Remember that piece from The Atlantic last year about how a decent chunk of affordable housing for artists could come across as basically just favoring low-income subsidized spaces for white college-educated artists?
Affordable housing sometimes has a bad reputation: The name often conjures crumbling public towers or far-away pre-fab units built by private developers.
But there’s another kind of affordable housing, built with tax credits and city loans, typified in a place like the A-Mill lofts. Set on the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, the A-Mill lofts include a penthouse resident lounge, a fitness center, a yoga studio, free wi-fi, dishwashers, and studios for painting, pottery, dance, and music.
The A-Mill lofts sound like the type of opportunity that most poor families would dream of. But a new report suggests that the lofts are not accessible to most poor families. Though they were built with affordable-housing tax credits and city loans, they’re too expensive for most voucher holders to afford, the report finds. Instead, they go to mostly to white artists, who have incomes below the median for the area but above the average affordable-housing tenant.
This type of majority-white subsidized housing is not unique. According to the report, from the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity at the University of Minnesota, about 6 percent of housing built using low-income tax credits in Minneapolis and St. Paul is built for artists. And those buildings don’t look at all like traditional affordable units. The artist housing is 82.4 percent white, and the average income of tenants is $29,890. Only about 3.3 percent of tenants receive rental assistance. All other housing built with low-income-housing tax credits in those two cities, by contrast, is 19.8 percent white, with an average income of $17,140, and 67 percent of tenants receive rental assistance.
“There’s a dual system of subsidized housing in Minneapolis and perhaps other cities,” Myron Orfield, one of the study’s authors, told me. “There's the traditional form of subsidized housing, heavily concentrated in minority neighborhoods and heavily occupied by poor, non-white voucher holders. And then you have another system of affordable housing— artist housing in white neighborhoods that's predominantly occupied by non-poor, white artists.” [emphasis added]
Or another 2013 piece in The Atlantic about how artists that complain about gentrification tend to play a role in said gentrification?
Today, Vera Haller of The Wall Street Journal brought the nation's attention to the real victims of gentrification: college educated artists being priced out of the rough-and-tumble Brooklyn neighborhood of Bushwick. Because, as we all know know, the problem with low income, predominantly minority neighborhoods being developed is that, as Haller puts it, "gentrification usually displaces the artists who breathe life into gritty neighborhoods."
Ever since the infamous blackout of 1977, Bushwick has been a largely destitute neighborhood, just waiting for weekend raves and multimedia exhibitions to bring it back to life. Now the raves and exhibits are there, and developers are coming to ruin everything hipsters hold dear, just as was the case in Williamsburg ten years ago.
Haller's piece profiles a group of artists trying to curb the tide of condominiums and rent hikes by pooling their resources and buying their own studio space. She writes:
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There's nothing wrong with artists looking for cheap places to live. And in some ways, gentrification is good for a neighborhood. There are long-time residents who think it's great. As urbanist Benjamin Grant wrote in a piece for PBS, "Who wouldn't want to see reduced crime, new investment in buildings and infrastructure, and increased economic activity in their neighborhoods?"
Fair enough. The problem is, it is mostly the new arrivals, and people who bought into the community early, who reap the benefits of the change. Buying now is a smart move for artists looking for affordable studio space, but to act as if artists — specifically college-educated young adults — are victims, instead of part of the problem, is dishonest and ignores the people truly harmed as Bushwick becomes ever more synonymous with cool. [emphasis added]
Well, there's still time to complain that proposed changes in tax code could make things tougher for artists on the housing front but cutting down who can benefit from federally subsidized low-income housing.
Lofts and studios for low-income artists may suffer a major blow if the Republican effort to overhaul the tax system is signed into law.
An amendment to the tax bill passed by the Senate would strike artists’ housing from the list of qualified groups who can benefit from federally subsidized low-income housing. If the provision makes its way into the tax bill that moves on to the White House, it would forbid developers from using housing credits to build affordable housing with a preference for artists.
Moreover, as written, the law would also render all existing artists’ housing developments built with housing credits retroactively ineligible for the benefit—creating a sudden tax liability for the investors who have used these credits for years. [emphasis added]
The change comes in the form of an amendment introduced by Senator Pat Roberts, the Republican senior senator from Kansas. His amendment, which passed with the Senate tax bill at 3:00 a.m. on Saturday, includes a simple line-for-line language swap. Where current law carves out a special exception for individuals “who are involved in artistic or literary activities,” the new bill would instead specify a benefit for those “who are veterans of the Armed Forces.”
By eliminating the advantage for artists and giving it to veterans instead—without changing any other language—all artists’ housing developments built with tax credits could soon be on the wrong side of the law.
Bankers and other investors, not artists, would pay the immediate price.
But if there's some legitimate concern that subsidized housing and studio space for artists ends up favoring white artists rather than families of color couldn't someone make some kind of case that subsidized housing and studio space for artists could be sufficiently racially discriminatory in practice as to raise legitimate doubts about the viability of the policy? If the pie is only so large and we're running systemic deficits as it is then it might be a choice between artists and veterans.
“There is a lot of concern out there in the housing credit community for all the existing artist housing that is potentially subject to tax credit recapture,” says Peter Lawrence, director of public policy and government relations for Novogradac and Company, a national certified public accounting and consulting firm. “I think, once tax policymakers are aware of those potential consequences, there will be pressure to try to address that.”
Lawrence adds, “We do have limited time, and there are lots of people trying to get fixes to various provisions in either the House or Senate tax bills. There is going to be a capacity problem, in that there’s only so much that tax staff can try to work on at any one time.”
The clock is ticking, as members of both houses of Congress race to pass the most sweeping tax bill in 30 years, and the first legislative victory of the Trump era, before breaking for the holidays.
Roberts’s amendment may number among the many provisions of the legislation whose unintended consequences are just coming to light. With this amendment, banks and other investors who purchased tax credits legally could see their investments in housing credits challenged, canceled, or even recouped by the Internal Revenue Service.
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I don't know that I feel much urgency about this topic since I've never been in low income subsidized housing for artists. The author highlights that the differences between veterans and artists are so great there's no certainty that simply changing the subsidies granted from artists to veterans would help the veterans. Maybe not, but even if you think that Gulf War 2 and the War on Terror have ultimately been disastrous policy moves (which I don't just so happen to think) you can still believe that the subsidies for artists can end up being too much in favor of white college-educated artists to necessarily be a defensible policy approach. The Atlantic coverage over the last three or four years on this subject has been interesting to read because if the pie is only so big and subsidies come down to artists or people of color why, exactly, do the artists get to have better deals? Somebody might even suggest there's something potentially racist about it but that's more of a potentially Coatesian line of argument. I'd lean more toward a proposal that if a single artist or a family of four is up for consideration more people could be helped by helping the family of four.
It's weird reading a journalist say that bankers rather than artists would pay the immediate price as if we're supposed to feel bad for ... the bankers?
Huh ... .
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