Do art galleries stimulate redevelopment?

New York City is often held up as a successful example of arts-led economic development. Case studies have documented the influx of avant-garde artists and galleries into several neighborhoods, including Greenwich Village, Soho, and Chelsea, followed by yuppies and boutiques. Some researchers have used these examples to argue that artists and galleries can spur gentrification. An alternative hypothesis is that galleries choose to locate in neighborhoods with high levels of amenities. In this paper, I examine whether concentrations of galleries in Manhattan are associated with redevelopment of surrounding neighborhoods, conditional on initial neighborhood amenities. Results indicate that new galleries locate in high amenity, affluent neighborhoods, and near existing star galleries. In simple bivariate regressions, star gallery density is positively correlated with several metrics of building change. However, these correlations diminish when controls are added for initial neighborhood physical and economic conditions, and weaken still further under an IV approach. Results are consistent with galleries selecting neighborhoods that have a higher propensity to redevelop, due to the presence of observed and unobserved amenities.