The Artist As Advocate and Speculator: Real Estate and Public Policy in SoHo, New York

By the mid 1970s New York’s SoHo neighborhood had been transformed from an industrial slum slated for demolition through urban renewal to a mixed-use district of artists’ homes, galleries and surviving light industrial enterprises.  Yet, the neighborhood was being threatened by its own success.  Investors and non-artists residents sought to covert the neighborhood’s remaining lofts into market rate homes despite laws limiting legal living in the neighborhood to artists.  To do so, they often used the piecemeal policies governing loft housing to their advantage.  The actions of real estate investors set off a political and legal battle involving over the fate of the neighborhood that pitted artists, residents, business owners, speculators and unions against each other in complex and often contradictory ways. 

The history of SoHo during this era demonstrates complex role that artists play in urban development.  In SoHo, some artists became community organizers, unifying area residents and industrial businesses behind the cause of protecting affordable rents for artists and jobs for working class New Yorkers.  Others used their political connections and familiarity with the formal art world to marshal the support of legislators, curators and noted artists behind their cause.  Yet, at the same time, some artists became speculators themselves, using their favorable position in the local real estate market to their advantage, often at the expense of local businesses and less privileged artists.

All told, SoHo demonstrates how artists helped create one of the postwar era’s first gentrified neighborhoods and a model for urban development used in cities throughout the country and the world.  Yet, it also shows how artists can both gain, and lose control over a process of urban development for which they were an important catalyst.