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Category: live-work spaces

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Home studio or artists’ cooperative?

Would moving enhance your career? Probably not.

My former studio.

My first professional studio space was a corner of our kitchen. The light was good and it had a laminate floor. A few years later, we enclosed our garage, adding full-spectrum fluorescent light bulbs and cat5 wiring.

Then we moved. I rented a space on the top floor of the Hungerford Building in Rochester. It was a large room facing east with beautiful light. Eventually I relocated my studio to the third floor of our house. This was a quirky, beautiful space with great light and lousy headroom. After a few years of bumping my head, I reshuffled my workspace in the former master bedroom at the head of the stairs. That studio was 325 square feet, large enough to teach six students. Here in Maine, I have a large, light room that’s about a third of the total square footage of my house.
My current studio.
A dedicated home studio seems less expensive, but that is an illusion. The median list price per square foot in the United States is $140, according to Zillow. Special-purpose industrial space averages $11.25 a square foot/year. My last studio’s only upgrade was a better lighting system, but that still cost me thousands of dollars.
It is only cheaper to work from home if you already have space to burn. For my friends in New York City, where space is at a premium, a rented studio is often a better option.
Will your projected art income can really cover an additional rent payment? A home studio is already wrapped into your current rent or mortgage. Renting a studio is cheaper than adding on, but the cheapest solution is to repurpose an underutilized space you’re already paying for.
A professional studio needs good light (natural and enhanced), adequate storage, room to work, a space for office work, wi-fi, and separation from other people and activity. If you’re teaching, you also need to consider access to a restroom, handicapped accessibility, and safety.
Storage is something we often fail to consider when calculating our space needs.
Art materials should be kept away from food prep areas. That’s especially true of pastels, which allow pigment to be airborne. Having said that, risks associated with oil paints are overstated. Still, the pigments in art supplies—and some solvents—aren’t good to ingest. I ran a whole-house air cleaner in my first house.
I need an orderly environment. It’s difficult for me to pick up my brushes when there are dishes in the sink. I don’t like visitors to my studio. It was that need for order that drove me to a rented studio when my kids were little. However, I found myself leaving work every afternoon at 3:30 when my youngest child got home from school. I had more flexibility than my husband, who worked from an office. 
Is the neighborhood in which your cooperative studio is located really safe? In Rochester, my studio was on the fringes of a tough neighborhood. I could work late at night in my locked studio; the parking lot and corridors were the problem.
325 square feet was sufficient to teach six students.
How introverted are you? Some artists are challenged and motivated by other artists nearby. Others find community to be a distraction. However, the network you build in an artist’s cooperative can be invaluable; so too can their cooperative art shows.
Will an outside studio enhance your career? Unless you’re in a prestigious cooperative, no. Neither gallerists nor potential clients judge you by your address; they care about your work.
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Is it fair to use housing subsidies to build live-work spaces for artists?

My working-poor friend couldn’t get into the Projects, so she’s rented this house instead.

One of my friends was homeless this past Christmas. She was on a waiting list for an apartment in the Projects. Evidently openings are scarce in her hometown of Braddock PA, where 2/3s of the residents are African-American and the median household income is $18,473. She ended up renting part of a house instead.

While most public housing is intended for people like my friend, there’s a subset of units being built in historic neighborhoods as mixed-use spaces for artists. In 2016, the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity (IMO) examined four such projects. They noted:
“They are often visually spectacular, offering superior amenities – underground parking, yoga and exercise studios, rooftop clubrooms – and soaring architecture. Very often, these white-segregated subsidized projects are created by converting historic buildings into housing, with the help of federal low-income housing tax credits, historic tax credits, and other sources of public funding. Frequently, these places are designated artist housing, and – using a special exemption obtained from Congress by Minnesota developers in 2008 – screen applicants on the basis of their artistic portfolio or commitment to an artistic craft.”
Although such units are built with public funding, they’re far too expensive for my friend Helen. In fact, they end up furthering segregation. White artists’ income may be low compared to their social peers, but are high compared to wages for the black working poor.
The foyer of the A-Mill Artist Lofts, a publicly-subsidized live-work space in Minneapolis. From their own website.
“Unlike typical subsidized housing, however, the residents of these buildings are primarily white – in many instances, at a higher percentage than even the surrounding neighborhood. These buildings thus reinforce white residential enclaves within the urban landscape, and intensify segregation even further,” IMO reported.
These units are not being occupied by impoverished millennials coming up with the next Great Idea. This study found that most of the artists inhabiting subsidized live-work housing were middle-aged. This surveyechoed that. In other words, these artists should be in their prime earning years.
We can’t even count on these units continuing to be live-work spaces. “There is a demonstrated tendency for live-work space to revert to purely residential use, regardless of how it was permitted or represented,” wrotearchitect Thomas Dolan.
The gym at the A-Mill Artist Lofts, a publicly-subsidized live-work space in Minneapolis. From their own website.
Who really benefits from these schemes? Developers, of course. “Look at every opportunity to finance projects by evaluating their eligibility for tax credit financing through the New Markets Tax Credit (NMTC) and Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) Programs, which are designed to support investment in communities and meet the housing needs of residents,” advises accounting firm Baker Tilly. In 2014, almost a quarter of all apartment new-builds were being done with Low Income Housing Credits.
My friend lived in a motel on Route 30 outside Braddock while she was homeless. One room, three people, but at least she had heat and a bed. 
Cities, too, are desperate for some way to repurpose their abandoned industrial real estate. We all know the stories of how development followed artists into Soho or the Village and drove property prices sky-high. But that was in land-locked Manhattan, where anything habitable is worth millions. Whether that same phenomenon will play in Peoria, or Buffalo, or Milwaukee, remains to be seen. Meanwhile, billions of dollars in subsidies are being redirected away from people like my friend. 
Want to learn more? See here and here.