Placemaking Manager to Business Owner

I started Distill Creative after leaving a job as Placemaking Manager at Vornado in Washington, DC focused on the Crystal City area. I left for a variety of reasons, but one of them is that I wanted to do my own work as an artist and in the art consulting and creative placemaking world without the constraints of a real estate investment trust. 

This is ironic because my main excitement about the job was doing just that — creative placemaking for a real estate investment trust. The leadership at Vornado/Charles E.Smith was supportive to my work and collaborative in how we carried out plans, which often were across many departments and disciplines. I had a dream job and I still miss it sometimes. My team was amazing and it was the first time I had a job that paid me well and didn’t expect me to work outside of office hours. However, once Vornado spun off the DC portfolio and merged with JBG to become JBG Smith, many things changed, including my role being expanded to the entire portfolio. 

If you’ve ever done community building work, you know that it takes a lot of time and effort in the actual community you are working in to be successful and genuine in your work. Because I was expected to cover so much surface area (JBG Smith has 11+ million sf of office space, 6,000+ owned and operated residential units, and 1.7+ million sf of retail space), I asked for more resources, both financial and staffing, and long story short, it did not happen. This was particularly irksome because JBG Smith was known for it’s ‘placemaking’ — they even trademarked the term.

Because we were in the middle of a merger and IPO, the situation made total sense: the company was unable to make decisions quickly and it seems like everyone was hesitant to make any move at all. Their previous head of placemaking was leaving to run her own company and I was kind of tossed around like a hot potato with no home. I have been through an IPO before, when I was at 2U, and I’ve worked at startups before, so I knew the reality of how long it would be before I’d be able to do my job. The company also had a lack of diversity in leadership roles and other women at the firm seemed like they really struggled to for promotions or work/live balance, which made me want to run the other way. So I did. 

Sometimes I still regret my decision to leave because the job was an amazing opportunity to do work I believe in for a large real estate company. On the other hand, I was already starting to ruffle feathers just trying to do my work and took off the very project I knew the best — Crystal City. The slow movement of the company and last minute budget removals were starting to affect my personal relationships with artists and arts organizations. Overall, I know I made the right decision and look forward to possibly working with them in the future. 

Originally I had a plan to move to Berlin and be an artist and live off of my savings for a bit, but instead I decided to move to New York City, still be an artist but also run my own company, Distill Creative. I realized my original plan was to escape — escape the US and any expectation to make things better. My move to New York City symbolized that I want to make things better here. I don’t want to escape. I want to share what I know to help real estate developers do better work in communities. They have money and power and if we can steer just a little bit of it toward the local communities and artists in the very areas they are developing, I think it could make a huge difference. 

Creative Community Fellowship — Project Idea Formed

I applied to the National Arts Strategies Creative Communities Fellowship Program with an idea to create a professional development program to educate real estate developers on how to work better with local artists for inclusive, equitable art projects that strengthen communities. I got accepted and joined 24 other fellows working on amazing projects throughout the US and Australia.

We were on a farm in Vermont recently for the NAS Creative Community Fellows retreat to kick off the fellowship and I was able to work on my project further. I realized I should start with a blog series and develop the other elements as I share more about this project. I also realized I need to refocus my business on creative placemaking and art consulting and do more creative activations as well as my own artwork for real estate developers so I can test and practice my theories of best practices for creative placemaking and art consulting. 

Why am I focused on real estate developers?

Real estate development has a huge impact on both urban and rural environments, especially in the US. If I learned one thing from my job at Vornado, it’s how incredibly powerful landowners, and real estate investment firms, are in particular. The changes we see in our neighborhoods today are the results of decades of behind-the-scenes activities that often involve policy changes and financing that is at best transparent and at worst shady. There’s a reason why real estate developers have a bad reputation in most cities — they are the visible culprits who are increasing the numbers of luxury apartment dwellings and vacant storefronts as well as ruining views, gentrifying neighborhoods, and overcrowding public transportation and public facilities. 

On the other hand, real estate development firms, even the ones with the worst reputations, are often staffed by well-meaning people who have their own families and their own dreams and their own desires to create buildings and communities. At least I’d like to think that is why they got into real estate. Sure, the ones at the top who own shares and make the big bucks are trying to make as much money as possible. The development managers and property managers and even maybe some brokers actually want to live in the same diverse, healthy, equitable communities I want to live in. I’ve worked with these people and they are not evil, they are just part of a system that is, well, capitalist and fundamentally pits the haves and the have nots against each other for the benefit of a very few. 

The opportunity = wealth transfer to women and POC artists and cultural producers

A trend in real estate is - no surprise here - that people want to live and work in diverse, healthy, communities that are walkable, have a variety of cultures, and are visually stimulating. This is why ‘placemaking’ and mixed-use projects are in. This means there’s potentially money available for art and cultural uses in areas where there is real estate development.

Also, all that behind-the-scenes policy making and schmoozing of government officials to approve development projects sometimes involves real estate developers making commissions and often they are in the realm of art and culture. 

In addition, I have a theory that an increase in intentional, inclusive, and equitable art and culture projects created in collaboration with local artists and community members will increase lease-up velocity and retention in residential and commercial properties, making it a no-brainer area for investment for the real estate developers who purely want to make money.

Finally, I think we should hold real estate developers accountable for using that money in a way that actually supports and uplifts the community they are developing in, instead of them just hiring fancy, out-of-town agencies and artists. It is not enough to change power structures or overthrow capitalism, but it is a start. 

Distill Creative Development Project: Phase One — A Blog Series

Over the next few months, I will be blogging about this concept and in particular sharing resources and tips for how to find, curate, commission, and install site-specific art projects, ideally by women and people of color artists. This is mostly to help real estate developers do better, but also to make the process, as I know it, more transparent for other artists and also to open up the discussion around the intersection of art and culture, real estate development, and public/private space.

There is a lot of information around creative placemaking, including toolkits and case studies, so I want to first review what is already out there and hopefully condense it so that if you are interested you can find practical tips on how to do this. I also want to focus specifically on the commissioned artwork and activation practices because that is what I know — it’s what I do currently as an art consultant and what I intend to do as an artist. I also don’t want to recreate something that is already out there, so it’s important to me that I take time to review what is available. Please share anything relevant with me so I can incorporate it as a resource! 

There are a lot of agencies and artists doing great work in this arena, and there are a lot of agencies and artists doing problematic work in this arena. I want to talk about all of it in an effort to create best practices we can all use and share as well as create transparency around how things are done in different places.

Short term goals for the project:

1. Release a blog post every week or so. I’ll be following the topics in my draft curriculum (see bottom of this post) for the course idea I have

2. Educate real estate developers on how to work with local artists (and vice versa) and community members for intentional, inclusive, equitable art projects and creative activations via a blog series, and eventually a podcast, in-person sessions via airbnb experiences, and an online course

3. Determine best practices for real estate developers, artists, and community members working together to do creative placemaking/placekeeping projects

Long term goals for the project:

1. Increase wealth for women and POC artists by encouraging real estate developers to hire them for art and creative activation commissions

2. Flip the power structures around privately-owned land

3. Partner with institution to do a longitudinal study connecting equitable and inclusive art and culture projects with lease-up velocity and tenant retention in residential and commercial properties

4. Be a thought leader in creative placemaking and an artist with a public art practice

How You Can Help

• Read this post! By reading this blog post you are helping out a lot! It makes me encouraged to write more. 

• Share this post! Share this post on twitter, on linkedin, on facebook — anywhere you think people would be interested. 

• Support me! I am using Patreon to gather financial support for this project. No one is paying me to create this content and it would be super helpful to have some financial backing in order to keep up this blog series and start the podcast. 

• Hire me! Check out my arts and culture consulting services here.

Thank you!

Thank you for reading this very long blog post and for supporting me by being a reader. I am really excited about this project and I can’t wait to hear if you have any thoughts. 

If you are an urbanist just really curious about all this and have something related to share, email me!

Thank you again!

-Stephanie

Draft Curriculum

Below is a very rough draft of a curriculum for my course idea to educate real estate developers on how to work with local artists and communities. 

I will be using this outline to guide my blog posts and I would love any input you may have! 

Outline:

1. Introduction

   • Benefits of artwork on site

   • Benefits of engaging the community being equitable and inclusive throughout the project

   • Benefits of documentation

   • Benefits of realistic planning

2. Pre-Development

   • Budget!

   • Part of development schedule

   • Allocate staff and time for this project just like any other project

   • Art left to the last thing will look and feel like an afterthought and not reflect the quality of your project

   • Legal needs: contracts

   • Financial needs: budget

3. Goals

   • Why do you want to incorporate art into your project?

   • What benefits will the artwork have for your tenants?

   • For the community?

   • Commissioned or site-specific?

4. Site Assessment

   • Location?

   • Size?

   • Material of surface?

   • Development schedule?

   • Parameters?

   • Site images?

   • Community?

5. Vision

   • Brainstorm with Property Management, Marketing, Development team, Leasing

6. Curation & Planning

   • DIY or hire out?

   • Request for proposals or selection?

   • Commissioned or site-specific?

7. Artist Selection & Contracting

   • Proposal review

   • Contract

8. Design

   • Tips for working with artists

   • Updates

9. Installation

   • Scheduling, Weather

   • Lifts, Insurance

   • Opening

10. Measurement & Post-Installation

    • Ongoing maintenance

    • Ongoing plan & programming

    • Final Report