In 2013, the artists of MidwayArtStudio raised $20 million and bought their building. Our arts and culture reporter shmabelia tells us how they pulled it off -- and how their story offers hope for other Boston artists facing displacement:
, a mixture of affordable and market-rate live/work artist studios and condos in a former rubber factory in Jamaica Plain. Following the model New Atlantic used with Brookside, the Midway artists formed a nonprofit, Midway Artist Collective Inc., that would own the building and be controlled by a board elected in part by the artists. They decided to stick with rental units, rather than the more common co-op model, to keep the barrier to entry low.
They undoubtedly benefited from the alliance with New Atlantic. The small firm has made an outsized impact on the arts scene in Boston, having developed a number of projects featuring affordable artist live/work studios and other cultural spaces. New Atlantic is in the final stages of securing a property in Dorchester on behalf of the artists atHumphreys Street Studios, with their landmark chimney and mostly green painted buildings, which were once a laundry facility in Dorchester, Mass.
All of which is to say that there is no easy way to replicate the Midway artists’ success — no tried-and-true recipe for buying your own artist building. But the need is clearly there. Artists wait for years for studios at Midway to open up. It begs an obvious question: do any programs exist to help secure arts space on a larger scale?
CAST’s mission is straightforward: it acquires property on behalf of artists and cultural organizations and rents it back to them at an affordable rate. Very often, it helps them raise the capital to then buy back the property. A deed restriction ensures that the building will remain a cultural asset in perpetuity, even if the original buyer decides to sell.
East Bay PREC's democratically-run co-op model takes a radical approach to investment, with a low interest rate of 1.5% designed to bring down the cost of property acquisition. Investors and tenants share in the returns."If your interest rate is at 6%, a community cannot hold a project like that," Session says."They will spend the life of that project servicing the debt instead of servicing the community.
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