Esther Robinson testifies on cultural production space and long-term leases

Good afternoon, Deputy Speaker Williams and members of the committee.

I'm Esther Robinson.

I'm the executive director of Art Built.

At the Brooklyn Army Terminal, we operate about 50,000 square feet of affordable workspace for more than 120 artists and creative businesses created through the city's area initiative in 2016 and 2017, as mentioned earlier.

Art Built remains the largest nonprofit, long-term, affordable creative workspace built in New York City in the past 30 years.

That's a long time.

And we...

Oh, it is.

It is.

We want more in Southeast Queens.

I'm with you on that.

There should be more art belts everywhere.

And we've seen what stable production space makes possible.

These businesses hire, they train, they export, and they build lives in this city.

So I want to focus on something often missing from cultural planning, where culture is made, right?

Behind our theaters, films, fashion, dance, and visual arts are workplaces, skilled trades, small businesses, and entire networks of production.

The next Create NYC must make cultural production an economic priority.

Every borough and every council district needs places where goods and cultural work are made at scale.

These are working places, not simply cultural amenities.

The city needs to deliberately plan for, invest in, and build the spaces where this work happens.

And we need to build for generations, not development or political cycles.

ArtBuild shows what city-owned space plus nonprofit operation can accomplish, but short leases are undermining financing and long-term investment in a very big way.

The next plan needs to commit to leases of at least 20 years for publicly owned cultural production space.

Our written testimony also proposes a permanent cultural production infrastructure fund and measures to track whether production space is actually growing.

We don't even know what our loss rate is.

The opportunity is bigger than any single project.

We can build a citywide network of places where New Yorkers make things, build businesses, and invest in their neighborhoods across generations.

Let's build a New York where the next generation doesn't just inherit a cultural legacy, but where every New Yorker inherits the means

to create the greatest cultural capital in the world.

Thank you.