Month: January 2025

A lottery for six affordable artist studios in Gowanus— the first of more than 100 such studios slated to come to the neighborhood in the next few years — is now open. 

The studios, built as part of a Community Benefits Agreement signed ahead of the Gowanus rezoning, are set to open this spring at a new coworking space, The Shop, at 420 Carroll St. 

Priced at around $1.66 per square foot per month, the studios will rent for between $275 and $331 per month, or $3,300 and $3,800 annually. Per the CBA, rents can only increase by 2% per year. 

That’s well below market rate for the area, said Johnny Thornton, executive director of Arts Gowanus, which helped orchestrate the CBA and is overseeing the lottery and the affordable studios. 

Listings for arts studios in the area show rents two or three times higher than what’s expected at The Shop — a 220 square foot studio in Sunset Park costs $775 per month, where the largest affordable studio at 420 Carroll, at 223 square feet, costs $275 per month. A membership and a private studio at the Gowanus Studio Space runs at least $630 per month. 

Gowanus used to be an affordable haven for artists, and still has a thriving arts scene. But as the neighborhood changed, rents started to creep up, forcing creators to move elsewhere. When the Gowanus rezoning was proposed, locals worried more artists would be displaced, either by high rents or by developers buying and knocking down the buildings they worked out of. 

But as part of a 2021 agreement reached just before a critical City Council vote, ten developers agreed to include subsidized studio spaces in about a dozen new buildings around the nabe. More than three years later, the studios at 420 Carroll — a mixed-use building with housing and commercial space —  are the first to come to fruition. 

Anne Olsen, Director of Coworking at The Domain Companies — the developer behind 420 Carroll — said the company “couldn’t be more excited” to provide the studios.

“Place based development is a major priority for us, the opportunity to work with the existing community to preserve what makes Gowanus special was incredibly appealing to us,” Olson told Brooklyn Paper. “The Community Benefits Agreement and the subsequent studios through Arts Gowanus has helped us get connected with the community organizers on the forefront in this neighborhood. It is truly a wonderful chance to support their existing efforts within the new development and we are eager and excited to continue to connect with more people and organizers as we move toward opening.”

“It all seems like an abstraction that’s finally becoming real, like, you can see it,” Thornton said. “When I first get to open one of the doors and go into these studios, it’ll blow my mind, because it’s been such an abstraction for years.”

Each artist is essentially a small business, Thornton explained, and while many work at home, a dedicated studio space allows them to expand their work, meet with curators and other business partners, and become part of a community of artists. 

“Having a giant cost because of your dream, your passion, come out of your paycheck every month is a really difficult thing,” Thornton said. “So having [studios] that are affordable really can create a lot more flexibility, and create a lot more reasons to stay an artist and stay in New York City. That’s kind of one of our goals, to keep artists here, and keep them creating.” 

The studio lottery, and an even more affordable option

The lottery for the studios isn’t quite as strict as for affordable housing, Thornton said, and it’s available via the Arts Gowanus website, not a city portal. The studios are meant for “fine artists,” per the site, who must prove that they’re actively working by providing photos of their recent pieces and either an artist statement and biography, CV, or a letter from someone established in the arts who can back the applicant. 

An algorithm used to sort the applications will give more weight to artists who can prove they were previously displaced from Gowanus, and those who are part of an underrepresented community will also be given priority. 

Arts Gowanus will interview top applicants remotely, but the final determination will be made by the landlord or property owner — who may ask for their own application and credit or background checks. The rent includes heating, cooling, ventilation, electricity, and shared Wi-Fi — plus a communal kitchenette, bathrooms, and slop sink. 

Applications for the first round of studios close on March 1, 2025. Applicants who don’t get studios will be kept in the system for future lotteries, since all are in the same neighborhood, and won’t have to re-enter. 

There’s one more open space at 420 Carroll, for the Arts Gowanus Fellowship Program. 

Before the Fellowship Program, one studio in each location was subsidized even further, for artists making below 50% of the Area Median Income. But that still presented a barrier for some in the nabe, Thornton said.

Instead, Arts Gowanus itself will rent those further-subsidized studios and pay all costs for its fellows, plus offer career counseling and other opportunities. All low-income Brooklyn artists will be considered, but the org will prioritize those living locally, especially at Gowanus Houses, Warren Houses, Wyckoff Gardens, and Red Hook Houses. 

The fellows will have to commit to ten hours in the studio per week for one year, and participate in Arts Gowanus Programming and other workshops and events. Arts Gowanus is offering two fellowship spaces this spring, one at 420 Carroll and another at the Arts Gowanus office at 540 President St. 

Looking ahead

“We couldn’t be more excited about both of these things, it’s really been a long time coming,” Thornton said. “So, this being the first ones that are coming online, it’s just a really special time and it’s taken a lot of work.” 

With the studios at 420 Carroll set to be completed this spring, Thornton expects more studios in other buildings to start coming online later this year. Arts Gowanus’ new headquarters and community center, which will also include three free studios, will likely open in late 2026 or early 2027.

Justin Trudeau had a special bond with Canadians, who had known him since he was born, on Christmas Day in 1971, as the son of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.

That bond helped him get his Dad’s old job. In his first federal election as Liberal leader in 2015, his Conservative opponents warned Canadians that he was a lightweight, a celebrity with nice hair but no relevant work experience. Yet Trudeau had grown up in public, and he brought a welcome dose of glamor to the humdrum world of Canadian politics. Voters liked him, felt they knew him, and decided to give him a chance, in the form of a majority government.

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It was a remarkable triumph, unprecedented in Canadian politics. Trudeau—a former high school teacher with an unimpressive resume—managed to take his Liberal Party from third place in 2011, its worst showing in history, to first with a resounding mandate, an echo of the “Trudeaumania” that gripped the country when his father won government in 1968.

Justin’s election was a restoration of his father’s vision of Canada as a bilingual, multicultural northern social welfare state. But in the place of his father’s Jesuitical intellectual precision, he brought glamour, openness, and fun. Trudeau promised Canadians “sunny ways” after a decade of dour, business-oriented Conservative government, and successfully pursued an ambitious progressive agenda, winning two more elections. But after nine tumultuous years as Canada’s leader, he was forced to announce his resignation on Monday to avoid a revolt from Liberal Members of Parliament, who are facing certain defeat in an election that must be called by October.

Trudeau will stay on until his replacement is chosen. But his stubborn refusal to recognize that his time was up has left him, his party, and his country in a terrible situation, with Donald Trump and Elon Musk bullying him and threatening to make Canada the 51st state. He will govern as a lame duck in the first months of Trump’s presidency while his party chooses a leader to take on the combative Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre, who has had a double-digit lead in the polls for more than two years.

Trudeau leaves his country in peril, which means Canadians are not in the mood to celebrate his accomplishments as Prime Minister. He did do some things, though.

He enjoyed a long honeymoon, was briefly a global media darling, and won support for reducing child poverty, increasing taxes on the rich, and cutting taxes on the middle class. He legalized marijuana, brought in a carbon tax to cut emissions, and worked to improve the lives of Indigenous Canadians, whose difficult living conditions are a continued source of national shame.

Trudeau successfully managed the first presidency of Donald J. Trump, carefully negotiating a trade agreement similar to the one Trump inherited, and got the country through the COVID-19 pandemic, putting money in people’s pockets so they could stay locked down until the worst had passed.

But if Trudeau managed crises reasonably well, he also produced them regularly. He broke ethics rules with an ill-considered holiday on the Aga Khan’s private island, made a disastrous trip to India that was set up like a royal tour, was revealed to have worn blackface more times than he could say, lost two ministers and several senior aides in a scandal over an attempt to sideline the prosecution of SNC Lavalin, a corrupt engineering firm.

Yet what did him in was the post-pandemic cost-of-living crisis. Like Joe Biden, Rishi Sunak, Emmanuel Macron, and practically every other incumbent in the West, Trudeau’s poll numbers went underwater with people’s household budgets.

Economic growth has been slower than in the U.S., and his mismanagement of immigration made matters worse. Canada has long prided itself on its careful and successful integration of newcomers, with Trudeau’s father Pierre making Canada the first country to introduce official multiculturalism. But to inject energy into the economy after the pandemic, Trudeau carelessly opened the gates too wide, letting in record numbers of temporary foreign workers and international students that exacerbated what was already one of the world’s worst housing crises.

His doom started to be clear in June when he lost a byelection in a normally safe Toronto neighborhood, and became clearer when he lost another in Montreal in September. Liberal MPs called for him to quit. He ignored them, shuffled his cabinet, tried out a holiday sales-tax-cut and mulled $250 checks for all working Canadians, but nothing he did could change the numbers.

Then it all came to a head in December. After Trump threatened to impose ruinous 25% tariffs on all Canadian imports, Trudeau flew to Mar-a-Lago, hoping his charm would win the day. Trump responded by repeatedly bullying him, threatening to annex Canada. With little support at home, Trudeau could not find a way to respond effectively.

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Canadians had had enough of him, and he wouldn’t get the message. His growing number of unhappy former ministers felt he had a bad case of l’etat c’est moi. Trudeau has “gotten to a place now where he actually believes what he’s doing is good for the country, irrespective of anything else, which I think is hugely scary and problematic,” one told me.

Eventually, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, who saved the day during trade negotiations with Trump years earlier, forced the issue. She resigned on Dec. 16 amid disagreements over how to handle the incoming Trump Administration, triggering a crisis of legitimacy for Trudeau.

For years, Trudeau had been telling anyone who would listen that he had to stay on to fight the next election against Poilievre, whose right-wing policies and harsh attacks are outside the tradition of Canadian politics.

Trudeau despises Poilievre, sees him as a threat to the Canada his father built. He wants to fight him. And he is a fighter. The towering 6 ft. 2 in. Trudeau first won the Liberal Party leadership in 2013 after proving his toughness and unexpectedly triumphing 3-1 in a charity boxing match.

“I’m a fighter,” he said Monday. “Every bone in my body has always told me to fight because I care deeply about Canadians.”

But Trudeau had to acknowledge that it was time to throw in the towel. “It has become obvious to me that with the internal battles that I cannot be the one to carry the Liberal standard into the next election,” he said.

That was an understatement. On Wednesday his MPs were to demand his exit. The polling has been so bad for so long that the Liberals need a new leader. Canadians need someone to manage the relationship with the U.S, which suddenly looks more difficult than at any time since the War of 1812.

But voters are clear they want someone else to do that.