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Having moved here last year from New York (where I made most of my living as a writer and some of it as a musician and music teacher), I can testify that real estate is one of the major headaches for the arts. There, real estate prices have gotten so outrageous that almost every "artistic" performance space in the city has closed, along with almost every independent bookstore, small gallery, and art-house cinema. Nobody can afford to pay the rent. Looks like the same thing is happening here now too. At the risk of sounding Republican, one solution (though I don't know the laws behind this) would be to give tax breaks to landlords who lease space to arts organizations at below-market rent. Another alternative would be to incentivize real estate companies to provide temporary space to arts organizations in between-tenant commercial properties -- for one-week shows, for instance.

posted 5 years, 3 months ago
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