Arts organizations, and really any business, need to be cognizant of different environmental factors that may impact them. It is relatively easy to predict (or blame) the impact of the economy or local unemployment on earned and unearned revenue.
It can be a little more difficult to discern what effect zoning changes in different parts of your city might bring or if the adoption of Common Core standards by local schools is going to good or bad for the local arts over the long term.
Another thing that might not really be on your radar as a potential threat or opportunity is the availability and affordability of real estate in your community. An article predicting a worsening of the rental market on the Atlantic website says the number of people paying between 30%-50% of their income is expected to rise over the next decade.
The researchers estimate that the current rental crunch—the one where vacancies are around 7 percent, about half of renters spend more than 30 percent of their salaries on housing, and one quarter spend 50 percent or more—is only going to get worse over the next decade. Even if housing prices and income rise as quickly as inflation (about 2 percent annually) the number of severely rent-burdened Americans (those paying 50 percent or more) would increase by 11 percent over the decade, to over 13 million people in 2025.
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According to their estimates, the current trend—where fewer Americans opt for homeownership—will continue. And that could be bad news for household finances, since a greater number of Americans will wind up using a major chunk of their income just to pay for housing.
When it is put in these terms, it doesn’t take much effort to understand that there will be less disposable income floating around with so much of it is going into housing. If you are paying 50% of your income for rent, there is that much more motivation to stay at home and get your entertainment bingeing on Netflix series.
Unless you have a lot of housing developers and public policy makers on your board that you can advocate to, there isn’t much an arts organization can do to directly impact this reality. If you see this sort of thing on the horizon for your city, you could be proactive in your next couple 5 year strategic plans to prepare for and lower economic barriers for residents who are challenged by rising rents.
There are some problems with this analysis: some of the most rent-challenged parts of the country are also hotbeds for the arts. (Santa Cruz, where I live, is a good example—see http://www.deptofnumbers.com/rent/california/santa-cruz/#pct_income or the tabular form http://www.deptofnumbers.com/rent/metros/ ) College towns are often incubators for arts while also having astronomical rents relative to income.
I never said rising rents would squash arts activity, only that the economics would cause people on the lower end of the earning scale to make choices and select not to participate. If a greater percentage of people are paying a larger percentage of their take home pay in housing costs, the category of people who feel they must make that choice can grow. The concept that only the wealthy can participate, and therefore to whose tastes should be catered, may only end up reinforced.
Ah, I missed the point. I agree with you to some extent, but a lot depends on how the “arts” are priced and packaged. If you are trying to sell $300 seats at an opera, you won’t get many takers from those struggling to pay the rent, but if you have a $10 outdoor festival with popular dance music, you might get more people than you can manage.
Appreciation of an esoteric art form is often used as a marker of social class—the whole point for most of the participants being that it is an exclusive club. Trying to widen the demographics for those art forms is likely to be unsuccessful. If it takes a lot of training to “appreciate” an art form, that is an indicator that the form is used more for creating exclusivity than for the art itself.