Courtesy of St. Louis Art Place Initiative
When the St. Louis City Planning Commission adopted the Gravois-Jefferson Historic Neighborhoods Plan in 2017, it laid out the need for affordable housing stock for the artists who have long called the area home. Now, St. Louis Art Place Initiative, formed in 2019 by the Incarnate Word Foundation, Kranzberg Arts Foundation, and Regional Arts Commission to address that need, has completed the first of many planned homes in Gravois Park, and the first artist is finally home. We caught up with API director of operations Kaveh Razani to discuss the ins and outs of the project, and where it’s heading next.
What’s the core mission of St. Louis Art Place Initiative?
The mission for St Louis Art Place initiative is to build wealth and equity for low-to-moderate-income artists through homeownership. So essentially what we are is a programmatic housing initiative that reduces and eliminates barriers to homeownership for artists, specifically by creating an application process and streamlining the logistics of an artist applying for a home. We secure site control. We do all the redevelopment. We subsidize that redevelopment by essentially putting way more money into either the rehab or the new construction than what the artist's ultimate purchase price is going to be. And we partner with banks to create programmatic-based, CRA-fulfilling mortgage products for those applicants and then subsidize the down payment and closing costs of the purchase. The artist essentially needs to bring the equivalent of what they're often used to, which is the first and last month's rent. So they're really only bringing a thousand dollars out of pocket and sort of being walked through this process.
You just completed the project’s first home, and there are many more to come. What’s the process been like?
The real estate and the development side of it is pretty straightforward. Our original plan was to start with some new construction, but in listening to some folks in the neighborhood and some best practices advice, we made a shift to focus on the rehabs first and preserved the existing housing stock. What we learned is that rehabbing a home that is completely gutted is quite a bit more expensive than building one from scratch. I think we have learned that it is more important to balance a rehab against a couple new construction projects at the same time. That being said, the construction process has been pretty straightforward. It's a gut rehab, and we partnered with Habitat for Humanity St. Louis. They've to date been, I think, the most key partnership that we have engaged in. They bring their best-in-class experience in building houses affordably and working with low-to-moderate-income clients. So they were able to kind of take the lead on not only the construction process of the homes and serve as our general contractor, but they were also able to help inform a lot of our process about building our application and understanding what kind of mortgage products were out there, how to connect with banks to provide a uniform mortgage to all of our applicants, how to do homebuyer-readiness education, and helping us with some of our initial grants.
Photo by Michael Powers
Kaveh Razani, a volunteer, and landscaper Jamey Edgerton.
What is the application and selection process like?
The application process was really interesting. Before we swung our first hammer, we spent about a year and a half or so doing community engagement. Artists are typically on the low-to-moderate-income side of the spectrum and were some of the first to get displaced because of shifting prices [in the Gravois Park, Benton Park West, and Dutchtown neighborhoods]. So before we did any construction work, we kind of connected with Dutchtown South Community Corporation and did a ton of canvassing and town hall meetings, not only with residents, but also with artists, to help us understand what those artists’ barriers were to homeownership. Essentially, those town halls helped inform the application that we ourselves created. We did a ton of dialoguing with our neighborhood and eventually put together this application that we felt very proud of in how it essentially weighted an artist's community practice alongside their housing insecurity alongside their connectedness to that neighborhood. So actually our application most strongly weighs community connectedness. That way, we could ensure that the artists that were getting awarded these houses were folks that were in this neighborhood that were at risk of being displaced out of this neighborhood. It wasn't just an opportunity for artists from elsewhere to get a cheap house in the city.
It sounds like collaboration has been really key to the success of this project.
I would say that my greatest sense of pride about the work that we're doing–obviously it’s about getting artists homes, there's nothing that compares to that–but it is the way that we've been able to collaborate and build bridges where there hadn't been any. To bring people into conversations that hadn't been in the conversation before. We often point to the work that we're doing and identify the fact that we have brought arts philanthropy into affordable housing. It's not something that world had traditionally thought about, but obviously it makes complete sense when you start having those conversations.
What feedback have you heard from the artists and the community since starting this project?
We have had overwhelmingly positive feedback…There’s been a ton of support, not only from residents who like to see previously vacant parcels reutilized from a safety perspective and from an activation perspective, but also from artists who are just sort of like, “I never would've thought I would own a house, and here is a program that gives me that opportunity.” It's a lot of artists that have a lot of experience either in Dutchtown or on Cherokee Street who have lived in these neighborhoods their whole lives and are happy to be able to stay in these neighborhoods. The community loves the idea of keeping artists in the neighborhood. Artists are tremendously creative and innovative, and it's easy to see their tangible impact on the physical fabric of their community….Obviously the stakeholders on Cherokee Street are excited to see more artists retain homeownership in the neighborhood.
But it's not all been super positive. Obviously there are a lot of people that are not artists that are suffering from a lack of access to affordable for-sale housing. We've heard from some folks in the neighborhood that are just like, “Hey, I'm not an artist, but I need this too. How come you guys only serve artists?” And it's a very tough conversation to have, but there are other organizations that do that type of work. We as an arts organization find that, by resourcing artists, we're having an exceptionally tangible impact on a neighborhood beyond just the individual who is getting the home. So I think that's kind of where our focus has been, and it's nice to be able to work alongside Habitat for Humanity, who is also building houses for non-artists in that neighborhood, and being able to sort of tag team that need for affordable housing.
Are there ways people can get involved in and support your work?
Anyone who lives anywhere near our project footprint, Gravois Park residents or folks connected to that neighborhood, we love that type of help. As we are starting to kind of analyze our takeaways from these first couple houses, I think we will start to have a lot more of a public presence in how we interact with folks on a day-to-day basis. I will also say that it's our hope to just be facilitators and catalysts and that the real work happens in concert with the future homeowners and the community. So I think that there's certainly ways to connect with fellow artists in the neighborhood and help drive that process forward…We're looking to build things like neighborhood-embedded community art galleries, shared artist studio spaces, and short-stay rentals that could generate income for that community land trust in order to program some of these more public spaces.
Donations are also always appreciated. We do this type of work at a loss. I think people don't often recognize that someone's gotta lose money if you're building affordable housing. It's gotta come from somewhere. We rely fairly heavily on grants through the Affordable Housing Commission and through the Community Development Administration, but we look to supplement that with philanthropic donations. So any donations that come in go directly into subsidizing these houses and to keeping our organization running.
Photo by Anne McCullough
The first of the API-restored homes in Gravois Park.
What else do you want people to know about API?
Just that our focus is on community leadership and falling in line with how communities lead us in the work that we do. We always get the question of, “Will you guys expand into other neighborhoods?” And the answer to that has always been that if we are called to action by the community in another neighborhood, we will answer. But it is not our intention to impose our will upon somebody else's community. So that's a big thing. And one of our core goals in the work that we do is to build capacity for our partner organizations. So in any way that we collaborate with another organization or entity or individual, we are looking to help build capacity for those organizations or individuals so that they can springboard from this opportunity into their future success. The biggest thing for us is just ensuring that whatever we do is not only at the direction of the community, but that we're also available to whatever degree the community needs us to be to help assist and further catalyze future endeavors.
