S.F. Artists Protest Dot-Com Boom’s Effects

Dancers, drummers and performance artists converged on San Francisco City Hall on Wednesday in a dramatic declaration to city leaders that art, culture and nonprofit groups are being squeezed out of town by the dot-com boom.

The group, the Artists Eviction Defense Coalition, was seeking “to survive financially in a greedy city of skyrocketing rents and intransigent landlords determined to squeeze every last penny out of their commercial properties,” spokesman Todd Edelman said.

The artists’ demonstration followed a proposal by San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown on Tuesday to set aside almost $7 million to help art and nonprofit groups cope with soaring rents and disappearance of studio space.

In a new sign of the price San Francisco is paying for its Internet-powered economic revolution, Brown said it was clear that many artists, rock bands, dance troupes and nonprofit groups could not compete on their own for city space against space-hungry dot-com businesses.

“Nonprofits and arts organizations are incredibly important to San Francisco,” Brown said Tuesday, noting that the city relied on them for cultural vitality and many essential social services.

According to a new survey, arts groups will lose about 1 million square feet of studio space over the next three years as landlords reconfigure their buildings into dot-com offices.

The survey by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation also showed that nonprofit groups whose leases expire can expect rent hikes of as much as 500% as rents rise to market levels.