Huang’s Art College Arrives as Bay Artists Get Squeezed

Nvidia chief Jensen Huang and his wife, Lori, put a $75 million matching gift behind Vanderbilt University’s new San Francisco art college in July. The Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang College of Art, Architecture and Design is slated to open in fall 2027 on the California College of the Arts campus, after CCA shuts at the end of the 2026-27 year.

Eight miles east, in an East Oakland warehouse near Jack London Square, photographers, potters and knitters still split rent and argue over whether that money is a gift or a takeover.

A Warehouse Near Jack London Square

On a Wednesday in August, about a dozen people spread across two creaking wooden floors in a well-lit warehouse. Someone crouched before a mannequin with a fistful of pins. Potter’s wheels worked wet clay into the air. At a long table, three people ran remote jobs from laptops and talked through knitting and graphic design. Downstairs, a turntable, a sewing machine and a bicycle wrench kept time.

Adeeb Haidari, 27, a photographer and co-founder of Safariii Camp, lounged on the sofa by the open doors. The collective is a shared room where artists work and socialize, and he wants the mix itself to do the teaching.

The purpose is to have all different sorts of mediums around each other and let them naturally influence each other. Same with the people as well. We all come with the intention to collaborate. I think we all need each other, very literally and emotionally.

Adeeb Haidari, photographer and co-founder, Safariii Camp

Haidari grew up in Fremont, where his father worked in tech, and later spent time in the industry himself. He remembers street performers and people making strange things in public. That kind of space, he said, has become harder to build.

“Has tech corrupted the Bay Area? Yes, I think we lost a lot of our soul,” Haidari said. “It’s pushed people out of their homes, these communities, these artists … there’s not that many jobs to keep people going or to create opportunities.”

Member Cami Totah, a ceramicist and photographer, joined to be around other artists because the work is lonely. She will credit AI when it helps a nonprofit run its office. She does not want it in the studio. When she learns an artist used it, she said, she starts to question “whether or not they dreamt up that world or creation on their own.”

Huang’s Gift Lands on a Closing Campus

Huang’s family framed the Vanderbilt gift as a bet that a city still needs art at its center. Vanderbilt said the pledge has already helped push total support past $100 million, and that more than 40 percent of the funds needed for the full match were in hand toward a December 31, 2028 deadline. A national search is underway for the inaugural Katie and Matt Paige dean. The San Francisco campus is expected to serve about 1,000 undergraduate and graduate students.

Technology expands what we can build. Art and design determine why we build it. Together they shape civilization. We are delighted to partner with Vanderbilt University to cultivate the next generation of creators and help San Francisco remain one of the world’s great centers of creativity, innovation and culture.

Jensen Huang, president and CEO of Nvidia, Vanderbilt announcement, July 21, 2026

The college’s stated method is studio practice plus “the latest breakthroughs in advanced technology,” with business and engineering fluency built in. Chancellor Daniel Diermeier said Vanderbilt wants those fields as “the heart of our San Francisco campus.” Vanderbilt also plans a California College of the Arts Institute to hold the Wattis Institute, the CCA archives, alumni programs, and new fellowships.

Totah’s sister went to CCA. She does not read the new name as a rescue. “To see it now run in the way that it’s being run, I just don’t think that it is in alignment with our values as artists,” she said. “I think that it’s loaded. It’s basically to make themselves feel better about expanding AI in a place that is full of art and culture.”

The sequence is what makes the gift sting. Huang’s foundation had already given CCA $22.5 million in 2025, a matching sum that was sold as a way to keep the school alive. Less than a year later, the independent college was gone on paper.

THE HAND-OFF ON POTRERO HILL

1. 2025: The Huang family makes a $22.5 million matching gift to CCA, described at the time as a lifeline for a tuition-driven school under strain.
2. January 13, 2026: CCA President David Howse tells the community the college will wind down its current operations and close by the end of the 2026-27 academic year, with Vanderbilt taking the campus.
3. July 21, 2026: Vanderbilt announces the Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang College of Art, Architecture and Design as the flagship of its San Francisco campus, backed by the $75 million matching gift.
4. End of the 2026-27 year: CCA stops teaching. Students already on track may still graduate from CCA; others are pointed to transfer paths.
5. Fall 2027: Vanderbilt aims to open to students, pending approvals.

Howse wrote that CCA is the last private art and design school in the Bay Area and that its tuition model is “not sustainable.” A $20 million grant from the State of California, plus trustee gifts and budget cuts, bought time, he said, and still could not secure independence. “This agreement is a decisive act of stewardship,” Howse wrote. The mission, in his telling, outlives the college.

San Francisco Rents Jumped 25.6%

The money around that campus sits on a city that just named the squeeze. On September 10, 2026, Mayor Daniel Lurie rolled out a rent-emergency package of six proposed ordinances and more than $30 million in new spending, and said too many people can no longer tell if they can stay.

“Today, most San Franciscans feel our city is finally moving in the right direction, but many are also asking whether they can still afford to live here,” Lurie said.

THE RENT EMERGENCY IN NUMBERS

• Median rent: City figures show it has risen 25.6% in the last year, the nation’s fastest rent increase among major cities in 2026.
• Eviction notices: More than 1,000 had already been filed in 2026, on pace for the most in nearly a decade, with roughly one-quarter tied to nonpayment.
• Vacancy: Only 2.2% of multifamily housing was vacant and available as of June 2026, below Oakland at 4.5% and San Jose at 4.1%.
• Legal aid: The city dedicated more than $54 million in fiscal 2026-27 to emergency rental help and eviction defense.

Graphic designer Indigo Hansen moved to Oakland in 2018, around the time Salesforce Tower opened across the bay, and has watched the pandemic slump give way to another boom. “You have this industry that’s getting billions if not trillions of dollars being funneled eight miles away across the bridge” while working artists struggle to stay afloat, she said. “You can really feel that tension.”

OpenAI and Anthropic have both filed confidential draft S-1s, Anthropic on June 1, 2026, after a $965 billion Series H, and OpenAI a week later after an $852 billion private mark. Neither had priced a listing by mid-September. The overhang is already in the rent.

Why an Oakland Club Banned AI Flyers

Thee Stork Club, an Oakland music venue and bar, banned AI-generated “slop” flyers in September 2025 after owner Billy Joe Agan got tired of watching promotional art arrive as a prompt instead of a paid job. A flyer used to mean another artist got work. The house rule is blunt: a screenshot from the notes app is fine, a Sharpie on a hand is fine, a generated poster passed off as drawing is not. Agan said other small rooms around the country copied the policy.

He also sees a split by age. He said more Gen Zers and boomers use the tools without much fuss, while more millennials find the look “gross and cheap.” His quarrel is not with software as a subject. He points to electronic musician Holly Herndon, a former Oakland neighbor who studied at Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics and builds machine-learning systems into performances and installations with artist Mat Dryhurst. “She’s doing it in a very high-intellectual way,” Agan said. “Somebody said that they used AI, and I was like, you better have a good justification, because other artists are not gonna really like that here.”

That is the labor test Safariii Camp uses on new residents too. A tool that is the work can stay. A tool that deletes a neighbor’s invoice cannot.

The City Is Building 94 Artist Apartments

San Francisco’s official answer is a building, not a ban. Mercy Housing California is putting up Artists Hub on Market at 1687 Market Street, the old McRoskey Mattress site, with 94 new affordable artist homes due to open in early 2028. The $140 million project, backed largely by a $100 million anonymous gift and built without city housing funds, adds rehearsal rooms, offices, a café and an 88-seat black box theater. Certification applications are expected in February and July 2027. The housing lottery is slated for late 2027.

Rents are pegged to 30%, 60% and 80% of area median income, using 2025-level estimates the city says may change. A studio at 60% AMI is listed at $1,547 a month for a two-person household making up to $92,880. A one-bedroom at 80% AMI is $2,830. Certification raises your place in line. It does not hand you keys.

ARTIST HUB RENTS BY INCOME TIER

Those figures are the city’s published 2025 estimates. Income caps rise with household size, and some rehearsal rooms may cost extra. There is no car parking on site.

Who Qualifies for Artist Priority

The Arts Commission’s certification path is a filter as much as a welcome mat. Applicants need to clear income limits and then prove they are working artists through one of three doors.

THREE WAYS TO GET ARTIST PRIORITY

• Earnings test: Make at least $10,000 from your art in three of the last five years.
• Grant path: Show a grant, award or commission from a body such as the San Francisco Arts Commission.
• Portfolio path: Submit three pieces of work for review.

Veterans move up inside each lottery group. People with existing city housing preferences sit ahead of certified artists who have none. The general public can still apply and land behind both. Ninety-four homes will not absorb a 25.6% rent jump or a year already past 1,000 eviction notices. They will house 94 households that make it through the form.

Downtown, a different city program is already filling empty retail with art that wants the machines in the room. At The Intersection of Art and Technology, or TIAT, founder Ash Herr runs a gallery at 151 Powell Street through Vacant to Vibrant, the SF New Deal pop-up effort. She treats AI as one medium among live coding, hardware, 3D mapping and music. She has a working definition of the cheap stuff, and she does not flinch from it. “I personally love it. I enjoy ‘slop’ content,” Herr said. Effort, she added, is subjective.

Jay Elias Still Uses the Tools Anyway

Jay Elias, a Safariii Camp resident and self-described creative technologist, is more at ease with AI than many neighbors. They note that the camera was once accused of killing painting and then became its own medium, and that a paintbrush, a chisel and a printing press are all technology. “I think technology has forever been a part of the art making process,” Elias said. Resistance, in their view, often attaches to the word “tech” rather than to the tool in hand.

The line they will not cross is labor. An AI system that helps write code for an installation can belong in the room. A generative image model used because it is faster than a photographer or illustrator is a different act. “That’s why I think people are really critical of AI right now, because it’s this efficiency machine that’s really being leveraged by a capitalist system to accelerate profits, and in the process, automate jobs and separate people from labor,” Elias said. “If we’re moving too quickly by just not sitting in the mess, then you’re not really grappling with it properly.”

Hansen has already put the tools on the boring work, the admin that used to eat billed hours. Some clients now arrive with half-formed AI mockups. She compared them to “the person that drives the $200,000 sports car but doesn’t know how to drive a stick.” The image exists. It still fails in context. For now, the extra throughput has made the technology feel less like a pink slip than she expected. The rent has not moved with that relief.

The Work That Will Not Speed Up

Kathryn Wangthamkua, another Safariii resident, makes abstract wearable crochet, a medium whose physical process caps how fast a piece can exist. “The process is very human in that it’s chaotic and messy and slow,” she said. She can live with a useful relationship between machines and art. She does not accept the same economic story for both. “AI is inherently extractive, and art is not inherently extractive,” she said. “AI can’t function without people, and art is people.”

That is the argument the $75 million plaque cannot settle. Vanderbilt will hang Huang’s name on a campus that trained painters and architects for nearly 120 years, and it will tell students that studio practice and advanced technology belong in the same sentence. Lurie will try to keep tenants in place with counsel and caps. Mercy Housing will open 94 doors in 2028. Safariii Camp will still smell like wet clay, and CCA will still teach through one more school year, while the matching gift that could not keep the old college independent pays for the new one.