NYC has Lost 4% of its Resident Artists Since 2019

New York City’s artist population grew by roughly 35 percent between 2004 and 2019, but since then, the city has lost over 4 percent of its artists, signaling growing unaffordability for the city’s creative class.

As Samantha Maldonado explains in Next City, designating housing for artists is tricky: “For one, the city’s human rights law prohibits housing discrimination on the basis of occupation — a provision that has been in place since the eighties and was updated in 2016.” A proposed city ordinance could change that. 

No new affordable housing for artists has been built in New York City since 2015, when an 89-unit affordable development in East Harlem received over 53,000 applications for residency. But artist advocates say creating affordable housing and studio space specifically for artists is a safeguard against displacement for people who create some of the city’s most important cultural resources. According to Eli Dvorkin, policy director of the Center for an Urban Future, the consequence of the loss of affordable artist housing “is that we’re losing not only our artists, but our identity as a city, and I would say with it, not only a key engine of our economy, but one of the key factors that makes New York a place where people from all over the world want to visit and want to live.”