For artists New York City has always had unaffordable neighborhoods. Now it has an unaffordable borough, Manhattan. There, in the past, blue-collar areas like Greenwich Village, SoHo and the Lower East Side offered cheap living for the no-collar day-jobbers that most artists were and still are. Rents were such that they could make their work upstairs and show it downstairs. Art was a cottage industry. Then came the 2000s and money and Chelsea, which is the equivalent of a suburban mall: a business district, a consumer zone.