It ain’t exactly Trump Towers, but owning a three-story industrial building south of Market has been mogulicious enough for Peter Stein.
As the newly installed executive director of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, Stein is usually more at home in the screening room. But ever since festival organizers teamed with three other media arts organizations to buy the Ninth Street building two years ago, he’s also been enjoying the unfamiliar role of landlord.
With the 24th annual Jewish Film Festival about to get under way Thursday, July 22, Stein and his staff are insanely busy at the moment. They’ve planned an ambitious schedule this year, and preparing for it has taxed the entire staff of 25.
But it helps to have nice neighbors.
“There are four partners and four tenants in the building,” says Stein of the new headquarters. “We were all neighbors down the street for years.”
Besides the festival, those partners include the Film Arts Foundation, the National Asian American Telecommunications Association (a national advocacy group that produces the Asian American Film Festival) and Frameline, the parent organization of the San Francisco LGBT International Film Festival, now in its 28th year.
All four members of this arts consortium – known collectively as the Ninth Street Independent Film Center – have an equal stake in the property and have made their permanent home in the building. Other tenants include San Francisco Cinematheque, film distributor Canyon Cinema, the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture and TILT, a youth media organization.
The festival takes up a fairly small corner of the building (about 1,200 square feet), but it’s still a lot more space than before. Not only does the building provide the festival with considerable administrative space, there’s also a film library with more than 1,000 archived titles, audio and video editing suites, a spacious lobby, two kitchens and a 70-seat screening room shared with the tenants.
“Beginning in the fall,” says Stein, “we and our partners will launch quarterly Ninth Street forums in the screening room, the first joint programming effort of the Ninth Street Independent Film Center. These roundtable discussions and screenings [funded in part by the Walter & Elise Haas Foundation] will be collaboratively programmed by the partners in the building.”
In fact, sharing space like that was one of the reasons for going into business with the other groups.
Pooling resources to buy the building was a no-brainer for the partners. In 1999, during the height of the Bay Area real estate boom, the festival had been based a little farther down Ninth Street, along with the other three organizations, but all lost their leases.
Rather than panic, “we decided to come together in a unique collaboration,” says Stein, who was not on staff at the time. “We partnered with a private developer to go in on a building. In phase one, we needed to collectively raise $1 million to renovate the building.”
That private investor, Steve Oliver, has been something of a guardian angel to nonprofits over the years. He and his partners invest together with organizations like the festival, all with the understanding that he’ll be bought out over time.
“Everybody wins,” says Stein.
He and the others moved in to the building in 2002. They now have two years to raise the additional revenue to buy out Oliver and his partners, and own the building outright, but Stein is confident they can do it.
“This is a fabulous investment to ensure a rent-free future for us,” he says of his organization’s lease-to-buy deal.
This profitable arrangement among nonprofits has drawn national attention. The National Endowment for the Arts was so impressed, it not only funded a grant to the consortium, it posted a photo of the building on its Web site. Stein says the NEA now points to the Ninth Street consortium as a model for other arts organizations in search of permanent housing.
“We share more than space,” says Stein. “We share equipment and personnel. The consortium employs a shared publicist, a part-time building manager and a capital campaign manager. We’re also completing work to provide the partners with shared technology systems — from wiring the building for broadband to shared software costs. That means we will soon all have the same fund-raising and customized scheduling software, something that would have been cost-prohibitive if undertaken by each of the organizations individually.”
The James Irvine Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation have also rolled out the welcome wagon, having donated funds to the consortium. The idea is to get the equity partners to work together on collaborative arts projects in the future.
No one has to ask Stein twice.
“It’s a very small world,” says Stein of the arts festival community. “As much as we have a loyal audience, it’s really important that we learn from our colleagues in other festivals. We’ve grown together organically having shared offices for 20 years.”
And as much as Stein and his colleagues enjoy mixing it up with the diverse media arts groups down the hall, he is first and foremost happy to have his organization remain a pillar in the local Jewish community.
Meanwhile, having such simpatico neighbors makes life a bit sweeter for Stein and his staff, whether it’s to borrow the proverbial cup of sugar or to support each other’s artistic endeavors.
“It’s very collegial,” says Stein. “This is the furthest thing possible from a shotgun wedding.”