The ABCs of indie-arts real estate
Arts patrons are familiar with funders like the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, the Haas Foundation, Grants for the Arts and the San Francisco Arts Commission. Lesser known is the alphabet soup of partners, holding companies and city initiatives directing donor monies toward finding stable real estate for nonprofit arts organizations.
“There are a lot of moving parts,” says Kary Schulman, director of Grants for the Arts, or GFTA (a.k.a. the hotel tax), of the bewildering matrix of interwoven acronyms. “We’re all just down in the weeds on this.”
One of the major players is the Northern California Community Loan Fund, or NCCLF, which provides services such as lease evaluations, real estate readiness training and financial negotiations. The fund also referred Joe Landini to probono legal services from Dechert LLC.
For the past three years, the loan fund and the Community Arts Stabilization Trust, or CAST, administered the city’s Nonprofit Displacement Mitigation Fund, seeded with funds from the arts commission and the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development. The money subsidized renovations on vacant spaces repurposed by artists and social service agencies. The trust, a loan fund spin-off, also buys and holds properties on behalf of nonprofit organizations, such as 80 Turk St. for CounterPulse.
Tech companies and developers also contribute to the stabilization of the Central Market/Tenderloin. CounterPulse Artistic Director Julie Phelps reports that Group I, the developer of a massive complex planned for 950-974 Market St., contributed $100,000 to engage Tenderloin residents in creatively mitigating the construction’s traffic impact.
“They don’t have to be answerable in that way,” she says, “but working with the community is actually the best choice.” (The new development will also include rehearsal space for the Magic Theatre.)
And because the 409 buildings in the Uptown Tenderloin Historic District are protected by the National Register of Historic Places, further permitting and grant applications come into play for facade upgrades. CounterPulse, for example, got permission to repaint and purchase a neon sign, plus an arts commission-administered Economic and Workforce Development, or OEWD, grant to pay for it.
With the National Endowment of the Arts and other federal funding on unstable ground, these programs could be vulnerable. But the people who run them are determined to stay in the game.
“Maybe for the first time in my 35 years in city government, agencies are working together in a much more coordinated way to help organizations,” Schulman says. “This is what San Francisco does.”
— Claudia Bauer