Artists Need Housing

If I had a dollar for every time someone in Charlotte in the past 25 years had talked about “artists and lofts” as a way to bring life to various parts of town, I wouldn’t be driving a 16-year-old car.

Artists are often the leading pioneers into neighborhoods that are ultimately reborn. Then, because the neighborhoods get popular, artists find themselves priced out of the market. It happens all over, not just in Charlotte. Our example currently is NoDa, or North Charlotte – the one-time mill neighborhood near 36th and North Davidson streets.

All those people thinking uptown will grow into an artsy district? Get real. It’s hard to make anything resembling a living wage as an artist, so artists are drawn to neighborhoods with affordable buildings — usually old one that offer lots of space for not much cost. That doesn’t describe anything uptown.

Why not build artists’ housing uptown? The only way to build uptown housing you could rent out cheaply enough for artists would be if the land was donated. And what uptown land owner would do that?

Why build, you say? Just renovate older buildings, warehouses and such, as other cities have done. Well guess what. Charlotte government officials’ lack of willingness to study any overall preservation strategies used in many other cities, such as height limits or limits on surface parking lots, caused most of the older buildings to be torn down. Those that remain and have been renovated (Charlotte Cotton Mills, for example — bravo to the historic landmarks commission and developer Peter Pappas ) are now too expensive for artist housing.

So in Charlotte, artists are sprinkled throughout the city – in Stonehaven, Dilworth, Plaza-Midwood and County Club Acres, to list a few examples. That’s fine, except that when artists as an interest group are invisible because they’re so dispersed, then the city feels as if it’s missing some important vitality.

“That’s one of the challenges in Charlotte,” says Suzanne Fetscher, president of the McColl Center for Visual Art. “The lack of visibility of artists.”

If you’re interested in the issue of housing for artists, put this on your calendar:

7-8:30 p.m. Aug. 2, at the McColl Center for the Visual Art, 721 N. Tryon St. It’s a public forum to address the issue of affordable housing and/or live-work spaces for artists.

The event is a collaboration among the McColl Center, the Arts & Science Council, the N.C. Arts Council, Charlotte Center City Partners and the City of Charlotte. Facilitators will be representatives of ArtSpace Projects of Minneapolis. That’s a nonprofit group that has developed affordable live-work spaces for artists in some 20 U.S. cities.

What will they come up with? That depends on what they hear from people in Charlotte. If you’re an artist or creative type — or anyone with an interest in the issue — make sure they hear from you.