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Noodle Factory highlighted in Eastbay Express

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The Noodle Factory: A Place for Artists in West Oakland

 www.berkeleydailyplanet.com By Ken Bullock, Thursday June 19, 2008

Oakland, which saw its only remaining resident theater company, TheatreFirst, compelled to leave its Old Town storefront stage a year ago, last week witnessed introductory tours led by the Northern California Land Trust for a dual-purpose project, live-work studios and performing arts venue.

Designed to address the problem of rapidly shrinking and unaffordable working, rehearsal and performing space for independent artists and artesans in the East Bay, the Oakland Noodle Factory, at 26th Street and Union, on the fringe of the West Oakland industrial district, opened its doorways—or the plastic curtains covering them—to prospective buyers and renters of rehearsal and performing space.

“We’re trying to create opportunities for artists already living in West Oakland,” said Ingrid Jacobson, the Land Trust’s Housing and Solar project manager, “as well as to enrich an existing neighborhood, rather than just ‘developing’ it.

“With assistance from the City of Oakland and different layers of financing,” Jacobson continued, “depending on the units, an artist making $27,000 with $10,000 down can afford to buy. And there’s low-priced rehearsal and performance space onsite. Affordable housing is one thing—this opportunity for home ownership for low-income people takes it one step further.”

“Many of us on the staff and board of the Land Trust are working artists,” said Executive Director Ian Winters, himself a visual and performance artist and cofounder of Oakland’s Milk Bar. “And everybody’s lost lofts at least once, and performance spaces, and known many others who have lost both during a time when an astoundingly high percentage of the Bay Area’s cultural space has gone. We all have a list of friends who have said, ‘It’s almost cheaper to live in New York.’”

The previous owner of the Noodle Factory, after a number of local property management firms, “was an organizer of the Black Rock Arts Foundation of Burning Man fame, who found the Noodle Factory about 10 years ago,” Winters said.

He said it was “occupied in a quasi-legal fashion, like many other such properties have been—somebody paying somebody else rent—by someone who had the idea of turning it into a combination of a performance venue and live-work spaces. But she was in a funny position, realizing the technical complexity of upgrading the property, bringing it up to code compliance, retrofit ...

“Rather than putting it on the open market and having it end up as market-rate lofts, she decided to find an organization willing to take it on as a project.”

New affordable housing will help Oakland artists stay put

Oakland is home to a vast underground arts community, whose members often find the most affordable work and living spaces in warehouses in West or East Oakland. Still, the real estate boom has been tough for many artists and arts groups that were displaced by rising rents and new construction.

That will not be a problem for the future residents of the Noodle Factory in West Oakland.

In one of the few projects of its kind in the country, the Northern California Land Trust is turning an old industrial noodle factory at 26th and Union streets in West Oakland into permanently affordable spaces that will be sold to working artists at steeply discounted prices. The space already had been taken over as an underground artists collective.

Once completed, the bright blue building will feature 11 work/live spaces, a café, and a 2,700-square-foot rehearsal and theater performance space. It incorporates green technology and features solar panels that will power up to 75 percent of the building's electricity and hot water. It also has heavy-duty finishes, soundproofing and ventilation that allows artists to do whatever it is they do — sculpt, solder, paint, compose, edit film and more.

Ian Winters, NCLT executive director, said the Noodle Factory's former owner, Dana Harrison, had wanted to do the same thing after watching so many artists struggle and popular cultural arts and performance spaces close down.

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Non-Profit Alliance Press Release:

Bay Area Performing Arts Groups Going Green

Patrick Dooley beams as he shows off the roof of the Ashby Stage in south Berkeley. The top of the theater is encased in a white insulating foam that coats the surface and the ventilation tubes like a thick blanket of fresh snow. Two rows of black solar panels, 88 in all, cover 60 percent of the surface.

On Dec. 27, the Shotgun Players' Ashby Stage became the first theater in the Bay Area - and possibly in the nation - to convert to solar power.

The whole project cost $140,000, Dooley says. That is a considerable expenditure for a company with a $400,000 annual budget, even factoring in the $40,000 rebate the company later received from the state. But he figures that the savings it will bring - about $10,000 a year - will enable Shotgun to increase the actors' salaries.

More than that, he says, it's part of being a good neighbor in south Berkeley. "We address these issues in our art, but we wanted to find a way to pay them more than lip service."

This article appeared on page A - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
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