Rent hike forcing arts incubator NIMBY to move.
Oakland artist incubator space NIMBY hopes to move 300 miles north to a desert ranch
OAKLAND >> Michael Snook is tired.
For the past 15 years, he’s sat at the helm of NIMBY, an arts incubator that provides studio space and shared tools for makers and creators. Its alumni have built everything from giant installations for Burning Man to intricately crafted sculptures that can fit in the palm of your hand.
But now, its days in Oakland are numbered. NIMBY has until the end of September before its
rent will triple. A nearly two-year search to find anything comparable in the Bay Area has been fruitless, leaving Snook exhausted. It’s a fate to befall many of the do-ityourself maker spaces across the city as the increasing demand for land incents property owners to find higher-paying tenants.
Murray Hill Partners, a real estate investment firm, purchased the Amelia Street block near 84th Street in East Oakland at the end of 2017, said Steve Wolmark, a partner in the firm. It made improvements to the neighboring buildings and began leasing to
cannabis cultivation and manufacturing companies.
While Wolmark says he doesn’t have a new tenant lined up for NIMBY’s space, his company applied for a cannabis cultivation permit there, according to city officials. He says he needs to raise the rent closer to market rate to pay for deferred maintenance in the old warehouse. Demand from online retailers seeking distribution centers in dense urban areas, combined with the legalization of recreational marijuana, is making spaces like NIMBY’s scarce
across the entire Bay Area, he said.
“We’re in a period of explosive growth,” Wolmark said.
It’s not the end of NIMBY. The maker-space is hoping to secure a vast tract of farmland in Lassen County, some 300 miles north of the Bay Area near Reno and the Nevada border. Snook envisions a NIMBY compound, with temporary living spaces artists can use to work on projects for weeks or months at a time.
It’s closer to Burning Man, the annual end-ofsummer bacchanal celebrating community and art, where Snook first got inspired to embed himself in the DIY culture booming in the Bay Area’s underground when he moved from Oregon to the Bay Area in the mid-1990s.
Whenever his friends tried to build one of their large-scale art pieces in a backyard or parking lot, someone would complain to the city or police, he said. Snook, who was working as a property manager and flipping apartments, teamed up with several friends in the early 2000s to look for a 25,000 squarefoot warehouse to share.
Eventually, they found one in 2004 in West Oakland with 28,000 square feet, renting out the remaining area. And, NIMBY was born: a tongue-in-cheek nod to the “not in my backyard” attitude that had kept them from making art.
At the time, former California Gov. Jerry Brown was the mayor of Oakland. The
city was desperately trying to attract investors, and Brown’s office was friendly to artists who were beginning to give the city its cultural edge. Snook remembers West Oakland then as a sort of “wild west,” where artists had managed to lay claim to warehouses across the formerly-industrial area and where one had only to follow the sound of music blaring to find a party.
Then, at the end of 2008, a small fire in their space drew the attention of city inspectors, who shut them down because the building lacked fire sprinklers and had unpermitted electrical work. But, all was not lost. They moved to their current location on Amelia Street in East Oakland in 2009, upgrading to a 64,000 squarefoot space.
Inside NIMBY’s vast warehouse, glass-blowers neighbor blacksmiths, mechanics refurbish hotrods and metal workers craft orchids out of copper. There are video projection artists and film producers, woodworkers, mapmakers and tinkerers of all types. Snook purposefully doesn’t ask new tenants for a portfolio. He’s less interested in judging someone’s art than making sure his tenants can all work well together.
At its core, NIMBY is an incubator for the smallest of businesses. There, artists and makers can learn new skills, benefiting both from shared tools and shared knowledge, said Gaige Qualmann, a volunteer who’s had a studio at NIMBY for the past four years. Qualmann learned to weld at NIMBY and use different woodworking tools. And, it’s what drew him to Oakland in the first place.
“Without NIMBY, I wouldn’t be in Oakland,” he said. “I wouldn’t even think about it.”
Qualmann plans to relocate to a goat farm in southern Oregon in a few months. His partner, Clody Cates, may join him, she said, but she’s reluctant to leave the urban environment, where a vibrant mix of residents with varied backgrounds makes for more spontaneous interactions. And, the prospect of finding a space in Oakland or nearby is daunting, she said. Like many of the artists at NIMBY, Cates may leave the Bay Area altogether.
“Where are we gonna go?” Cates said. “I don’t know. It’s very stressful.”
It’s a huge loss to the city, said Kelley Kahn, the policy director for art spaces in the office of Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf. Kahn understands the value artists add to the city’s economy by making it a more attractive place to live. She intervened to convince Wolmark to extend NIMBY’s lease, which would have expired in December, another nine months and tried to help NIMBY find a new space in the city or nearby. But, short of subsidizing its rent, she could only pass along leads.
“Every time you lose a community like NIMBY, our arts and culture scene does get a little bit weakened,” she said. “Artists are always going to continue to find the parts of the Bay Area and California where they can do their work. But, I would really have loved for that to continue to be in Oakland.”