Their floors are covered with electrical cords and caulking guns, their fences yet to rise. But within weeks one of the nation’s most interesting new subdivisions will become a place for 11 Sacramento artist families to finally call home. “Everyone here is a first-time buyer,” said Kim Scott, a painter with art hanging in Sacramento City Hall, among other venues. “I’d guess the median age is 50, and we’ve never been homebuyers before.”
Dubbed Surreal Estates, the 11-home residential development is the first locally to accommodate what Scott calls the “notoriously low income” lifestyles of painters, sculptors, musicians and photographers. As they open on 1.3 acres in a Del Paso Boulevard-area neighborhood, the two-story detached houses in colors of cream, plum, teal and green mark a $2.4 million real estate and business venture, unprecedented in the capital, and perhaps in the United States as well.
The goal: to breathe more life into a 1940 North Sacramento neighborhood that many envision as an eventual arts community.
“It’s 11 houses, but it’s also 11 businesses,” said Scott, who currently lives and works in a commercial building in downtown Sacramento. “We’re moving 11 businesses into the neighborhood.”
For years, artists have banded together in co-ops, communes or rental buildings. But real estate experts say they’re unaware of another single-family home subdivision inhabited entirely by owner-artists who also work on site. The artists must not have owned a home within the past three years to be eligible to purchase one of the houses.
“I sure can’t think of a comparable project,” said Paul Shigley, editor of the California Planning and Development Report, which tracks building trends.
The homes of Surreal Estates, which has its official dedication today, are tailored to annual incomes as low as $22,900 for a single artist and up to $62,700 for a two-artist household. Sales prices range from $120,000 to $225,000 and sizes range from 781 square feet to 1,104 square feet. A lack of amenities such as carpets, dishwashers and landscaping keeps costs down. Heavier-than-usual insulation promises to trim energy bills.
The raft of discounts is perfect for Robert Johnson. He’s a lifelong renter and audio specialist who records a range of music from piano recitals to the Sacramento Philharmonic. He recently finished graduate school and “by the time that happened, the price of homes had tripled,” he said. “If you weren’t practicing law or medicine, it was impossible to get a home. This was a big part of the solution for me.”
The project’s developer, Mercy Housing California, says artists will make monthly mortgage payments between $650 and $1,300 on 30-year fixed-rate loans from Minneapolis-based US Bank. In lieu of down payments, the artists have spent 35 hours per week since May 2005 helping Larkin General Contracting build their subdivision.
“They’re really spending a lot of time out there,” said Mija Ryer, who lives across the street and has watched construction for almost a year.
Artists more comfortable wielding paint brushes and guitars have helped with framing, wiring and concrete work. They’ve installed windows and doors and are planting and landscaping.
“The things they didn’t do were things that required a license,” said Chris Glaudel, a West Sacramento-based vice president of asset management for Mercy Housing California. “While there’s a subsidy going into this, it’s by no means a giveaway.”
Though the real estate project has been years in the making and suffered through numerous stops and starts, it has won an array of backers for its larger civic goal of boosting a deteriorated Del Paso Boulevard-area neighborhood. The city has spent heavily sprucing up its main thoroughfare.
“This puts affordable homes here with artists as permanent residents,” Glaudel said.
Financing for the homes included nearly $500,000 in state Proposition 46 housing bond money and $710,000 from the Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment Agency. New curbs, sidewalks and traditional street lamps surround the subdivision, built over an unused school playground.
The project comes with conditions attesting to its peculiar real estate niche. Under the rules, no artist can sell a home for a large profit if property values rise. A certain percentage, based on several factors, must go back to the redevelopment agency. And only a full-time artist, defined as “a person who is regularly engaged in the arts as a career and not simply as a hobby,” can live here.
Restricting ownership to artists is legal, said Richard Friedman, a deputy director of the state Department of Housing and Community Development, because the venture is seen as a legitimate business and because state codes stipulate that the “cultural life of cities” is enhanced by having artists working and living in them.
“We did look at the condition closely and concluded it did not violate state law,” Friedman said.
The restrictions aim to prevent the typical urban scenario in which artists move into struggling neighborhoods with new energy that sparks rising property values, which eventually push the artists out.
But that’s a theoretical notion. For now, an eclectic collection of free spirits and small-business owners is focused on more practical issues of pending homeownership. There are fences to be built and inspections to pass. Decisions await, such as what color to paint kitchen cabinets and the living room.
Said Scott: “We want our piece of the pie the way middle America wants it.”
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