This Q&A is part of Lessons from the Field, Next City’s new series of interviews with anti-displacement practitioners across the country.

To Meg Shiffler, every artist is an entrepreneur. The inaugural director of the San Francisco-based nonprofit Artist Space Trust knows that when artists are priced out of their communities, it’s not just a loss of cultural vibrancy; it’s the shuttering of small businesses and the weakening of local economies.

Artists everywhere are on the brink. A longitudinal study of 20 million workers from 2006 to 2021 found that artists earn up to 30% less than those in other industries. Although over 5 million people work in the arts and cultural industries, they face higher unemployment rates, lower wages, and fewer benefits. And because artists are three-and-a-half times more likely to be self-employed than other workers, many lack the credit and stable income that banks and landlords require.

“The displacement of artists is not just the displacement of workers,” Shiffler explains. “It’s the displacement of small businesses. In the Bay Area, it’s becoming harder and harder to be a small business.”

Artist Space Trust, a two-year-old nonprofit launched by Vital Arts and Northern California Land Trust, is working to change that. By adapting the community land trust model — a strategy long used to preserve affordable housing for teachers, city workers, and other essential labor sectors — the group is securing permanently affordable, community-owned homes and creative spaces for artists.

“We’re a very traditional community land trust,” Shiffler says. “We are sitting inside of a prime example of a great, successful 52-year-old land trust: Northern California Land Trust. Luckily, we have a model available to us … but it just hasn’t been done for our labor sector.”

Next City sat down with Shiffler to talk about how Artist Space Trust is working to create pathways for housing for artists.

Tell us about Artists Space Trust and the problem you’re trying to address.

Artists Space Trust was founded by two individuals, Ian Winters and Kathryn Reasoner. Kathryn was a mentor of mine and a serial executive director in the arts. She got together with Ian, who is a working artist and has been the head of Northern California Land Trust for 20 years. Northern California Land Trust is one of the oldest and, until recently, was the largest community land trust in California.

They got together and were talking about how to stabilize the lives of artists and culture bearers. A one-bedroom apartment is going to cost one million dollars here. But these days, you really can’t get into much of anything for less than about $600,000.

The community land trust model became of great interest, and we realized how many artists are actually already in community land trust housing because we’re a primarily low-income labor sector.

Our labor sector contributes almost 8% to the economy. If you add the film and entertainment, it’s closer to 14%. But just arts and culture is 7.5% to 8%; the Bay Area, for a region, matches that number as well. So we’re a high contributor, primarily low-income workforce.

There is an organization here in the Bay Area that’s world-renowned. It’s called Community Art Stabilization Trust (CAST), and they are the international model for a creative land trust [which works to help arts nonprofits acquire property].

Ten years ago, the thought was that if we stabilized our art organizations, our artists would then be stabilized, but that has proven not to be true. You stabilize an arts organization, and the arts organization supports artists. Still, traditionally, the support of artists doesn’t mean they’re receiving a living wage for their work or that they’re lifting them out of this low-income category. No matter how stable our organizations are, we remain a low-income labor sector.

We were all kind of waiting, because it seemed to be part of their initial mission for CAST to start doing housing. Because they hadn’t yet and the pandemic hit, this opened up the space for us to focus on individuals.

While CAST’s focus is on organizations, we focus on stabilizing the lives of individual artists through housing and creative space. We’re in really close contact and keeping an eye on each other, but we’re building something that doesn’t exist.

We’re the only one in the world that’s a CLT – a creative land trust – that’s also a CLT – a community land trust.

What have you all accomplished so far? What are you most proud of?

We’re two years old. We have two full-time staff members and a bunch of contractors, volunteers, interns and advisors. We have a beautiful advisory group that continues to grow and consists mostly of artists. This advisory council has been an incredible link for us, connecting us to the needs and concerns of the artist community. We’re thrilled to be building an organization that’s equity-focused, which is a part of being a community land trust.

We’ve accumulated $10 million in properties that have been bequeathed to us. Our model is built on mutual aid, not exclusively, but at the core of what we’re doing is building a portfolio through mutual aid.

All of our property donors are artists themselves, who bought their properties at a specific time when it was more possible and realized that it’s the only way that they have been able to stay in the bay. These properties that have been bequeathed to us, all of them are from low-income artists. They’re part of the actual sector that we serve, not only as being artists, but also as low-income, and knowing what that means in the Bay Area. They’re culturally diverse, they’re in their 80s, and they’re thrilled to have the opportunity to build a permanent legacy with their homes. I can’t tell you how happy artists are when they find out about us.

We also distribute CalHome Down Payment Assistance and have helped two artists buy homes in Oakland. Those homes are not part of AST’s property portfolio, but we’re building a pathway – a buyer-directed program — for that to happen in the future.

We won the American Institute of Architects Changemaker Award. It’s our first public acknowledgement of the innovation of what we’re doing, being acknowledged by a national organization and its San Francisco branch.

How many artists have you all been able to house so far?

We were given a duplex in the Mission District in San Francisco, which means it’s a $2.6 million duplex — that’s what being in the Mission District means these days, because of gentrification. That was gifted to us by an artist who wishes to remain anonymous, but had this property. This person was thinking about how to give back to the community, and found out about us and donated it in full. It had no debt and was renovated.

We’re in the final stages of helping the final two artists who have gone through the selection process get mortgages, because it’s a True Interest Cost (TIC) in a CLT model. The mortgage companies are having to build a mortgage product for us because it doesn’t really exist. One of the apartments, which costs $1.3 million, will go to one of the artists for a mortgage total of $285,000.

Artists’ income really flexes and rolls. You may get a multi-million public art commission and not expense that out to the subcontractors for four years, but it’s this allocated project where maybe you’re only making $20,000 off of it. It’s very complicated accounting, and lots of artists don’t have their taxes set up or don’t have an LLC.

Part of the work that we’re doing right now is working with banks to look at three to five years of their finances for us as fair housing providers. We’re also looking at three years to get them into the area median income that they need to be in, and then we’re starting to work with artists to better represent their income and their business in their taxes, so that they can begin to qualify for this housing.

Talk to us about the biggest challenges you all have had.

Funding. We’re in a pilot phase right now. It’s not about properties. I have a list of 30 people that I haven’t even contacted yet who are elder artists in our region, and that’s just to start to talk about bequeathing. There’s something in America called the Great [Wealth] Transfer, which evolved from the silent generation and Boomers to generations below.

One of the hard things is that we need to build capacity — staff capacity, operational capacity — to reach all of the elder artists and let them know about this opportunity before they pass. There’s a 10-year window, or less.

We’ve already talked to artists who want this and whose life situations have changed in the process of our conversations, which meant that they could no longer change their wills. It’s not just life expectancy. There are all kinds of things that happen to elders that make them unable to change their requests in their wills.

We feel incredible urgency around this, and we’ll be focusing probably 50% of our property, time and effort on bequests in the coming years. We simply don’t have the staff capacity to do that and to go after the straight-up donations, bargain sales and partial donations we are also cultivating.

The problem is that housing funders generally have the big money. These are government sources of income as well as foundation support, and they see us as niche because we’re the first. Sometimes we get points for innovation; other times it’s a [negative].

They also don’t understand that the presence of artists is a health and well-being indicator for individuals, neighborhoods and cities. If we talk about that 7.5% of economic impact, and we talk about the data around health and wellness, it starts to make more sense. For example, kids who have an arts education in school are more likely to go to college. They’re also more likely to succeed at math.

What’s on the horizon for your organization?

We want to be the national blueprint for community land trusts that are creative land trusts as well. We’re also working on a toolkit to help other organizations that are interested in doing work similar to ours. We have multiple national foundations that are interested in funding the toolkit that we’ll be building once we have five years under our belt.

We’re interested in what it would look like to have a national nonprofit franchise. For example, Artist Space Trust: Cleveland. Artist Space Trust would be the national nonprofit, and cities would be taking on a hyper-local approach to doing this work, because that’s what community land trusts are. The work will look different in Houston than it does in Detroit than it does in Miami, but we share values and share the community land trust structure.

I think we can become a powerful national advocacy and awareness group around artist housing. We have to prove that it’s successful and that we can change local policy here in California first. There’s a statewide legislation called AB 812 that allows municipalities to develop cultural districts and then submit them for state acceptance, and then every new development of low-income housing that happens inside of a geographic cultural district can reserve at least 10% for artists and cultural barriers. We recently found a policy from maybe 2013 where Berkeley had developed legislation around workforce housing and included artists in it.

We’re digging, digging, digging in all these municipal records to see where the word artist appears and what sort of crack in the door that gives us, because we need that bigger money to grow and develop.

What do you want Next City readers to know about your work?

We want people to view the health and well-being, the holistic wellness of artists through many lenses — through health care, through housing, through food justice, through cultural identity and preservation and growth.

Let’s develop powerful language that puts our sector and our people that we serve in the same frame as small business entrepreneurs, that puts them in the frame of what is absolutely economically necessary and is required for the health and well-being of residents. We tend to use feel-good language when talking about artists, but to move policy and make people care, we have to start empowering a deeper understanding and a more holistic understanding of what it means to take care of artists beyond funding the symphony.

If the symphony went away, people would [blow] a gasket. If the third string oboe player had to drive three hours to get to a concert, because they’ve been displaced — nobody thinks about that, and they 100% should.

This story was produced through our Equitable Cities Reporting Fellow for Anti-Displacement Strategies, which is made possible with funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

This post was originally published on Next City.