CAST helps arts groups stay in S.F.
For the last five years, as San Francisco real estate values and rents have shot up, the local Community Arts Stabilization Trust, or CAST, has been buying buildings and leasing affordable spaces to nonprofit groups that might otherwise be forced out of town.
Created by the Kenneth Rainin Foundation and the Northern California Community Loan Fund in 2013, CAST, which was seeded with a $5 million grant from the Rainin Foundation, has bought two buildings in the Mid-Market area: one on Market Street near Sixth Street that houses the Luggage Store Gallery, and the former porn theater at 80 Turk St. that was purchased and renovated for the interdisciplinary dance and performance group CounterPulse.
There’s another project pending on Minna Street — a four-story building that could become home to Intersection for the Arts and Youth Speaks — and some East Bay projects are also in the works.
“CAST aims to create long-term/permanent affordable work space for the arts,” says Moy Eng, the organization’s energetic and well-connected executive director.
Prior to taking the job in 2014 — when builder and philanthropist Steve Oliver became president of the CAST board — Eng directed the Hewlett Foundation’s generous arts program, helping groups like ODC and Berkeley’s Freight & Salvage buy their buildings. She spent the previous two decades in the New York performing arts world as a fundraiser and grant maker, serving as choreographer Alvin Ailey’s last director of development.
“Lucky me. I got to work with a genius,” says Moy, on the phone from her Palo Alto home. She laughs about being in the heart of Silicon Valley and having to step into the yard to get cell reception.
“Anytime you’re in a city as attractive to live and work in as San Francisco or New York or Shanghai,” she says, you’re going to experience the surge and ebb of the economic tide. “Is it expensive or hideously expensive? It’s become hideously expensive again.”
That’s why CAST, using tax credits, philanthropic dollars, money from the city and other sources, bought and renovated the CounterPulse building and the one for the Luggage Factory, where Hospitality House Community Arts Program is on the ground floor with a favorable lease. The two buildings together cost about $10.2 million, with $2.3 million coming from the federal New Markets Tax Credit Program.
Those deals are structured on the lease-to-buyback model, says Moy, whose organization also helps smaller cultural organizations like these develop their financial and fundraising acumen. CAST has given them below-market-rate leases, essentially freezing the price until the financing comes due in 2022.
“They have seven years to raise the money to buy their home for the price we paid in 2015,” says Moy, who credits Oliver with developing the model over the last 20 years with his own fund.
CAST, Oliver says, has worked “to find a way to fight back against what’s happening along Market Street, from Sixth to 12th streets — that whole area is being transformed with new residences and offices, and old buildings being resurrected and restored — and protect the arts from the tech explosion.”