From urban renewal to gentrification: Artists, cultural capital and the remaking of New York's SoHo neighborhood, 1950--1980

Current scholarship on the postwar American city focuses on deindustrialization and the flight of the middle class. Because of this attention to urban decay and suburban growth, scholars have not widely studied development at the urban core during the postwar era. The recent phenomenon of urban growth and gentrification inside of cities has its roots in New York artists' transformation of former industrial buildings into residential lofts and galleries in the SoHo neighborhood during the 1960s and 70s. This novel form of urban development revitalized the neighborhood of SoHo and sparked zoning debates, fights against urban renewal and cultural tourism that eventually made loft living both legal and popular.;Yet, while today artists are seen as having the power to revitalize neighborhoods, artists were not welcomed as urban saviors in the 1960s. In SoHo, city leaders saw artists as a threat to urban renewal projects and local businesses. To legally convert industrial lofts into residences, and prevent housing projects and highways from being built in SoHo, artists mobilized to win recognition as important contributors to New York City's global status as a center of artistic innovation (and consumption) and, increasingly, as people who attracted precisely the sort of high-income, highly talented, creative professionals and entrepreneurs upon whom the city's economic future would depend. Their ceaseless efforts to secure legal recognition of their right to turn deserted industrial lofts into their living as well as work spaces played a key, if initially unanticipated, role in pioneering new strategies for urban renewal. This renewal strategy of adaptive reuse of former industrial space was particularly resonant in the wake of growing hostility to the consequences of postwar urban renewal programs, which caused the massive dislocation of the residents of "blighted" districts.;The new form of urban living that artists created in SoHo was appealing because it allowed cities to confront the dual problems of a declining industrial base and a middle class fleeing to the suburbs during the postwar era. Artists also found new uses for industrial buildings, creating a new form of residential housing, the loft, which proved attractive to the middle class. At the same time, artists and art dealers opened galleries in the neighborhood's vacant industrial space that drew distant art buyers, government arts funding and tourists to SoHo. Area visitors became the customer base for SoHo's retail sector, the growth of which made the neighborhood a more attractive place to live.;With the expansion of area retail and the attractiveness of loft homes, demand for lofts increased among artists and non-artists alike. By the mid 1970s, demand far outstripped the supply of legal loft residences, causing conflicts between artists, industrial tenants, property owners and city leaders over the nature, extent and legality of loft conversions, as well as the cost of loft space. These conflicts resulted in numerous confrontations over individual loft conversions, as well as a broader loft policy that sought to balance these competing interests. The creation of formal public policy regulating loft living throughout New York demonstrated that civic leaders believed loft conversions had the power to revalue other city neighborhoods as they did in SoHo.