The creative class

Reading Megan Woolhouse’s article about Marlborough’s quest to convert an old mill to artist live-work space was like déjà vu all over again. In the late 1990s, the Lowell City Council amended the city’s zoning code to create an “artist live-work overlay district” to facilitate the reuse of two vacant office buildings in the center of downtown.

When the renovations were finished, the condominiums sold quickly as artists priced out of Boston by rising real estate values flocked to Lowell. Other office buildings were converted to residential condos and the market became red hot. Unfortunately for the artists, even the smallest downtown units soon exceeded their budgets -- they’re artists, after all -and the city’s new creative class was again displaced. Many gravitated to the affordable space cited in Sunday’s article, known locally as Western Avenue Studios. But that building is on the fringe of downtown in an industrial area that is literally on the wrong side of the railroad tracks (making it tough to get to). The artist-angle has been great for Lowell, but the DNA of the reborn downtown came from soaring real estate values more than anything else.