As a side note, Leipzig is also an extremely livable city with a ton of history. Definitely not a nothing place.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/soccer/comments/fwkfot/but_why_leip...

I've been to Leipzig for a festival. It had history, culture, and art for certain value of "art". It didn't seem like a nothing place.

Artists aren't somehow totally oblivious or too high-minded to take this into consideration. It's a weird narrative that paints artists as totally separate from the system, which just isn't true

> don't want to waste time making money when they could be making art.

You would be making money precisely because you are spending your time making art.

My mother was a professional artist. She was contacted by a property developers who had noticed this effect and wanted to bring artists to their development so it would become gentrified. Mum explained that to do that, they would need to provide cheap (very cheap!) studio space for the artists to use. The developer did the maths and decided to just make apartments for yuppies as it was more profitable.

To make money off this, the artists would need to own the buildings they occupy, and then sell them to the incoming gentrified yuppies. After having spent the money upgrading the building, of course, because the yuppies need all the mod cons. That would involve spending attention, money and time on making money instead of art. To do this, they would need to stop being artists and become property developers.

The economic benefits to the city of having a thriving art community might be diffuse enough across many people that there's no one person or group willing to pay individual artists to provide the benefit. That is, it's mostly a positive externality / public good.

You could ask the municipal government for pay for it, the way they pay for roads and other services, but then you'd have the problem of establishing some sort of worthiness standard to ensure the system isn't just being taken advantage of. The determination of such a standard, besides being possibly unrealizable, would probably undermine the creative spirit it's designed to foster.

It's hard to describe but my anecdotal first hand experience includes plenty of rich tourists hanging around the emerging cultural hubs. I sincerely think the money goes into feeling cool rather than fueling the art economy, it's the surrounding bars, restaurants and cafes (and property developers) that end up making the big money. As mentioned elsewhere - the artists end up gone, the soul of the place eventually goes, and they end up with those weird soulless expensive places that used to be poor and full of artists.

The returns go to property owners, not workers.

Please pause for a second before saying "why don't they just buy property" and come up with possible answers to that yourself.

So artists that have this kind of pull would probably have a hard time just buying a cheap warehouse and opening shop.)

There is a very clear divide between creatives (artist, musician, videographer, photographer, etc.) who are at the beginning of their career, and those that have achieved some success. The beginners are still trying to make their money in Berlin. The somewhat established creatives make their money outside Berlin, but use Berlin as their home base because of the cultural connections and creativity it generates.

How would they do that?

Money devalues art.