Independent Perspective News

By ROBIN POGREBIN

New York City's vibrant arts scene is often portrayed as an unalloyed good, economically as well as creatively. But the resistance in many neighborhoods to a large increase in artists looking for places to live is so strong that it is the biggest obstacle to the healthy development of the arts in the city, a study to be released today by a nonpartisan policy research group said.

The study by the New York-based Center for an Urban Future, a neighborhood-by-neighborhood assessment that looked at the potential of arts and culture to stimulate economic growth, concluded that much of the neighborhood concern was justified because artists' moving into a neighborhood can drive up rents and force out long-term residential and commercial tenants. The paradox is that arts groups drive up the rents and then cannot afford to remain in the neighborhoods whose rejuvenation they spurred in the first place.

"Everyone is fearful of the demon of SoHo-ization," said Neil Scott Kleiman, director of the center, which focuses on economic development.

"You have this Darwinian progression: artists move into a neighborhood, prices tend to go up, and the artists have to move out," he said. "You're seeing it cloud cultural development."

The city's cultural affairs commissioner, Kate D. Levin, disputed the study's main finding about resistance to arts groups. "That may be true in some cases," she said, "but most of the time arts groups are not interlopers, they're essential parts of how neighborhoods grow and define themselves."

"In almost every case I can think of, communities welcome artists because of what they bring to the mix in terms of 24-hour liveliness and the business they bring," she added. "Artists and arts groups are themselves the first victims of gentrification."

The study, which took two years to complete and was commissioned by Deutsche Bank, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts and the Rockefeller Foundation, asserted that the city had yet to understand fully the economic value of its cultural industry, which is responsible for more than 150,000 jobs, stimulated by a 52 percent growth rate over the past nine years.

"While everyone agrees that arts and culture is a pillar of our economy (in fact, no other single industry has stimulated as much economic improvement throughout the five boroughs), the vast majority of us haven't the slightest clue how to define the sector," the report said. "Culture is not just Broadway and Museum Mile, in other words, but thousands of commercial artists, galleries, botanic gardens and zoos citywide."

It is largely because of the disparate nature of culture in New York, the study said, that city government has failed to address it. "The arts are a scattered, tribal and complex industry, with roots widely dispersed throughout the five boroughs," it said, "and therefore, don't lend themselves easily to a grand `master plan' from City Hall."

Mr. Kleiman said the resistance was evident, for example, in Harlem and in St. George, Staten Island, where an influx of artists — along with young professionals looking for a less expensive alternative to Manhattan and Brooklyn — have increased real estate prices.

"In five of the seven neighborhoods we assessed, concerns about displacement were plainly laid at the feet of cultural development," the report said.

The seven neighborhoods the study focused on were St. George; Jamaica and Long Island City, Queens; Lower Manhattan; Fort Greene, Brooklyn; Harlem; and the South Bronx. Because of their retail strengths, the report said, Lower Manhattan and Jamaica did not experience the problems that the other neighborhoods did.

"Addressing displacement is the biggest challenge for any community, and very few, if any, have come up with a good response to this crippling issue," the report said. "Any cultural development that drives away longtime residents and artists might benefit property owners in the short term but cannot be considered successful for the community and in the long-term interests of local business."

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