Should New York City prioritize the housing needs of struggling creatives – including artists, sculptors and actors – and give them an advantage over other city dwellers grappling with the affordability crisis? It’s a question that’s landed in the laps of city councilmembers.
Since 2019, the city has lost 4.4% of its artists, according to the Center for an Urban Future, but the number of artists who have fled specific neighborhoods in recent years tells a deeper story of displacement, economic strain and neighborhood change.
In the last decade, the artist population has dropped by 32% on the Upper West Side, 18% in Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen, and 17% in Harlem, neighborhoods that have been historically rich in artistic life, according to the Center.
The exodus has been especially profound on the Lower East Side and in Chinatown, which have lost nearly 56% of their artist population since 2013. Even Bushwick, which is nationally renowned for its creative class, has lost 5% of its artists due to rising housing costs.
The stark findings were contained in a report released on Wednesday by the Center, along with a warning for policymakers: “New York City can not survive as a global center for arts and culture if artists can not afford to live here.”
Eli Dvorkin, the editorial and policy director at the Center and co-author of the report, told Gothamist the solution lay in legislation currently before the City Council that would set aside more affordable housing units just for artists.
The Center’s report calls for creating 5,000 such units by 2030, and argues that other U.S. cities had created thousands of artist units while New York City had effectively sat on its hands. “The city has effectively built zero units of artist housing over the past decade,” Dvorkin said.
But in a city where virtually everyone other than the highest earners struggles to pay for housing, the mere suggestion of singling out creatives for special treatment breeds resentment and faces political headwinds. The last affordable housing project to be built for artists in the city was built in East Harlem in 2014.
Aides to Mayor Zohran Mamdani did not respond to multiple queries about the Council's legislation. Council Speaker Julie Menin, however, publicly expressed support for the bill at a conference held in Chelsea on Wednesday and said she looked forward to a public hearing on the matter.
"I have instructed our Council’s Land Use Division to be proactive and to re-envision zoning frameworks so that more neighborhoods can support artists with affordable live-work space, studios, and the conditions they need to create, stay and thrive in New York City,” Menin said at the conference, according to a transcript provided by her office.
Sade Lythcott, the CEO of the Harlem-based National Black Theatre, said public perceptions clouded artists' struggles. Too many New Yorkers, she said, imagined celebrity artists like Julian Schnabel or Sarah Jessica Parker, rather than working-class people juggling multiple jobs.
“The vast majority of the ecosystem of how New York thrives through arts and culture are individual artists that are mostly gig workers,” Lythcott said.
In 2022, 90% of New York City artists earned less than $50,000, according to the Center's report, which noted that after adjusting for the cost of living, artists here earn 23% less than the national average, compared to 15% a decade ago.
The pandemic took a toll on many creatives. Since 2019, the city’s population of dancers fell by 19%, actors by 8% and composers by 7.6%, while the number of set and exhibition designers plummeted by 45%, according to the findings.
Lucy Sexton, a dancer and performing artists who serves as the executive director at the advocacy group New Yorkers for Arts, said dancers in particular required both living space and work space, “two things that are increasingly expensive in New York City and therefore, we see them moving sometimes to communities upstate, sometimes to Philadelphia, sometimes to Chicago.”
Advocates for more artist housing point to housing complexes developed in previous generations, such as Westbeth Artists Housing and Manhattan Plaza, which were created in the 1970s and served as home to thousands of artists and their families over the decades.
Dvorkin said the better approach now would be for the city to incentivize the development of small numbers of artist housing across the five boroughs, and said any such efforts would have to be paired with large-scale affordable housing creation.
He urged legislators to pass the Council bill, sponsored by Councilmember Erik Bottcher and former Councilmember Keith Powers, whose term ended in December. Bottcher did not immediately respond to questions about the legislation and its prospects.
The bill, as written, would establish that state or city housing programs that “give preference to artists do not violate the human rights law prohibition against discrimination on the basis of occupation.” Dvorkin said in the absence of such a law, city officials had shied away from building artist housing due to ambiguity.
“There's no insurmountable legal barrier,” Dvorkin said, “but there's a perception problem: City lawyers have become increasingly risk-averse on this issue, which has contributed to the standstill today.”
But not all housing activists embrace the push for more artist housing.
Ritti Singh, a spokesperson for Housing Justice for All, said historically, New Yorkers had benefited from housing that was affordable for tenants regardless of their occupation.
In 1950, 2.1 million apartments in New York City were rent-controlled, she said, and in the subsequent decades those affordability provisions helped enable a rich cultural climate, including “the downtown art scene, Andy Warhol, the Greenwich Village folk scene [and] the beginnings in New York City of punk.”
“We need nurses and we need teachers, and we need artists,” she said. “ Having universal housing stability, having programs that ensure that we have that for the largest number of people possible, those are the conditions that create good art.”
Jenny Dubnau, an artist and housing activist in Queens, said, “Our drastic shortage of affordable apartments makes it hard to argue that X percent of them should be set aside for artists in particular, rather than for New Yorkers of all persuasions—based purely on income and risk of becoming unhoused.”
“Many artists would certainly fall into that lowest-income category,” she said. “But for those who don’t, should they get preference over non-artists?”
The Center’s report, however, argues that artists – and art – play a unique role in the life of the city.
“New York City’s vibrant and diverse arts and culture sector is arguably the city’s greatest asset — sparking local economic vitality, inspiring New Yorkers and visitors alike, and knitting communities together in the face of immense challenges,” it states.
Brian Palmer, a Queens-born photographer who fled the city in 2016 due to high rents, said he’d stopped “pining” for life in New York but returned regularly to see his mother, sister and other family members.
Since moving to Richmond, Virginia, he and his wife managed to acquire a dog and a three-bedroom house, and he said, “ One of the biggest burdens to lift from our shoulders was the cost of New York.”
“ Certainly if options had been available way back in the day, a decade ago or even a little bit longer, we would've been able to stick around in the city,” he reasoned. “We would've been able to make different decisions.”
