Fitchburg sits fifty miles northwest of Boston. It is what urban economists call a Gateway City — a mid-sized post-industrial town that once had a manufacturing base and now doesn't. The mills are mostly empty. The population has declined. The high street has gaps. It is, in other words, a story that most UK place practitioners will recognise immediately.
What Fitchburg has done that is worth attention is to take a former middle school — a large, vacant public building sitting in the middle of the city — and convert it into affordable live-work housing specifically designated for local artists. The project is not speculative. It is part of a city-level economic development strategy that treats arts and culture as a driver of recovery, not a beneficiary of it.
Gateway Cities and the vacancy problem
The insight at the heart of the Fitchburg project is simple and widely applicable: post-industrial cities share a common characteristic. They have large, underused buildings — mills, factories, schools, civic buildings — that are too expensive to demolish and too complex to repurpose through conventional development. The planning, structural and financial challenges of bringing these buildings back into use are exactly the conditions that make artist housing viable. Artists tolerate imperfection. They bring their own programming. They create footfall and activity that makes surrounding streets feel lived-in rather than abandoned.
This is not a new idea. What is new is the deliberateness of the strategy and the speed of replication. San Francisco is currently building a fourteen-storey artist housing block on Market Street. New York City is pushing legislation to unlock artist-preference housing for the first time in a decade. These are not coincidental — they reflect a consensus that is forming around the creative class as economic infrastructure.
Ann Markusen's research on artists as lead users of transitional neighbourhoods remains the foundational text here. Her work on how artists' presence in a neighbourhood precedes — and enables — broader economic recovery is directly relevant to any Gateway City or market town regeneration strategy.
NEA research on arts and economic development →What the UK equivalent looks like
The UK has run versions of this experiment — ACME studios in London, the early history of Baltic in Gateshead, the Custard Factory in Birmingham — but rarely as a deliberate component of a city-level economic development strategy. More often, artist housing and workspace emerges opportunistically, fills a gap, then gets displaced as the neighbourhood improves and rents rise.
The Fitchburg model is different because it is permanent affordable housing, not temporary occupancy. The artists who move in are not being used as a tool to raise land values and then moved on. They are being established as a permanent constituency within the city's economic base. That distinction matters enormously for the long-term outcome.
For UK economic development officers and housing associations working in secondary towns, the transferable insight is this: your vacant public buildings are not liabilities waiting for a developer. They are the raw material for a creative economy strategy — if the political will and the housing architecture exist to support it. Both of those things are within the gift of the local authority.
The replication question
What makes this moment different from previous cycles of arts-led regeneration enthusiasm is the breadth of replication. When three cities of very different sizes and geographies — Fitchburg, San Francisco, New York — are all moving simultaneously toward artist-designated affordable housing, it suggests a policy consensus rather than individual experimentation. The UK has the building stock. It has the creative talent. The question is whether it has the policy architecture to connect them.
Nick Bolton is Managing Director of Positive Places Ltd. Sticky Places is published fortnightly. Subscribe here.