Town Hall
Town Hall: Housing and the Arts
Artists, tenants and small-business owners share the same squeeze. An open forum on what affordability actually looks like in North Beach — and who gets to stay.
Community-led · North Beach, SF
Art is
the portal
North Beach Now is a community-led San Francisco event and news resource. We put on the music, the art and the arguments.
Our premise
Culture gets people
in the room
Art and culture are the most powerful portals to community engagement and social justice.
People who will never come to a policy meeting will come to a concert. So we produce music and fine art events and performances alongside Town Hall forums — to create lasting bonds within the community, and to forge new relationships between different communities in San Francisco.
On the calendar
What’s coming up
Music
Grant Avenue Jazz Sessions
Three sets of local players working the standards and the strange stuff, in the room where the neighborhood has argued about music for sixty years.
Fine art
North Beach Open Studios
Two days, one neighborhood, forty working studios with the doors open. Walk the hill, meet the people making the work, buy something directly from them.
What we do
Three ways in
Music
Live sessions, benefits and street performances in the rooms and on the corners where this neighborhood has always made noise.
Fine art
Exhibitions, open studios and community murals — work made here, shown here, and often paid for by the people who live here.
Town Hall
Open forums on housing, small business and public space. No panels of experts talking down. Neighbors, in chairs, deciding things.
From the neighborhood
Latest news
Town Hall
What came out of the sidewalk Town Hall
Ninety people spent two hours on folding chairs arguing about parklets. The proposal that came out of it is now in front of the city — here is what it says and what happens next.
Arts
The six painters remaking Columbus Avenue
A wall that sat blank for eleven years is being worked on every Saturday by a rotating crew of neighbors, half of whom had never held a brush.
Music
The jazz rooms that remain
North Beach had more than twenty clubs at its peak. We counted what is left, talked to the people still booking live music, and asked what it costs to keep a stage open.
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