Law Looks to Subsidize Housing for Artists
Governor Spitzer signed a bill yesterday aimed at helping artists pay for housing, a measure meant to shore up the city’s cultural capital. The bill, which was sponsored by Assemblywoman Joan Millman, will give artists two-year grants of up to $12,000 for live-work spaces. “When people want to make it in the arts they come…
Governor Spitzer signed a bill yesterday aimed at helping artists pay for housing, a measure meant to shore up the city’s cultural capital. The bill, which was sponsored by Assemblywoman Joan Millman, will give artists two-year grants of up to $12,000 for live-work spaces. “When people want to make it in the arts they come to New York,” said Millman. “Artists come into communities that are rundown and sleazy and bring a life and vibrancy to that community—they are an economic engine and they shouldn’t be overlooked.” Though funding for the program has yet to be hammered out, it will likely provide grants for between 40 and 50 units, and Dumbo is being eyed as a possible location for the housing. As New York continues to hemorrhage artists to cheaper cities like Philly, you gotta wonder whether a bill like this is too little too late. And does it make sense to import artists back into nabes, like Dumbo, that they had a big hand in gentrifying?
Housing Help Slated for Artists [AM New York]
Photo by Escapefromnewyork
Believe it or not, 9:45, teaching and social work are not professions that just anyone can do. They’re far more complicated than merely passing a civil service exam. In the end, teaching children to read and helping the less fortunate seem far more central to the operation of NYC than displaying paintings or showing short films to your friends and relatives.
11:15 C’mon- the artists lay the groundwork for the yuppies by setting up camp in an uninhabited areas. Yuppies will not move directly onto piss covered streets filled with junkies and homeless people- with no amenities. Artists will.
The Walentas started out as idealistic artsy types. If their experience isn’t a cautionary tale of the how the art community will turn on you if you’re not starving…
Artists are not the reasons that areas like Dumbo are prime – that credit belongs to the yuppies that follow and bring the amenities.
Once and for all, why do artists insist that they alone make a neighborhood? They act as though vast areas of Brooklyn were nothing but sand and scrub brush before they arrived with their paintbrushes, easels, and eternally outstretched palms, demanding that the govt. subsidize their “genius”.
I’ll take an i-banker or corporate lawyer any day over these adult children.
Sour grapes from the artists that have been on the Walentas dole and couldn’t get anything rolling in their free two years?
Leave it to the self-proclaimed Pied Piper of Dumbo to get the politicians behind this. DUMBO seems a ludicrous choice of locations.
“Firefighters and policemen are PAID to to their jobs. Why should they then be subsidized?”
The point really is -why is someone doing a job that they can’t be paid doing? That is called a hobby.
I bet Dave Walentas, the “Neighborhood Creator and Patron of the Arts” DUMBO Developer, and his art-loving, carousel-restoring wife, Jane are pushing for Millman and DUMBO “which has been fingered as a possible location for the units.”
Private benefactors are even better.