It’s a familiar pattern. An arts organization lands a great deal on space in Seattle. The new space is flexible, allows for artists to be noisy and make a lot of dust preparing and tearing down shows, and it’s super cheap. Somehow nobody noticed that big white sign out in front, the one with the “Death to Capitalists!” graffiti.

It’s called a MUP (Master Use Permit) board, and it indicates the site is about to be redeveloped. When? Who knows? It’s part of the challenge all new building faces, unpredictable permitting. The board explains a lot about why the site is so cheap and why nobody really cares about how the space gets used.

Still our hypothetical arts groups is happy with the space — and it’s working! Attendance is up. Lots of people are hearing about the innovative things being incubated in the space. Artists are hitting a creative stride, audiences are having fun and being challenged, and enough money is coming in the door to just about off set the costs. Then one night the fire marshall shows up: the space has too many people in it. The arts group has a choice, bring the space up to code, which could cost tens of thousands of dollars, or limit attendance, or shut down. Soon the venue is shut down. The building gets redeveloped into housing. Everyone says, “All this development is killing the soul of Seattle.”

I shake my head and sigh. I’ve been here before.

More than 10 years ago I addressed this issue as an arts funder. When I was at the County we built a program called Art Patch that was part educational outreach to artists about health and business but also funding art too. This scenario became all too common as the city was growing before the last economic collapse in 2008. What’s the answer. I wrote a proposal in the Seattle Times about ideas to prevent this AND keep building housing. It’s a long story. But Seattle is facing the same issues again.

The Arts Commission wrote a letter with some great recommendations to the City Council and Mayor. Two dangers lie ahead. One is that this becomes about race and social justice. Already references to the tragic fire in Oakland have been made and implications also about the disproportionality of the experience I described — the suggestion is being made that more organizations of color are being impacted. We don’t need to do all that. I know, I know. We don’t.

And we don’t need to blame growth and greedy developers for knocking down sites that have been great venues. We need to work together for a change. The one group in town the struggles with the same regulatory gauntlet is housing producers, both market rate and non-profit.  The second danger is making this the same Seattle routine about economic and social repression and issuing fiats and mandates from downtown instead of figuring out ways to meet health and safety standards at lower costs. Please. Let’s do that. And let’s look at Transfer of Development Rights (TDR) to help preserve low-rise buildings that could have a much longer life as arts and cultural venues if the unused FAR could be used somewhere else.

The tragedy in Oakland unfolded in minutes, killing human potential. Everyday a slower fire is killing off hope as well in the form of housing scarcity. Much of this slow motion tragedy, a story of talented artists giving up on trying to make a living and be creative in Seattle, is self imposed by our code. We can be safe, successful, creative, and build a better, more diverse city. But it won’t happen picking out villains and victims but combining forces to solve the problems (the featured image for this post is from a Seattle Weekly feature on arts and growth in Seattle).

For what it was worth, I offered my experience and of the development community to work to address this issue. There is a great program in Chicago that I learned about my last time around on this issues. Here’s what I sent the Commission and Council. We’ll see if we go the route of working together or of putting more of a squeeze on growth which is sure to make the problem worse.

Hello [Matthew and Councilmember Herbold],

While we are an organization that is working for more housing of all types, in all parts of the city, for people of all incomes, we also agree that arts and cultural venues are what make a great city.

We support the spirit of your recommendations which seek to meet basic health and safety requirements without necessarily fully complying with all code requirements. Your take on this is absolutely correct: compliance is along a spectrum, and goal is health and safety of patrons and the community, not simply complying for compliance sake.

We face many of the same issues in trying to deliver safe, affordable, and livable housing for people who need it. Often we’re confronted with the same issues, code requirements that push up the size and the price of units, for example, to meet arbitrary square footage requirements.

I also am trying to reconnect with Julie Burros who is now head of the arts and cultural office in Boston but who several years ago was working on the issue in Chicago. Chicago received a MacArthur Grant to address this issue (you can read about it here:  https://www.macfound.org/press/press-releases/new-macarthur-fund-to-help-small-chicago-arts-groups-obtain-city-licenses/).

In any event, if there is anyway we can be supportive of this kind of effort please let us know and I’ll share what I learn about what happened in Chicago

Roger