The Arts Are Struggling to Survive in San Francisco. Here’s Why.
Did you ever wonder why, in Beat novels like Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, the characters have so much time to sit around and drink and smoke pot, despite living in expensive cities like New York and San Francisco? It’s because in the 1950s and 1960s, the cost of living was comparatively lower, while the minimum wage was higher — and meanwhile, the victories of the labor movement meant that well-paying blue-collar jobs were much more plentiful. Furthermore, with basically free college tuition and the GI Bill — whose beneficiaries include poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, author Joseph Heller and painter Romare Bearden — there were far more means for artists to survive. Hence, Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise could work in the fields for a couple of weeks and then have enough money for gas, booze and contraception to last the rest of the novel.
For the reasons listed above, the Beats had a lot of time to write. And time is an artist’s most basic need — time to create, time to think and time to hone one’s craft. Historically, artists have found cheap places to make art and then stuck around till they struck it big — or burned out. This is what has drawn artists to neighborhoods with cheap rents, like the Mission in the 1990s, SOMA in the 1980s and North Beach in the 1950s.
But in today’s San Francisco, you have to know someone who knows someone to find an affordable space, or live in a trash can. Meanwhile, those of us who fantasize about being artists now are more likely working in the service industry, generally doing work that is demanding and emotionally and physically draining, and that pays low wages that require workers to work full-time or more to pay the rent.
Besides the necessity of a day job amenable to the artist lifestyle, most of the reasons the arts are dying in San Francisco are about real estate prices. But beyond that, it’s the changing economic landscape, the changing nature of work and quality-of-life laws that go hand in hand with gentrification.
Reason 1: You can’t afford to get a studio space.
Do I even have to say this? It’s not like San Francisco’s going rate of $1,000-ish per square foot doesn’t magically not apply to artists. You have two options now: charge $1,000 per square foot of art and do a work-trade with your landlord, or live in your car. Oh, wait … you can’t live in your car.
Reason 2: You can’t live in your car.
If you’ve lived in San Francisco for long enough, you surely remember them: the RVs in assorted colors and states of disrepair that lined up under the freeway in SOMA and down through the Dogpatch, Bayview and the Mission.
Then, the city started rolling out an overnight parking ban in 2013, which was expanded in 2014, and most of the RVs disappeared.
Overnight-parking bans are one of a suite of anti-poor measures cloaked as “quality of life” issues that are typical to rich and rapidly gentrifying cities. Along with the comically discriminatory “sit/lie” ordinance and Scott Weiner’s puritanical battle against nudity, San Francisco has started to slowly criminalize not being rich and normal, which is concerning, given that most artists are poor and weird.
Living in one’s car is a long-standing Bohemian rite of passage. It’s a safety net, a way to devote yourself to your passion, work less and not worry about rent.
But with these new laws hostile to this lifestyle, longtime RV residents of San Francisco are decamping for asphalt on the other side of the Bay, in Oakland and beyond.
Reason 3: You can’t afford to be a musician.
What does it say that Iggy Pop can’t even survive off his music anymore? The music industry was dealt a major blow by Napster and Kazaa, a second whammy by iTunes and a knockout hit by Spotify. Every time you play a song on Spotify, the artist makes about $0.001128 — one-tenth of one penny. If your band has four or five members or you’re in the Polyphonic Spree, those numbers move even farther right from the decimal point.
At the same time, some of the legendary music venues are threatened by closure as the city becomes nothing but co-working spaces. Truthout wrote about the perils facing Sub Mission; there is a chance it may go the way of legendary punk factory the Farm, an early victim of rising rents in the late 1980s. If no one can hear your music live, it’s pretty hard to promote yourself.
San Francisco’s loss tends to be Oakland’s gain, and Oakland’s industrial history means there are still plenty of old factories and warehouses teeming with underground shows.
Reason 4: You don’t have a trust fund.
I went to undergrad with Lena Dunham and had a similar dream of being a writer and an artist, yet it’s safe to say that the two of us had very different postgraduate paths. While I struggled to make it as a writer in San Francisco during the recession, working 50+ hours a week at soul-sucking minimum-wage jobs and living off food stamps, her substantial trust fund and rich parents meant that she could dope around in her family’s Tribeca loft and direct her debut film, Tiny Furniture.
Every artist dreams about what it would’ve been like to be born with a trust fund, though deep down I’m also relieved that the New Yorker has never referred to my work as “the cinema of unexamined privilege.”
Reason 5: You can’t afford to be a writer.
Many of San Francisco’s beloved writers came from modest means and worked their way to the top through journalism jobs. Armistead Maupin got his start working for the San Francisco bureau of the Associated Press in 1971, and Rebecca Solnit studied journalism at Berkeley in the 1980s. At the time, they both made a living off their craft, which is hard-to-impossible to do nowadays.
What changed besides the obvious? It’s not so much that journalism is in shambles, but more that talk is cheap. The days of 50¢/word for articles are over, partly because there are so many people willing to write for free (which drives down the wage for writers), and partly because the value of online advertising is about one-tenth of what it is for print advertising.
The situation is the same for writers all across the board, but the days of newspapers as great incubators of literary talent have passed. The situation is similar for photographers, as the payout for photos has dropped dramatically as well, and most stock photos can be sourced for free from Creative Commons collections.
Reason 6: You can’t get an arts grant unless you’re famous.
The arts world is a bit like the real economy, where the top 1% takes 95% of the income gains. True, San Francisco has a robust public-arts funding model, whereby 4.3% of San Francisco’s hotel tax goes to fund arts in the city to the tune of around eight million dollars a year. However, the money mostly goes to the arts giants, in particular the ones beloved by the city’s well-heeled citizens. Over half a million of that hotel-tax money goes to the San Francisco Opera, and much of the rest is divvied up between hundreds of arts nonprofits, which then dole it out according to their own formulae. This creates a patchwork of arts grants that are neither universally accessible nor easy to access for individual artists, especially those struggling to get by with no history or knowledge of the internecine nonprofit-grant-writing world.
Most artists I know want to make art, not schmooze with nonprofit boards of directors and fill out grant applications. If you’re looking to survive as an artist on your own, this is not the way to go. But if you’re an opera singer with a gig downtown, perhaps you have a chance at getting some of that sweet tourist moola.
