By TOM DAVIS and PHILIP CAULFIELD

Steven Silverstein has a full kitchen in his Manhattan Plaza apartment, with a refrigerator, microwave and counter space. What makes it complete, however, is the 3-foot-long Yamaha synthesizer and the acoustic piano he squeezed inside.

It’s not a perfect fit. He'd love to insert a table, or a hutch. But it’s nirvana compared to what he had when he lived in Midtown Manhattan on the East Side, where neighbors banged the walls whenever he tapped on his piano keys – even in the middle of the afternoon.

“It's about making the best fit for living in New York,” said Silverstein, who waited eight years to get into an apartment building that markets itself as a space for artists.

One of the most expensive cities in the world, New York is a place that many artists, like Silverstein, can't do without – even though they rarely find an apartment that offers rehearsal space or, for musicians, a place to store a piano or brass instrument for practice.

Or they can’t afford the high rents for apartments that are spacious enough to handle their lifestyle, or insulated enough so that neighbors don’t knock on their door to complain about drums pounding away at 8 p.m.

New York needs the artists, too, and the city has choreographed efforts over the past three decades to provide housing to a community whose livelihoods depend upon Broadway, the opera, the various television studios and art and fashion galleries that make up the city’s cultural showcase. While the city has claimed progress, the challenge of finding living space is getting tougher for actors, musicians, painters and sculptors who provide more than $5.7 billion annually to the local economy.

Despite offering the 1,689-unit, rent-subsidized Manhattan Plaza that reserves 70 percent of the apartments for performing artists, New York’s housing market is besieged with waiting lists and rents that exceed the typical price range for up-and-coming actors and entertainers, said Kate deRosset, director of policy and external affairs for the city Department of Cultural Affairs.

The city Department of Housing Preservation and Development also recently spent more than $250,000 to retrofit apartments in Brooklyn, Manhattan and elsewhere that it’s marketing toward the artist community, deRosset said. But officials expect the Brooklyn Greenbelt project – which will include rehearsal space – to fill as soon as it opens, possibly by 2010.

“It’s tough – it’s tough for everybody,”’ deRosset said. “What we try to do is foster public access with the creative sector. Artists provide a neighborhood with identity and they help the city's tourism industry, and they enhance the culture.”

Many, like Silverstein, make do, despite the paltry space available for musical equipment and rehearsal space in Manhattan Plaza. But others say their patience is tested when they have roommates and must squeeze their beds, musical equipment and stacks of scripts and study books into apartments that lack air conditioning and closet space.

"The city of New York is doing nothing to nurture its artists," said Jennie Booth, a painter who has lived on 11th Street in a former squat in Alphabet City for six years. "The whole nature of New York City is supposed to be its variety, its creative impulses. And it's just being destroyed. It's becoming one chain restaurant."

Getting a job in New York was once the biggest challenge for aspiring stars in the nation’s entertainment capital. Now artists said they find themselves in competition for living space that, despite the city’s efforts, is diminishing.

New York’s artist population – based on surveys conducted by city and cultural groups – has grown 14 percent since 2000, deRosset said. The average rental price in Manhattan, meanwhile, jumped 8.3 percent last year and, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, now averages around $2,400 – more than five times what some residents of the rent-controlled Manhattan Plaza pay.

Getting into Manhattan Plaza, meanwhile, was considered a sure thing when it opened in 1977. Now the typical waiting list has grown from eight to 12 years since Silverstein moved there in 2004. The logjam reflects the city’s ever-increasing occupancy rate, which was 97 percent last year, according to The New York Times.