Our Mission

Nonprofit co-op housing and venues for artists, writers
and musicians in the city of San Francisco

Throughout the 20th century, a new creative medium flourished in San Francisco nearly every decade. The last creative innovation here was Burning Man, started in 1990. In the 21st century, nothing new in the arts has launched here, and the city’s once huge creative community has been reduced to a fraction of what it was. The cost of living skyrocketed, and landlords no longer rented to gig economy tenants. As we watched our friends and collaborators leaving the city, we started thinking about solutions. 

For the last nine years, ArtHouse has put our creative energy into developing models for co-op housing and venues for people in the arts. The NEA offered to fund this project if we could partner with the city, but neither of our last two mayors agreed. We began thinking in terms of partnering with the private sector. There are currently 61 thousand empty units in the city and hundreds of empty buildings. We’ve investigated ways to partner with building owners and turn the standard landlord-tenant relationship into shared profitability. 

In a city where the real estate market is flat, we’re offering ways to turn empty buildings into cultural hotspots that revitalize struggling commercial corridors and give our building owners a legacy, publicity, goodwill, and a share of what our ArtHouse businesses generate in commercial spaces in addition to rents. Eventually, we want to own buildings, but the first objective is providing housing for the thousands of artists who want to return—or remain—here, and the most expedient way to do that is partnerships. 

We’ve come up with a variety of ways to achieve this. In one model, we team up with realtors, who know which clients need to find uses for properties—for example, buildings purchased to offset capital gains tax— and include them as third parties in a partnership. We are open to corporate partnerships or finding private sector owners with white elephants in their portfolios. We’re looking into new relationships with the city that could bolster the city’s budget. Our goal is to channel creative energy into finding ways to make this work—not necessarily one way, but as many ways as we can manifest.

In the section “Who Benefits,” we explain how artists are an asset that serves many demographics. When we restore the creative community, we serve small business, tourism, real estate, community mental health, art lovers, and other beneficiaries. Our mission is to bring back what made this city so beloved and reverse the doom loop in the most pleasing way possible.