{"id":192111,"date":"2026-04-10T12:16:07","date_gmt":"2026-04-10T12:16:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/192111\/"},"modified":"2026-04-10T12:16:07","modified_gmt":"2026-04-10T12:16:07","slug":"essay-blaming-real-estate-for-killing-nyc-art-scene-is-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/192111\/","title":{"rendered":"Essay Blaming Real Estate for Killing NYC Art Scene is Wrong"},"content":{"rendered":"

A 19-page essay<\/a> by New York City artist Josh Kline<\/a> lamenting the state of the art world has gone viral.<\/p>\n

\u201cNew York Real Estate and the Ruin of American Art<\/a>\u201d argues that the city has become too expensive for artists to forge a career here. I was expecting Kline to blame the real estate industry, but he mostly didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, this part of his explanation missed the mark (and he shouldn\u2019t have attempted one, because he\u2019s an artist, not an economist):<\/p>\n

\u201cNew York City\u2019s runaway real-estate prices, and the unaffordability of housing nationwide, are a result of epochal transfers of wealth from the middle and working classes and the poor to the rich during the 2008 financial crisis, the ensuing recession, and the pandemic.\u201d<\/p>\n

New York City has 3.7 million<\/a> housing units. The U.S. has 148.7 million<\/a>. The concentration of wealth among the top-earning 1 percent, or even the top 10 percent, cannot explain why most of those homes have become harder to afford.<\/p>\n

Assuming the 1 percent own an average of two homes, they would account for only 2 percent of dwellings. The other 98 percent have become less affordable largely because demand<\/a> has outpaced supply<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Also, the Great Financial Crisis did not make income inequality worse. Quite the opposite. It made the 1 percent poorer (temporarily). It also made housing less expensive, as home prices plunged 30 percent when the bubble burst. Unfortunately, mortgages were hard to get, so few could seize the opportunity.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s get back to Kline\u2019s thesis. He says the city\u2019s high housing costs make it hard for artists to scratch out a living. Those who work other jobs have little time to make art, and even if they had time, high studio rents make it hard to find space.<\/p>\n

All true. The days when upcoming artists could find cheap space in neighborhoods abandoned by industry (Soho, Hell\u2019s Kitchen, Long Island City, northern Brooklyn, Gowanus, Red Hook, etc.) are largely gone. This happened as the city added about a million jobs, but not a proportional number of homes.<\/p>\n

Kline does get the economics right in a footnote about the 1960s and 1970s:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe cheap rents and overall inexpensive cost of living at the time for artists living and working in Manhattan were a consequence of massive white flight into the suburbs and the deterioration of New York\u2019s urban fabric that resulted from the evisceration of the city\u2019s tax base,\u201d he writes. \u201cIf so many middle-class and wealthy white people hadn\u2019t left the city, there would have been much greater pressure on the prices and rents.\u201d<\/p>\n

But he seems naive as he wonders why vacant office space hasn\u2019t been repurposed for artists:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe upper floors of older commercial buildings are rife with empty offices abandoned in the shift to hybrid work. With all this empty real estate, why aren\u2019t we living in a new golden age of DIY project spaces and experimental art? Why aren\u2019t New York\u2019s empty offices filled with art studios?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOne answer is that the city of New York\u2019s tax policies make it more profitable to leave commercial space empty than to lower the rents.\u201d<\/p>\n

Um, which tax policies do that?<\/p>\n

Landlords do reduce rents when vacancies rise, but if rents for art studios are too low to save a building from foreclosure, owners won\u2019t bother. Renovating to attract office tenants or converting to residential are usually better options.<\/p>\n

Kline\u2019s other suggestion makes more sense: He advises struggling New York artists to move to his native Philadelphia.<\/p>\n

What we\u2019re thinking about: Should supply skepticism be added to the DSM<\/a>? Send thoughts to eengquist@therealdeal.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A thing we\u2019ve learned: The phrase \u201cstarving artist\u201d dates to the late 18th and early 19th-century Romantic movement in Europe and was popularized by Henri Murger\u2019s 1851 work Sc\u00e8nes de la Vie de Boh\u00e8me, according to Wikipedia.<\/p>\n

Elsewhere\u2026<\/p>\n

Despite city and state laws outlawing discrimination based on source of income, it\u2019s still hard for voucher holders to rent an apartment desired by tenants who can pay their own way, one landlord emailed me.<\/p>\n

\u201cMost people will not admit this publicly but they really do not want vouchers and subsidized people in their building, and as a result, they quietly market off-book,\u201d she said, meaning without listing the unit.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor those people that are walking around with subsidized vouchers, no one really wants them because they come to the table with social issues, plus they carry the possibility of government-issued voucher cancellation,\u201d she continued. \u201cSo, bottom line, for people with subsidy there are very few apartments available.\u201d<\/p>\n

The flipside: \u201cFor the people that work and have savings put aside and a good track record, there seem to be a lot of apartments to choose from \u2014 many more than what are publicly known.\u201d<\/p>\n

This seems plausible. Given how hard it is to evict problematic tenants<\/a>, landlords choose carefully.<\/p>\n

Closing time<\/p>\n

Residential: The largest residential sale Thursday was $38 million<\/a> for a 7,500-square-foot co-op at 740 Park Avenue in Lenox Hill. The unit last sold for $20.5 million<\/a> in 2019.<\/p>\n

Commercial: The largest commercial sale was $76 million<\/a> for a 142-unit apartment building at 34 Berry Street in Williamsburg. Delshah Capital purchased the property from LCOR.<\/p>\n

New to the Market: The highest price for a residential property hitting the market was $13.5 million<\/a> for a 5,262-square-foot condominium unit at 76 Crosby Street in Soho. The Gold Team at Corcoran has the listing.<\/p>\n

\u2014 Matthew Elo<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A 19-page essay by New York City artist Josh Kline lamenting the state of the art world has…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":192112,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[76841,9,56,63,65,64],"class_list":{"0":"post-192111","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york-city","8":"tag-jonathan-kline-essay","9":"tag-new-york","10":"tag-ny","11":"tag-nyc","12":"tag-nyc-headlines","13":"tag-nyc-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=192111"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192111\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/192112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=192111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=192111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=192111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}