Follow the Drips of Paint Gena Mimozo, a filmmaker, is among the young artists who have settled in Stapleton, Staten Island. She lives above the Full Cup cafe, a place replete with colorful murals. THE race to anoint the latest neighborhood for New Yorkers eager to pursue careers in the arts is never-ending. Greenwich Village, for much of the 20th century the heart of American Bohemia, was shoved aside by one after another newcomer, first the East Village, then SoHo and the Lower East Side, and most recently the Brooklyn quartet of Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Bedford-Stuyvesant and Bushwick. These days, a new destination seems to be proclaimed every few weeks, as artists rush about pell-mell in search of fresh terrain to colonize. The first sign that the artists are arriving can be seen at the entrance to the local subway station. Seemingly overnight, the crowd is swelled by lanky 20-somethings in the uniform of skinny jeans, cowboy boots and black-rimmed eyeglasses. In short order, an old-school bar starts serving lattes along with the Buds. Wildly colored paintings sprout on the grubby walls of a onetime factory, and in abandoned storefronts, bands with wonderfully arcane names can be heard blasting away far into the night. For young people laboring in notoriously low-paying fields, the grail is cheap rent, followed by proximity to like-minded souls and especially to mass transit. It's no accident that Brooklyn's outposts for artists are strung like beads along the necklace of the L train and more recently the G. If these young people are lucky, their homes also offer space in which to create art and music. Still, the next wave of artists" neighborhoods might not have the grit and authenticity of those that came before, said Robert Anasi, the author of a forthcoming book on Williamsburg, where he lived from 1994 to 2008. "Artists" neighborhoods turn over so quickly these days," said Mr. Anasi, whose memoir, "The Last Bohemia: Scenes From the Life of Williamsburg, Brooklyn," explores the neighborhood's transformation from industrial backwater to artists" district to trendy high-rise colony. The speculators are there practically before the artists themselves. What's more, 21st-century technology guarantees that neighborhoods will be discovered almost instantaneously. "People learn about the cool place the day after it happens," Mr. Anasi said. And because people have so much mobility, they can be there the next day - from France, from Germany, from Japan. Neighborhoods are overrun so rapidly, they don't have a chance to establish an identity. In a few months, as newly minted college graduates start flooding into the city, their numbers will include the latest wave of young artists seeking living quarters. In a city in which rents move in only one direction, they will search ever farther afield for compatible and affordable neighborhoods. The list of possibilities includes Ridgewood, just across the Brooklyn-Queens border from Bushwick, along with Upper Manhattan and a tiny outpost on Staten Island. The community of Stapleton, just south of the better-known St. George and Tompkinsville on Staten Island's North Shore, is remote, far from the city's most happening precincts. And forget the L train. To get to the clubs and galleries of downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn, you hop aboard a ferry. But in the past few years, the neighborhood has emerged as a destination for young people in the arts, especially those born and raised on the island. Gena Mimozo, an island girl through and through, personifies this population. Ms. Mimozo, 29, grew up in West Brighton, studied at nearby Wagner College and the New York Film Academy, worked for the Snug Harbor Cultural Center and Botanical Gardens, and is the arts in education program officer for the island's Council on the Arts and Humanities. For the past three years, she and two roommates have shared a three-bedroom apartment in a small, century-old brick building on Van Duzer Street. One roommate, Corinne Guglielmo, 22, is a visual artist who recently graduated from the Fashion Institute of Technology. The other, Keith Joergens, 29, who was raised on the island, was trained as a chef and works delivering meat for Boar's Head. Amenities include a back porch where they can barbecue and, on the walls of Ms. Mimozo's bedroom, paintings by a friend of birds and flowers with the heads of aliens. The total rent, split three ways, is $1,575. Ms. Mimozo is a founder of SIcoLab (Staten Island Collaboration), an organization that offers support for local artists, and she is a project manager of Van Duzer Days, a music and arts festival on Van Duzer Street that is heading into its fourth year. Since graduating from film school last August, she made a 20-minute short, "Left Behind," the story of two young people whose friend has committed suicide after having been bullied at school. She also created an "It Gets Better" video for the Staten Island LGBT Center, among other works.