Our Mission

Affordable nonprofit housing for artists, writers, and musicians in the city of San Francisco.

ArtHouse SF offers a variation on the co-op concept. While a traditional co-op is based on the idea of combining involvement with a percentage of ownership, ArtHouse SF takes a different approach. We see everyone involved—tenants, management, and building owners—as collaborators in a project that benefits everyone. While a landlord may collect less in rents, they can more than make it up in tax benefits, as the lost income can be claimed as an in-kind charitable donation as well as a business loss. Tenants would expect to put in a certain number of hours to run businesses, like galleries, cafes, performance spaces, and so on, but those same businesses would sell their work, give them a venue, or promote their projects. Work hours are investments in their futures.

We see this project as a place to build careers, and we expect tenants to achieve success, and ultimately, income that enables renting or buying elsewhere—because we will invite tenants with tremendous talent. We see involvement in this community as a beginning, although we expect that collaborators will always remain part of it, however famous they become. 

We have more than one mission, and the creation of a first ArtHouse makes others possible. The very first building will be highly publicized internationally, because it is a brand-new concept from a city famous for brand-new creative work. While in the past, a city of cheap rents and incomparable, inspiring beauty gave us a century of creative innovation, that energy will return with the restoration of people who make it. ArtHouse SF will be documenting the changes in the mood, business, attractiveness, and gentrification of areas where artists converge, using a variation on the World Happiness Index. Science keeps demonstrating, in study after study, that artists make things psychologically better. We’re planning on proving that ourselves. 

For the last nine years, ArtHouse has put our creative energy into developing models for housing and venues for people in the arts. The NEA offered to fund this project if we could partner with the city, but none of our mayors agreed. We began thinking in terms of collaborating with the private sector. There are currently over 61K empty units in the city and hundreds of empty buildings. It only takes one visionary, creatively minded building owner, with one old white elephant on a commercial corridor, to collaborate with us to trigger a joyful renaissance of San Francisco’s creative heritage. When the first neighborhood gets an ArtHouse and sees the changes it brings, they’ll be wanted everywhere. It will spark an upward spiral in the city’s sluggish economy.