How Does Coupling Housing With the Arts Build Communitiies
[ Editor'south Note: How tin arts and culture back up community development work? It's a big topic these days. The following is an excerpt from a field browse commissioned past ArtPlace America that sifted through dozens of place-based arts interventions around the land, in a variety of settings, and put them into 6 categories. We found the framework very useful, and hope you practise, too. ]
Clear
Arts strategies that appoint topics of housing, neighborhood, and customs can help to interpret, identify, and communicate important dynamics in powerful and unique ways. Artists, by working to express situations through non-verbal, not-belittling strategies, can help unearth important conditions, encouraging identification, empathy, and understanding of common barriers and problems and the impacts of them.
While these strategies may not have measurable benefits in terms of normally used financial indicators, they serve crucial roles intrinsically. These examples are often identify-based and connected to urban development in a particular identify, equally in the case of Projection Row Houses, simply may as well exist less straight continued, as in the case of Mel Chin'due south "Safehouse." While this strategy may almost directly impact artists, communities can utilize the increased awareness of a housing issue that resulted from an arts strategy through partnerships, advocacy efforts, and more.
Nourish
Arts and civilization tin be the middle of housing work. Whether information technology is to beautify projects, blueprint culturally generative elements that help build community (like porches), or aid a formerly homeless individual make a new apartment feel like home, culturally focused housing work adds a much-needed human element to projects that do not always emphasize humanistic elements.
This attribute of arts work overlaps with design, both in terms of process and product—customs developers may choose to build a thoughtful public space into the design of a projection for residents' wellness and wellbeing; CDCs may appoint urban designers to conduct a collaborative design process equally an engagement and education strategy. These kinds of artistic strategies are crucial to ensure that housing developments accrue benefits to our emotional and physical well-being, especially for vulnerable residents who may accept experienced trauma in a variety of forms.
For instance, The Haven in Charlottesville, Virginia, is a homeless services system that has always worked to admit the importance of a beautiful, creative, and restorative surround. The shelter is located in a re-used edifice downtown, which Executive Manager Stephen Hitchcock says feels special as shortly every bit you walk in, especially in comparison to the average shelter, which can often feel barebones and clinical.
The Haven has partnered with New Urban center Arts for years on various programs, most recently the Housing2Home program, funded by ArtPlace America. The program came nigh at the suggestion of a volunteer who was trying to help a formerly homeless individual brand their new house a home, and suggested that they bring in artwork to practice and then. The Housing two Domicile plan will pair a creative organizer with formerly homeless individuals to bring art into their homes. This program is expected to nourish the soul of program participants likewise every bit help with The Oasis'south bottom line. Ensuring that a placed individual stays in their home for six to 24 months is a fundamental indicator for success.
"The arts are uniquely humanizing—to be a humanist is to alive across subsistence," Hitchcock says.
Organize
Many community-based groups appoint in arts-based strategies to eternalize and enliven community organizing, movement-building, and collective action. While organizing can be difficult, artistic strategies help ensure that customs edifice through housing evolution is enjoyable, joyous, and enriching. Arts and pattern-oriented strategies and interventions assistance educate, empower, and create space for shared decision-making in a housing and community evolution context. These strategies directly benefit those engaged with the organizing campaigns at hand, and secondary benefits may also come to residents, policymakers, and others.
"Venturing into cultural arts work has made everything that we do amend. It has its own natural spirit and benefits. Staff is enthusiastic; tenants are engaged, they know the artists who come and go," says Ellen Baxter of Broadway Housing Communities in New York.
In Buffalo, New York, for instance, Push button Buffalo is a multi-upshot organization that combines customs organizing, political advocacy, housing development, and more. By staying focused on a specific neighborhood over a long period of time and maintaining deep roots in its residents and organizers, PUSH has found itself naturally including arts-based organizing strategies into its activism and customs development work to boost effectiveness. In order to focus on comprehensive customs development, Push button created its housing arm, the Buffalo Neighborhood Stabilization Company, to develop and maintain affordable housing for its residents. Aaron Bartley, executive managing director, identified key cultural factors for successful community organizing and housing evolution: relevance, dynamism, free energy, and fun, even if the bug themselves are technical or dry. Push button has its own drumming and dancing troupe, it'south supported landscape development by people living in the neighborhood, held two summer concerts per year showcasing local and regional talent, and more. They piece of work to make these practices internal to the organization as a way of building community, strengthening, and celebrating their piece of work. And now, a customs congress identified the need for an onetime school edifice to become an arts and community center, which is at present under development and will add important value to its housing development and other initiatives.
Bridge
Artistic activeness can serve a crucial part to bringing people together in new ways. Cultural programming in a housing context can play many important roles, including some that overlap with others discussed here. One important outcome that many interviewees identified every bit particularly beneficial is attainable cultural activities that can increment empathy and provide a common footing for people who may not otherwise interact. This of import part addresses the negative consequences of highly segregated regions, as well equally in mixed-income neighborhoods, which over time have created mistrust, bias, and prejudice.
"Meaningful interactions through the arts tin slowly build strong bonds that are fundamental to community development piece of work," says Theresa Hwang, the director of the Department of Places in California.
Overcoming biases, lack of exposure, mistrust, and prejudices benefit all parties who may then alive more comfortably in their neighborhood and within the larger urban region with stronger ties to, and understanding of, diversity. Arts projects can rebuild humanizing social connections—they can prevent seeing a homeless person, a working artist, or even a developer equally a strange entity, every bit dehumanized and anonymous.
Broadway Housing Communities in New York is a supportive and affordable housing developer that is breaking through constraints and barriers to innovate new forms of affordable housing for low-income individuals and families. The recent Sugar Hill Housing Development created 124 units of affordable housing as well as a new Children's Museum of Arts & Storytelling in a building designed past high contour architect David Adjaye. The project congenital upon BHC's previous incorporation of the arts into supportive housing developments, which began when a community organizer who was also an artist curated a show in the building. BHC found that this brought new not-residents into the building and helped pause down longstanding barriers and biases between members of the neighborhood. BHC's Baxter is excited to begin programming the new museum space and is hopeful that it volition continue to exist a cultural resources not just for residents but also for broader Harlem and New York Urban center communities, placing the building on a cultural map of the urban center.
Stabilize
Many community-based groups take found that arts-based strategies are crucial in their efforts to stabilize communities that are particularly vulnerable to displacement. Groups like the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative pioneered neighborhood stabilization and wealth-creation through customs-endemic country and housing past utilizing creative strategies to have country off of the individual market through land trusts and other mechanisms. In the cases identified here, customs-based groups identify artistic strategies or engage in partnerships with artists or arts organizations. Such partnerships bring together technical expertise in the fields of real estate development, urban planning, and political organizing with either professionally trained arts workers or creative members of the community are frequently effective because they let the creative workers to maintain a level of creative liberty while besides moving forrad tangible urban development work. Stabilization strategies are well-nigh often aimed to support vulnerable populations, weakened by celebrated or ongoing neglect or uneven funding for individuals and communities of limited ways; people of color; Native American communities; and others who are usually at a disadvantage. These practices are largely experimental and in need of more research, study, experimentation, and funding in society to help community groups develop best practices and achieve long-term stabilization for vulnerable communities and residents.
"Nosotros are using cultural strategies to help gain command of the neighborhood through belongings ownership, community-led revitalization, and more. We need to brand certain our existing residents, whether they are grandmothers or younger folks who will raise families hither, tin stay when new investment comes. We are working to create infinite at a footstep that won't displace," says Nia Umoja of the Cooperative Community of New West Jackson.
Project Row Houses in Texas is an early practitioner of arts-based cultural and community-based housing evolution. Information technology is focused on the preservation of a mixed- income, African-American community in a apace gentrifying neighborhood in Houston. PRH began in the 1980s every bit a project past and for local African-American artists, and began by salvaging and preserving several vernacular row houses for artists' studios and galleries. Building on the attention they received every bit innovative, socially engaged artists, PRH has successfully preserved and developed over 50 units of housing also as continued to build several spaces for galleries and artists in the culturally historic row house style. Since and so, the Third Ward of Texas has seen increasing real estate development pressure that is making information technology difficult to retain the celebrated African-American customs and neighborhood surroundings, peculiarly for those of low and moderate incomes who are particularly vulnerable to long-term unemployment. PRH is now partnering with churches, landowners, renters, politicians, and more in the neighborhood to convene the Emancipation Economical Development Council. The quango is pursuing several strategies, including land trusts, anchor establishment development strategy, and others to address community stabilization and wealth creation comprehensively and in ways that address structural dynamics, simply beginning necessarily with the ability to remain in housing. This partnership allows the arts to "stay nimble," and not rely on arts-based leaders for everything that they may not exist expert in.
Generate
Arts and cultural strategies are imageable; besides the benefits afforded to those participating in them, they tin can point to outsiders that a particular neighborhood may be valuable and can thus attract investment. Considering funds for affordable housing preservation, evolution, and rehabilitation are so low, utilizing arts strategies tin aid in a communities' competitiveness. Creative placemaking strategies have benefitted community-housing developers past attracting national attending, which can and so distinguish a CDC from others and attract additional investment. Theaster Gates' work in Chicago, which has attracted significant attention due to its innovative nature, has opened the door to funding for housing development. Northeast Shores, a CDC in Cleveland, has been able to attract financing and reach economic evolution for a neighborhood with high vacancy by intentionally marketing the neighborhood to artists, who can afford to buy homes there.
"Narratives most a detail neighborhood, even if they come from a social justice standpoint, tin can be perceived every bit an invitation to invest. We take to be really conscientious about what story comes out in the public nigh our neighborhood," says Aaron Bartley of PUSH Buffalo.
Many developers are starting time to understand this and utilize it to benefit their financial lesser lines. However, interviewees identified important caveats to utilizing arts-based strategies purely for economic development. Without being intentional, systematic, and strategic about whom the benefits of economic evolution will go to; at that place are often unintended negative outcomes for already vulnerable and marginalized communities. This can also translate into developers mistaking the wood for the trees: ane interviewee noted that developers, seeing the value of the arts, may choose to bring in art from outside of the community that is not site specific or culturally relevant, simply to increase profit rather than gain benefits for residents.
The Power of Arts
I began this enquiry with the hopes of understanding how creative strategies aid build sustainable and healthy communities of opportunity. I've seen firsthand how powerful arts and culture are in articulating complex dynamics of urban and community development; in raising the flag to indicate where need exists; in providing crucial emotional support and connection; in helping to cohere diverse communities, and and then much more.
The portion of the housing sector that endeavors to support depression-income communities and communities of color is under an enormous amount of financial and political pressure level. A legacy of disinvestment, discrimination, and neglect continue to plague our country.
We must come to terms with this history and piece of work intentionally and explicitly to do things differently. While creative work itself will not solve this, the piece of work described here shows that information technology tin, in some cases, infuse community development work with the crucial alchemy needed to help overcome longstanding barriers. This scan too indicates that the fields of creative placemaking and affordable housing need each other to exist effective and also demand to improve consider each other as they endeavor to accomplish the overall goal of building good for you communities of opportunity. Creative placemaking practitioners need to think comprehensively most how their work impacts and intersects with housing outcomes. Housing is maybe the most tangible, and besides about complex, measure of community evolution. Nowhere is this more credible than in the communities effectually the country that are facing eviction and displacement. New place-based investments, when made without explicit regard for accountability to and touch on those structurally barred from access to capital and resources, tin exacerbate negative impacts. Communities are organizing to resist this deportation and sustain themselves in the long term and many of them organically utilise creative strategies to address central housing barriers. At regional and national scales, policymakers and funders tin can learn from those working on the ground in this way about how they might adapt their policies and funding mechanisms to back up the sustainability and autonomy of low-income communities, communities of colour, Native Americans, and others who accept been historically at a disadvantage.
Photo credit:
Image 1. Project Row Houses: Project/Site's inaugural project has commissioned Houston-based artists Otabenga Jones & Associates to realize OJBKFM Radio, a temporary outdoor community radio station that will broadcast from the back of a 1959 pink Cadillac Coupe de Ville. The mobile station will defibrillate the Dowling Street Corridor. Photo past Shulamit Seidler-Feller, courtesy of Creative Time.
Image 2. Lincoln Park Declension: Customs Farm. Photo courtesy of LCPPD.org.
Image 3. Trivial World: Photo from National Night Out, 2012. Photo courtesy of LittleEarth.org.
Source: https://shelterforce.org/2016/05/26/6-things-the-arts-can-do-for-housing/
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