In recent years, rapid economic growth in the Bay Area has put tremendous pressure on housing prices. Many communities once thought impervious to gentrification, such as West Oakland, San Leandro, and Richmond, are now gaining new upper-income residents. Such neighborhood change may bring benefits, in the form of improved amenities and services, but also costs, such as the displacement of existing residents as rents increase.

In 2004, we created a Community Outreach Partnership, funded by HUD, to help community groups and the City of Richmond understand how to facilitate change and development without displacement. As part of this outreach process, we conducted research on the factors that create and maintain neighborhood stability despite development pressures. One of our key findings was that neighborhood "social seams," or places for informal social interaction between different groups, were associated with more stable neighborhoods. These social seams often take the form of arts-related institutions (for instance, the East Bay Center for the Performing Arts, in downtown Richmond).

We are forming this working group on the arts and community development in order to learn more about how neighborhood-based arts institutions work to stabilize neighborhoods. We hope to use the working group to form new collaborations with academics across campus who are interested in the intersectin between the arts and low-income groups, but perhaps without the lens on communities that we offer at our center (now called the Center for community Innovation). We envision engaging with faculty from art history and practice; music; theater, dance, and performance studies; architecture; and landscape architecture.

Specifically, we want to foster dialogue and build research agenda around the following questions:

• How do neighborhood-based arts institutions contribute to their communities?
• To what extend do arts institutions facilitate social interaction between diverse community groups?
• What are the ways in which unleashing creativity (particularly in local youth) helps to stabilize neighborhoods?
• does the recent trend toward arts districts (e.g., Downtown Berkeley) bolster or harm neighborhood-based arts institutions?

Principal Investigators:
Karen Chapple
Heather Hood

Contact Information:
Tel: 510.642.1868
Email:  chapple@berkeley.edu
Website: http://communityinnovation.berkeley.edu

Funding Information:
U.C. Berkeley — Townsend Center

Start Date: 7/1/06