After a long and highly emotional hearing, the Planning Commission voted to approve conditional use permits legitimizing office, trade shop, and commercial uses at the Redlick Building, the former home of the artist group Studio 17. The allotment for office use in the building, one that artists and activists opposed, was reduced slightly after the artists angrily appealed to the Commission.
“I’m so frustrated I’m losing my words,” said Lisa Vincenti, an artist trying to clarify to the Commission the amount of space that had previously been occupied by artists at the Redlick Building.
“Every time I turn around, I’m presented with bad choices,” Redlick landlord Rick Holman told the Commission in regards to his attempts to maintain the building while also preserving artist space.
The Redlick Building has been at the center of a disagreement for months. A seismic retrofit that requires the removal of the roof resulted in the exit of artists that formerly occupied the fourth floor. To get the permits to proceed with the retrofit, the building owners needed a conditional use approval for offices, trade shop space, which can include fine arts, woodworking, upholstery, and other craft work, and the retail use on the ground floor. Thrift Town and the Fabric Outlet now do business on the ground floor.
Many former tenant artists had studios on the fourth and third floors, which boast soaring ceilings and huge windows that offer natural light and ventilation. Future plans for the building would maintain a significant amount of square footage for artist use, and at the below-market rate of $2 a square foot. But that space would now be on different floors where, artists say, ceilings and ventilation are inadequate and natural light sparse. Meanwhile, the fourth floor is expected to become office space after the retrofit.
“We have already lost… Our community has been displaced and most of us will not be able to return,” said Marisa Villa, an oil painter who had a studio on the fourth floor of the Redlick for 10 years. Villa left the building in June.
For Truong Tran, Adam Barry, and a few other former artists, the trouble is also the change in the character of its occupancy. Through various legal complications, lease expirations, and relocations, a remedial driving school, a garment workshop, a homeless children’s nonprofit, and a dollar store have now left the building. Barry speculated that tech workers who might move in would be earning substantially more than former workers and surrounding residents.
“What would happen if you took the entire fourth floor and the majority of the third floor … in the middle of this very low income area, and filled it with people earning $100,000 a year?” Barry asked the Commission. “You would be dropping a gentrification bomb.”
Rick Gerharter, representing the Redstone Labor Temple Association, worried that allowing the landlords of the Redlick building to legalize previously unauthorized office space would set a precedent that might encourage landlords of other buildings to similarly transform the use of their space from art, social service, nonprofit and labor tenants to tech office space.
“If a precedent is set, the threat to the Redstone is even greater than what it is now,” Gerharter said.
That concern about setting a precedent was echoed today by 48Hills editor Tim Redmond.
Every detail was hotly debated — the original cost of the building, whether alternative proposals are economically feasible, the building’s state of disrepair when it was purchased, and the exact division of the building’s types of use.
In the end, “Nobody’s going to be anywhere if we don’t pass this thing, and so, that’s the big problem,” said Commissioner Michael Antonini. “210 people are currently working in the building and they won’t work anywhere if the building doesn’t get fixed.”
Planning Department staff member Brittany Bendix explained that if no decision was made, the department would take enforcement action because none of the current office tenants are legal, and the landlord would have to return with a new proposal.
Though commissioners discussed mandating specific uses for specific floors or square footage, they eventually conceded that this was not in their jurisdiction.
Commissioner Christine Johnson voiced some disappointment at the landlord and artists’ inability to reach a compromise on the specifics before the hearing.
“All we can really do is approve land use categories,” Johnson said. “You guys have put it on our plate now to either come up with something or throw you back into chaos, and I’m inclined to come up with something that is not going to make anybody happy.”
In an effort to preserve the trade shop category that would allow artist space, the commission reduced the amount of office space to 46,600 square feet and brought trade shop space up to 36,600 square feet. They also recommended that no less than 21,000 square feet of the trade shop space be used for artists. Ground floor retail would remain unchanged except for the transition of the former dollar store space into an artist gallery.
“The allocations are staying pretty much where they have been historically,” said Jessica Berg, a spokesperson for the landlord. “The changes made were very small and I think we’re just trying to do the right thing by the building and by the community.”
“I think the neighborhood loses,” said former Redlick building artist Trung Tran. “[The Commission] didn’t give us anything new. But the bigger issue here is that a lot of the artists are not going to return.”