SXSW Panel Addresses Housing Affordability for Artists

A panel discussion at the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival tackled housing affordability in Austin, zeroing in specifically on the city’s musician population and their struggles to find affordable housing and avoid conflict with noise ordinances and other rules not catered to artists.

As Brianna Caleri explains in CultureMap Austin, the panel, entitled Music Urbanism in Motion: Affordable Spaces to Preserve Austin's Cultural Pulse, discussed housing strategies and ideas from Austin, Philadelphia, and Jacksonville.

The panel participants described examples from their cities, such as programs that activate alleys and other underused spaces for community and music events to reduce vacancy and keep communities vibrant and repurposing old city buses into recording studios and practice spaces. However, “Readers who can smell gentrification a mile away can't be blamed for feeling suspicious of projects to clean up and throw events in these public spaces. How many times has a fun new festival in Austin put a park out of use for a week or more, closed roads, created massive waste, or skyrocketed hotel rates?”

According to panelist Brian Phillips, “We're trying to offer alternatives. There are zero tools. What we're doing is not perfect, but literally like, nobody has any real strategy for how you occupy spaces outside [the market's mainstream].” 

For Kady Yellow of Jacksonville, solutions can come from communication and connections between artists and housing developers. “A developer's power is the ownership. Gentrification narrows down to ownership. So when artists get weary of those things ... reach out to [developers], invite them to a venue. Let them see the rawness and the realness and start to speak each other's languages.”