Kidding, this is actually a really great little article that it took The Pitch three weeks to write. Lots of great personal insights as your favorite hipster forwards this one around to all of their other friends waiting for the right time to ask their parents for more cash as they approach 50 or even 60 . . . Gasp! The creative-class struggle is real. Read more:
Cheap rent and studio spaces are rapidly vanishing from Kansas City's arts landscape. What now?
Not so very long ago, Davin Watne and his bandmates in the garage-soul act Thee Devotion rented the entire upstairs floor of a Crossroads building for $100 a month. The year was 2008. Downstairs was Posterworx, a digital printing company at 1523 Oak. Posterworx's owners, John and Paul Migliazzo, weren't using the extra space.
The artists need to gang up and purchase their own building. Also there is plenty of open spaces in Swope Park.
ReplyDeleteWhen the city borrows money for the GO Bonds that increases the property tax. When the library increases the tax levy that increases the property tax. When we give tax free property taxes to Cordish other downtown developers and property gets reassessed to the correct value that increases the property tax. When the City imposes a registration fee that increases costs to landlords. So who is causing rents to increase?
ReplyDeleteMove out South, Ruskin and Loma Vista are cheap.
ReplyDeleteI wonder what could happen if KC used incentives for the intended purpose instead of socialism for the wealthy???
ReplyDeleteI wonder and didn't see this listed in the article but what is the sq footage for the places these so called artists are paying for. Hard to determine what is high or low when the amount of space they are getting for their money isn't listed.
ReplyDeleteKC used to be a great place to bum around a be an artist...like even 10 years ago. I don't mean this in a lazy kind of way, but more in this city used to be affordable to those who wanted to live in midtown and pursue those sorts of leisure activities. Now a lot of people have been priced out and the neighborhoods has slightly less character and the stores, shops, and restaurants are mostly changed. It's slight, but in another 10 years it will be just another boring and expensive city to get shot it
ReplyDeleteit's impossible to take articles seriously when they contain lines like this: "Gentrification, of course, is as real in KC as it is in every other city living under late capitalism."
ReplyDeleteThis is how you know you're not dealing with serious-minded people
Maybe they should grow up and get a job? Just sayin.
ReplyDeleteSay goodbye to First Fridays.
ReplyDelete"Left to their own devices, the forces of gentrification and capitalism will eventually eat everything."
ReplyDeleteHow did this sentence make it past an editor?
Government involvement in the arts led to the downfall of the arts in Europe. Places like Paris, Rome, and Madrid were incredible artistic hotbeds 100 years ago. The government stepped in to fund artists and Europe's artistic downfall began as the ceded it to the United States.
ReplyDeletePoint is, this article has some of the most unlikable people I've ever read about just complaining and bitching about shit because they can't have a $50 a month office anymore
4:23, the person who wrote that nonsense is 22. The editor is 23. Both majored in grievance studies or, worse, journalism.
ReplyDeleteNorth Kansas City is just across the Bridge.
ReplyDeleteKCK has a bu ch of places that would be good. Probably get something cheap in the East Bottoms also.
ReplyDeleteMayor Buttplug will soon be in town and should have some great advice for the artistic community, and their real estate concerns.
ReplyDeleteAlthough he is in deep shit in the city for which he serves as mayor, he surely has brilliant solutions for this small totatoes KC situation.
As someone running for prisident, I sure he'll have the answers.