When Artspace Buffalo received its first tenants last summer, glowing reports seemed to issue forth from the building nearly everyday, and for good reason. The $16.9 million project that converted the nearly 100-year-old Buffalo Electric Vehicle Company building at 1219 Main Street into affordable housing units for artists and their families was brimming with promise. When the dust of construction settled, there would be 60 live/work units available to local artists of every stripe, offering them not only the chance to live in expansive, affordable lofts, but also a close-at-hand community of like-minded creative people with whom to cooperate and collaborate. Not only that, but the project’s implications would go beyond its tenants and extend into the long-neglected Midtown neighborhood, attracting investment and bridging the racial and economic gap that’s long separated East Side from West.

News reports told of musicians, photographers, painters, sculptors, graphic designers, dancers, actors, curators and furniture designers eagerly moving into the five-storey, 86,000-square-foot art deco building and the six contemporary four-plexes to its rear. They were happy with the amount of space they had, happy with the sunlight that poured through their over-sized windows, happy with their newfound community and, perhaps most importantly, they were happy with the rock-bottom prices they were paying for it all. The whole thing seemed too good to be true.

Months later, however, with construction still incomplete and resident complaints mounting, some tenants say that if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.

Mutiny

Two weeks ago Tuesday, Will Law, Chief Operating Officer of Minneapolis-based Artspace Projects, Inc. and manager of the Buffalo project, stopped into Buffalo while en route home from New York City. He was there to meet with the tenants and hear them out on their concerns. It didn’t take long for the meeting to turn ugly. Not 15 minutes in, resident Kelly Metcalfe, a UB dance student, dropped a bomb: “I think we’re going to have a mutiny on our hands,” she said. “People are angry, and I include myself as one of them.”

But what was everyone so angry about? Well, that all depends on who you ask.

If you ask Metcalfe, it’s the fact that she and her husband pay for a three-bedroom apartment, but they can only effectively use two. The third room, with its uninsulated masonry walls, is a heat sink that remains 20 degrees colder than the rest of the flat despite attempts to warm it. It’s the unexpectedly high electricity bills—roughly $225 for each of the past two months. It’s the fact that they didn’t have access to laundry facilities for their first four months. “I have two kids,” she says, “I do laundry like it’s going out of style.” She’s mad that her ceiling has been leaking for months and it still hasn’t been addressed. Above all, she’s pissed off that her problems don’t seem to warrant the attention of either Artspace or its management partner, Belmont Shelter.

If you ask Michele Pamer, a fine art photographer who works in the Division of Neonatology for UB Pediatrics at Women & Children’s Hospital, she’s mad that the lofts came without amenities that she says were promised to residents. An informational handout that was still being distributed as late as November listed garbage disposals and self-cleaning ranges under amenities. Pamer’s upset that the intercom system is still on the fritz and there’s currently no on-site management. She’s irked that her bathtub leaks; that the sliding glass door on one of her bedrooms is installed improperly and so doesn’t work; and that there’s snow piling up inside her windows.

If you ask Justin Lowe, a graphic designer and photographer, he wishes that he and his girlfriend would’ve known that the 10,000-square-foot shared workshop space in the main building’s basement wouldn’t be available come February. His girlfriend, Kate, is a silversmith, whose work involves relatively dangerous materials, the kind they’re not eager to bring into their living space—blowtorches and caustic materials such as sodium bisulfate and borax. “If we had known that it would be almost February and we still wouldn’t have a place to work,” Lowe said at the Tuesday night meeting, “we would not have moved here. Our livelihoods are seriously being compromised without a place to work.”

If you ask Elaine Bain, a graphic designer who lectures part-time at Buffalo State, she wishes she’d had windows along the east side of her flat during the first five months she lived there. Instead, she had large pieces of plasterboard in place of the three windows—leaky plasterboard. On two separate occasions, storms caused huge pools of water to leak into her apartment, damaging her artistic prints and some furniture. She’d like reimbursement for the damage.

If you ask them all, collectively, you’ll hear many of the same complaints. Universally, complaints include sky-high electricity bills, construction workers randomly entering apartments to do work (sometimes leaving outside doors unlocked upon exit), the unavailability of laundry facilities for the first four months (for which tenants received a $10/month compensation), community spaces that are still unavailable and, above all, a huge lack of communication between Artspace, Belmont and the residents.

These were only some of the complaints aired by the two-dozen tenants gathered Tuesday meeting. The sense was, among the gathered tenants, that neither Artspace nor Belmont had cared enough about the residents to reply to their concerns in the past, and that they were currently dodging questions and hiding something. The airing of grievances, however, did provide measured relief for some. And Law’s visit seemed to signal a new awareness and concern from Artspace.

Digging itself out of a hole

While some residents seem to think that Artspace has a fairly large hole to dig itself out of, Will Law would argue that no figurative hole could compare to the one that the project started out in. That was a literal hole.

In spring of 2006, when Savarino Construction first began foundation work for the new lofts, it uncovered an unanticipated surprise—two leaky diesel tanks buried in the ground. The property, which had been purchased from the city and had a clean environmental report, would have to be remediated. According to Law, “The things had leaked for years and our tests, which are a series of random borings in the soil, just missed it.” All of the contaminated soil had to be removed and replaced, costing the project more than four months and $1 million. “The worst thing that came out of this,” Law says, “is that we started in May and lost the prime building months of summer.”

That hole set the pace for the rest of the project, physically. Any contingency time built into the construction schedule was immediately erased. Everything was pushed back.

The financing that nonprofit Artspace uses to make its projects possible is extremely complex. Essentially, they cobbled together the $13 million for Artspace Buffalo from state and federal housing tax credits, historic tax credits, federal HOME money that channels through the city, housing trust fund money from New York’s Division of Housing and Community Renewal (DHCR) and philanthropic money from local foundations, including the Oishei Foundation. “The bottom line is that this thing is as complicated as any real estate deal out there that you can imagine,” Law says.

Added to the difficulty of the project is the fact that the Buffalo Electric Vehicle Company building is on the National Register of Historic Places. What all of this means is that there are a lot of hoops that need to be jumped through in order for construction and funding of Artspace Buffalo to be approved. In this kind of situation, huge bureaucratic delays become part of the process. “It’s a complicated deal with many layers of potential complication that could come to haunt you,” Law says.

And haunt them they did. One of the largest set of complaints from tenants stems from the fact that they were made to move into the buildings, and thus their units, before they were properly completed. Law blames this on the housing tax credits coupled with the new, pushed-back timeline. “Tax credits are 40 to 45 percent of the whole deal here, so those alone are worth something like $7 million,” he says.

And they expire at a certain point, if you haven’t moved people in and filled up your units. At Artspace, that date was August 31, after which they’d lose credits for every unoccupied unit. According to Law, the original plan was to move tenants in between May and August. But with the environmental remediation having pushed construction back several months, Buffalo fire and building inspectors couldn’t clear the buildings for occupancy until late July. And that’s when chaos ensued.

In early July, prospective tenants signed their leases without having ever viewed their apartments. At the end of the month and through the end of August, they picked up their keys, took a brief tour of their future living spaces and began the process of moving into their new, imperfect—and unfinished—community. But they knew they were moving into an incomplete building. It was hard to miss the fact that the lower lobby featured a gaping hole to the basement where stairs should be. They were ready for that when they arrived. But as days turned to weeks turned to months, and their letters, phone calls, emails and faxes to management went unanswered, their patience wore thin.

In the “big, panicked rush” (as Law describes it) to complete the construction, move tenants in and settle paperwork, lots of balls were dropped, particularly in the field of communication. “This is affordable housing,” Law says, “so there’s a huge amount of work to qualify residents that they themselves have to do, but there’s also an amazing amount of work for Belmont.”

Belmont Shelter has the unenviable task of third-party verifying all of the income information that comes in from residents. They have to conduct background checks, call employers to verify salary and employment and contact previous landlords on the way to resolve whether they meet government standards for affordable housing. On top of that, they had a very narrow timeframe to get tenants moved in, one quarter of the time they were supposed to have. “It’s not an excuse,” says Law, “but from where I sit I think our partner did an amazing job.” He repeats this—“it’s not an excuse”—several times during our phone conversation. “If Belmont fell down on emails that were construction-related, that has something to do with the fact they probably didn’t have an easy way to answer them. They had to come back to me or Andrew [Commers, a member of Artspace’s development team] and then wait on us to respond.”

Law has answers for many other concerns voiced. Many tenants, for instance, argued that their heat essentially wasn’t included, since they had to pay so much to circulate it. His simple answer is that it is: “I think there’s a general misunderstanding about what utilities should costs the tenants.” While Artspace pays for the gas that heats the air in tenants’ forced air furnaces, they have to pay the electricity that circulates it throughout their lofts. With vents perched 12 feet high on exposed ducts, it takes a lot of rising hot air to heat an apartment. You essentially have to fill the entire apartment with hot air. “These places are 1,000 square feet and up, with 12-foot ceilings; when you look at that kind of volume, it costs more to heat and cool it, no matter what,” Law says.

And he’s probably right. Most tenants reported, in effect, a doubling of their electricity bills from the warmer months. If it costs $100 to cool your apartment with air conditioning—cool air falls, remember—it’s not surprising that you could double that filling the entire space with warm air. On top of that, Law admits that they made construction mistakes in some of the apartments, leaving exposed, uninsulated walls. The State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO) prefers that exposed brick walls be left exposed wherever possible. “We need to better insulate the bedroom units on the north wall, no doubt about it.” Additionally, Law says they’ll soon install SHPO-compliant inner storm windows behind the drafty, historic windows. But some of the high utility costs are just part of living in a large, open space with big windows. “It’s just the quality and nature of the space,” Law says. “It’s a tradeoff for that kind of space.” Some of the confusion regarding utility expectations was probably introduced by the “utility allowance” included in the Artspace lease. That number is just part of a HUD formula, Law says, unrelated to realistic utility expectations. “They’re unrelated, and we probably could’ve done a better job of trying to explain that to people in terms of how these credits are calculated.”

As far as community gardens, Law said he’s working on that. Artspace has already acquired one of two vacant lots adjacent to, and directly east of, its property line. So far, they’ve only “got a line” on the second one. Law hopes to turn those lots into a community garden. “We’re going to be able to buy these lots, I’ll try and find a few thousand dollars for supplies and it’s going to take a lot of sweat equity and organization on the residents’ part, but I’m thinking this will be a great thing.”

According to Sam Savarino, company president and CEO, some things can be pinned on his company. The fact that laundry facilities were inaccessible, for instance. Both sets of stairs, he said, had “design code issues” that pushed back their completion. “We didn’t know initially that we had to redo the stairs, but afterwards it was determined that, to comply with the most recent building codes, they needed to be modified,” Savarino says. Midway through the process, they had trouble with their contractor and had to replace it. “That was no one’s fault but ours, since it was a construction issue.”

The same is true for Elaine Bain’s windows, which had to meet SHPO regulations. Whenever SHPO is involved it’s a painstaking process. The windows were custom-made by the manufacturer, and need to be sent to SHPO for approval, modified and resent. Then, when the approvals finally come in, they are custom-made. That’s certainly enough to push their completion back four months. That still doesn’t resolve, however, the fact that Bain hasn’t received any compensation for her water-damaged possessions.

As far as the amenities that were promised and not delivered on, Law says he doesn’t know where that information came from. “These things were never in the plan. We’ve built exactly what was in our programmed plan from DHCR.” Garbage disposals, he says, aren’t allowed, according to New York State affordable housing guidelines. Another rumor circulated—thanks to a blank spot in each kitchen’s cabinetry—that dishwashers were originally in the plans but were left out when Artspace ran out of money. “We never had dishwashers planned,” Law says, explaining that he included the space so long-term residents could easily buy a dishwasher and install it at their own expense. “In our very first project in St. Paul, a third of our residents are still there from 17 years ago. One of their comments was that it would’ve been nice if we had left room in their kitchen layout for a dishwasher.”

Other problems are currently being worked out. Thanks to a new deal Artspace made with Savarino, construction crews will be more coordinated, and should be able to tie up any loose ends in each living space in scheduled one- or two-day visits.

In other words, Artspace is working to improve conditions.

In the beginning

Back when Artspace was first founded, in 1979, it was a small, neighborhood operation in Minneapolis’ blighted Warehouse District. Then-director (and single employee) Cheryl Kartes used the initial budget of $50,000 from the Minneapolis Arts Commission to help artists find live/work spaces in that neighborhood, which would, in turn, revitalize it. In the 1980s, Artspace decided to become more proactive and jumped head-long into the development business, starting with the Northern Warehouse in St. Paul. They created the live/work space. It was a grand experiment, but it worked. Artists found cheap places to live and could afford them. The neighborhoods around the Northern strengthened and eventually gentrified, but the artists weren’t priced out of the neighborhood.

Since then, Artspace has grown tremendously to include 20 artists’ residences around the country, with 12 more in development and a multi-million dollar operating budget. But its mission remains basically the same. To give artists affordable housing in a creative, nurturing atmosphere, while simultaneously raising blighted communities by attracting further investment.

Many residents mentioned to me Law’s tendency to “spin” things and deflect questions, which probably isn’t fair to him. Most of their interactions with Law have been at large group meetings, where the perceived relationship is one of “us vs. him.” Will Law may or may not have a degree in public relations (I didn’t ask, and he never volunteered that information), but it’s clear that he is a smooth talker. And when you’re facing a group of angry people, you have to be to prevent all-out insurrection. “There are no hidden agendas here,” Law says, and I believe him. While it’s little comfort to people like Justin Lowe and Michele Pamer, who are reasonably sure they won’t be renewing their leases, it’s probably true.

At the Tuesday night meeting, Law characterized it this way: “Think of your own artwork and the 45 ways you’ve conceptualized it, then, at the end, think of how many times you screwed it up before you realized your vision…and that’s what this is. It’s messy, it’s hugely imperfect, it’s trial by fire.”