Cheap rents were perhaps the greatest facilitator of 1960s artistic innovation

Evidence

Born in 1949 and brought up in New York, I lived through this period. Written in my seventies, Everything Is Now is an act of remembrance, underscored by a sense of belatedness. Although too young to have participated in most of these events I evoke, I am old enough to have experienced what might be termed the normalization of cultural craziness that characterized the 1960s. As a young adult, I also benefited from the era of cheap rents—perhaps the greatest facilitator of artistic innovation. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 15

Categorization

• XREF: The cheap-rent material condition is the reader’s stated key variable and a touchstone for all gentrification-origin claims on the shelf.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: is there data on rent levels and vacancy rates in 1960s SoHo/LES that could quantify how cheap ‘cheap rents’ actually were?