If you didn’t barricade yourself into an art news bunker to wait out the Art Basel Miami Beach carpet bombing last week, then you may have seen the announcement that Brooklyn’s celebrated Galapagos Art Space will be moving to Detroit in 2016. Their migration will end roughly 20 years of eclectic for-profit performances and cultural events in the borough, ranging from a weekly cabaret circus to an ongoing series of booze-friendly science lectures–as well as a variety of programs aimed at engaging with and assisting the city’s developing young artists. 

According to Robert Elmes, Galapagos’s Director, the reason for the migration is simple: The rent is too damn high to stay in Dumbo, or anywhere else in New York for that matter. As he told Colin Moynihan of the New York Times, "A white-hot real estate market is burning a hole through [NYC’s] affordable cultural habitat. And it’s no longer a crisis, it’s a conclusion.”