I get this view a lot from folks who didn’t grow up in the neighborhood.  Don’t live in it now and never will.  They’ve never waited in line for the giant tin cans of peanut butter and blocks of cheese to take home, find a safe place to keep it from the always-waiting rats and wonder what more there is to life. (Good thing I wasn’t lactose intolerant back then!) Give them poor folks their rooms, their meals, their meds and throw in a bunch of cops.  Mission accomplished.

I’ve grown tired of explaining to privileged progressives why the arts matter to poor folks.  But the message is too important to stop.  Endless cycles of dropping out and incarcerations for most young people who share my background.  We don’t offer them nearly enough ways out and the arts are a most powerful way.  I take consolation that someone with the lofty credentials of Maria Rosario Jackson recently shared she struggles with the same constant challenge. To date my favorite testimony on the topic still belongs to the late Quentin Easter of Lorraine Hansberry Theater:

We had an especially well-attended Tenderloin Arts Advisory & Friends meeting this summer. Our friends at CounterPulse kindly hosted at their new home at 80 Turk. Representatives from 35 organizations attended including major arts funders as special guests. As usual for the TL Arts Advisory it was a very diverse crowd.

I reported to the group that we need a new format and organizational structure. Our great, collegial and informal gatherings have worked very well these past 5 years but the issues are now too big and too complicated – special use district for arts legislation; cultural equity funding; divisions between disciplines and neighborhoods, new facility development – for a one-person volunteer facilitating 90 minute meetings a few times a year.  We need systematic organizing and advocacy.

Over the years I’ve heard calls to expand the TL Arts Advisory to include friends and colleagues working in other neighborhoods.  My reaction was always concern that the needs of Tenderloin groups like the Vietnamese Youth Development Center, the Shih Yu-Lang Central YMCA, TL Boys & Girls Club, i.e. the small guys (my peeps), would quickly be lost in a larger circle.  One of the wonderful aspects of our advisory is to see these groups sit alongside larger organizations like American Conservatory Theater, LINES Ballet, and form collaborative projects for the benefit of the neighborhood residents.  Community development through the arts; it’s been a wonderful development to watch unfold.

But we’ve now arrived at a place where the Tenderloin groups would be best served by being part of a larger, more powerful whole.  Perhaps, like Arts for LA, we can keep our neighborhood collaborative going while engaging with our colleagues from the rest of the city who would form neighborhood groups that would be part of the larger whole.

The TL Arts Advisory has a lot to be proud of. It was the well from which inspiration was drawn that gave rise to the campaign to build 950, the creation of CAST, the impetus behind special use district legislation for the arts.

After June’s meeting I was approached by a brilliant friend who leads a wonderful arts organization in the Mission.  She asked me “Why the Tenderloin and mid-Market?”   A neighborhood arts center. Special use district legislation for the arts.  Why us?

The answer: years of dogged, extremely difficult, extremely frustrating, at times militant, at times diplomatic, in-the-trenches advocacy by the TL Arts Advisory and the Tenderloin Economic Development Project.  I’ve been picked up and dusted off more times than I can remember by the Arts Advisory and my old board of directors at TEDP.  Nobody gave us anything for free, and the fight is not over.  (Really, with mid-Market business booming, why bother with the arts?)

Any neighborhood can do it.  All should.  I’ve heard arguments that the Mission has been more heavily impacted by the tech-fueled real estate boom than the Tenderloin/mid-Market has.  I don’t know the Mission community well at all but we are happy to break bread with our peers and see what we can build together.  And with the next community.  And the next.

Let’s see where we can all take this.