An Artful Economic Development Strategy

As housing prices in popular urban settings continue to skyrocket, small town in Kentucky uses affordable live/work housing to attract artists: "The newcomers have come from as far away as San Francisco and Massachusetts to take advantage of incentives making it easy for them to buy old houses -- at dirt-cheap prices -- to turn into studios and galleries. Almost to a person, these painters, sculptors, muralists, printmakers and jewelers say they never, ever pictured themselves moving to Kentucky... 'Three years ago, if someone had said to me, 'You're going to be living in Paducah,' I would've said, 'You're out of your mind,' said Mark Palmer, a painter from Washington, D.C., who had set foot in Kentucky only once before the program brought him here. 'Life just has a way of presenting things you have no way to anticipate.' "