Our cities are amalgamations of opportunity, crowded with a particular kind of freeing kinetic energy, in continual motion, physically, culturally, and ideologically. Artists, young people, and individuals from marginalized groups move to cities in search of perspective and acceptance, a means of assembling a new more dynamic sense of personhood and identity. For opportunity, anonymity or a new kind of life, we find ourselves in unavoidable close proximity, sharing unceremoniously renovated single family homes, looking for space to call our own in the midst of millions of other individuals. However, in Boston and in cities all around the country, costs of living are impossibly high, with everyone from artists to working families to immigrants nervously treading water, hoping they can make it work with limited resources.

For artists, DIY spaces are the resultant laboratories of carefree and untroubled collaboration. They exist as informal gathering places in an oftentimes overregulated cultural milieu. They are the liminal in-between places vital for hosting performances and gatherings when artists and audiences lack more afffordable options. They also are incredibly vital places for artistic experimentation, for new work to be drafted and debuted, shared with close-knit communities or total strangers. In the way of expression, these spaces are shelters for marginalized individuals, people who may not be comfortable or able to perform and work in more traditional venues, subject to stereotypical preconceptions about the nature of their work, outright dismissal, or physical discomfort. Culture, despite its nebulous, abstract nature, is of particular value for its ability to elevate new perspectives, to shift dominant narratives to emerging ones, in the face of less-than-assured social progress. DIY spaces are places of radical self-acceptance, and can be the inevitable vehicle by which these particular types of shifts occur.

In the wake of the Oakland Ghost Ship fire, city governments have become reactionary, focusing on closing spaces rather than provisions of safety, short-term thinking at best. Cities and major reporting outlets mistakenly view these spaces as the chaotic and unregulated product of a kind of shallow youthful hedonism, rather than for their more precise purposes of community building and sharing. In a practical sense, it is also important for DIY communities and managers of DIY venues to evaluate the safety of their spaces, while carefully considering their responsibility to their own artists and audiences. While we seek to highlight long-run issues related to the policies of local governments, we are also aware that simply levying critiques in the abstract is not enough. Clearly, artists need access to safe, reliable spaces to work and perform.

At the Hassle, we are striving to address this need. We hope that policymakers will consider the detrimental effects that unaffordability and a lack of safe, alternative cultural spaces have on everyone before simply closing the spaces where so much of Boston’s creative energy is generated.