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Sharon Zukin, "Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change" (Rutgers UP, 2014)
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books welcome to the New Books Network.
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Hello viewers, and welcome to New Books in Urban Studies. Today we're very lucky to be joined by Dr. Sharon Zukin to discuss her book, Loft Living Culture and Capital in Urban Change. Sharon is Professor Emerita of Sociology at the Brooklyn College and the Graduate center of City University of New York. This book, Loft Living, is a cornerstone in urban sociology and the study of gentrification. It's also set to be the focus of a new documentary film, so what better time to revisit a classic? Good day, Sharon, and thank you so much for joining us. To start with, maybe you can tell our readers a little bit about your background and how you came to write Locked Living First.
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Hi Alex, and thank you for inviting me to join you to talk about Loft living. I almost came to Loft Living by chance. I was sitting at my breakfast table one morning in the late 1970s, reading the print edition of the New York Times, which is what we did in those days, and I found an article about manufacturers in small businesses in a set of loft buildings not far from where I Lived. And I, in full disclosure, my spouse and I lived and still live in a loft not far from soho. We lived there illegally, as most people did live in lofts in the early 1970s and mid-1970s. And I knew something about lofts, but we had not displaced a manufacturer from the. The space that we were renting. We moved into an artist studio, but there were other small manufacturers in our building because it was still mainly a manufacturing building. So I read about these manufacturers and I thought, what's going to happen to the workers? Most of the workers in the 1970s were African American and Latino, probably Puerto Rican and Dominican workers. And this was going to be a severe blow to a small part of the base of manufacturing not far from where I was living. So I said, I've got to be able to help these people. I'm a sociologist. And I went down to one of the lofts. It was the space of a company that manufactured thermometers. Not environmentally a very good kind of business. But this happened to be the place where the son of the owner was a recent law school graduate who probably did not have many cases of his own, and he was undertaking a defense of his family's right to be in their manufacturing loft. So I said, well, I've got to be able to do something to help you. So I enlisted some of my students at Brooklyn College to work with me on a survey of the manufacturers to find out who they were, how many workers they had, and what their prospects were if they were displaced from these lofts. I have to point out that the owner of the building was New York University, which is this city's largest private university. And they were going to lease these buildings to a national real estate developer to turn into loft apartments. Very trendy at the time. So I thought. I thought I'd be able to document the loss that these workers are going to experience at their businesses, because it turned out that the businesses were so small and the owners were mostly so old that there was very little chance they would relocate anywhere near the workers. So I presented the results of this survey to our local community board that represents SoHo and adjacent neighborhoods. And the community board was very much impressed by the loss. I have to say that this was Jane Jacobs former community board. And at that time, there were still people on the board and leading the board who had worked with Jane Jacobs to fight Robert Moses on several different projects, projects that would have totally disrupted these areas of Lower Manhattan. So they were very receptive to questioning the city government's agreement because this was entirely within the law to displace these manufacturers and lose these manufacturing jobs. And the community board took up the cause. I actually was appointed to be a public member of this community board as a result of my advocacy. And the result, which was perhaps the best that could be expected, was that the manufacturers got a financial payment from the owner and developer to set up business at a new address. But the project went ahead as planned. And that entire block of New York City is filled with apartments, which, you know, we can say is good because of the chronic need for apartments in New York City. But it also displaced a considerable number, a few hundred manufacturing jobs. So that's how I got involved in lofts. And that was my first experience setting my foot on the terrain of loft living. But even though I had been living in a loft for a few years and understood, you know, how people find lofts and how they move into lofts for at that time, mostly for work reasons, because my spouse was building furniture and needed a large space for his woodworking machines. So I understood kind of the way that part of the residence process worked. But I was very curious about how loft living became such a general phenomenon and such a popular phenomenon. So I started to look into the way this space and this real estate market were produced out of nothing, right? Out of practically nothing. So this led me into the byways of government intervention in markets and into the power of print media in those days. Now we might say social media or media in general, and also changes in the social position of art and cultural producers. Now, I had been influenced intellectually by urban studies that I found in Paris, some of which have never been translated into English. Some of our listeners may know the name of Manuel Castells, who moved to the United States and became an internationally known sociologist. Others were French sociologists who have become known, but less known than Manuel. And I was very much influenced by one particular book by the French sociologist Christian Topolov, called Real Estate Developers. And it was all about real estate developers in Paris. So I found his interpretation of real estate development as a for profit production of space out of nothing. Really, really interesting. And that's what led me to, you know, to try to put all the pieces of this jigsaw puzzle together.
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Right. Very interesting, Interesting kind of origin story and kind of being kind of a part of a part of the story. And your experience living there. Yeah, it's that the kind of creation of this market for converted manufacturing lofts is, you know, it's just such an. Such an interesting study. I think that one of the pieces that really like, kind of sets this book apart is really that specific look at how, you know, artists and the kind of cultural industries in New York. And it's played into this process. I think, you know, you have the, you have city government, you have, you have property developers. But can you speak a little bit about, you know, some of the, the impact that artists and the arts market had in this process? I mean, both. I think this in your book, it really is so wide ranging. But, you know, talking about, you know, changes in the fine arts market, changing, you know, taste and middle class interior design, all these different kind of aesthetic factors. I wonder if you could speak a little bit about that.
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This is such an important topic and you suggest some of the really big categories of important changes that began in the 1960s, I'd say. And now that I've been making a documentary film about the history of the artist community in SoHo and real estate development, I've had to revisit the conditions of art and artists in the 1960s and 70s, and I've concluded that I was correct to begin with. But there's so much more to understand. There's a really good book by Aaron Scuda, The Lofts of Soho, that was published about 10 years ago that uses art galleries and artists archives and interviews that were not available to me when I wrote my book that goes even more deeply into these questions. What I think I see now is that during the 1960s, there was a change in the social origins and the social position of cultural workers, starting with the United States, but elsewhere throughout the world. And that was a change from working class artists to college educated artists. This was the seed of what Richard Florida many years later called the creative class, or at least part of Richard's creative class and the cultural. The artists who formed organizations in the early 1960s, which was a change from earlier generations of artists who formed studio groups and different kinds of artists clubs, but never had a political organization or a lobbying organization the way artists began to do in the early 1960s, kind of at the same time as Students for a Democratic Society, SDS and other student political activist groups. So artists in the beginning of the 1960s called their organizations organizations or associations of cultural workers or artists as workers. But during the 1960s, as more artists bought lofts, even though they were dirt cheap in those days, they began to think of themselves as property owners and loft owners. So they then began to. And they saw the rise in prices that were being paid for the work of older contemporary artists like Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning, or eventually. The painters of the 1960s, Jasper Johns and so on. And they asserted themselves in a more direct and more influential way, at least in city politics. In the mid-1960s, the US government and all the state governments and all the local governments began to establish government agencies to fund the arts and the humanities. Of course, in our time, very recently, we've seen setbacks in that funding. But the 1960s was a very exuberant period of funding of the arts, and many artists became loft owners again for very low prices. Maybe $5,000 or $10,000 for a 3,000 square foot loft, unimproved, with very little plumbing and no heat on some days of the week. But artists used their grant money in the 1960s to buy a loft. I don't know whether they were supposed to use their grant money to buy a loft, but they maintained themselves by buying their housing. And at the time, artists have told me recently when I have interviewed them for my documentary film, they said to other artists, why are you buying a place when you can rent a loft for $35 a month or $50 a month? And artists had the same reasons that anybody else wants to buy housing security. Other artists would say, well, now my landlord cannot evict me, I can't be evicted. And this was a very strong motivation for artists at the time who in the 1960s might, if they were middle class, might be able to borrow $5,000 from their parents to buy a loft. So this already set artists apart from previous generations of artists and put them on the road to collaboration or cooperation with the state on every level, from the national government that might fund them through the National Endowment for the Arts, to the state level, where there would be a state commission on the Arts and then local government, which gradually, because some patricians and some politicians began to understand the value of appealing to young, college educated, professional workers, including now creative artists. And the artists had a big constituency out there, bigger than ever before. And the loft owners and loft renters also were able to capitalize on all of these elite reasons to support the arts, to get support for their legal status in loft neighborhoods. And SoHo emerged, for various reasons, as the epicenter of Lower Manhattan loft neighborhoods. Now there are lofts in various neighborhoods of Lower Manhattan, Brooklyn, Upper Manhattan, the Bronx, Harlem. But because of the wealth of late 19th century manufacturing buildings in Lower Manhattan, that's where most artists concentrated. And because Robert Moses plans to build an expressway across Lower Manhattan that would have cut SoHo off from the financial district, his plans failed. At the end of the 1960s Soho was both a disinvested area and an area that was ripe for development, right?
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Yeah, in the, in the piece, you know, you describe this artistic mode of production and this I guess you would say like artists mediated real estate dynamic. You know, speaking of J and Jacobs, Robert Moses, speaking of you kind of discussed drive it as a bit of a softer version of previous decades urban clearance. I think he used the first slash and burn Urban clearance. I wonder if you can elaborate on this dynamic. Like I, I, I know in the book you kind of talk through these various phases that the neighborhood went through from this kind of working class light industrial through the bohemian artist enclave, maybe a little bit on how that transitioned to today's upper class luxury housing. That was even the case at the time that the study was published.
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You're asking for a lecture that's 24 hours long. Let me try to be succinct. Are art appear to be economically valuable to New York City and to the officials in New York City in the late 1960s and early 1970s? Remember that in 1975 New York City fell into a deep financial hole. The fiscal crisis. The city almost went bankrupt and was saved by the financial industry. And people in the financial industry, of course their institutions had been responsible exorbitant rates of interest on debt that bankrupted New York City. But other members of that financial establishment stepped up and saved the city by drastically reducing social welfare expenses and also reducing the police, fire department and other necessary services. So the city in the 1970s was in a big financial hole and art and culture seemed like a bright spot, a relatively cheap bright spot to subsidize. So the economic value of art artists culture seemed to sway public officials to be lenient towards artists or helpful even towards artists. That did not mean that most artists made a good living. Although the prices paid for contemporary artwork began to rise quite a bit in the 1960s. You had one of those top tier, bottom 90% situations where the very top tier of famous contemporary artists earned a lot of money from the sale of their art and everybody else had to scrounge for their daily expenses. So in the big city there are always a lot of teaching jobs. There are, as artists found out in the 1960s and 70s, there are waitstaff and bartending jobs and those kinds of low level service sector jobs that artists could use to subsidize their living expenses. Also, some of the artists who are now in their mid-80s whom I have interviewed for my film talk about working for textile firms as textile designers in the 1970s, or working at fashion houses like Chanel in the 1970s, where they were not the fashion designers, but they had some sort of creative work to do. So you had this kind of high wage or high income, low income division between some contemporary artists and others, but a lot of them were able to live in the city and they found the city in the 1970s as disinvested and poor as the city was a tremendously fruitful place for ideas, for diversity, for self expression. It was really an incredible period. And despite the financial hardship of many people and the financial hardship of the city as a whole, and so you had this emerging college educated art precariat. And what I really meant by the artistic mode of production was not that there are powerful or influential artists, but that there is a huge college educated group of people who are available for low wage service work. And this is really what I meant by the artistic mode of production, where you have the growth of an influential top tier of artists and performers and cultural workers and a huge base of low income artists who are scrabbling to get by, but who are all in one ecosystem, together with art dealers and art museums, art critics, writers, journalists and patrons of the arts, very important as buyers of supporters of art, who formed a really interesting growing ecosystem Especially in New York City.
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Very interesting. Yeah, I really just. I think, you know, anyone who's interested in that, in that cross crossing between, you know, urban development, arts and culture, I mean, I think this is just a, you know, a really kind of e book to read. So I think our readers will be really interested in hearing the conversation with you. I wonder, kind of as in. Kind of in a. In closing, like we usually at the New Books Network discuss with authors about, you know, a chance to discuss any new books and projects they're working on. And you've discussed that. You were meeting. Right. Not meeting. Sorry. You were working on a documentary film on. On the topic of this. Of this book. Maybe by way of that you could. Yeah. Talk a little bit about, you know, the legacy of this book and sort of your. Your kind of your experience, you know, still, you know, living and working in the same area and how that documentary film has been to put together.
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When I published loft living in 1982, I joked that I would sell the book to Hollywood. And, you know, 40 years later, that's coming true, but not exactly Hollywood. With my film partner, Alice Arnold, I have been working on a documentary film about SoHo that will be. That is now in post production and will be completed at the end of 2026 and available for public showings after that. The historical perspective that I can bring to Soho now, looking back after almost 50 years at what has happened to this area and what has happened to the place and what has happened in the individual life stories of people who live there, that's all been tremendously interesting and I think significant in talking about the future of cities in general. The two bookends of the film, which is called Soho in flux, the two bookends are two momentous rezonings of SoHo. One that occurred in 1971 when the new York City government legalized artists live workspaces in soho, but only in soho at that time, and only artists who were certified by the city as real professional artists. And a second very momentous rezoning just a few years ago in 2021, when the city government really removed the privileges that artists had received as the only legal residents of Soho for 50 years and recognized the right to live in Soho for anyone. The impetus for this was, first of all, the need for housing, the desire of the city government under the previous mayor, Mayor de Blasio, and the current mayor, Mayor Mamdani, who was not known involved in the rezoning, but who has carried on in that spirit the huge motivation to create housing more housing in New York City. The vacancy rate is under 2% in New York. So that was one motivation. And the other comes actually from the Obama administration. In 2015, they made a rule that said every city that receives federal funding from the Department of Housing and Urban Development must show in an annual report what they are doing to create fair housing, which means to decrease racial segregation in housing markets. So the de Blasio administration made a rule that if there was a zoning change, the city could compel developers who created a large amount of housing on any project to include between 20 and 30% affordable units. And there are formulas, good and bad, for devising what the affordable rent is and the relevant income levels that renters have to have to qualify for this housing. So soho emerged as a fairly affluent neighborhood, not because of the artists primarily, but because of all the non artists who had bought lofts in soho in the past few decades. A fairly affluent, majority white area that was ripe for rezoning. The problem with SoHo is that you have all these buildings that are protected by historic district laws and you can't change those buildings except if you ask for an exemption from the Landmarks Preservation Commission. But the zoning change really opens the SoHo market and the SoHo space to larger buildings than have been there before and tries to encourage residential construction, mainly apartment houses, which is not the only thing that's being built in soho now because there are still loopholes in that zoning law and very wealthy individuals have been able to buy five story buildings and turn them into a single family home.
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Well, yeah, thank you for, thanks for sharing with that. I'm sure our listeners will be interested in checking out the, checking out the new documentary film when it comes out. Yeah, I just want to thank you again very much from New New Books Network and Urban Studies for, you know, coming on and speaking to us about your, you know, your classic book Loft Living. And so, yeah, Dr. Zukin, thanks. Thanks a lot for, for making the time today.
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My pleasure,
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Sam.