Our first meeting in Pittsburgh

We arrived at Pittsburgh International Airport in the morning, rented a car, checked into the Renaissance Hotel and met 12:30 pm at the URA offices with:

Renee Piechocki (Office of Public Art)

Lea Donatelli (Office of Public Art)

Rob Stephany (URA)

Lena Andrews (URA)

Morton Brown (City of Pittsburgh)

What follows is a rough transcript of that meeting.

Renee: I was talking with some colleagues about this and they just thought that it was really exciting that the URA even entertained this idea of having artists come in and thinking creatively about some land use stuff. I am, like… it’s Rob and Lena, I am not surprised. What we are hoping to do over the next couple of days is show you as much of undeveloped Pittsburgh as we can and look for some kind of proposal or report of what could happen.

Rob: We are grateful that you guys came out. The city is going through some really interesting reverb that masks in large part some of our historic and heritage of loss, the city has lost 50 percent of its population. Some of our neighborhoods are the most vibrant from a market standpoint as any place on the East coast and some of them have lost up to 90 percent of their population. You would be hard pressed in your tours to call them non neighborhoods. You would be hard pressed to say that there is not a there there. We are the development authority and we believe in some kind of grass roots change, but not all togethet sure that they all have to be redevelopment. Not altogether sure they have to be re-population strategies. We have challenged a few neighborhoods to start thinking about what’s the vision of their neighborhood that acknowledges loss.

Population loss shouldn’t mean a vision for a neighborhood that deals with some of this market loss shouldn’t be uninspired. So at places like Larimer we are starting to think…how do you extend regional parks into their neighborhood.

Other folks from Hazelwood are thinking about not just green ways but real expansive notions. And we are willing to be as regressive as any community group might want to be in that endeavor. I think some of our conversation has been, and I can’t wait to hear your vibe on this, but there are places like Homewood that will be very exciting neighborhoods 20 years from now. They just happened to have the life sucked out of them right now. You drive down the street and 60 percent of the property is vacant land or vacant buildings. The other 40 percent is either slum landlord property or owned by people who will be leaving the neighborhood in the next couple of years. These are heavily senior populations. You can do one hundred units of housing in Homewood and not keep ahead of how much housing they are going to loose over the same four years that it will take you to develop a hundred. So is that a park, where 50 percent of those housing units had their roofs ripped of and their porches ripped of, and the skeletons and bones of those structures become a sculpture garden. We keep wondering, how does an artist inspire community based on loss.

We have these neighborhoods up on Plintz and there are these steps that are still a part of every day working life’s – what if these steps, instead of being goofy, crazy, utilitarian public steps that do nothing but disintegrate from the moment they are constructed, what if they were some pedestrian narrative that inspired folks. The other neat thing is… there is good plans. Pat Hazad? is a good co-conspirator for us. If I was able to find some money to rebuild some steps he would be a guy who could figure out how to get us through the bureaucracy that doesn’t want an artist designed railing. We got the director of the department ready and willing to make me not step into my own shit and figure out how to do that.

Renee: Pat Hazard works at the department of public works. A great ally there.

Rob: ..and a career bureaucrat who has always found a way to find inspiration.

So. That’s it. I think we want to give you some context today of the city at large and respond to some questions you might have.

Lena: This is a map. As Rob has mentioned, we lost 50 percent of our population since 1950, so we used to have about 700.000 people living in the city boundaries, and now we have 330.000.

Rob: But what I think is important, this is really a tale of three neighborhoods. Some of these have actually not only lost a minimum amount of population but have actually gained population.

Lena: If you drive around a lot in these green neighborhoods you can’t even really tell that they have lost population. It’s probably just that household sizes have gotten smaller and there are fewer people living in these enormous houses.

Rob: My house in Lawrenceville was built by the builder, the inspiration was a single family house but by the time it got constructed there was the need for so many jobs at the mills down at the river that it was built as a three unit apartment building. The early census shows about 4 or 5 people per unit. So my one little house that has four people, and we feel a little cramped in there, had twelve people living there.

Lena: So, the population loss seems really extreme, but in some of the neighborhoods in the city you can’t really even see it. It just varies a lot depending on where you are. This is a chart that shows that we have lost 50 percent of our population but only 15 percent of our housing units. A lot of that are smaller households but there are lots of vacant structures that are still standing.

So we have a lot of vacant land, vacant buildings and public property. This is a map that shows public owned property, some of it is parts of that is parks and hillsides. A lot of times the city and the URA take possession of land when it‘s tax delinquent, when people are not paying taxes anymore. So this is an indicator of blight. These are all properties that are either owned by the city, the URA or the housing authority.

So you can see we have these kind of clusters of vacancy and blight and then we have larger areas that are fairly stable.

Rob: These parks might be the only property that would show up as an asset. Even housing authority they have been selling their properties to private individuals.

What’s so interesting about this is… a lot of our hills used to be the worst places in the city to live, because from there they used to look out over hell on earth, these steel mills just polluting…and so much of the slope housing that was built by Polish people with their own hands, or Italians and not with the greatest construction methodologies. Unlike where they came from, we have really frail slopes. So we have a constant kind of slippage. Much of our population loss has been dealt with by houses falling off of hillsides, and the forest growing in instead. Usually we have topography and green as the underlay to these maps, and if you did this all this garbage would show up as terrible, but if you look at it as green as an asset, a lot of that stuff starts to get hidden, and what ends up peering out are what insiders of Pittsburgh read and recognize as blight. Here is the hill district, Garfield, Larimer, Homewood, Brushton, Bellshoover just outside the inner rim of the North Side. That I would say reads to Pittsburhgers as the place where this population loss is flat. It’s our Detroit. But Detroit has no mountains and Detroit lost 50 percent of its population, but Detroit across the board reads like it’s lost. That’s our Homewood.

Lena: But a lot of land that we own is steep and undermined and flood plains.

So there are areas that are hazardous and we can’t really build on them. We have been trying to make the case that the green space is a part of the economic development. That was a study of what the University of Pennsylvania did where they looked at what happened when you improve vacant land, what happens to the property around it and in Philadelphia they did this massive greening project of vacant lots and then they looked what happened to adjacent sales and property values. When you are next to a vacant lot that is green the property value went up by as much as 30 percent. They also looked at street trees. This is making the economic case for doing these types of improved green space projects. And we are about to do a study like this in Pittsburgh.

Rob: I think art and green have similarities and differences. It cost us so much to develop property and I can spend a Million Dollars on a deal and I am ok spending this as long as it impacts people off of the site. I am really interested in trying to figure out how the senior citizen gets equity in her home. I don’t just wanna do a deal. There is a lot of data in places that relates to greening efforts and how that has market impact on nearby real estate. Now, I believe in this arts thing at my core…it’s a leap of faith and I am willing to take that. It’s how its implemented. I think if you did the right thing in Homewood where 10 houses were converted into sculptures people might flying in from Chicago…so it’s just a different thing. So with what we are obsessed with is: How does it add value to the people who have stayed there long enough.

Renee: I always love seeing studies like this but to my knowledge there is no entity that has studied this with access to cultural institutions. Is it public art, is it a museum or a gallery, I don’t know if anyone has actually done a real study. It would be really great if there was a study like this, because a lot of the information about art being valuable is really anecdotal. You always hear people talking about the artist come in and get the neighborhood going and it becomes completely gentrified and then the artists are pushed out and can’t afford it anymore. That’s something that happens in bigger cities all the time, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles. I don’t know that is has happened here in Pittsburgh yet.

Rob: Gentrification hasn’t happened in Pittsburgh yet. I think the idea of the artist as pioneer and somebody who believes in neighborhood and doesn’t suffer from other ills, like racism, the artist as pioneer is a different move than public art as reclamation of place.

Franziska: How do you define an increase in value?

Rob: We can show you how we define that. It’s looking over time at actual sales prices. Assessed value has no meaning in our region right now for a variety of reasons. If 30 people sold property in Homewood last year and the average was $30.000, 40 people sold property in the year before and the average was $40.000, we can get a sense that we are going downward. It’s pretty straight forward. There is 10 For Sale signs up on this block today. Artist moves in works with community…whatever. Fast forward 2 years from now, all 10 For Sale signs have been taken down. Homeowners interviewed, Homeowners believe that there are not on a downward spiral, which is why they pull their property off the market. Even any level of stabilizing.

Franziska: When the population decreased, because you just said, homeowners believing that they are not on a downward facing road, where there some kind of things that were happening here, where suddenly there was this hysteria and  people just started selling their homes, and other people followed and there was not a real reason may be?

Rob: Early on during suburbanization there were things like block busting, where realtors would sell their first house to an African American Family in a white neighborhood and then start essentially a rumor mill to the rest of the block about race. And then other people would start to sell so that those realtors could do, so that was called block busting. At this point, unless there is a gang house across the street, unless there is some decremental social thing that actually starts driving people out quickly, it’s more kind of a nutrition issue. It’s sort of watching something die on the vine. And for all our predecessors, that was an ok strategy to let it die. I feels there is a way to not let it die and I think we have to figure out other strategies, cause you can let it die by building housing. The exact opposite of the intent of what we do could unfold in some of these places that don’t have a lot. At this point there is a slum landlord condition, where people have purchased property for nothing and now they are renting properties…I don’t mean to over- characterize it, but it’s not that far off. And there is Senior home owners. That’s where they have lived and they are not going to move because of market value. They are going to move because their son or daughter tells them they can’t cut the grass anymore it’s time to go. Or they pass on, and we have a substantial amount of them. And it’s interesting because a senior home owner is one of the safest conditions known to mankind, next to a slum landlord which can be a haven for  poorly managed  rental housing, be a haven for crime.

Hajoe: So what is your vision for it? To get the slum lords out to keep the retired people in the place, or to get new people in there.

Morton: There are problems with maintenance with slum landlords. That is a problem that we all have. You can’t get them to maintain their property properly so it contains that visual blight.

Rob: yes, I think well managed rental housing is great. But these neighborhoods don’t have a lot of it. These neighborhoods have some kind of path of least resistance transactions happening. So we don’t want to perpetuate more slum landlords. I think we have to be humane with seniors. One of the things going on regionally right now is that Pittsburgh is probably better than any place in the world

Providing services to seniors in place. Lot of other cities have just built a ton of senior housing, moved everybody out of their big mansion and into their little efficiency apartment. We have networks like Meals on wheels, Health and Human Services. But we still almost monthly run into a condition where that senior shouldn’t simply live there. She is afraid, she is sequestered into the first floor of her house. And she got all kinds of emotional ties. Just last week in Polish hill, there she is right on Bergen street pleading for us to buy the property next door because she is positive there are people in there. And at some point when you don’t feel safe other weird shit starts to happen. But we are really good at keeping people there for very long periods of time, and I think that’s a good thing. I think that’s a core capacity. I think by the end of the day trying to clearly get good people to want to be there, I don’t care if it’s rental or for sale, other people obsess over owner owned occupancy above rental, but in many of these transitional places people are more likely to rent just to test it out. If it is really transitional I make a year commitment to this place but I don’t know if I want to put my $5000 on the line as equity. There is a future vision for these places where they are the green, gracious neighborhoods. Diversity will always be a part of that. What sets them apart is that they weren’t frankly the 5000 people living in row houses. There is something a lot more gracious about Garfields future and Larimer’s future and Homewood’s future.

Homewood hurts me, because in Pittsburgh many of the neighborhoods that have great architecture have rebounded. We had workers and we had middle management neighborhoods and in some instances we had the mansions on the main street. These middle management neighborhoods, and Friendship is one of them the markets rebounded there and for the most part much of our distress in these working class neighborhoods, frame, row house, brick row houses, it’s only built to last ten years and it has lasted 95. It was built in some instances by the mills to accommodate an influx of immigrants to service the mills. Homewood has a characterization of Friendship, within 2 blocks you can have houses selling for $25.000 and $450.000. And this whole area is actually the only place in the city where I think they are figuring out, this line right here is where stability meets instability. We haven’t it figured out yet in Homewood and North point Breeze. Larimer is still much of an outpost, but I think we are getting excited about Larimer.

Lena: you see here right on the map. this is this street called Penn Ave. it goes all the way from the east quarter of the city and it goes all the way downtown. These are some of our strongest real estate markets here in the county and then here houses cost like $10.000- $15.000.

Rob: it’s one of the few places in the city where it’s not encumbered by some crazy topography.

Lena: Yes, it’s flat. It’s just a street in between.

Hajoe: Is there like a bleed over happening?

Lena: There is actually a physical barrier that is hard to cross. There is a bus way corridor.

Morton: it’s like a highway but only buses can go on.

Renee: It’s unique. Who else but Pittsburgh has a bus way?

Lena: We have this open space group that comes together that encourages creative use of vacant land in the city. So we meet with the City Real Estate Department, City Planning, the Mayor’s office, all these different city agencies that work with vacant land and we try to help neighborhood groups in technical assistance provider to urban gardens or community farms, or extend the green ways.

Rob: It is funny. It is so rewarding having the city people talking amongst themselves about all the same shit they are dealing with.

Lena: It’s funny because each one of us deals with a different piece of it, and the vacant land projects are confusing. The ownership is confusing, how you permit it and so we are all working together in this.

Renee: Is that working group new?

Lena: It’s been going for a year. We are now called Osnap, Open Space Neighborhood Advisory Panel.

This is an example of a neighborhood development project that we did recently.

Rob: It’s kind of a transitional neighborhood, called Marshall Shaveland. The two vacant parcels used to accommodate 44 row houses that were really poorly managed. They negotiated the sale of the property, the URA ultimately had to buy it from the community group, we tore down the buildings. It’s been green space for about 8 years and the community group has been pursuing a 22 housing development on that parcel, because that’s all that we told them they could ever build on that parcel. In the interim they started using, what is really crappy green space, but you have seen kids throwing frisbies..

So we reengaged them a little bit and said, what if we abandoned the idea of building 22 units of housing that would taken a decade to sell. So it costs on average $235.000 per address to build, the average sales price in Marshall Shaveland is $35.000. So we said, what if we built three new houses and they will front a new public park. (…) It’s a really successful project.

Franziska: Who used to own the row houses?

Rob: one of those slum land lords. And then the community bought it from him.

Franziska: And who is the community?

Rob: There is a community group. We have a very robust community development system. It was formed literally out of …when our industry started to collapse we were the front runner in kind of employee led organizing efforts that really transcended into a community development setting. So we have community groups that are 40 years old now. It ranges from being totally dysfunctional to being cutting edge. But every community has some structure of people meeting monthly try to figure something out.

Renee: I don’t know if you guys are interacting a lot with community boards in NYC., It’s that same system but they are not legislation. Because in NY every neighborhood is part of a community board. They have the same function but they don’t have the official capacity.

Rob: One of the things these guys are constantly confronting is to sit down with the community group that can do really good things and trying to work with them on a public art project…

Lena: We are looking for creative ways to use vacant lands and there is this group in the city called Birded Bees. They are putting aviaries on vacant lots. We are working with them to do a license agreement in Larimer, which is next to Homewood to give them a more permanent use of a lot.

Another group is the Landslide Community Farm

Hajoe: What about contamination? Do you do soil testing?

Lena: Yes, we work with Penn State. They  have an Extension Center in Pittsburgh and they do a lot of the testing.

Rob: I think some of the technical assistance providers on the green landscaping front are some of the best in the nation and well funded by philanthropy. So we have Grow Pittsburgh, that can work with anybody on the creation of any kind of community garden. You wanna have to own that garden, you wanna have to manage and maintain that garden but they can do soil testing through Penn State Cooperate Extension, they can help you with the right plantings and the right crop rotations. We have a student conservation core which at a drop of a head could bring 40 talented young people to a neighborhood to eliminate basils?? on a hillside, as long as the community is there. We got G-Tech, some kind of cutting edge thinkers as it relates to soil remediation through bio crops. Then we have some grass roots folks like Diane Swan, who is sort of a hero. She has just taken 35 lots around where her house and where her business is and doesn’t care who the owners of those properties are. She maintains those lots and has been doing so for 20 years.

Lena: We have a really extensive green way network in Pittsburgh. It’s something that’s unique to the city. It’s passive green space that belongs to the city. A lot of our wooded hillsides, they are not parks but they are green ways. So there are mainly trees and there are trails that go through them. We have been helping people turning vacant lots next to their houses into side yards. We sell them at a reduced price. There is a thing going on in Larimer now called The Experiment Station.

Rob: Heinz founded through Kingsley. Essentially giving them the opportunity to pursue creative ideas as they materialize from their community planning process. And it’s specifically whre vacant land reclamation and development might intersect. There are great stories nationally of the High School planting herbs on a vacant lot creating a salad dressing and being all the rage at the high end restaurant in LA and actually making money out of that. So I think it was Christine from Heinz essentially saying: I like what I am seeing here, here is some cash Kingsley.

This Experiment Station is like: It’s ok to F-up. It’s not ok to not try.

Renee: I think that’s a Pittsburgh theme actually. People really expect you to try things and it’s ok if they don’t work. Because we’ll do a study them and do an evaluation and that will help the next person.

Rob: But it’s not ok to be inspired only to have it fizzle out because there wasn’t any fall out. So, our parole center has to be relocated to accommodate Target just down the street. One of the things they are actually thinking about is: Can you move the Parole center into one of the buildings on Hamilton Avenue? The neat thing is…30 detectives coming into a neighborhood near you every day. They are actually the safest places in the city. (…)

If we have done anything then it’s trying to encourage people to think about a reuse strategy that’s not an expensive development strategy that won’t do any good.

Hajoe: so in a way you are advising?

Rob: we have taken on a purposeful, early stage, kind of technical assistance team, we have 7 or 8 folks from the URA that will go into a community setting and help them with some of their re-visioning activities. It’s their vision but we can help them get passed the… Literally for the last 40 years the idea of loosing population was a negative that people couldn’t get passed, like we don’t even want to think about it. Shut up and build the house. Now all of a sudden it’s like, well this could be an asset.

We have worked in Garfield, Polish Hill, we are now in Hazelwood and help them think through what’s going on with Land Use.

So Larimer is actually thinking, so what if we took all this vacant land and extend the park (Highland park) into our neighborhood? All of the sudden Larimer would go from being a plimphed to being next to a regional park.

Lena: And groups started coming to us.

Rob: We don’t impose our will on neighborhoods. We used to.

Lena: Yes, we can show you some projects…

Rob:… many of them we are trying to undo.

Renee: It’s interesting to think about the idea of population loss and asset, because in most affluent cities, it’s all about people who have the most space. It might be interesting to get people to rethink about this asset they don’t know about.

Franziska: And these vacant lost, are they used in any kind of unofficial way, by individuals or groups, or are they just vacant, overgrown?

Rob: I would say the general condition across the footprint of the city is overgrown and unmaintained. Some neighborhoods started to take control of that.

If you think about scale and the other part of the land issue (maintenance)  you start to have a condition where something is a small scale low maintained solution would be side yard. I own this house. I am going to buy this yard right next to me from the city and I am going to maintain it. That’s a good solution and one we are trying to encourage, all the way to something that’s a large scale high maintained solution which would be a public park. And at the end of the day we are trying to shift things into that direction. (public park) The general overarching condition off city and URA owned land is probably easily read as poorly managed vacant land. The URA is better than the city is at keeping grass cut and this kind of stuff.

Hajoe: Oh, this actually happens? It’s maintained at that level.

Lena: If it’s owned by the government it’s supposed to be maintained.

Rob: The stuff that you will see during your travels… that multiple year rat’s nest, that’s privately owned.

Hajoe: So there is a gradient in maintenance of what is city owned, URA owned and privately owned?

Morton: What’s up with the green up program?

Rob: It’s a great resource. Public Works Department of the city has set aside a dedicated crew to be supportive of grass roots efforts at land reclamation. Plublic Works has access to huge earth moving machinery, if you wanna get rid of 50% of the material on site, they just do it. If you put this kind of work out to bid I am in the 10^th of Thousands of Dollars just to prep a site. When you start thinking: oh, this almost feels impossible the green up team can essentially say: We can do this.

The bad thing is that they are getting a bad reputation among these other technical assistance providers which I think is somewhat unwarranted, that they do things for communities, not with them.

Renee: I think one thing that we should think about when we look at stuff is the ideas you come up with should be as big as they can be. Potentially we could have access to these amazing people who can move dirt, or funders that are interested in ideas and experimentation. Don’t fell like as you go home and think about this that any idea is too wild, because it would be great to have a list of all the ideas. Don’t edit, is what I am saying. There are so many people and resources here who are interested in helping Pittsburgh be as good as it can be that any idea is really worth putting out there. The access you can have to people that can make things happen is completely different. The scale is very different to NYC for example, but in a good way. People want things to happen. It’s not a cynical place…It’s a cynical place in the sense that people are famously feel bad about themselves, but that is trying to shift.

Morten: The city itself has a self esteem problem. But the support you are talking about is all across the board on all levels. It’s the government all the way down to the homeowner. People in the neighborhoods are proud of where they live, they want to see it rebuild itself, they want to build new pride into it. I agree. The support will come from everywhere.

Rob: It’s an interesting task, because much of this has its inspiration in the people you will never talk to until you do a deal, right?! To a certain extent your task is to inspire us about what could be. Here is 30 crazy ideas. People will give you a pass as long as you ask for it. We don’t wanna do it, if you don’t wanna do it.

Hajoe: Is there actually information about how many of the houses are rented and how many are owner occupied?

Lena: Yes, we have this data. It’s different in every neighborhood.

Hajoe: I am curious, because I think it reflects how the community is built and what the interest of the people is.

Rob: And I continue to challenge. There are places where there is community, you can feel it and I would say home ownership is higher there than where there is a loss of traction, there is more stuff going into rental, going into for sale, and I want to push a little bit on: Is there a role for a kind of community engaged public art move in those different settings? And it’s a hard push, because you want to find a place where people are going to fall in love with this, own it, it will be theirs. It’s really easy to want to move away from these places where everything moves away and I am wondering if public art is one of those things that could set a flag into the ground, or may be it can’t.

Hajoe: That’s something we have to consider because in our work whenever we worked with a community we were never assigned to a community and for us that is very important. That’s something what’s interesting for us working here: How can we solve that issue. Because we are not interested per se in a group that is already willing to work with us. For us it’s more like: oh, now we are here, now we have to figure out what happens.

Rob: So in your ideal world you can calk something catalytic and then it materializes.

Hajoe: No, it doesn’t. That’s the point.

Rob: Ok, let me just say that I am cool with … I have been down every road. I have commissioned artists and I walked down the long and excruciating path of what hyper community involvement looks like. And almost everything else is a hybrid. If I could be in this position… since I am a public entity…but this is where we have conversations with philanthropy… if you gave Kingsley this over a three months time period… once the curtain comes down, this is what could unfold and I am not asking anybodies permission for it. And Kingsley has enough tentacles in the community to say: wait…this should be exciting. I am not obsessing over one or the other

Renee: I think…see what happens. This might also causes shift for experimentation in your own work.

Hajoe: That for sure will happen. Pittsburgh already is different than a lot of settings we have worked in. It has a lot of similarities for example to the desert, I did some street views with google earth…and it looked like the desert, which at the same time looks very familiar.

Franziska: I think, we were never interested to do something for a community. We usually turn things around, where we have this idea, and then we need people who can help us and that approach really integrated only people who wanted to do something. And not just like…there is a groups and here we present you this and we hope you all like it.

Renee: And that’s why I was interested in bringing you two here, because these are places that need ideas. I think the whole idea of the artist and the community working together to come up with something… like nothing has these communities really stopped from coming up with their own ideas. So the concept of, coming in, you have seen the space, and then coming up with some ideas and then seeing which ones become magnets  for peoples inspirations and aspirations makes sense in the neighborhoods we are talking about.

Rob: These are all neighborhoods that have had the big brain development imposed on them, only to have it failed. Not many have worked. It’s how do you prep for success? These zones are primarily African American, it’s just too easy to say: Here comes the white people again.

Renee: Part of that is coming up with the right partnerships and unveil the ideas at the grass roots level. It’s not going to be like: Oh we have this great idea and then we get money from Heinz and come and say: Look we are going to do this here. It will be about real grass roots testing before we go, because I think that would cause the funding to happen. We brought these people in, this is the geographic space they are thinking to work with, this is an idea and look we have aligned all the support and people who want to participate in it, now we need money to make it happen.

But I think the danger is going to be… not only here comes the white people, but these two white people with accents from somewhere else. They are not even with CMU, where do they come from?

Hajoe: That sometimes helps.

Renee: but I think some neighborhoods in Pittsburgh have CMU project exhaustion. And they have tons of really good programs that try too hook up students with real neighborhood projects. But I think if the hill district gets another studio for creative inquiry project they might just start crying. We don’t wanna work on another project that doesn’t lead to anything.

Franziska: Why didn’t these projects work?

Renee: Because they just last a semester. They don’t get deep roots. Some of them do. I am not trying to sound very negative.

Hajoe: That’s interesting to know, that there are some communities which are may be already saturated with artists coming in there proposing great ideas.

Renee: I don’t think Larimer is one of those places.

Rob: I don’t think any of these places are saturated with artists.

Morten: But the outsider can’t be overstated. I mean this outside syndrome you are talking about is very real. I think you have to treat it carefully and go through a community group.

Hajoe: That on the past was avoided by us owning property. Every time we did a project, when we bought land in the desert, in Germany and other places, we became neighbors. We were not the outsiders coming and doing something there, we had a reason to be there.

Morten: … a right to be there.

Hajoe… there were people who brought presents and said: Welcome neighbors, even though we did not intend to move there. This could provide a lead in which could provide us with a different reason than just being assigned to do something there.

Franziska: This idea is also based in the belief that land comes with a responsibility. You are basically in the same boat as the people around you. And even though we haven’t been there very often the fact that we owned the land counted.

Renee: That’s why you asked about all these $100 lots.

Hajoe: Yes, that’s a way to approach this, a point of entry.