Author: P Segal

If there have been no posts recently, it’s because ArtHouse has been forced to take a new approach to moving things forward. In June, we were told that our policies no longer qualified us for fiscal sponsorship, since current guidelines did not allow our fiscal sponsor to represent an organization that involved real estate or that offered a benefit to someone in the private sector. As a result, the immediate objectives have changed, and we’re in the process of filing for our own 501(c)3 status.

The news was hard to fathom, for a variety of reasons. The first was that we’d been sponsored by the same organization since 2019, when it was still run by a director who’d been there for 40 years. He told me not to bother with philanthropy or government funding, but to look for support from the private sector. After he retired, I learned he was right; I couldn’t find a single foundation in America that had artists’ housing in their guidelines, and the city of San Francisco had no intention of helping. Although the NEA offered to fully fund our project, if we could partner with the city, no one in city government would talk to us at all. The private sector remained the only option.

It was also a very strange policy because every nonprofit with a reasonable budget has an office, which involves real estate and profit to a member of the private sector, their landlord. ArtHouse isn’t seeking ownership of property, but partnership with building owners to give them huge tax deductions for in-kind charitable donations. Apparently, fiscally sponsored organizations can have an office, but not a partnership. Only organizations with their own 501(c)3 designation can embark on corporate-nonprofit (or individual-nonprofit) partnerships, and so that’s our current goal.

The process is tedious, even if you are low-budget and qualify for the EZ application. It’s somewhat less expensive if you have no money, but it still involves countless unpaid hours to fill out the multiple forms, draft the requisite business plan, contact all the government agencies involved, edit the website, research the fine points, et cetera.

This is a labor of love for me, which I carry on with whether there’s money in our account or not. I was born at 200 Columbus Avenue, in an era when San Francisco was the epicenter of literary culture, and the most famous poets alive were at the same table in the Caffe Trieste every day. I lived in the years when musicians in the Haight became globally famous, the punk scene exploded south of Market and on Broadway, where the world’s most famous comedians were regulars, Latin rock emerged from the Mission, and we got art forms that never existed before: performance art, machine art, environmental art, and zine culture. In 1990, the last new art phenomenon to come out of San Francisco , Burning Man at the Black Rock Desert, was conceived and planned in my living room until 2000. They were fascinating times in a stunningly beautiful place. I loved this city so much, not just for its beauty, but for the fortune of creative energy that made it shine.

There are still creative people here, but far, far fewer. And people can no longer come here to start a career—without a trust fund— because you can’t rent an apartment without pay stubs proving you make three times the egregious rent. As a writer, I can’t rent an apartment here, and for the first time in my adult life, I don’t have a lease with my name on it. But I can provide a magnificent in-kind charitable donation to a landlord with a big, empty flat for ArtHouse.

This is also a labor of love for my fellow San Franciscans, to give them back the quality of life I’ve known in this city humming with creative energy and the improved mental health it brings, proven in hundreds of academic studies. I can almost guarantee what I want to do will undo the city’s economic downturn. I’m in search of the right collaborators, to give them the opportunity to do something as remarkable as starting Burning Man, some life-changing and rewarding pleasure.

But first the paperwork for the 501(c)3.

psegal (at) arthousesf.org

Two things have taken up a lot of my attention recently and made
me wonder why the decision making in this country is done by
people who know so little about the consequences and folly of
their decisions.

The most pressing thing concerns ArtHouse, my nonprofit for coop
artists’ housing and venues in San Francisco, which is losing
its fiscal sponsor at the end of this month. After checking with
another fiscal sponsor I have worked with before, I discovered
that the policy that is depriving me of this service is happening in
all fiscally sponsoring agencies here: they cannot sponsor any
organization that deals in any way with real estate, or that could
benefit a company or corporation.

When I started working with the current sponsor, 7 years ago, the
director—who had run it for 40 years—told me that I should be
looking for funding in the private sector. The three directors to
succeed him should have known that forming partnerships with
landlords was essential to my business plan, but no one told me
that the guidelines had changed until I reminded the current
director of what I’m doing. And now I’m beginning the process
of filing for my own 501(c)3.

Anyone paying attention to the plight of artists in San Francisco
should know that the current landlord policy is only to rent to
people with paystubs proving they made three times the rent.
They should also know that people in the arts mostly work in the
gig economy and have no paystubs. The fiscal sponsors who
exist for the purpose of helping artists survive and qualify for small
grants don’t seem to care if their clients have anywhere to live. Or
the people making the decision to cut artists off from working with
the private sector have no clue that gig workers can’t get housing,
because they have no trouble renting or buying property
themselves. No thoughtful analysis of the problem took place.
This is madness. It’s been known for a long time that artists have
been fleeing the city, priced out. No efforts were made to keep
them here, and all my efforts to return them have received no help
from the city at all. Even when the NEA offered to fully fund the
ArtHouse project, if we could partner with the city, no one in City
Hall would talk to me. They were glad to replace artists with
people who had paystubs, and now the city can’t shake the
economic downturn. No one in city government seems to have
researched what artists do to benefit community mental health,
longevity, quality of life, aesthetics, and economics.

Similarly, I was just involved in protesting a state budget issue this
month, which cut off funding for acupuncture for MediCal
recipients. I’m an avid fan of acupuncture, and the clinic I go to
asked me to show up and speak at a protest. I was filmed
speaking and it was sent to the governor. I said, among other
things, that the person who decided to cut funding obviously knew
very little about what acupuncture can do, and that if he or she
had consulted the national Library of Medicine, they’d know that it
can do things that Westen medicine hasn’t figured out yet, like
controlling the devastating symptoms of ALS, Parkinson’s,
rheumatoid arthritis, and other diseases, while not relying on
chemical pharmaceuticals that are poisoning the water supply. I
also pointed out that a fifth of San Francisco’s population is
Chinese, and for a lot of that community, acupuncture IS
medicine.

This campaign to bring research and reason to solve a problem
was successful, and the funding for acupuncture was restored to
the budget. But it wasn’t just me that fixed a dopey budget
decision; lots of big groups and important people joined the fray.
But I do suspect I was the only one to point out, obliquely, that
cutting funding for acupuncture could lose the Chinese vote in the
governor’s campaign for the presidency.

As I pursue my own 501(c(3, I’m distressed by the obvious lack of
research or critical thinking going on in government. In times
when there are problems everywhere, the need for collaborative
problem solving and cooperation between every potentially useful
party is worth investigation. The business world is not the enemy
of the nonprofit world, since it’s a major source of funding, and the
fact that it’s not available to the fiscally sponsored seems like a
way to make sure they can’t get ahead. Who made this decision,
and why?

I have a few days left when I can still receive charitable donations
through fiscal sponsorship, and donations over the next few days
will be valuable in offsetting the expenses of filing. After that, I can
only raise donations that aren’t tax deductible until the paperwork
clears for my own nonprofit. So, if you have ever thought about
helping ArtHouse to meet its goals, today is a most wonderful time
to do it.

https://arthousesf.org/donate/

We created a global event out of nothing in the middle of nowhere.

This photographer unfortunately unknown.

─── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ──

It goes without saying that if you have unlimited access to capital, you can make almost anything happen. But when you have no access to capital and rely on ingenuity and creativity to manifest a project, what you make happen is creative and ingenious, and consequently very, very compelling.

Burning Man was a perfect example of this. When my Cacophony friends and I brought the wooden sculpture to the Black Rock Desert in 1990, everyone put in $35 to cover the cost of renting a port-a-potty and a Ryder truck. Some of the Cacophonists maxed out credit cards for materials. I, as a writer, didn’t even have an extra $35, but I had the enormous, 4800 square foot, 2-story. semi- dilapidated mansion flat in the inner city that I filled with artist roommates, where we all met every night to plan the desert event—and I offered to cook for the crew that would be doing the hard labor on the playa.

I wrote one article about the event that was published in a national magazine—and it even paid—but we did no advertising at all. Word of mouth doubled the attendance every year, because we all couldn’t stop talking about it, until there were 70,000 people heading for the largest empty space in North America every Labor Day, and fans in 100 countries around the world created annual versions of it, that mirrored their own cultures.

In less than a decade, Silicon Valley was a ghost town during Burning Man, because they were all on the playa, in their cloistered compounds of luxury RVs, chefs, wait staffs, and party girls. It was the most obvious illustration of the fact that when people have all the ˚money in the world, they want to be where the artists are, and make that place their own. Parties at First Camp, where the organizers were, became Silicon Valley parties. The same thing happened in the city; all the cheap neighborhoods once occupied by communities of people in the arts were gentrified and the artists priced out.

Building Burning Man was an epic example of the art of play. How do we make something fabulous happen with no money? I was able to do it again in the late ’90s, in my still inner city neighborhood, when I opened the restaurant, Caffè Proust, with what was considered “no money” in the business world. But I had artist friends. A party of creatives decoupaged the table tops with themes from Proust and quotes related to each theme. There were the glorious colors of the interior, the rust walls reminiscent of Italy, the olive and gold window frames and columns, and the deep blue of the tall ceiling, like dining under the night sky. We bought old lamps in second hand stores and adorned them with a friend’s hand made faux Victorian shades. There was a zine in the menu. Lots of classical music raised the general vibe, and we hired people because they were genuinely charming. We were written about on four continents.

At the 3-year mark, I applied for an SBA loan. The SBA director asked me how much we spent to open, and how much I wanted to borrow. I said we’d need $100K, and we’d opened for $60K. Her jaw hit the desk. “I am not loaning you $100K,” she said. “I’m loaning you twice that.” Unfortunately, a few days after that interview, 9/11 happened, and we got nothing. There was virtually no business for months and hundreds of restaurants closed. But the invaluable lesson we learned was that the art of play, using imagination and creative energy to make something happen, is as applicable in the business world as it is in art.

The same things that built Caffè Proust and Burning Man—conceiving of something new and imagining how to do it—were the same as in the idealistic beginnings of the tech industry. Perhaps that’s why Silicon Valley, unconsciously, was drawn to the Black Rock Desert. Or perhaps it was just because so many people made phenomenal art there.

I’m currently applying the art of play to manifesting housing for artists, since that huge community that once lived here and made the city so fascinating is almost completely gone. This goal is harder than the ones that came before because San Francisco is now unspeakably expensive and affording it takes more effort. But we can play with tax advantages, and revitalizing depressed commercial corridors, to make housing artists a much more useful option now, as we watch standard business practices fail to undo the economic downturn. It is adult play, and more compelling, because it isn’t just for fun; it’s absolutely for the common good.

#play #imagination #ingenuity #art #business #tech

Why Really Smart People Should Plan Cities

─── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ──

The legendary San Francisco columnist, Herb Caen, once said, “San Francisco isn’t what it used to be, but it never was.” He captured, in a few words, the city’s relentless innovation and openness to new kinds of thought, lifestyles, and creativity. Things that started here, especially in the arts, have inspired the world; the tech industry, expanding here from its Silicon Valley origins, took over the world.

There’s an economic downturn in San Francisco that shows no sign of relenting. Every few months, another city institution, like a century old department store, shuts its doors for the last time. There are 61,000 empty and expensive rental units, only available to tenants who can prove they make, reliably, three times the rent. Consider how many well-paid people have lost their jobs recently and are having trouble finding new ones. AI is replacing a lot of workers— badly—and for an example of how badly, try calling the DMV with a question requiring special advice.

Since San Francisco has always been open to new ideas, we welcomed the tech industry and delighted in its innovations. But then it grew more expensive, when you couldn’t just buy Microsoft Word any more and got saddled with Office. And before long, it became a weapon of surveillance, data mining, grifters, misinformation, privacy violations, propaganda, and advertising. Most recently, it’s riddled with theft, as AI companies steal writers’ online work to train their LLMs, without crediting authors or offering remuneration. But because it was so fascinating in the beginning, we let them own us, which brought about the final coup de grace of capitalism: the top seven companies on the stock exchange are all tech, valued in billions. Very few people have almost all the money, and that hardly keeps the economy running smoothly, does it?

San Francisco needs some innovative thinking to find a way out of this mess. The old business models aren’t working, and the city’s decision makers are just waiting for everything to get back to normal. Developers can’t wait to put up buildings for which there are no tenants. These powerful figures just don’t have the imagination to conceive of alternatives to what used to work for them.

This is the time for visionaries, writers, intellectuals, scientists, artists, and academics to lead the discussion, instead of critiquing it.

Visionaries see possibilities of what hasn’t been done before, as do many writers. Intellectuals spend their entire lives thinking things through and contemplating consequences. Academics have immense knowledge of how things changed in the world and which changes improve matters. Scientists know what we need to do to save the planet and human life. There are some smart people in politics , who do have good ideas, but not enough. They need the wealth of insight from people who have dedicated their lives to knowing things and creating new ideas. We’re in terrific need of new ideas, because the old ones are facing retirement.

San Francisco lost its openness to new ideas when the cost of living made it untenable for people devoted to thinking outside the box. But of course, outside the box is where new ideas come from. And since the decision makers we have left are neither aesthetes nor intellectuals, we get things like this:

Proposed construction on the city’s northern shore.

The image above illustrates what happens when people who only care about money get to do whatever they want. An artist would look at the rendering and say it’s hideous, ruins an iconic lovely skyline, and destroys the view for people who have enjoyed it all their lives. Academics and scientists would know perfectly well that the ground on which the developer wants to build is landfill. Anyone who can remember back to the earthquake of 1989 would remember that when the earthquake hit, single family houses on that northern strip of landfill collapsed. So what is a gigantic mound of real estate going to do when the next earthquake happens? It’s could take down the entire north coast of the city. Also, good luck to the developers getting insurance for anything on landfill. It’s getting harder and harder to get insurance here. Environmentally, much of the city is in trouble, thanks to the leadership of people who just weren’t smart enough and a department of building inspection openly for sale.

Here’s another prime example of developer idiocy: the Millennium Tower. Built on landfill on the city’s eastern shore, the 58-story building started to tilt soon after construction. By 2016, a golf ball could roll at epic speed from one side of a unit to another. The owners were obliged to undertake massive changes in the structure to make up for the fact that they were too cheap to sink piles all the way to bedrock. It has continued to tilt further since. And now critics are saying that the building needs to be taken down before it collapses and kills thousands of people and destroys countless buildings around it. This is what happens when you have greedy people calling the shots and not smart ones.

This is what happens when you leave decision making in the hands of greedy nitwits.

What San Francisco used to be was charming, built with love, care, the finest materials, and embellished with things of beauty. What the city is now is a playground for billionaires and salivating developers. A neighbor in North Beach overheard a conversation between a couple of this ilk, quite accidentally, talking about property purchased on the eastern stretch of Broadway, which resulted in tearing down the only firehouse in the area. One of them said to the other, “This would be a great time to have some big fires in North Beach.” Then they could tear down all those dopey Victorians and turn the neighborhood into a mass of dull high rises, which the mayor thinks is a great idea. He is opposing giving the neighborhood historic status, because that would keep his developer friends from tearing it all down. We voted for him because he was a fifth generation local, who we assumed would support conservation. Never assume. They’ve already decided which blocks to tear down and replace with their boring taste. They have a map of which ones they want to take from people who have lived there for a lifetime and have no desire to leave.

Herb Caen was right: this city isn’t what it used to be, and never was. What it has been in this iteration is a boom town for developers, who buy approval for their lack of aesthetic or educated judgment. Our city government continues to allow corruption, and so we get things like Millennium Tower. But soon this current phase of the city’s history will give way to the next. The citizens are rising up, organizing, and fighting developers, destruction, and corruption, while fighting for preservation, beauty, and, like me, for the return of the artists who made this city glorious.

Herb Caen said it best: “The beauty is slowly vanishing, but enough remains, more than enough, as the lights come on and the bridges turn golden and a pinkish glow softens the hard lines of the marching buildings that could almost stamp out the spirit of a great city. Almost, but not quite.: