Cincinnati’s Wave Pool is creating a Creative Land Trust to provide permanently affordable artist studios, housing, and creative spaces while combating displacement.

Across the country, artists have helped transform neighborhoods into vibrant places to live, work, and visit. Too often, however, rising property values eventually push those same artists out.

Wave Pool in Cincinnati’s Camp Washington neighborhood, is exploring a different approach.

The organization is working to establish a Creative Land Trust—a long-term strategy for preserving affordable spaces for artists, creative businesses, and cultural organizations. Similar to a traditional land trust that protects natural landscapes, a creative land trust acquires and stewards residential and commercial properties to ensure they remain permanently affordable for creative uses.

Wave Pool Executive Director, Boris Oicherman, will soon head to Helsinki, Finland, to participate in an international Creative Land Trust Summit, where practitioners from around the world will share models, legal structures, and lessons learned. The visit will help inform the development of one of the first initiatives of its kind in the midwest.

“Wave Pool has been working in Camp Washington for more than a decade,” said Oicherman. “The neighborhood’s affordability and our presence drew many artists to rent and buy studios and homes here. But development pressure is moving in, and we know what happens when neighborhoods gentrify: artists get displaced. We feel a responsibility to prevent that displacement.”

Rather than reacting after prices rise, Wave Pool hopes to secure properties now, before land values make preservation financially out of reach. The long-term vision is a portfolio of permanently affordable studios, storefronts, live/work spaces, and cultural facilities that allow artists to remain part of the neighborhood as it evolves.

While the project is still in its early stages, Oicherman believes there are lessons for communities everywhere.

“Start before gentrification arrives,” he said. “Think of this as community and economic development work. Artists and creative businesses are part of the local economy, and preserving space for them helps preserve what makes a neighborhood thrive.”

As communities across Ohio explore strategies for equitable development, Wave Pool’s Creative Land Trust offers a compelling example of how arts organizations can help shape the future of the places they call home.