Some Downtown Equity Issues

Posted on March 17, 2018 by DANTH

Part 2 of the A Closer Look at Some Strategic Challenges Generated by the New Normal for Our Downtowns Series of Articles

By N. David Milder

Introduction.

There are a number of issues that involve questions about who will visit, live, work and play in our downtowns and how all stakeholders – be they those who live, work and play there or those who own properties and businesses – can share in their successes. The term “equity” seems to fit all of these issues. Their emergence has been relatively recent, and their full dimensions are probably yet to be grasped. As a result, most are not on the radar screens of many downtown leaders, save in those cities where the problems have already become very acute and/or nationally visible, e.g., affordable housing in San Francisco and the entire Bay region.

The core equity issues are essentially about what our values and preferences are and how they will be applied to many of the component parts of these successful downtowns. Decades ago, at their nadir, downtowns had a different set of users and, often, different stakeholders. Strong concerns about equity were not really salient since there were so few goodies to distribute and so few people who wanted either a psychological or legal stake in these districts. These days, that has all changed. The equity issues are generated by downtown and community successes, sometimes huge ones, not their failures!

Way back when, it may have been from one of Jane Jacobs’s books, I learned two axioms about downtowns that have stayed with me ever since:

A downtown needs its community’s residents to take psychological ownership of it. It must become “my downtown” in their guts. When that happens, they will not only use it, but also politically defend it, and support efforts to improve it. Psychologically, they become stakeholders.
A downtown should be everyone’s place. It should have attractions suitable for large swathes of the community. It also should be the community’s central gathering place. Anyone acting in an orderly manner should be welcome.

During the decades when downtowns were in decline, it seemed as if few people within their communities wanted to take psychological possession of them. Today’s successful downtowns show a marked ability to attract many more people, many of whom are affluent and well-educated, to live, work and play in them. In some, where the median price of a residential unit exceeds $1m and where the price of a ticket to a show or ballgame can exceed $1,000 in secondary markets, many local residents may wonder what’s there in the downtown for them?

Who Can Afford to Live Downtown?

Downtown experts agree that more residents in the downtown and in neighborhoods within reasonable walking distances of it have been the strongest engine for downtown revitalization. Yet, more housing in those places is proving to be a double-edged sword and concerns about middle income and “workforce housing” are popping up across the nation. The situation in San Francisco has attracted a lot of national attention and demonstrates many aspects of this problem. Nearby Silicon Valley has had a famed economic success and many of its relatively well-paid workers seek housing in San Francisco. For example, Google-owned buses haul hordes of them to and fro daily. The result has been a very expensive housing market in the entire Bay area. It’s become very difficult for these relatively affluent workers to find affordable housing and those pressures are also impacting other types of workers. One response is to accept smaller and/or unusual types of dwellings. Here’s a recent headline in the New York Times: “Dorm Living for Professionals Comes to San Francisco” (1). The article goes on to detail that: “In search of reasonable rent, the middle-class backbone of San Francisco — maître d’s, teachers, bookstore managers, lounge musicians, copywriters and merchandise planners — are engaging in an unusual experiment in communal living: They are moving into dorms.”

Dorms and other “co-living” arrangements are just one solution path San Franciscans have followed to cope with their region’s skyrocketing housing costs. For example, Business Insider even headlined that: “A 23-year-old Google employee lives in a truck in the company’s parking lot and saves 90% of his income” (2).

A Cargo Container Converted into a Small House in San Franciso.

The Tiny House movement has even penetrated the San Francisco area as evidenced by the photo above taken from an article in Business Insider (3). In this instance, a cargo shipping container was converted into the wee home. Some more affluent San Franciscans have spent $1m+ to purchase and renovate “earthquake shacks,” or are living on boats in the bay. Still others are squeezing together with a large number of roommates into an apartment or house (4).

High housing costs are not confined to San Francisco. As can be seen in the above table, in all 10 of these highly successful major cities, the ratio of median home prices to median household incomes exceed the 5.1 level deemed to indicate serious unaffordability.

An important question: are the housing costs in smaller communities than our major cities also skyrocketing and having adverse impacts? Probably yes, if they are located in a region, such as the San Francisco Bay Area, where the whole area is thriving economically. For example, the communities where the Jobs, Zuckerbergs, Pages, and Ellisons live are small and hyper expensive. In less economically robust regions, one might expect a more complicated picture. My hypothesis is that higher housing prices are an inevitable result of a downtown and its community becoming successful, desirable places to live, work and play. So, where that has happened, the prices will very likely be higher. For instance, in districts that have recently experienced a significant revitalization that was propelled by mix-use, residential anchored projects. This has happened in a number of suburban communities around our major cities, especially those served by commuter rail. Otherwise, in smaller towns and cities, housing prices probably have not skyrocketed. For some smaller towns, their lower housing costs when combined with strong quality-of-life assets, and decent broadband and transportation access, might give them a meaningful competitive edge in attracting new residents and businesses.

“Micro-living,” i.e. living in units of 300 to 400 SF or less is a growing phenomenon in cities across the globe where their economic success has pushed housing prices well beyond what middle-income and even upper-middle-income persons/households can afford. In the U.S. they can be found in many of our largest cities — e.g., Boston, Chicago, and NYC – but especially in cities such as Atlanta, Cincinnati, Denver, Pittsburgh, Seattle, St. Louis and Washington D.C., where the share of single person households exceeds 40%. The mini apartments also are not unusual in Tokyo and many European cities (5).

To provide some perspective on these 300 SF to 400 SF units, consider that in the recent past many of their occupants would have rented studio apartments. Their average size in NYC, San Francisco, and Oakland are 550, SF 514 SF and 531 SF respectively. The micro-living units are 20%+ to 40%+ smaller than the studios. Also, consider that in the 20 most populous metro areas there is a distinct trend toward smaller units – though all still average above 854 SF (see the above table). The decreases in size have been smallest is in the metro area that have very high costs and low costs and highest in the high cost and moderate cost markets.

The small units, such as those in dorm or co-living buildings, often have desirable social/communal advantages that attract their inhabitants. Whether a true equity issue exists for these residents under these conditions depends on whether the inhabitants really want to live in such units or are occupying them because they are the best of the bad options available to them.

This discussion would also be more informed if there was some research establishing that humans need abodes that have XYZ square feet of living space. My memory says that HUD somewhere at some time established that dwellings were overcrowded if a unit’s occupants have less than 188 SF each. I have not found any research that supports a number like that. Moreover, it is highly probable that the personal space needs vary culturally. For example, NYC subways certainly get crowded, but I doubt that their riders would accpt either the level of crowdedness found in the Tokyo subways or their use of car packers to assure that the subway cars are maximally stuffed with riders. Moreover, there are many people in neighborhoods in the Borough of Queens in NYC, such Kew Gardens, Forest Hills, Bayside, who use the l far more expensive Long Island Rail Road rather than experiencing the crowded subways.

Many San Franciscans and residents of other high price communities have responded to the housing equity issue with their feet. A recent report notes that: “San Francisco lost more residents than any other city in the US in the last quarter of 2017…. San Francisco lost net 15,489 residents; about 24% more than the next-highest loser on the list, New York City” (6). This behavior pattern probably results in area firms losing a lot of talented employees. Of course, very high housing prices probably will also dissuade a significant number of talented people from taking jobs located in a community.

Tourists and Tight Housing Markets. City leaders, their economic development officials and local business operators often brag about how many tourists and second homeowners they have and all the revenues and jobs that means for their local economies. However, the residents of many of these communities may tell a different story. They may note that the retail developed for tourist shoppers really does not provide the types of merchandise and services they need or want and often creates seasonal traffic nightmares on local streets. In many communities, large and small, tourists also have impacted negatively on the housing market from the perspective of the needs of local residents.

Moses Gates, in a study by Regional Plan Association (RPA), noted that: “54,764 apartments in New York City … are vacant, according to the 2014 Housing and Vacancy Survey – but not really. These are apartments used for ‘seasonal, occasional, or recreational use’ – i.e., pieds-à-terre or second homes” (7). He went on to state that:

“We also need to better leverage our housing inventory, especially in places where land is scarce and building new homes is difficult. One way to do that is through policies like a tax surcharge on second homes in the New York City (or a pied-à-terre tax) designed to get mostly unused apartments back on the housing market.”

It should also be noted that strong suspicions have been raised about many of these pieds-à-terre in some of our biggest and most tourist-popular cities (e.g., NYC, Miami, etc.) being money-laundering operations for their wealthy and unknown foreign owners.

Many of these units are vacant for most of the year. They thus do not contribute the pedestrian traffic to the sidewalks below nor the expenditures in the city’s shops, restaurants and entertainment venues that one might reasonably expect – nor the sales taxes on those expenditures.

Are these second homeowners to be treated differently from a downtown’s normal stakeholders? Laws probably protect them in many ways, but I am certain that many local residents would say there is something unjust stirring here that must be fixed.

Airbnb has seemed to be looking for trouble in a host of cities, quickly getting into conflict with city governments because of its alleged flaunting of local laws and putative negative impacts on the availability of affordable housing. As a recent study published in the APA Journal noted, Airbnb had been criticized for enabling:

“…tourism accommodations to penetrate residential neighborhoods, which creates conflicts between visitors and residents, displacing permanent accommodations in high-demand cities and exacerbating affordability pressures for low-income groups (8).

Governments, at all levels, have for decades often mounted programs to cope with the affordable housing issue, though they almost always targeted low-income and impoverished households. Also, the units produced by those programs usually were placed in poor neighborhoods or in those very out of the way, e.g. Far Rockaway here in NYC. The downtown housing equity issue differs in that the targeted population is middle or even upper-middle-income households and that the units produced for them should be at least within a very reasonable travel time of the downtown. It would also probably be a good idea to have representatives of these residents and their employers extensively involved in the development of the needed housing units.

Downtown Success Encourages Landlords to Ask Independent Retailers for Unaffordable Rents

This problem is made more complicated by the fact that to properly understand it one must break it down analytically into three constituent parts: fairness to the merchants, impacts on vacancies, and the impacts of the loss of popular, able merchants. In many discussions of the affordable retail rent problem, things get murky as attention quickly shifts from one of these sub-issues to another. My objective here is not to provide definitive solutions, but to help illuminate the problem and to suggest some solution paths that may be worth exploring.

The Problem Is Not New. Unaffordable retail rents are an issue that long predates the Great Recession. For example, back in the late 1970s, when I surveyed street-level merchants in Charlotte’s CBD about how they were impacted by an off-street, internal shopping network that was created by overstreet bridges connecting a number of new buildings, they replied that it took traffic from the sidewalks and led to hard to afford rent increases. In the two districts I managed, I never met a small merchant who did not have something negative to say about their rent increases.

Generally, when downtowns or neighborhoods become observably successful, they not only attract retail chains, but also tend to attract many other types of businesses, such as personal, professional and financial service operations. A very high percentage of these operations can afford higher retail rents than the average independent retailer. Some, such as the banks, are willing and able to spend a lot more on rents than even the well-heeled retail chains. As one observer noted: “Banks frequently overpay by 15% to 20% or more on average for real estate compared to other retailers for comparable space. Over 10 or 20 years we’re talking a lot of money!” (9).

I put together the above table for an article I wrote back in 2010. It shows how much space a merchant could afford to lease if 15% of his or her annual sales were devoted to paying rent (10). The 15% figure makes the analysis somewhat conservative, as a more accurate number would the 8% to 12% range for downtown merchants and about 10% for restaurants. Small merchants just cannot afford a whole lot of space in any successful district unless they have very significant annual sales.

Small retailers have not been the only group impacted on. Jeremiah Moss, in his book Vanishing New York, describes how bohemian artistic live-work areas, such as the East Village, were erased by major retail chains coming in.

Why Do Landlords Ask for Unreasonable Rents? Landlords are not necessarily being venal or thoughtless if they sign these higher paying tenants when they appear on their doorsteps. They are simply responding rationally to proven market demand. Of course, even then, they must decide, perhaps just implicitly, that these non-retail uses will ultimately generate more value than if a current small retail tenant was retained. However, one might ask if they considered how that tenant might affect nearby businesses and buildings or if they just considered their own bottom lines. Obviously, another important question is if considering the impacts of a potential tenant on the district should be obligatory in some way, shape or form? This problem would ease if a landlord or an accomplished EDO owned a lot of downtown properties with retail tenants and managed them like a mall, but that is an unlikely outcome.

Here are some other patterns that I have found in the ways landlords establish their rent increases

Some increases are based on a reasonably accurate assessment of local rising property values and dominant asking rents. Both of these may already reflect the district’s growing success. These landlords tend to avoid asking for the highest rents. Among them, are a number of experienced professionals who see the landlord function as having strong stewardship aspects and consider what is good not only for their properties but also for those that are near them. I fear that they are a dying breed. How instead can we develop more of them?
Some small landlords I’ve spoken to simply could not explain the reasons for their very high rent increases, save to say they were products of their best judgments. Among those that I have met, many were new to the U.S. and new to local property and retail markets. A number of them would stubbornly maintain unreasonable asking rents for a year or more. These landlords do not typically care who their tenant is as long as they pay the asked for rent. Here the high rents and vacancies are being sustained by landlord ignorance and management ineptitude. Newness to the area is another factor.
Other increases are based on hopes, often wishful, that a national chain or other higher paying tenants can be attracted that will pay much higher rents and have a better credit rating than those of the current independent retail tenant. An analysis of the local retail market is either perfunctorily done or simply missing. An example of this is Wong Kee, located in Manhattan’s Chinatown. It recently “succumbed to a new landlord and rising rents.” It was in Chinatown for nearly 30 years. Its lease was not renewed. by the landlord. The landlord wants to build a pharmacy in its place, though there are already several pharmacies nearby (11). This type of landlord needs to learn what is really feasible from a business recruitment perspective.
A few other landlords – usually those unfamiliar with the downtown, retailing or even property ownership – will ask for very large increases because they paid way too much for their newly purchased building. Their huge rent increases are what they need to financially stay whole. This may be because their bank loan agreement probably stipulated a formula for determining what the rents should be. There was little room for them to consider local market factors, even if they wanted to — and too many didn’t care anyway. According to Jerimiah Moss, banks will devalue a property if it has a small business tenant but increase it for a retail chain tenant. “There’s benefit to waiting for chain stores. If you are a hedge fund manager running a portfolio you leave it empty and take a write-off” (12). In other words, such landlords have tax incentives that encourage them to demand very high rents and tolerate long-term vacancies. They also seem absolutely oblivious about how a vibrant district will increase their local property values and bottom lines.

The Fairness Issue. Local residents and civic leaders may feel that some of the merchants facing unaffordable rent increases are being unfairly treated. This issue is implicitly present in most usages of the phrase “unaffordable rents” where unaffordable is really seen as a synonym for unfair. Should such an equivalence be accepted? Moreover, why should any government entity or nonprofit help those facing unaffordable rents? Market forces are freely at work and, to quote Barzini in the Godfather, “After all, we are not a bunch of communists.” I would argue that it is not the unfairness of the unaffordable rents that justifies remedial action, but their most important impacts: long-term and multiple vacancies and the loss of many popular, high-quality merchants.

Vacancies. First, let’s establish that a certain level of vacancies is necessary for a downtown to work correctly and prevent ossification. Downtowns need some churn to recruit new, attractive merchants and to get rid of the dregs. I think it’s generally accepted that a vacancy rate below 5% suppresses the desired level of churn while one above around 10% can have bad effects on the district. Many consultants, downtown leaders and, perhaps more frequently, elected officials, believe that vacancies can be an unattractive creeping plague. However, the real problem about vacancies may not be the emptiness of the storefront, but the absence of an accomplish operator to occupy it. Let me anticipate those who will claim that a cluster of empty storefronts is visually an eyesore for the district, diminishes its walkability and a puts a blemish on its reputation, by asking: Is the district really any better when the vacancies are filled by unpopular, inept operations? Bad operators can repel customers and downtown visitors even more than empty storefronts.

It is also important to realize that any valid explanation of today’s retail vacancies must take a multi-causal approach that includes far more cautious consumer behavior, the rise of Millennials who prefer experiences over things, significantly reduced demand by retail chains in terms of both the number and size of their new locations, and affordable rents. The reduced retail demand is especially relevant because many of the landlords that were pushing out independents were doing so in hopes of recruiting the very chains that were hardest hit by reduced consumer favor and demand, such as the apparel specialty retailers.

It is also important to consider that reducing landlord asking rents is not the only way of reducing vacancies. As Andy Manshel reminded me, good results can be achieved by “animating vacant storefronts with temporary art or high-quality other pop up uses.” He also suggested that vacancies could be taxed, motivating landlords to sign leases.

Generally, it can be reasonably argued that concern about vacancies is a misunderstanding of the essential core problem.

The Loss of Popular, High-Quality Merchants. That core problem is not the emptiness of the vacancies, but that ill-informed landlord rent increases can result in the closings of independent merchants who are well-loved in the community. They are real losses for their customers, nearby business owners, and their district. Additionally, it usually is very hard to replace them.

However, it must be understood, that by definition, about half of a downtown’s merchants will be below average in their performance, including their ability to satisfy local customers. Are the potential closings of poorly performing, unpopular merchants the type of losses that are worthy of preventive actions by an EDO or municipal interventions? Some, who are ideologically committed to small businesses, may say yes, believing every small firm by definition is worth retaining or saving. Yet, many savvy downtown managers and civic leaders see a prime result of their revitalization efforts being the replacement of their poor-quality merchants, not necessarily with bigger operators or chains, but with higher quality operations.

Who Should Receive Help? One might cogently argue that the harm done to the public and/or district that would result from the closing of a popular and able merchant might justify an EDO or municipal intervention, but how much sway should the “fairness” of the rent increase have? For example, should an unpopular or incompetent merchant who gets an unaffordable rent increase be helped? That would imply that the fairness issue carries the day. Or will assistance only go to merchants who are able and/or popular? Is the fairness issue unrelated to the issue of the merchant’s value to the community or district? I would suggest that the fairness issue only becomes relevant when the merchant’s community value criterion is satisfied.

My observations suggest that the merchant’s value to the community is very likely to be considered when one specific business favored by an important segment of the community announces that it will soon need to move or close – whatever the cause, e.g., poor sales, increased competition, workforce problems, high operating costs (including costs of space) etc. In contrast, because of the sheer number of businesses involved, municipal attempts to remediate unaffordable rents cannot logistically evaluate each of the benefiting firms and it would probably be a political nightmare to do so anyway. As a result, the fairness issue seems to prevail when municipal actions are taken. For example, here in NYC, the City Council has passed a bill that reduces the Commercial Rent Tax that businesses have to pay if they are located in Manhattan below 96^th Street, pay $250,000+ annually in rent, and that have annual revenues under $5m (13).

In several large cities across the nation — NYC being one of them — proposals also have appeared for rent control laws that cover properties with retail uses.

What Kind of Programs Do We Need to Cope with the Unaffordable Rents Problem? Municipal actions tend to treat quality merchants and underachievers in the same way, probably out of necessity. Moreover, both the retail rent control and merchant tax abatements seem to be rather shotgun approaches aimed at helping broad classes of small merchants. The key actors, whose behaviors need to be altered, are the landlords, not the merchants. The retail rent control approach carries with it great potential dangers and certain resistance from the entire real estate community. Yes, the tax abatement helps some worthy merchants, but it also helps make the unaffordable rent increases more bearable. In that way, it implies the increases are justified.

Downtown EDOs may be in a far better position to mount more effective programs to influence landlord behavior. Many of the landlords are probably on their boards and many others have engaged in their programs. Anyone who wants to educate or convince landlords has to have won their esteem, trust, and confidence. The goal of such an educational effort cannot unrealistically be to convince large numbers of landlords. Instead, it should be, to convince a savvy few among them who can lead by example and thereby also exert some market pressures for others to follow.

Probably the best solution to the affordable retail rents problem is to help able merchants buy the spaces they need to do business. They might do this alone or as a group. Buying a single storefront space is unlikely unless it is from some kind of retail coop or condo. In many suburban towns and cities with populations under around 100,000, I’ve encountered retailers who own the entire buildings in which their stores are located. In big, high rent districts with stores located in big expensive buildings that is not likely

It might be possible for buildings that have multiple storefronts to lease, that a partnership of some kind might buy either the entire building if it is cheap enough or just the retail spaces in the larger more expensive buildings. These groups of retailer property buyers most likely will not emerge organically from the merchants themselves. Probably, they will need the catalytic interventions of teams lead by the downtown EDO that has strong active support from the municipal government and a civic-minded developer.

Local governments can do a lot to assist the development of the retailer-owned co-op or condo buildings:

Provide low-cost land or a low-cost building.
PILOTS just as developers are ordinarily given.
Other abatements such as on NYC Commercial Rent Taxes.

The EDO might also help the buyers connect to financial organizations that will provide them with loans that have reasonable terms.

If helping able retailers purchase their spaces is not viable, here are some other actions that might be tried to assist these merchants. Their effectiveness is far from assured. To influence landlords, local governments might consider:

Using zoning and tax incentives to reduce spaces so that they are smaller than what chain stores would want, perhaps around 1,500 SF to 2,000 SF. Landlord blowback can be expected. Also, quality independent merchants might find such spaces too small and a few chains now might still find them suitable.
Use zoning to limit where chain stores can go. This has been done for personal service operations and big boxes. Various legal and political problems can be expected. Landlord blowback can be expected.
Use their own legislative powers to change its tax code to erase any incentives for landlords to demand higher rents and tolerate long vacancies. Also, vacancies might be taxed as if they were occupied.
Use their external political influence to change the state’s tax code to erase any incentives for landlords to demand higher rents and tolerate long vacancies

If the retailer space purchasing option is not viable, to influence landlords, downtown EDOs might consider:

Creating either a formula that landlords can use to calculate an appropriate affordable rent for their retail spaces or to identify the steps in an analytical process that can help landlords make a well-reasoned decision about rent increases.
Educating landlords about the importance of taking into consideration district benefits and harms in their recruitment decisions.
Make a special effort that targets landlords new to the district, retailing or property ownership.
Jawbone banks about the value of small merchants to properties and downtown.
Issue a brief annual report that identifies the most “recruitable” types of businesses to the district and the types of spaces they will want.
Publicly praise and disseminate information about what landlords who are effectively dealing with the rent increase issue are doing.

To help high value, threatened merchants, downtown EDOs should assist them to:

Find new locations. Deft use of the Internet can help many independent retailers thrive in locations previously deemed less than optimum.
Find financing for the move.
Publicize their new location to let current and potential customers know where they now are.

Who Can Play Downtown?

As Central Social District (CSD) functions and venues have become of growing importance to the vibrancy and success of our downtowns, this basic question has become correspondingly important.

A few years ago, I put together the above table to demonstrate the user frictions that five specific CSD venues and two types of CSD venues have here in NYC. The specific venues were Bryant Park, Lincoln Center (LCPA), Madison Square Garden (MSG), The Museum of Modern Art, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The types of venues were movie theaters and Broadway theaters. The user frictions I looked at were:

When the venues were open.
Their admission fees.
Whether the user’s schedule could drive a visit or does the user have to conform to what is available on the venue’s schedule of performances.
Can the venue be used for visits that last 45 minutes or less? Lots of downtown visitors have holes in their schedules of that length and districts that have venues that can entertainingly plug those holes will be much stronger than those that cannot.

From the perspective of when the venues are open for people to use them, hands down Bryant Park has the most hours open, followed by the movie theaters. LCPA and MSG are basically closed during most days, while the two museums are closed 5 nights a week. If you work or go to school, these results mean that some venues are much harder to use than others.

Another key friction is how much it costs to be admitted to these venues and here is where many downtown users are simply priced out. Again, Bryant Park followed by movie theaters are the most affordable – and in many instances by gargantuan amounts of dollars:

Bryant Park is free to enter and the fees for using some of its attractions, such as riding the carousel or ice skating, are reasonable. It and other parks in the city cost the least to use.
At the time I did the research, my check of cinemas in Manhattan showed the average price for a ticket was about $13. Nationally, at the time it was about $8. I would argue that movie house ticket prices should be the benchmark of affordability because so many people still go to the movies.
MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art rank next in lowest general admission prices. The Met “asks” for a $25 donation; MoMA requires it. The Met request is based on the deal the city made when giving land for the museum that gives NYC residents free admission. Residents can pay what they want or nothing at all. A $25 fee/donation to these museums would be 1.9 times more than the average cost of a movie ticket in Manhattan.
The prices at Lincoln Center are pricey. An average ticket to the opera costs $156. That’s 12 times more than going to a movie and taking a four-member family could cost a real bundle. If you want to accept alpine, nose-bleed seats you can get a ticket to a NY Philharmonic concert for about $29. But prices go up to about $112/concert if you are a subscriber to a series. That’s 8.6 times more than a movie ticket. Tickets to the opera and philharmonic concerts can be even higher than those cited if they are purchased on the secondary market and there is strong demand for them. But, given that their audiences have weakened in recent years, the markups are not as large as for Broadway shows or Madison Square Garden events. Perhaps in recognition of its high admission prices as well as its mission to serve a broad public, the Philharmonic does give a lot of free concerts on the LCPA’s campus as well as in the boroughs outside Manhattan. It also has a significant educational program in NYC’s schools.
In 2013, the average price for a ticket to a Broadway show was $98.64. Back in 1955, for her birthday, I took my girlfriend to see Mr. Wonderful on Broadway. We had dinner before at a steakhouse, Gallagher’s and to get to and from I hired a limo. It was a very memorable evening. The whole thing cost under $70, with the fifth-row center seats costing about $8.50 each. Adjusting for inflation, the price of those tickets would be $73.91 in 2013 dollars, substantially less than the actual $98.64. The difference is probably substantially accounted for by higher costs, such as for labor, talent, marketing, and equipment, etc. The biggest problems with today’s Broadway theater ticket prices is that so many of the tickets are bought by dealers who then resell them at substantial markups and that some hot plays are asking for $500 a ticket. Paying $1,000+ per ticket for hot shows.in the secondary market is far from uncommon.
The average ticket to a Knicks game at Madison Square Garden, in 2013, cost $125, while a ticket to a Rangers was $78. A ticket to a Billy Joel concert at the Garden could range from from $64 to $124. However, here too, a significant percentage of the tickets are captured by dealers in the secondary market and prices for a very popular game or concert can go above $1,000. Joe Six-Pack fans are unlikely to have the financial resources to attend with any regularity the basketball and hockey games of their favorite teams. Their attendance is more likely confined to special occasions for which they either plan early and save or are gifted. For these fans, downtown sports bars may be one way to deliver the more affordable TV access to these games in an arena-like, fan-filled setting.

Parks, other public spaces, and movie theaters are entertainment venues that help make a downtown everyone’s neighborhood. They are the most easily accessible and the least expensive to visit. Consequently, they provide reasons for most of a community’s population to take psychological possession of their downtown. Where they are absent or weak, the downtown will be lacking very important support mechanisms. On the other hand, attendance at the events of many high culture performing arts venues, popular concerts, and professional sports events can only be afforded by those with above-average amounts of discretionary dollars to spend. These folks, too, are assets for their downtowns, assets that downtown leaders only dreamed of attracting in years past.

The Impact of Tourism. The table above was generated from data published online by the Broadway League. It shows just how much the attendance at Broadway shows is dominated by out-of-towners. Just 22% of the ticket holders are NYC residents. Another 18% come from the surrounding suburbs. Most, 61%, are tourists, with about 46% coming from other parts of the USA and about 15% from other countries.

Strong tourism can have important impacts on a local economy. For example, here in NYC, we have about 60 million tourist visitors annually and their direct spending in 2016 amounted to about $64.8 billion (14). About 6.45 billion went to firms in the recreation and entertainment industries. Without tourist expenditures for Broadway tickets, the relatively high ticket prices probably would not have been reached or maintained. One may wonder if a lower flow of tourists would have resulted in lower Broadway theater ticket prices that would have attracted more buyers from NYC residents and from folks in the surrounding suburbs.

As is happening in many entertainment niches (defined to include cultural/arts venues) across the nation, tourism now accounts for very high percentages of the attendance at many of NYC’s major entertainment venues. This is particularly true for our most prestigious museums, where tourists account for 75% or more of their attendance (see table above). These institutions aspire to be and are world-class venues. That means that though they are located in NYC, for New Yorkers, they are no longer just theirs. Some psychological adjustments may be needed. As I write this I remember many years ago, when my neighbors and shopkeepers in Paris warned me in the late spring, that soon “your Americans and the Germans would come” and Paris would not be the same until the fall. They were absolutely right. The buildings, the Seine, the Metro, the museums were all the same, but Paris in the summer was very different. My French friends explained that they felt during the summertime as if their beloved city is taken over by foreigners. It’s really not theirs during those months. Things may have changed in Paris since my student days there, but that sense of tourists taking over is one I’ve encountered in several other communities here in the USA

Tourism can be boon for many downtowns, but it also often is a two-edged sword, that brings a number of problems with it. Some of these problems are obvious, such as how tourism can impact housing and retail, while others may be quite subtle, such as residents psychologically feeling dispossessed in their own communities. Part of the New Normal, as more and more downtowns become adept at attracting tourists, will also be the emergence of these problems.

ENDNOTES

1. Nellie Bowles. “Dorm Living for Professionals Comes to San Francisco.” New York Times. March 4, 2018. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/04/technology/dorm-living-grown-ups-san-francisco.html?

2. “Employee lives in truck in parking lot.” “Business Insider. October 2015. http://www.businessinsider.com/google-employee-lives-in-truck-in-parking-lot-2015-10

3. See: http://www.businessinsider.com/american-suburbs-dying-photos-2017-10#in-lieu-of-traditional-housing-some-millennials-are-turning-shipping-containers-sailboats-and-vans-into-homes-59

4. Melia Robinson. “All the crazy things happening in San Francisco because of its out-of-control housing prices.” March 6, 2018. http://www.businessinsider.com/why-people-are-leaving-san-francisco-2018-3

5. Wendy Koch, “Mini-apartments are the next big thing in U.S. cities,” USA TODAY, August 1, 2013. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/07/30/tiny-apartments-apodments-catch-on-us-cities/2580179/

6. Prachi Bhardwaj. “San Francisco is losing more residents than any other city in the US, creating a shortage of U-Hauls that puts a rental at $2,000 just to move to Las Vegas” BI. March 5, 2015. http://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-bay-area-residents-moving-away-increase-u-haul-rental-prices-2018-3.

7. Moses Gates. “How a pied-à-terre tax could help solve New York City’s housing crisis.” City & State New York. Aug. 30, 2017. https://www.cityandstateny.com/articles/opinion/pied-a-terre-tax-could-help-solve-new-york-city-housing-crisis.html

8. Nicole Gurran and Peter Phibbs. “When Tourists Move In: How Should Urban Planners Respond to Airbnb?” Journal of the American Planning Association. January 2017. 2017https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01944363.2016.1249011)

9. Richard Pilla. “Why banks overpay for real estate” BAI Oct 6, 2015 https://www.bai.org/banking-strategies/article-detail/why-banks-overpay-for-real-estate

10. N. David Milder. “As we leave the recession, affordable downtown retail rents are a revitalization imperative.” Downtown Idea Exchange. May 2010. https://www.downtowndevelopment.com/perspectives/dixperspectives050110.pdf

11. “Wong Kee Vanished.” http://vanishingnewyork.blogspot.com/2018/03/wong-kee.html Retrieved on March 14, 2018.

12. Quoted in Edward Helmore. “New York’s vanishing shops and storefronts: ‘It’s not Amazon, it’s rent.’” The Guardian. Dec 24, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/dec/24/new-york-retail-shops-amazon-rent?CMP=share_btn_link

13. Sarah Maslin Nir. “Tax Break Could Help Small Shops Survive Manhattan’s Rising Rents.” New York Times. Nov. 28, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/28/nyregion/rent-tax-manhattan-local-shops.html

14. Tourism Economics. “The Economic Impact of Tourism in New York.” https://www.governor.ny.gov/sites/governor.ny.gov/files/atoms/files/NYS_Tourism_Impact_2016.pdf

Let’s Get Real About: The Potential Audiences for Events at Arts Venues in Smaller Downtowns

Posted on August 15, 2017 by DANTH

The Arts As an Important Downtown Revitalization Tool — Redux. Part 3

By N. David Milder

Introduction

This is the third and final article in a series aimed at helping downtown leaders and stakeholders (downtowners) in our smaller communities to more accurately assess just how strong an economic engine the arts can be for their districts. The focus, this time, is on the potential audiences for the events their arts venues might put on. Audience preferences and behaviors are changing and create significant challenges for those programming arts venues. In part, this is due to the electronic consumption of arts products – e.g., books, films, concerts, recorded music, plays, operas, etc. Of course, some performing arts have long had electronic distribution via radio, recordings and some TV, e.g., all forms of popular music, country music, classical music, jazz and opera. (Texaco sponsored radio broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera for 63 years!) However, Internet streaming and the use of personal electronic devices may have brought about paradigm-level changes in arts consumption, and its full impacts are still unclear.

Perhaps even more important determinants of changing arts consumption preferences are shifting demographics and consumer behaviors such as

The maturing of the huge Millennials age cohort and its arts preferences and spending patterns.
Our growing “minority” populations, especially Hispanics, and their arts/entertainment preferences.
Our long-term wage stagnation and the emergence of much more cautious consumer behaviors.

Together, they have created significant constraints on an arts organization’s ability to penetrate local consumer markets. They’ve strengthened arts venue admissions prices and convenience as determinants of personal decisions about whether or not to attend an arts event. Consequently, more and more arts organizations must choose between:

Charging higher and higher admission fees for high-quality events that only can be afforded by affluent households.
Assuming greater financial jeopardy by either lowering their prices or offering free access to a much broader audience demographically, or
Providing performance and exhibition events that are perhaps less attractive, but can be provided at an affordable cost for the arts organization to produce and at affordable prices for their audiences.

We may well be in the midst of a trend where in person attendance at arts events is becoming overwhelmingly for the wealthy, while the middle and lower income strata consume arts products primarily through electronic media.

Most towns with populations under 25,000 do not have large numbers of wealthy households that can most easily afford arts event admissions fees. Their arts venues must compete with arts/entertainment consumption opportunities available physically nearby as well as through electronic media. To compete effectively, they must provide sufficiently attractive events that are not financially threatening for them to produce, yet affordable for consumers. That can be quite a challenge.

A Closer Look At Arts Consumption Through Electronic Media

Just as the Internet has disrupted our nation’s retail industry, electronic access channels are changing how Americans consume arts/entertainment events and content. For example, in 2012, a large National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) survey on public participation in the arts found that 71% of its respondents had consumed arts through electronic media in the past year:

61% Used TV, radio, or the Internet to access art or arts programming
38% Used a handheld or mobile device to access art
27% Used a DVD or CD player, a record-player, or a tape-player to watch or listen to music or to programs about theater, dance, visual arts, or literature. (1)

Today, most movie watching in the US is not done in movie theaters, but on TVs and personal electronic devices – and by a very wide five-to-one margin (2). The NEA survey also found that 4% of the respondents watched operas electronically (2.1% reported attending in person), while 7% claimed that they watched some form of dance recital, musical or stage play electronically. Since 2012, those numbers probably have increased. A number of theater and opera companies have made much stronger efforts to engage in simulcasts and other forms of electronic distribution to regain audience share and strengthen their finances. The Metropolitan Opera Company in NYC, for example, will simulcast 10 operas in 2,000 theaters located in 70 countries during its 2017-2018 season (3).

Frequently, this electronic distribution has meant that famous plays and operas with celebrated performers became available to audiences in theaters – including many movie houses — in smaller communities in which they otherwise would never have appeared. This enabled these theaters to have a better “arts product” to offer in their local market areas. On the other hand, the big arts organizations’ expansion of their electronic performances may mean more competition for smaller performing arts companies, e.g., regional theaters and opera companies. Or they might be market builders for these smaller performing arts companies as, in years past, Texaco’s opera broadcasts were for smaller opera companies across the nation. Speaking with such uncertainty here is intentional since it demonstrates a key characteristic of the situation most arts organizations now are in when dealing with e-arts.

Museums across the world are rushing to put their holdings on their websites. See, for example, https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/rijksstudio where you can browse through 606,474 of its works of art.

Moreover, by 2013, 79% of the sales of music and videos and 44% of books and magazines in the US had moved to the Internet (4).

While it is still too early to tell with any real certainty how e-arts are impacting attendance at events held at most brick and mortar arts venues., movie theaters are an exception. Most observers agree that electronic consumption has reduced attendance at our movie theaters. Certainly, by offering households a cheaper and very convenient way to consume arts/entertainment products, they directly meet consumers’ strongest concerns about attending arts events and probably reduce to some unknown extent the need to go to another geographic location to consume them. Annual movie attendance today is nowhere near the per capita levels it reached in the 1930s and 1940s when weekly attendance was far from abnormal. More recently, aggregate movie attendance has dropped by about 14% between 2003 and 2016, though the US population had grown by about 11% (5). Also, since only about 12% of the movie industry’s annual sales come from US movie theaters, they are seen now by industry leaders primarily as a marketing tool to support electronic revenue streams, not as a major profit center (6). Some movie moguls would like to stop distributing all films to them and rely solely on pure digital distribution channels.

On the other hand, the practices of one theatre in a smaller community suggest that the distribution of arts/entertainment events over the Internet sometimes can be quite advantageous for such venues. This theatre not only offers simulcasts of arts events, but also football playoff games and baseball world series games. The sports events are offered free and the theater recoups costs from its concession stand. This theater is not so much in the arts business as it is in the entertainment business, of which the arts certainly are an important part.

Savvy arts organization leaders may, in the future, find more ways to positively leverage the electronic media.

Patterns in Arts Venue Attendance

There are many kinds of arts events. As common sense indicates and opinion surveys confirm, the content of an arts event is one of the most important determinants of an individual’s decision to attend it or not – more about this later. Knowing the popularity of the various types of arts events is critically important for any arts organization, especially new ones. Such knowledge should help arts venues and organizations shape the events they put on and how they are marketed.

About the Data. The discussion below is based on a secondary analysis of various kinds of data collected by a number of other organizations. There are two ways of looking at admissions. The first is how many times people report attending various types of events in assorted opinion surveys. The second is based on the admissions reported by arts venues or organizations, usually when they are surveyed by related professional organizations such as the League of American Orchestras or Opera America. Each has its methodological problems that cannot be detailed here without making a major diversion. Let’s just say that they should be treated with some caution, but when their findings show consistency and agreement they deserve serious attention. However, that means that the same subjects have to be looked at from two perspectives, even though it may appear repetitive

Attendance Data from Surveyed Individuals. The NEA has conducted three important large surveys on the public’s participation in the arts in 2002, 2008 and 2012. Some of their findings about attendance for a variety of performing arts events are presented in the table below.

One thing to notice is that fewer than 12% of the respondents in all three NEA surveys attended these kinds of “high culture” performing arts events. They have not captured large market shares. Moreover, other data sources indicate that attendance for these types of performances pales in comparison with that of motion pictures. For example, in 2013, about 68% of the US/Canada population went to the movies at least once in the previous year (7). The relatively small audiences for these performing arts forms suggest that arts venues that try to capture them will do well if they either have a large cluster of these potential audience members living nearby or are able to penetrate a relatively large market area in which sufficient numbers of them are present. These market areas are probably much bigger than the trade areas of the retailers in the towns in which the arts venues are located. Such market penetration will require a very effective marketing program and strong arts products.

The second thing to notice is the pattern of attendance decline that afflicted all types of events save those involving Latin, Spanish and Salsa music. The Great Recession had an obvious hand in this. Any rebounds by 2012 were uneven. The attendance declines were significant: -23%, -25%, -11% -31% and -34%. Operas and ballets, according to these surveys, were hardest hit.

The above table is based on other survey data presented in the National Arts Index, 2016 Report produced by Americans for the Arts. It is based on a collection of surveys that were done by one research firm of people attending arts events. The Index report provides attendance data for each of the types of venues/events listed for the years 2002-2013, with 2003 being set as the base comparison year. In that report, attendance statistics for 2003 are treated as having an index value of 1.0. The table above looks at just three of those years: 2003, the base year; 2010, the year after the Great Recession formally ended, and 2013, the last year for which the Index had complete information. By 2013, economic recovery was well underway, if bumpy and uneven.

Data about population growth has also been inserted in the table, with that of 2003 again having an index value of 1.0. It is there to serve as a kind of benchmark of potential arts attendance growth. If the population grows, one might reasonably expect arts attendance will, too. However, such growth would not be strictly linear. There is probably a lag time before “newcomers” become old enough or sufficiently acculturated to attend arts events. To provide some insight on that contingency, data on population growth for the 1993-2002 time period is also included. Between 1993 and 2013, there was substantial population growth — about 11% between 1993 and 2002 and about 9% between 2003 and 2013. This population growth should have had some significant positive impact on the potential size of arts event audiences, even allowing for a time lag.

The Index’s data confirms the patterns found by the NEA surveys. Compared to 2003, the decreased attendance rates for high culture performing arts events in 2013 were:

Dance and ballet performances, down from 1.0 to 0.87
Live theater shows, down from 1.0 to 0.87
Symphony concerts and operas, down from 1.0 to 0.79.

All had significantly fallen by 2010, probably due in large part to the Great Recession.

The table also shows that those performing arts that might be considered to be more as popular entertainments than vessels of high culture were somewhat more resistant to the recession and showed significant audience growth between 2010 and 2013. Their index scores moved over those four years from:

0.95 to 1.25 for country music concerts
0.93 to 1.34 for r&b/rap/hip-hop concerts
1.02 to 1.17 for rock concerts.

Online visits to a number of theaters and performing arts centers in smaller and medium-sized cities across the nation showed that their schedules were dominated by popular entertainments rather than high culture performing arts events. This is probably the programming path that new performing arts venues in our smaller communities should pursue if they want to have audience appeal and financial stability.

Given our nation’s population growth and the ability of popular entertainment types of performing arts to grow significantly in the post recession years, the public’s reported lower attendance at dance and ballet performances, live theater shows, symphony concerts and operas probably are due to factors other than those associated with the Great Recession. One hypothesis is that they simply became less popular.Another is that their ticket prices are too high.

Culture Track 2014 also looked at arts audiences. It used an online survey with 4,000 + respondents. However, those respondents “were double-confirmed for interest in cultural events and attendance to at least one cultural activity in the past year” (8). The survey consequently only looks at the “culture choir,” so to speak. Doing that can be very useful because the members of this culture choir are the most likely patrons of cultural events and its always good to know your customers and their characteristics. However, less useful for the current analysis, the survey did not differentiate participation done at an arts/cultural venue in person from participation done electronically, e.g., via streaming or the radio or TV. The survey found that among these proven culture consumers, attendance between 2011 and 2014:

Rose for historic attractions, living museums, science museums, art museums and art galleries. Declined for children’s museums. Moreover, overall, the museums attracted the most people.
Rose for musical theater, but declined for dramatic theater.
Rose for classical music and jazz, but declined for opera.
Declined for both modern dance and classical dance. (9)

The attendance patterns of these proven culture consumers differed from those found in surveys of our general population that also included those who did not attend arts events. Their attendance at museums, classical music, and jazz events rose. However, opera and classical dance also showed declines among the culture consumers.

Data from Surveyed Arts Organizations. These surveys have some important built in potentials for significant errors. First, they use samples of orchestras, museums, opera companies, theater companies, etc. The question of how representative each sample is always is an issue. The response rates among smaller venues in each group, for example, has had a substantial variation that has impacted on findings. Second, the surveys are then used to extrapolate to the entire arts sector and this can also bring in errors. For example, the Theatre Communications Group (TCG) represents 1,750 nonprofit theatres. Its annual report for 2015 on aggregate attendance, average capacity utilization, tickets sold, packaging and pricing was based on the responses of 198 theatres. The results of that survey were then extrapolated out to the 1,750 theatres that are assumed to be the entire nonprofit theatre universe. Another issue is which events are being included in an organizations counts. For instance, orchestras and dance companies can have traditional concerts, but also educational and community outreach events. Often just attendance at the traditional concerts is counted.

The table below shows that two types of for-profit performing arts events – Broadway shows and touring Broadway shows – basically came through the Great Recession with larger audiences. However, as noted earlier, attendance at movie theaters — that are also for-profit ventures — declined during this period.

Consistent with surveys of the general public’s (not the culture choir’s) participation in the arts, the surveys of arts organizations found shrinking audiences for art museums and operas in 2010 as compared to 2003, and by 2013 they had not rebounded.

SYMPHONY ORCHESTRAS. Contrary to the surveys of the public, the surveys of organizations that manage symphony orchestras and nonprofit theaters in the Arts Index data show significant attendance rebounds from 2010 in 2013 and growth from 2003. It is useful to take a closer look at them.

The symphony attendance went from an index value of 0.94 in 2010 to 1.15 in 2013, while the nonprofit theatres went from .90 to 1.02. The Arts Index explains that the increase in symphony orchestra attendance counts in 2013 “reflects higher response rates to the League (of American Orchestra’s) survey among small orchestras, which have above-average levels of attendance at community engagement and education events” (10). These events, that often are contrasted with “core events,” are regularly uncounted. As the Arts Index, 2016 Report notes: “Much symphony, theatre, dance, and opera activity is offered in educational and community settings to large audiences. Those audiences, however, are not systematically counted” (11). The Arts Index apparently includes such counts when available.

In 2016, the League issued an important report that recognized a significant decline in its core audience between 2010 and 2014:

“Overall, audiences declined by 10.5% between 2010 and 2014…, broadly in line with other performing arts sectors…. This decline was sharpest within tour audiences, which decreased by almost 50% over the five-year period” (12).

However, it proudly proclaimed in the same report that:

“Over the same time period, the symphony has become more accessible to a wider range of people, with the average ticket prices dropping, free attendance rising, and orchestras engaging large and diverse audiences through a range of education and community engagement programming” (13).

The decline in tour audiences suggests that the orchestras had severely reduced drawing power for smaller concert venues in smaller communities.

That report made a number of other points that also illuminate the position many performing arts companies may find themselves in these days:

Free Activities. “In 2014, free attendance at orchestra performances, activities, and other musical events was at its highest point in the previous five-year period, and the lowest ticket prices offered were at their cheapest and most affordable level.” (14)
“Approximately one in four performances, musical activities, and events offered by League member orchestras was delivered free of charge to audiences and participants, each year from 2010 to 2014.”
“Opportunities for audiences to attend both (community engagement and education programs) and symphony performances for free increased over the five-year period. Indeed, by 2014, 15% of all audience members for “core performances” (a term used to refer to all performances excluding those given on tour or within the orchestra’s community engagement and education programs) were attending without charge.”
Lower Admission Fees. “Over the same time period, the cost of attending paid-for orchestra performances became more accessible to a wider public. Specifically, League member orchestras dropped the price of their most expensive tickets by 30% between 2010 and 2014, and that of their least expensive tickets by 12%, on average.”
Financial Stress Remains. “Despite this drop in ticket prices — but broadly in line with other performing arts sectors — 60% of the 65 League member orchestras reporting data to the OSR reported a drop in overall attendance, between 2010 and 2014….”

Free admissions and lower ticket prices are apparently needed, yet unable to stabilize attendance. Both, however, are likely to place the arts organizations under increased financial stress and with a greater need for contributed incomes. Yet, the biggest benefits that these symphony, theatre, dance, and opera companies may provide in smaller communities may result from their free admissions and community engagement and education programs.

NONPROFIT THEATRES. These arts organizations were having attendance problems well before the Great Recession. Again using the Arts Index data, with attendance in 2003 equaling an index value of one, the annual index scores for nonprofit theatres between 2004 and 2008 were 0.94, 0.95, 0.89 and 0.90. However, in 2012 attendance had surged to 1.07, though it declined to 1.02 in 2013.

In 2016, the Theatre Communications Group, the industry organization for nonprofit theatres, issued a major report that noted: “Attendance is an ongoing challenge and serious concern for theatres” (15). Between 2011 and 2015, attendance peaked in 2012, but then entered into several years of modest decline. Over these five years, total attendance dropped by -3.6%; -2.7% for resident audiences, and a more significant -14.1% for touring audiences. These declines occurred despite an increased number of performances for both resident and touring audiences (16).

The audience decline for the theatres is an admitted serious concern, but it has not been as severe as it has been for the orchestras, especially for touring performances. It is also interesting to compare them along a few other dimensions:

As with the orchestras, nonprofit theatres have a significant number of free admissions. Three to four percent of all performances are free (compared to 25% for orchestras) and 10% of their resident audiences attended free of charge (compared to 15% for orchestras). (17)
Community outreach and education activities are also important for the theatres, though they charge fees for them that are a significant revenue source. However, much of this outreach and educational activity appears to be related to “training,” for which fees may be expected by participants.
In contrast to the orchestras, nonprofit theaters increased their admission fees between 2011 and 2015: 11.4% for subscriptions, 12.3% for single tickets (18). This might be because theatre ticket prices have been lower or perceived as more affordable by potential audience members than orchestra ticket prices. Or it might be because theatres are less interested in trying to attract less affluent potential audience members.

Some Observations:

Fluctuations in annual attendance are to be expected at performing and visual arts events, much as any business has fluctuations in customer traffic and sales. Additionally, just as businesses were adversely impacted by the Great Recession, so were nonprofit arts organizations.
However, most of the performing and visual arts have had relatively unsteady and slow recoveries in attendance from the recession.
This struggle has continued despite significant population growth over the past two decades. Two possible explanations are: they simply have become less popular generally or they may not be winning over as many young people and immigrants as they did in the past.
Another troubling factor about arts attendance is that there seems to have been a critical and steady decline in the number of people who frequently attend arts events. For example, Culture Track’s surveys found that in 2007, 31% of its culturally engaged respondents reported attending three or more events per month, but in 2011 that number had fallen to 22% and in 2014 it was only 15% (19). The arts’ core consumer base appears to be shrinking.
The degree to which potential audience levels at brick and mortar arts venues have been clipped permanently by electronic consumption channels is still unclear, but such a diversion probably has occurred. For example, Culture Track’s 2014 survey found that about 8% of its respondents reported less frequent attendance at cultural events, because they were “experiencing culture in alternative ways” (20).
Some types of performing arts, however, have demonstrated a significant ability to quickly rebound from the recession and to sustain meaningful audience growth in the post-recession years. These performing arts are conventionally seen as popular entertainments – e.g., salsa music, R&B, rap, hip hop, etc. Those that have struggled most are those often associated with high culture or affluent audiences: e.g., opera, ballets, symphony orchestras.
In this dynamically changing environment, it is important that arts venues and arts organizations in our smaller communities know who their potential audience members are, what types of arts they are likely to consume, and the spending power they likely would bring with them.
To win and maintain broader community support, they also should be prepared to provide a significant amount of community outreach and education activities as well as a significant number of free admissions. Doing this will likely increase their need for contributed incomes significantly.

Arts/Cultural Venues and Organizations, For-Profit or Nonprofit, Are in the Entertainment Business

Unless they have a sufficient base of very rich, very culturally superior and very socially snobby people to comfortably support them, any arts or cultural organization should guard against coming across to the public as having those attributes. Not only is it morally offensive, it’s bad for business and their survival.

People engage in cultural activities for basic reasons of personal enjoyment and social conviviality. For example, Culture Track’s 2014 survey found that the strongest reason its large sample of people who attend cultural events gave for making cultural activities a part of their lives was that they were entertaining and enjoyable, 93%. It was followed by being able to spend time with friends and family, 83% (21).

Also, as was noted above, the performing arts that are conventionally seen as popular entertainments are precisely those that have done best over the past decade. In many small and medium-sized communities, their successful performing arts centers (PACs) or theatres have recognized this fact and structured their programs accordingly.

Event Content and Admission Cost Drive Individual Attendance Decisions

Culture Track’s 2014 survey investigated the positive and negative elements – termed motivators and barriers – that are involved in an individual’s decision-making about attending cultural events. It listed many factors. However, as can be seen in the table below, event content and admission cost stand out because they rank either first or second among both the motivators for and the barriers to attendance. Content is the most important motivator of attendance; event cost is the most important barrier.

The above discussion of arts audience admissions delved into the popularity of different types of arts event content as well as their fluctuations and uncertainties. In the first article in this series, considerable attention was focused on the need for arts venues/organizations to have strong “arts products.” If an arts organization/venue is to succeed, it must certainly provide the types of events that local arts consumers want and enjoy.

The Culture Track survey also shows that the desirable arts product must also be provided at a price that people can afford.

Affordability is a function of the product’s price and the consumers’ incomes. Those with higher incomes obviously can afford more things. The table below shows that households in the top income quintile account for 54.8% of all household expenditures for entertainment fees and admissions — that includes those for arts/cultural events. The top 40% of households by income account for 75.4% of all entertainment fees and admissions expenditures. For smaller communities that want to develop strong arts venues that draw significant audiences, the distributions of household incomes in their market areas should be significant factors in determining their admissions price structures.

The Content – Ticket Price Connection. This is very important: people will be willing to spend more for content they really like. They also are less likely to spend much on tickets for events with content they are unfamiliar with or dislike. This connection is aptly illustrated in this quote from a report from the Wallace Foundation:

“I can see myself paying $100 for a show I’ve wanted to see for a long time, but not more than $50-60 for a normal show, and really more like $20 to 30 if I can.” (22).

Impact of Deliberate Consumers. Americans have suffered from wage stagnation for decades and the Great Recession sparked a wave of more deliberate and conservative consumer behaviors (23). Though this more deliberate consumption has eased somewhat with economic recovery, it still remains very strong among middle-income households and even continues to impact on luxury retail purchases. It also has had its impacts on attendance at arts events. For example, Culture Track’s 2014 survey found that 40% of the respondents reported attending fewer culture events because of economic conditions, and among them:

82% reduced expenses across the board
51% cut back on leisure activities
51% reprioritized their expenditures of leisure time and money
20% experienced culture in alternative ways (24).

Some Ticket Prices. Expectations about ticket prices often are higher than they actually are. In one study, for an actual ticket costing $20:

Millennials estimated it would cost $44.57
Gen Xers estimated it would cost $34.00
Boomers estimated it would cost $29.05. (25)

Generally, smaller communities have arts organizations with smaller audiences and smaller budgets – and lower ticket prices, as demonstrated in the table below that shows ticket prices for 38 opera companies by the sizes of their annual budgets.

A good benchmark for setting ticket prices is the average cost of going to the movies in the local entertainment market area. In 2016, the average ticket price was $8.65 nationally, with significant local variations. Throw in about $ 4.50 for popcorn and another $4.50 for a soda and that brings the total up to about $19.00. The more seats that are available near that price, the larger the potential audience — though admission revenues may well decrease.

Online visits to several museums, theaters and performing arts centers in smaller communities showed:

Museums generally have admission fees of $20 or less, with lower fees for students, children, and seniors. Not much different than $25 at MoMA in NYC or $20 at the Art Institute of Chicago for local residents.
Tickets for performing arts events ranged from $20 for a play done by a local theater company located in a small rural town, to around $40 to $65 for music concerts in larger rural regional centers, and to a range of between $108 and $1,748 for a seat at a Tom Jones concert at a PAC in a large, densely populated and relatively affluent suburban regional area.

A very important determinant of an arts venue pricing structure may be the definition of its primary mission. If it is to serve residents of the surrounding community and enhance their quality of life, then it will likely have inherent pressures to have lower prices and more free performances that incentivize greater community attendance. If, on the other hand, the venue/organization is tasked with enhancing the area’s prestige or to draw more affluent visitors into its district, then its targeted audiences and pricing structure would likely be quite different.

The Social Aspects of Attendance

Going to arts events with friends and family is an important motivator for attendance. Culture Track’s 2014 survey found that 83% of their proven culture consumer respondents cited spending time with friends and family as an important reason for their engagement in cultural activities. It also found, as displayed in an above table, that:

83% said they were motivated to attend cultural events because they were invited by family or friends.
73% were motivate because their spouse/partner was interested (26).

A report on building Millennial audiences done for the Wallace Foundation found that socializing and having someone to go with are important factors when they decide whether or not to attend an arts event (27). Culture Track 2014 found that: ” Millennials are far less likely than older generations to go to a cultural activity if it means going alone.”

This behavior pattern explains why arts venues can be such important elements in a downtown’s Central social District and why it will probably become even more important as Millennials age.

The Rising Importance of the Millennial and Minority Market Segments

Our nation is changing demographically. Minority populations are growing rapidly and projections indicate that within about three decades, the white population will be a minority. The largest growth has been among Hispanics. Also, Millennials recently became the largest age group in our population, supplanting the Baby Boomers. The fact that their entry into adulthood has been heavily stamped by effects of the Great Recession means very significant changes are appearing in consumer behaviors – and that includes the consumption of arts products.

Minorities. One of the best windows on the importance of the minority market segments is to look at attendance in movie theaters.

It is amazing how infrequently movie theaters are mentioned when the enhancement of downtown arts offerings is under discussion. Nevertheless, they are often critical cornerstones of many downtown entertainment niches and Central Social Districts. Unfortunately, their future, especially in smaller communities, remains uncertain, even though lots of small cinemas recently successfully dealt with the threatening need to adapt to the digital distribution and projection of films. Besides the presence of a number of Hollywood moguls who want to dump movie theaters as a distribution channel, theater owners are increasingly adopting a strategy that will lead to significantly higher picket prices. It is seen as the best way to cope with declining attendance.

For example, the number of movie tickets sold in 2016 was 86% of the 2003 sales (see above table). On the other hand, gross revenues from ticket sales had increased by 123%, and ticket prices had jumped by 143%, about 12% higher than inflation. To deal with declining attendance, theaters owners have determined that their financial future rests on offering more amenities – big leather reclining seats, terraced seating, restaurant type food and drink, 3D and IMAX screens, etc. – for which they can charge higher fees. The viability of such a strategy is most problematic in smaller market areas from the perspectives of both the theater owner and movie goers. For more on this see: https://www.ndavidmilder.com/2014/05/downtown-formal-entertainment-venues-part-4-movie-theaters

Movie attendance, however, has not been uniform across all ethnic groups. As can bee seen in the table above, between 2012 -2016, the average per capita movie attendance of African Americans, 3.86, Hispanics, 5.46, and Asians, 4.90 were higher than that of Caucasians, 3.36.

This, of course, is also reflected in annual ticket sales:

Although African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians only account for about 38% of the US population, they account for 49% of the movie tickets sold.
Caucasians represent 62% of the population, but account for 51% of the tickets sold.
Hispanics over the five-year period accounted for 21% of the tickets sold, but in 2012 they accounted for over 30%.
The trend is for minority movie attendance to grow and for Caucasian movie attendance to decline.

One might wonder where many movie theater operators would be today without their ethnic minority patrons?

Movies are an art form that can attract minorities with relative ease compared to many other performing arts for three reasons:

It is familiar to them. Even if they are immigrants. They do not have to learn what they are about.
It is relatively very affordable.
It is probably easy for minority patrons to go to a movie with friends and family, because prices are affordable and cinemas are probably relatively easy to get to.

However, as the growth of Salsa and Spanish music, Rap and Hip Hop suggest, the influence of these minority groups will have an increasing impact on our art forms in the future as jazz and rhythm and blues did in the past. Of course, as their population sizes and household incomes increase, so will their impacts on visual and performing arts audiences.

Millennials. In 2015, Millennials (e.g., those aged 20 to 36 in 2017) became the nation’s largest living generation, then numbering 75.4 million people. Baby Boomers (aged 53-71) were the second largest, with 74.9 million (28). While the Boomers have far more purchasing power, they are aging out. The Millennials, many of whom had the early years of their careers and incomes hindered by the Great Recession, the slow growth of our economy over the past decade and/or very burdensome student loans have started to have their major impacts on our economy — and on the arts. Moreover, their run is only in its early stages and it will be a long one.

As was noted above, the affordability of ticket prices is a key factor in individual decisions about attending arts events and in the determination of the sizes of arts audiences. The levels of household incomes and discretionary dollars structure how much individuals can pay for arts admissions. A report issued by the Wallace Foundation found that compared to prior generations at similar ages, Millennials are more financially challenged:

They have lower annual earnings.
They have lower net worth.
Higher percentages of them have student loans and the loan amounts are much higher (29).
It is unlikely that these lags in earning and net worth compared to prior generations will disappear even as their careers mature.

The Wallace Foundation study also looked at attendance by 18 to 34-year-olds in 1992, 2002 and 2012. There were declines in all of the studied performing arts: theatre-musicals, jazz, non-musical plays, classical music, dance (non-ballet), ballet and opera. What is interesting is that save for opera, all the others were already in decline in 2002 when compared to 1992 (30). The performing arts’ problem with attracting young adult audiences apparently is not that new.

Culture Track’s 2014 survey found that Millennials was the generation that attended the most events per month and that had the most folks who frequently attended cultural events, i.e., 3+/mo (31). However, since that survey also found that the number of frequent cultural consumers had declined by half since 2014, it is likely that their number has also declined significantly among Millennials compared to prior generations when they were of the same ages.

Ticket pricing will probably have a big affect on an arts venue’s ability to attract Millennial patrons. These venues also will have to compete with other entertainment events that may be more affordable. Moreover, Millennials – who grew up using the Internet and digital devices – are more likely to consume art products digitally, and those arts products are also likely to have the advantages of lower costs and greater convenience.

The competition for Millennials’ attention, time and money when it comes to entertainment can be pretty fierce. Arts venues and the organizations that mange them in our smaller communities must be ready and able to compete.

Endnotes.

1) National Endowment for the Arts. How A Nation Engages With Art. Highlights From The 2012 Survey Of Public Participation In The Arts. https://www.arts.gov/publications/how-nation-engages-art-highlights-2012-survey-public-participation-arts-sppa . Hereafter referred to as NEA12.

2) N. David Milder. Downtown Movie Theaters Will Be Increasingly In Peril. February 24, 2008. See: https://www.ndavidmilder.com/2008/02/downtown-movie-theaters-will-be-increasingly-in-peril . Hereafter referred to as Movies08

3) Data from the Met’s website.

4) Ali Hortac?su and Chad Syverson. “The Ongoing Evolution Of US Retail: A Format Tug-Of-War,” National Bureau Of Economic Research, Working Paper 21464, http://www.nber.org/papers/w21464, August 2015, pp. 33, p.24

5) Data from http://boxofficemojo.com/yearly/

6) See Movies08

7) Motion Picture Association of America. “Theatrical Market Statistics 2013.” P.2. http://www.mpaa.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/MPAA-Theatrical-Market-Statistics-2013_032514-v2.pdf

8) LaPlaca Cohen and Campbell Rinker. Culture Track 14, p.2. http://culturetrack.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Culture_Track_2014_Supporting_Data.pdf Hereafter referred to as CT14

9) ibid. p.7

10) Roland J. Kushner and Randy Cohen, National Arts Index 2016, p. 71. Americans for the Arts. http://www.americansforthearts.org/by-program/reports-and-data/legislation-policy/naappd/national-arts-index-an-annual-measure-of-the-vitality-of-arts-and-culture-in-the-united-states-2016. Hereafter referred to as NAI16.

11) ibid.

12) Zannie Giraud Voss, Glenn B. Voss, Karen Yair with Kristen Lega. “Orchestra Facts: 2006-2014. A Study of Orchestra Finances and Operations, Commissioned by the League of American Orchestras” November 2016, p.1. https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/Research-Art-Works-League.pdf

13) ibid. p.7.

14) ibid. All of the points in this series of bullets come from pages 4-7.

15) Zannie Giraud Voss and Glenn B. Voss, with Ilana B. Rose and Laurie Baskin. Theatre Facts 2015: A Report On The Fiscal State Of The U.S. Professional Not-For-Profit Theatre Field. Theatre Communications Group. 2016, pp. 37. P 10.. http://www.tcg.org/pdfs/tools/TCG_TheatreFacts_2015.pdf

16) ibid.

17) ibid.

18) ibid. p.11.

19) CT14, p.9.

20) ibid. p.12

21) ibid p.25

22) “Building Millennial Audiences: Barriers and Opportunities.” The Wallace Foundation, Building Audiences for Sustainability January 2017. Analysis Conducted by Marketing Research Professionals, Inc. Pp.51, p. 21. Hereafter referred to as Wallace.

23) See: https://www.ndavidmilder.com/downtown-revitalization/the-deliberate-consumer

24) CT14, p.13

25) Wallace, p.22

26)CT14, p. 25

27) Wallace, pp.23-25

28) Richard Fry. “Millennials overtake Baby Boomers as America’s largest generation. FACTTANK. Pew Research Center. April 25, 2016. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/04/25/millennials-overtake-baby-boomers/

29) Wallace p.9

30) ibid., p.14

31) CT14, pp. 10-11.

Let’s Get Real About: The Impacts of the Arts on Smaller Downtowns. The Arts As An Important Downtown Revitalization Tool — Redux. Part 2

Posted on July 13, 2017 by DANTH

By N. David Milder

Introduction

My intent in this article is to help increase the understanding among downtown leaders and stakeholders (downtowners) in communities with populations under 25,000 about the potential impacts that the arts can have on their districts as well as the types of research techniques and data that should be used in assessing those impacts. (However, much of the content also is applicable to downtowns in larger communities.) Hopefully, such an improved understanding will lead to more realistic expectations, consequent better planning, and more successful arts projects and programs. Optimistically, it will also enable downtowners to more accurately assess just how strong an economic engine the arts can be for their downtowns.

Downtown Arts Impact Studies Should Be Structured to Meet the Needs of Downtown Leaders and Stakeholders as Well as The Arts Organization’s Board and Its Donors.

If downtown arts venues cannot have positive benefits for their districts, then they might as well be located anywhere else in their counties or regions. As a result, the concerns of downtowners should be addressed in any studies of arts venues’ economic impacts. Art organizations that do not do that are being extremely disrespectful to their neighbors – and some of their staunchest political supporters. Of course, these organizations may simply fear that they have insufficient positive impacts on their district and do not want that known.

I have done 20 downtown assignments in which possible arts projects and programs were important elements. I cannot remember a single downtowner raising the issues of how much the proposed arts entity would buy from downtown businesses, or how many new jobs they would create or their ability to raise household incomes in the whole community or county. In my experience, downtowners, in municipalities of all sizes, are primarily interested in how a new arts venture might affect:

Downtown Businesses. What would their audiences spend in their districts and how would that affect downtown businesses, especially retailers, restaurants, and hotels? Would it attract strong new businesses or strengthen existing merchants? What would happen in the county or city as a whole are at an entirely different level of concern for them.
Downtown Properties. Very importantly, how would a new downtown art venue affect the rents, occupancy rates, appraised values and real estate taxes of nearby downtown properties? Would it spark nearby building improvements and new construction?
How the Downtown Works. Would new arts venues raise the level of pedestrian traffic and increase the numbers of the downtown’s out-of-town visitors and persistent local users? Or improve their attitudes toward and perceptions of the downtown, while also having positive effects on the downtown’s appearance, walkability, traffic congestion and parking needs?

If I am correct and the above describes fairly accurately the information most downtowners would like to have, then those needs should heavily influence what an economic impact study of a downtown arts entity should cover. These needs are a lot more fine–grained than some often used impact methodologies can produce.

Some may argue that things like visitor attitudes, the district’s physical appearance, its walkability, traffic, and parking do not strictly fall under the purview of an economic analysis. Yet, those factors have important influences on site selection, the operations of many downtown firms, and the critically important downtown visitation rate. To deny their inclusion in a purported economic study seems plainly dogmatic and idiotic. Of course, the best thing to do is not to take my word, but to ask your own involved downtowners about the types of impacts – current or potential –they want to learn about.

Limitations of Input-Output Models for Downtowners. At the regional, county or multi-zip code level, these models can estimate how many arts audience expenditure dollars will be captured by business operations and how they then will re-spend those dollars. However, they have the following strong deficiencies for downtowners:

They cannot be applied to geographies as small as the vast majority of our downtowns. They just don’t work at that level since the needed data are too iffy or unavailable.
Even more importantly, they cannot ever say anything about how arts audience expenditures influenced: business expansion, the opening of new businesses, higher rents and property values, improved property conditions, etc. They cannot address most of the information needs of business people on these issues even if their concerns would be at the regional or county level, where these models are most easily applied.

Arts Advocacy Efforts May Have Different Information Needs. A very important reason that impact studies of downtown arts venues and organizations have not been driven more by downtowner information needs is that they mostly have been undertaken for advocacy reasons. They accordingly tried to meet the information needs of the government officials, foundations and large corporations who would provide needed donations and/or permissions and approvals. The need of arts organization leaders to respond to donor needs and government approvers is certainly understandable, and input-output models and the variables they can address are often well suited for doing that.

Impacts Involve Senders, Receivers, and Re-Senders: It’s Very Important to Know Their Characteristics.

Impacts are relationships that involve two basic types of entities: the “sender” that causes the impact and the “receiver” that is being influenced by it. The sender has outputs. They turn into impacts when they are absorbed by a receiver. For example, a new theater’s audience generates more customers and higher revenues for nearby restaurants. The receivers can then become “re-senders,” passing along part of that impact to still other receivers: e.g., the restaurants increase their orders to their wholesale food suppliers. The I-O models used in many impact analyses recognize and quantify these types of relationships among the variables they can analyze. This is a simple example of “the multiplier effect’ of any economic activity.

Problems are generated when analysts focus too much on the impact senders and their acts of sending and fail to analyze the presence and ability of the impact receivers to catch and absorb what is being thrown to them. For example, if a small downtown does not have any restaurants, then there is no entity present that can catch the new audience’s dining dollars. If there are some restaurants, but they are of low quality, have a bad reputation, few seats, or are open only for breakfast and lunch, etc., then they probably will not capture many of the audience’s dining dollars. Ignorance about potential impact receivers’ characteristics is particularly dangerous when analysts are trying to identify the potential positive impacts of a new arts project or program. Estimating what the new arts endeavor will throw off is hard enough, but an equally important question is how much of it the receivers are likely to capture.

Sometimes, what a sender is emitting is so strong that it can induce the attraction, creation or expansion of a receiver. For example, a new small town theater is a big hit and attracts a large audience that generates enough potential diners that someone opens a new restaurant. That may sound simple but may not happen all that easily. A typical full-service restaurant nationally will need sales of between $150 PSF and $250 PSF to break even. A restaurant with 1,500 SF would need annual sales of between $275.000 to $375,000 to make it; one with 2,500 SF would need between $375,000 to $625,000 (1). Among a sample of 23 communities with populations below 25,000 (more about these towns below), the median amount of expenditures for meals and drinks generated by their arts events’ audiences was $994,542. The 1,500 SF eatery would need to capture between 15% and 25% of the audience expenditures for meals and drinks; the 2,500 SF restaurant between 38% and 63%. Of course, other consumer expenditure factors might also come into play in the determination of whether a new restaurant will open, e.g., the incomes, spending habits and preferences of the local trade area’s residents and non-resident members of the downtown’s daytime population. Furthermore, my research suggests that in communities with populations under 3,000, it is somewhat easier for a restaurant to enter a market because they only need a relatively small market share to survive financially. However, the quality of the food and service at such a restaurant may not be comparatively high. Such factors further underscore the point that just knowing how much the audience will spend is a very necessary, but insufficient step for determining arts venues’/events’ impacts on the downtowns they are located in. Analyzing the impact’s receivers and the environment in which they are located is also essential.

Additionally, sometimes what the impact sender is emitting is too weak to have much effect on a receiver. For example, the Country Gate Theater in Belvidere, NJ, (population around 2,600) has seating for 200 and 15 performances scheduled for its 2017 season. If they were completely sold out, the total audience would be 3,000 people. If every audience member spent $10.20 (the average for arts audiences in 23 towns with populations under 25,000, more about them below) in local eateries, the total potential direct impact on local restaurants would be about $30,600. That’s not a lot, even though I’ve optimized the scenario. Also, it’s capture will be potentially split among the local eateries – and others more distant.

Theaters and PACS in communities with populations in the 15,000 to 35,000 range that I surveyed online had seasons with 80 to 90 performances. Some theaters are only open during the summer months, while others, to the contrary, have heavily reduced schedules. Many museums in smaller towns are only open one to three days a week; others only have those sorts of schedules in the warmer months and are otherwise closed. When these arts venues are dark, they generate no customer traffic or spending for other downtown businesses.

Impacts Seldom Occur in Isolation: There Are Usually Multiple Senders (Causes).

The renovated Bryant Park in Midtown Manhattan – a venue for many performing arts events such as outdoor movies, plays, dance and music concerts – has had impressive positive impacts on its surrounding neighborhood. In no small measure this is because it has been able to “mobilize the neighborhood,” i.e., it strengthens and mobilizes other existing nearby impacting forces.

As illustrated in the above diagram, first, Bryant Park had positive impacts on two existing buildings: the Grace Building, and the American Radiator Building that later turned into the Bryant Park Hotel. Then these three entities all had positive impacts on the construction of 1 Bryant Park (BoA) and years later the four entities all helped stimulate the construction of 7 Bryant Park. Notably, both the Grace and American Radiator buildings had inherent strengths and magnetism, so they could benefit significantly from the area’s improved image and higher visitor traffic induced by Bryant Park’s renovation. The new construction of One and Seven Bryant Park was facilitated by the renovated park and the more desirable Grace and American Radiator buildings through both direct and indirect causal paths. Bryant Park’s renovation, because of the quality of the office building stock, was able to “mobilize the neighborhood” and help induce new construction. As time passes, and the neighborhood further improves, Bryant Park’s impacts will become more and more indirect, while other important entities appear that are also exerting positive impacts of their own as well as passing along indirectly some of Bryant Park’s influence.

This is important: if the nearby buildings had been in worse condition, the park’s renovation would have had far less impact on their rents, occupancy rates, and capital value. That implies that if a replica of Bryant Park was created in a far more decayed environment, the magnitude of its impacts would probably be significantly less because it would have far weaker neighborhood “co-impacters” to affect and mobilize.

Because so many impact studies are done to advocate support for a particular arts organization or a specific arts project, their focus is all too often on the present or future benefits produced by them. However, in the real world, arts organizations and projects are likely to have favorable impacts on a downtown only if a number of other forces are involved that also have important impacts. In many instances, their impacts will be greater than those of the arts entity. The impacts of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (LCPA) on the Lincoln Square neighborhood are instructive.

Impact studies have rightly claimed that Lincoln Center influenced a great influx of housing units that then attracted a good deal of retail development. What the studies failed to note was the nearby presence of Central Park, the Hudson River, several busy subway stations and the Midtown Manhattan CBD. Each, individually, may have had a stronger impact on residential development than the LCPA – especially the renovated and revitalized Central Park. Combined, these four factors definitely had far, far greater impact than the LCPA on neighborhood housing development. However, and strategically important, the physical development of the LCPA probably sparked the initiation of the neighborhood’s housing resurgence. It took down many decayed structures and replaced them with buildings filled with uses that brought into the neighborhood a lot of more affluent and well-educated people. That may have been its most important role in the neighborhood’s impressive resurgence.

LCPA’s direct impact through its audience’s spending on retail probably has been relatively modest. Residential growth probably has had the strongest direct impact on Lincoln Square’s retail. LCPA undoubtedly also had some indirect impacts on retail via its direct impacts on housing.

Why is this important? If you are trying to figure out what the impacts of your proposed arts endeavor will be, it is important to identify the other factors, both positive and negative, that might be in play. They can make a critical difference in determining whether a potential impact is likely to happen or not, its magnitude, and if it is likely to be beneficial or harmful. Also, if you are thinking of making the arts the engine of your downtown revitalization, maybe you need to include some other engines as well!

Determining The Impacts Of An Existing Arts Project Or Program Is Much Easier And More Accurate Than Determining The Impacts Of One Being Proposed.

There is an obvious and simple explanation for this, but it still needs to be stated because it is such an important point: the existing projects and programs will have a lot of essential data on admissions, ticket sales, overall revenues and expenses, building and land costs, etc. Estimates must be made for proposed projects and programs and though they may be produced through diligent work, they still will have significant built-in potentials for substantial errors. Finding comparables to use in estimating the impacts of new projects is not easy since there is often a lot of variation in the aforementioned types of information among arts organizations, even those in communities of roughly similar size. Additionally, such estimates are often the foundation for other estimates, so one substantial initial error can undermine the entire quantitative analysis.

It is best to treat such estimates for new arts endeavors as having ballpark accuracy and reliability and stating so frequently in reports, press releases, etc. I would argue that impact analysts should exercise great prudence in stating their findings and overtly acknowledge the potentials for errors. When dealing with the future, analytical modesty and caution are always in order. PR puff is an enemy.

Accurate Information About Downtown Arts Audiences’ Expenditures Is Essential If An Impact Analysis Is To Be Accurate And Useful.

Americans for the Arts (AftA) has just published an enormous amount of valuable information about arts organizations in 250 study areas around the nation (2). For this article, I have extracted information for 23 that are in towns with populations in the 1,500 to 25,000 range. AftA groups together town, city and county study areas with populations under 50,000. However, to me and to some other economic development specialists I conferred with, the 25,000 population threshold more truly focuses on the smaller communities this article is primarily aimed at. The table below shows the expenditure components in their 2015 budgets as well as their audiences’ expenditures. Total organization expenditures and total audience expenditures are two key data inputs in AftA’s impact analyses for each of these communities. They represent the very important direct impacts. If you go to http://www.americansforthearts.org/by-program/reports-and-data/research-studies-publications/arts-economic-prosperity-5/use/arts-economic-prosperity-5-calculator you can get a ballpark estimate of the event related audience spending of your arts organization by providing three pieces of information: town size; its total expenses and its total audience. However, these estimates should be treated as very ballpark since they are not based on a survey of your arts venue’s audience, but on “the average dollars spent per person, per event by cultural attendees in similarly populated communities” as revealed by surveys in those communities.

Arts Organization Spending. The table shows that total organizational expenditures average about $5.6 million or 44% of the combined total, though the median is about $2.6 million, or 52% of the combined total. That suggests the organizational expenditures are more important among the smaller organizations. Such expenditures are substantial and obviously an important channel through which the economic impacts of these arts organizations flow. However, an essential question is how many of those expenditures are likely to go to downtown businesses? The basic geographic unit of analysis AftA uses, counties, does not facilitate generating an answer.

One approach to answering this question is to assess the likelihood of the arts organizations’ expenditure items having related vendors located in their downtowns that can capture them. The above table shows how the Paramount Theater in Rutland, VT, spent its money in 2014. Of the $1,480,086 in expenditures, about 57% was for performance expenses (mostly for out-of-town talent) and 19.9% for salaries (most of which probably was not spent in the downtown because it does not dominate the city’s economic activities.) Of the remaining 24%, the associated line items potentially can be captured by downtown firms, but the Paramount’s CPA, for example, is not officed downtown and most of its other business and professional services vendors probably are not as well. I have also looked at the expenditures of several art museums around the nation and they show a similar story regarding the likelihood of nearby firms capturing their organizational expenditures. Moreover, many of them were not located in their downtown and were too big to be easily accommodated in one. I fear downtowns, especially the smaller ones, are highly unlikely to capture any large proportions of their downtown arts organizations’ expenditures because they have thin business mixes. Moreover, even in large cities, many of the vendors serving arts venues are not located in their neighborhoods. For example, much of the scenery and costumes for Broadway shows in NYC are created or stored in NJ, Brooklyn and other parts of Manhattan.

It should not be burdensome for an arts organization to identify its vendors who are located in its downtown and to total its payments to those vendors in a way that preserves anonymity. They might use their IRS Form 990 responses as a report structure. If they cannot do that, then a lot of other questions should immediately be asked of its managers.

Arts Audience Spending. The AftA data above shows that, on average, the expenditures of the audiences of the 23 smaller town arts organizations were larger, about $7 million, than those of the organizations themselves, about $5.6 million. That is the channel through which most downtown arts venues potentially can impact local businesses.

The best research tool for getting information about what the audience expenditures purchase is a survey based on a significantly large number of interviews. I would suggest at least 600 respondents are needed, the more the better. However, such surveys are notoriously hard to do because respondents’ memories of non-repetitive expenditures, such as how much they paid for dinner last night, or smaller incidental items, are likely to quickly fade. The surveys also can be expensive to conduct. The best approach is to do intercept surveys at arts events and ask about expenditures that happened within the last day. AftA has developed a good questionnaire to use that is available on its website, though downtown organizations might want to amend it somewhat to reveal expenditures made in their districts. With a bit of good training, staff or volunteers can administer it at local arts events. Of course, the questionnaires then have to be made machine readable and properly analyzed. The latter can require professional expertise and experience.

Some of our nation’s most prestigious arts organizations have had studies conducted of their impacts that –done on the cheap, quick or easy — were based on surveys carried out neither by them nor the research firms they hired, but by still other organizations with unrelated research objectives in mind. Other arts impact analyses were based on surveys that were too small, poorly worded or amateurishly administered. Every other piece of analysis based on those poor audience expenditure surveys was, garbage in-garbage out, worthless. Getting a good survey done of your downtown arts organization’s audience spending is a sine qua non for getting a fairly accurate and useful analysis of your existing arts program or project. Properly planned and executed, they can be quite affordable.

Here Is A Real Problem For Downtown Arts Advocates Of New Projects Or Programs: There is no existing actual audience for your proposed arts endeavor, only a potential one of uncertain size. Still, there may be other arts events in your district or community with audiences that could be surveyed. However, if they differ in when during the day their major visitation occurs or in how long the visits last, the results would require very careful and skilled interpretation.

If there are no local audiences to survey, the estimates might be made based on what has been found in comparable communities. Finding a truly comparable community or a group of them is not an easy task– and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Audience Spending Patterns In A Sample of Smaller Towns With Populations Under 25,000.

The 23 towns I selected from the AftA data set to look at this question all are comparable in that they have populations under 25,000. However, if you look closely at the survey-based estimates of the audience’s total expenditures for meals and drinks and overnight lodgings in each study area, you find that the ranges between lows and highs are quite large. Also, looking at averages may not be the most prudent thing to do. For example, in 19 of the 23 study areas, expenditures of non-resident audience members were below the overall average for all 23; for resident spending 14 of the 23 were below average. In a normal distribution, 11 or 12 would be below the average. The medians appear to give a better indication of where most of these study area audiences are.

The table above shows the total, average and median expenditures for each audience spending category in these 23 towns. It has two parts. The top displays the results for audience members who are local residents; the bottom covers audience members who are not local residents. The results for the average smaller study area seem impressive: about $3.69 million from non-residents and roughly $3.38 million by residents. Expenditures for meals and drinks are $1.11 million and $1.39 million respectively. However, a more conservative approach is probably more prudent, since so many of the 23 study areas have below average audience spending and most other arts venues in similar communities are likely to as well. Looking instead at the estimates of total spending based on medians shows significantly lower spending levels: the average median of total spending by non-residents is around $1.03 million and about $1.1 million by residents. Spending for meals and drinks are respectively estimated at $401,488 and $593,054.

The per person spending of audience members – see above table — as might be expected, reflects the patterns displayed in the aggregate category totals. Estimates of the total per person expenditures are very interesting. For non-residents based on the means is $42.94, and $31.54 based on the medians. For residents, the estimates are $20.27 and $17.35 respectively. The per person spending for meals and drinks by non-residents averaged $13.52, with a mean of $11.12, with residents averaging $8.84, and having a median of $7.95. To put some perspective on that spending level:

In 2015, the average meal in the 22 largest family restaurant chains was around $28 per person. Red Lobster, for example, was at $20.50, Outback at $20.00 and Red Robin at $12.17 (3).
Bryant House, near the Playhouse in Weston, VT, has seven entrees on its menu that range in price from $15 to $19.
Roots, around the corner from the Paramount Theater in downtown Rutland, VT has several entrees all priced between $19 and $23.

This suggests that per person arts audience spending in these smaller communities is not relatively high. That means that to get any really significant aggregate audience expenditures, the arts venue must attract a significant number of admissions.

This is demonstrated in the table below. For each expenditure item, it simply takes estimates of the total expenditures based on averages and estimates of total expenditures based on medians at the study area level and divides them by the daily average and the daily median of per person spending. This is done for resident and non-resident audiences combined. The resulting estimates are the number of audience spending days needed to generate the total expenditures at the study area level for each expenditure item.

Planners of new arts venues in smaller communities should keep these statistics in mind when assessing their potential economic impacts. As should downtowners when advocates for new arts projects come a–calling.

The Biggest Audience Expenditures Go To Firms In Hospitality Niches. Expenditures for Clothing Are Negligible, But Those for Gifts /Souvenirs Can Be Significant.

Whether one looks at the averages or medians, data at the study area level or at the per person expenditure item level, the patterns are persistent and their strategic implications for downtown revitalization leaders are clear:

The biggest POTENTIAL impacts of art venues are through their audiences’ POTENTIAL spending in hospitality type establishments – places that provide accommodations, food, and drink. For example, per person expenditure Items associated with a hospitality niche – refreshments and snacks, meals and drinks and overnight lodging – accounted for an estimated 61.2% of the total resident audience’s spending based on study area averages and 71.7% with estimates based on medians; 66.8% and 71.3 % respectively of the non-residents’ expenditures.
Meals and drinks are the biggest single expense items (41.4% mean-based and 53.2% median based) for resident audience members and 30.3% and 38.9 respectively for the non-residents. So restaurants have the most opportunity to benefit from arts audience spending. Overnight lodging is the second biggest expense item for non-residents. (These observations are from the table above with the title starting: Categorized Audience Expenditures by Attendees).
The potential impacts of arts audience spending on retail are very narrowly focused on just a few types of retailing.There’s little to no impact on such essential small town needs as a grocery or pharmacy.
Audience spending for clothing is relatively meager. Downtown leaders should not expect such spending to help sustain their existing apparel shops or to stimulate their expansion or to attract new ones.
However, arts audience spending for “gifts” may be significant. Unfortunately, their impact paths are not easy to research. Such expenditures may HELP attract art galleries, crafts shops, bookstores or gift shops that offer an array of such products, though huge amounts of book and music sales are now on the Internet. Moreover,
such spending pales in comparison to that for food, drink, and lodging.
Valparaiso, IN, has adopted a downtown revitalization strategy based on growing its hospitality niche and strengthening its strongly related Central Social District functions. Those are potential revitalization engines that all downtowns should also seriously consider.

Examples of Arts Audience Spending Looked at With Some Additional Information About the Local Context.

From an impact perspective, behind many of the things that downtowners want to know about a potential arts endeavor is this issue: can it favorably influence the decisions of businessmen that are related to the downtown? Will it, for example, make them feel more financially secure, or spark them to expand their operations, or to open new ones? It is hard to provide the necessary answers without an assessment of these operators and the overall market conditions in which they operate. However, some indications of what those answers might be can be obtained if we look at the downtown context in which the arts venue is situated. Often helpful in putting data about arts audience expenditures into a clearer perspective is identifying:

The relevant trends affecting the downtown. For example, today apparel shops are facing strong headwinds (e.g., e-commerce and deliberate consumers) that probably will not abate any time soon.
Simply if there are currently firms in the sector being looked at and their characteristics. If there are no establishments, then the related audience expenditures cannot be captured. Starting a new firm to capture them is far more complicated than for an existing firm to do so. But, weak or badly managed firms are unlikely to capture many of these dollars and may, in fact, be on the verge of closing.
The size of the relevant audience spending compared to the annual revenues of existing firms in that sector. Business operators certainly will accept any new revenues, but for them to expand an existing operation or to open a new one, they usually have to see a very significant market opportunity
Other influential forces that cross the arts venue’s impact paths and either facilitate or hinder the ability of art audience expenditures to stimulate business expansion and attraction.

Below, I will try to do this when looking at arts audience expenditures for overnight lodgings and restaurants. For reasons of space, I will not look at the retail related expenditures, except to note here that:

They are relatively small, especially for apparel.
The gifts expenditures have fewer and fewer stores to capture them as music and book sales have gone strongly to the Internet.
The retail industry is in turmoil.
Again, note that arts audience expenditures only go to a few types of retailers.

The analysis looks at six arts venues that are located in towns with populations under 17,000. I wrote about four of them in my last article: The Weston Theater Playhouse, The Brandywine River Valley Museum, The Norman Rockwell Museum and Goodspeed Musicals. Being added are the Paramount Theater in Rutland, VT and the Country Gate Theater in Belvidere, NJ. I used averages of AftA estimates of arts audience expenditures in the 23 study areas described above to estimate those generated by these six arts venues. They are probably on the high side as a result. The data on the number of firms in a town should be treated with caution. I used Google and Yelp to make these estimates. I have more confidence in the magnitudes of these estimates than in the precise numbers. Also, I used census data on “accommodations” because that category included operations such as hostels and B&Bs as well as hotels and motels. From here on, I’ll use “hotel” to cover both.

Hotels. Most hotel chains and developers, today, shy away from smaller towns and only see as viable projects with lots of rooms that cost tens of millions of dollars. Attracting a hotel developer/chain to small towns is not impossible, but it certainly can be very, very difficult. There is, for example, at least one chain, with 90+ locations, that specializes in smaller towns. Rehabbing an existing old hotel is never cheap and seldom easy. Whatever the size of the arts audience lodgings expenditures, converting them into new or renewed hotels is unlikely to be either quick or easy.

In the above table, notice that all of the towns have accommodation operations, even those with the lowest populations. Several of these communities have operations that call themselves small hotels or inns, with as many rooms as what others might call a large B&B. However, they often also have fairly popular restaurants and bars. Stockbridge, MA, and Weston, VT, are examples. These operations can capture some arts audience meals and drinks expenditures as well as some of those for lodgings.

The audience expenditure dollars for overnight lodgings vary being between 2% and 29% of the average accommodation establishment in the counties in which these six communities are situated. They account for less than one percent of all accommodations revenues in each county. A new hotel in these communities obviously would need to tap other market segments and would not be able to capture all of the audience expenditures. Arts audience lodging expenditures could be important, if only minority revenue sources, for a hotel with average revenues in four of these towns: East Haddam, CT; Rutland, VT; Stockbridge, MA and Chadds Ford, PA. In these communities, it is probable that existing accommodation establishments are benefiting to some unknown, but a probably significant degree, from the local arts organization audience expenditures. They probably do not in Belvidere and Rutland — and for contrasting reasons. My estimate of the maximum that the County Gate Theater’s audience might spend on overnight lodgings is just $11,070. That is far too small to produce any appreciable effect on either the downtown’s hotel or the town’s highway motel. Competition in the county is relatively sparse – only 14 competitors – so the local operations would have a stronger chance of winning a good share of larger audience lodging expenditures.

The situation in Downtown Rutland (population 16,495) merits a still closer look. It demonstrates the importance that other factors can play in determining if an arts audience’s expenditures will be captured and influence business operators in a downtown. Downtown Rutland has not had a major hotel since 1980 (it has a small hiking hostel), though the city has about two million tourists passing through it annually and several motels opened in the nearby Routes 4/7 corridor. For over 40 years community leaders have tried to attract a hotel developer for “The Pit,” a vacant site where the Berwick Hotel once sat. That site is across the street from the restored Paramount Theater. A recent effort to develop a 128-room, $18 million hotel notably selected another site in the downtown. However, that proposal has been on the table for several years now. Market support, according to a consultant’s report, is not a problem. Another report suggests the project stalled because of city tax rates. I suspect other factors may be involved such as city financial incentives or the need to relocate a bank drive–through that is now on part of the site. Without that hotel, there is no downtown entity that can capture a meaningful share of the Paramount’s audience lodging expenditures

The Paramount’s annual audience of 50,000 probably throws off (based on AftA estimates) about $184,000 in expenditures for overnight lodgings. That’s only about 30% of the average annual sales of hotels/motels in Rutland County. The Paramount’s audience, by itself, plainly cannot provide the needed market support for such a hotel. It might provide some market support, but the amount would also strongly depend on the hotel’s ability to compete with the county’s other 61 hotels/motels. The stalled Rutland hotel project shows that other forces can determine whether an arts venue’s audience expenditures can have clear paths for having positive impacts on downtown businesses.

Some smaller communities with strong scenic and leisure activity assets might attract a large resort hotel, e.g., Crested Butte, CO. Otherwise, nurturing B&Bs, Airbnb units and campgrounds might be better-calibrated facilities for capturing arts generated overnight stay expenditures. This is another good example of how the existence and attributes of an impact receiver can make a big difference in determining whether any impact will be made, as well as its magnitude.

The Brandywine River Valley Museum is located in Delaware County. Of the six counties in the table, Delaware is by far the largest with a population of 558,979. It also has some of the most prestigious educational institutions in the nation: Swarthmore, Haverford, Bryn Mawr and Villanova. These factors will also generate substantial demand for hotel rooms – and restaurant tables.

Restaurants. As noted above, whether the eateries in these smaller towns can capture the arts audience expenditures for meals depends a lot on their characteristics and those of their immediate environs. It’s also important to realize that the restaurant industry today is in the midst of a significant upheaval, if not quite to the extent seen in the retail industry (see for example https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/06/its-the-golden-age-of-restaurants-in-america/530955/). Consumer preferences are changing and restaurant operators are trying desperately to keep up with them. This creates more uncertainty about any analysis of an arts audience’s impacts on restaurants.

Nevertheless, the data in the above table suggest that even in these smaller towns, arts audience expenditures may be of considerable interest to local restaurant operators.

All of these towns have at least six eateries, four of them have 14+. Furthermore, four of them have sufficient audience expenditures to support between 1.0 and 2.8 restaurants with annual revenues equal to their county’s average. Also, in those four towns, if each eatery is allotted an equal share of the audience meals dollars, they would average earning between $28,333 and $291,429 from this source. In Chadds Ford, that revenue share, $291,429, is itself above what is minimally needed to support a small 1,500 square foot eatery, $275,000. Stockbridge’s share is about 75% of that number. Those revenue shares would be 16%, 6% 39% and 40% of the average restaurant revenues in their counties. It seems reasonable to conclude that at least restaurant owners are likely to pay attention to these arts venue audiences. Indeed, many are probably now capturing significant revenues from them.

Belvidere is where restaurant operators are less likely to pay attention to its theater’s audience. Only $30,600 in audience meals and drinks expenditures are generated there. Proposals have appeared to build several hundred units of market rate housing in this community. Such units are likely to be predominantly occupied by households with fairly affluent incomes such as those presented in the above table. Just 25 new units occupied would provide three to five times more potential revenue dollars for local restaurants than the theater’s audience now can. Larger numbers of units might have some benefits for the theater. It may increase demand for tickets to its performances. It may also stimulate the improvement of local restaurants, which then enables them to make more theater goers happy and the eateries can capture more of the audiences’ meal expenditures.

Of course, the expenditures of these new households would go to shops across the whole gamut of retail and professional service functions and have far, far greater potential impacts on the local business community than any arts venue can. Downtowners in smaller cities should also explore housing as a revitalization engine. Conversely, the presence of arts venues can make a community a much more attractive place to live and help bring in more residents.

Weston, VT, also appears to be a place where its arts audience probably will not attract much attention from restaurant operators. However, it is special because the Playhouse audience’s spending for meals is condensed into 10 weeks during the summer. The $204,000 spent during that period may have the impact of $800,000 spent elsewhere over 12 months. As a result, local restaurants might pay a lot more attention than the sales potential numbers alone might suggest. These expenditures also come at a time when there are no “leaf peepers” or skiers — the prime market segments for Windsor County’s hospitality operations. This shows just how important the timing of audience expenditures can be.

More Studies On The Arts’ Impacts On Downtown Real Estate Should Be Done — and Can Be Done — in Small Downtowns.

Any study of a downtown arts venue’s impacts should have a real estate component.

As noted above, many parks are venues for performing arts events. Some also exhibit art or hold crafts fairs. Their ability to impact on nearby property values has been well-established since Olmstead did so for Central Park. Some of the research done on parks has employed techniques and produced findings that should be of considerable interest to those analyzing the impacts of arts venues. Studies done on Bryant Park and Millennial Park in downtown Chicago, are two good examples.

Some interesting research, done over the past decade or so, has been very sophisticated methodologically. These studies recognize that impacts occur in a multi-causal world, using statistical techniques and relevant data that enabled them to estimate the individual impacts of several variables. Two of them are:

Landauer Valuation & Advisory’s study of Bryant Park’s impact on nearby office building rents and property values(4).They used a multi-regression statistical model to isolate the park’s impact compared with several other relevant variables. They also incorporated personal interviews with 29 appraisers, commercial brokers, and building representatives.
Stephen C. Sheppard and his team at Williams College’s Center for Creative Community Development did a landmark comprehensive study on the impacts of MASS MoCA, including those on property values in North Adams, MA. They also studied the impacts of the Kenosha Museum in WI on that town’s property values (5).

Unfortunately, as Sheppard has acknowledged, the methodologies used are relatively expensive. Today, only organizations with large budgets are likely to use them.

There is a real need for less expensive, yet similarly, effective research techniques to be developed to study the impacts of arts venues on downtown properties. In smaller towns, fewer properties may make such an analysis easier, if property records are computerized and properly kept.

Some attempts to do so have been conceptually muddled. For example, one study selected an inappropriate geographic area to use as a comparable to establish the impacts of a PAC on its neighborhood. Others mistakenly take the total cost of a new building as the dollar expression of an arts venue’s impact on it – disregarding the possibility of other impacters or that the size and cost of the building might have been heavily influenced by the space requirements of its future anchor tenant.

In smaller downtowns, simple real estate research techniques may be ample for meeting the information needs of their leaders and stakeholders. To begin with, many of these small downtowns will not contain a huge number of properties, so data collection may be easier. In the larger small downtowns, selecting a subarea around the existing or proposed arts venue might also reduce costs and simplify the research. Also, for these downtowners, impact findings that state the magnitudes, not in metric terms, e.g., numbers of dollars or jobs, but through the many ordinary ordinal quantifiers contained in our everyday language (e.g., more-less, strong-weak, large-small, etc.) may not be optimal, but still very sufficient. Though they may not be able to quantify in terms of dollars how an existing arts venue has affected the rents, occupancy rates and property values of nearby properties, they can establish if there have been positive or negative effects. Collecting before and after data on these variables should be feasible. (Landlords and municipal data can provide a lot of the most important data.) Visual inspections of the properties from photographs from previous years and field trips to see current conditions can also provide important clues. Most importantly, interviewing local landlords and a convened panel of experts who really know the downtown’s properties can provide very useful insights on those impacts and whether they have been small or large, important or unimportant, etc.

As for a proposed arts venue, finding comparable projects in comparable downtowns probably will provide useful insights. However, again, finding that comparable may not be easy, so it’s best to be prepared for that.

If the impact analyst can develop reasonable estimates of how much residential, retail, restaurant and hotel space the new art venue might generate that can be turned into estimates of how it would increase demand for those spaces, then asking local landlords, developers, bankers and savvy real estate brokers how they would respond to that increased demand might be instructive in a directional manner, but certainly not predictive with any precision. But, then, you can’t make wine from rocks.

The biggest lesson I have learned from the impact studies done on the Lincoln Center for Performing Arts is the importance of looking at how arts venues affect the desirability of their surrounding neighborhoods as places to live. Restaurant and retail growth usually follow residential growth, as does increased pedestrian activity. An intercept or online survey of local residents to determine how an existing arts venue has affected how much they like living in that town or how much a new venue would do so, can provide very strategically important information. In these small downtowns, the fate of the businesses operating in them as well as residential property values is heavily tied to how many people live nearby and the personal and financial resources they have. Residential development is a key even for smaller downtowns. The degree that arts venues can contribute to it is an important impact path to know about. It also can be part of a quality of life business recruitment strategy.

How the Downtown Works

Dead pedestrian spaces, traffic congestion, improved physical appearance, pedestrian traffic levels, improved walkability and many more aspects of how your downtown works can be impacted by any new venue, including those related to the arts. As a downtown’s Central Social District functions grow in importance, so do those issues. Below are some of the kinds of information I would try to collect and some ideas about where to find them.

The Information Needed (And How To Get It):

Arts organization spending by category and identification of district vendors. (Its annual budget and IRS 990 Form; interviews with organization staff or from its vendor list).
The number of events. (From organization calendar.)
When during the day the events are held. (From the organization’s calendar.)
The number of people attending the events: annual total, event average, time of day average. (From organization records.)
The arts event related audience expenditures (ideally from an intercept survey at the arts organization’s events; otherwise ballpark estimates based on comparable communities.)
Attitudes and perceptions of downtown users about how downtown arts venues and the town’s desirability as a residential location (Intercept and online surveys.)
Building Improvements: new, major rehab or addition, minor rehab or addition. (Visual inspections, organization reports, review of photos, review by architects; surveys of downtown residential and daytime populations.)
Data on rents, commercial and residential in downtown buildings (Landlords, realtors.)
Increased auto traffic and congestion. (Traffic counts, field inspections, consultant reports.)
Parking: increased demand, spaces added. (Parking agency and studies.)
Mass transit: increased demand and use. (Transit agency.)
Public spaces added: if so, is it well-activated or stagnant.
Dead spaces added. (Field inspections and distance measurements made with a “wheelie.”)
Increased pedestrian activity and congestion points. (Counts and field observations.)
Increased need for police and sanitation services. (City departments.)

The Bottom Line

Downtowners in smaller communities who focus on making the arts the chief or only engine for revitalizing their downtown are likely to be disappointed. The range and depth of the impacts arts venues have are insufficient by themselves to spark lots of other businesses to prosper or grow. They often themselves need other strong downtown actors and/or favorable conditions to prosper.

The arts, however, have a value in and of themselves. We should want arts venues basically because of their intrinsic value and how their programs and holdings inform and celebrate the human condition. True, they also can make important contributions to a small downtown’s economy. They can be a valuable component in a comprehensive downtown revitalization strategy. Growing arts venues as part of a larger effort to grow the downtown’s Central Social District functions and to increase the community’s attractiveness as a residential location can succeed because there are strong impact linkages among them. Together, they have true synergies and, for a change, their pathways are fairly well known.

Do not, however, give the arts the role of becoming a downtown’s economic savior. More often than not, that will be a bridge too far.

ENDNOTES

1) See: Baker Tilly. “Restaurant Benchmarks: How does your restaurant compare to the industry standard?” http://www.bakertilly.com/uploads/restaurant-benchmarking.pdf

2) Americans for the Arts. ARTS & ECONOMIC PROSPERITY 5: THE ECONOMIC IMPACT OF NONPROFIT ARTS & CULTURAL ORGANIZATIONS & THEIR AUDIENCES. http://www.americansforthearts.org/by-program/reports-and-data/research-studies-publications/arts-economic-prosperity-iv

3) Ashley Lutz. “Here’s how much it costs to eat at 22 chain restaurants.” Business Insider, March 23, 2015. http://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-it-costs-to-eat-at-resaurants-2015-3

4) Landauer Valuation & Advisory, “Valuation Study of: Bryant Park Business Improvement District.” New York, NY, December 2014

5) Stephen Sheppard, “Measuring the impact of culture using hedonic analysis.” Center for Creative Community Development, October 2010, pp.28. See also: Stephen C. Sheppard, Kay Oehler, Blair Benjamin and Ari Kessler. “Culture and Revitalization: The Economic Effects of MASS MoCA on its Community.” C-3-D Report NA3, 2006, pp.17.

Let’s Get Real About*: The Arts As An Important Downtown Revitalization Tool — Redux. Part 1

Posted on June 18, 2017 by DANTH

By N. David Milder

“Aeschylus and Plato are remembered today long after the triumphs of Imperial Athens are gone. Dante outlived the ambitions of thirteenth century Florence. Goethe stands serenely above the politics of Germany, and I am certain that after the dust of centuries has passed over cities, we too will be remembered not for victories or defeats in battle or in politics, but for our contribution to the human spirit.”

–John F. Kennedy

Back in 2014 and 2015, I wrote a number of articles related to the development of downtown arts and entertainment niches (1). Their thrust was that while developing and operating formal enclosed venues for arts and entertainment uses can strengthen downtown revitalization efforts, they also are often fraught with organizational complexities, financial difficulties and negative trend headwinds that are overlooked by ardent supporters of arts projects. The result is too many underperforming or even failing formal arts venues. Moreover, many of the purported benefits of these arts venues might be more reliably and cheaply provided by well-activated public spaces, parks and third places.

I recently attended a very good conference that was aimed at mainly small and medium-sized communities located in rural and suburban areas. However, I came away very worried by the strong and incautious advocacy of the arts as a small town revitalization engine I encountered there. These arts advocates, some new to the faith, did little to indicate the wide range of challenges such a strategic approach is likely to encounter. Nor did their audience seem to have any awareness of such challenges. Many of them seemed to be eagerly looking for something to take the place of the weakening retail in their downtowns, and the arts appeared to be a very appealing solution. Alas, arts projects may be highly desirable, but it is foolish to assume they are quick or easy to do.

Part of the problem had to do with how most of our conferences use success stories for their content spines. It seems that in contrast to Silicon Valley, we in the downtown revitalization field only learn from our successes, not our failures. However, it also may be due to the fact that not many downtown leaders and experts are providing the needed information. This has prompted me to update my research and write this article. Let me be clear: its objective certainly is not to rail against the arts as an economic asset. It is, instead, to help downtown leaders and stakeholders better calibrate their arts development efforts, so that more of them will succeed, because they properly mesh with local resources and opportunities.

One reason that great care needs to be taken when using the arts as a key element in a downtown revitalization strategy or program is the hybrid earned/contributed incomes business model that nonprofit arts organizations use. It is more complex and consequently requires a wider set of management and leadership skills than the simpler for profit model used, for example, by the organizations that own and operate our movie theaters or put on our touring Broadway shows. The hybrid arts organizations are both charities with a built-in need for substantial contributions from individuals, businesses, foundations and/or government agencies as well as businesses that sell arts products (including performances and exhibitions) to earn incomes. Unfortunately, as events in recent years have demonstrated, these contributions are very dependent on economic and political conditions and can be very erratic. This model has a high level of financial failure as measured by having budget deficits. The use of the hybrid business model is a de facto admission that these arts organizations cannot cut it financially on just their earned incomes. Some may argue that the hybrid model benefits from greater diversification than the for-profit model, but that may mean, with tight budgets and unreliable donors, more ways to fail than to be safe.

On the earned income side, things these days have not been easy either. For over a decade, all types of arts organizations, be they nonprofit or for profit, have been facing a disconcertingly changing pattern in the way Americans participate in the arts. More arts participation is being done electronically. Some of the performing arts – e.g., opera, ballet, movies, symphony orchestras, jazz – have reported significantly reduced attendance, while others, such as Broadway shows and nonprofit theaters, have experienced serious and sometimes financially stressful fluctuations in attendance. “High culture” performances were losing popular support, while “low culture” entertainment performances (salsa music, comedians, rock bands, rap groups) were gaining popularity. As a consequence, many renovated theaters and new PACs have had hard financial times because they couldn’t find the right programming for their market area. They also had not done their homework.

While I acknowledge that arts venues can strengthen a downtown’s central social district functions and that credible research has demonstrated that they can have positive economic impacts, the impacts on their downtowns may not be as glorious as purported in project proposals – or conference presentations. My research has shown that too often the potential positive impacts of arts projects on downtowns are grossly misunderstood, and their actual magnitudes often go unmeasured, though wrongly assumed to be large. On the other hand, their negative impacts are far too often conveniently overlooked, even if easily noticed and measured.

The demographics of a downtown’s market area have an enormous influence on how many visitors and the amount of the financial contributions downtown arts venues can attract. Arts advocates too often put the cart before the horse, focusing on purported positive impacts, while not looking closely enough at the demographics that influence an arts project’s or an arts organization’s viability.

Another hard truth is that many small and medium-sized communities probably will have stronger positive impacts on their downtowns and a consequent higher ROI by investing in strongly activated parks and public spaces as well as in the micro businesses of local artists and artisans, than in building and operating covered venues for the performing arts and museums.

The Lack of Proper Calibration of Aspirations to Available Resources and Opportunities

Through my travels, arts consumption and professional activities, I have encountered many arts organizations that are in such a precarious financial situation. Some are huge with budgets over $100 million, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC. Others are large and well-known entities in our big cities such as the numerous symphony orchestras that recently have been downsized and/or re-organized. There are also the PACs that have struggled in suburban communities such as Englewood, NJ, South Orange, NJ, and White Plains, NY. Many small downtowns have museums with very limited operating hours or theaters and cinemas on the verge of failure. In dense, modest-income urban areas, large amounts of community energy and scarce funds have been used to develop attractive arts venues, such as the Jamaica Performing Arts Center in Queens, NY, that are largely underutilized and need deep subsidies to survive. Stories of local governments having to step in to save the day are easy to find: e.g., the city to save a museum in Gering, NE; the county to save a PAC in Englewood, NJ. I could add many more examples to this list, but won’t for the sake of brevity.

My takeaways from all of these examples were:

All suffered from the same underlying problem: their aspirations were not properly calibrated to the resources and opportunities available to them. Their eyes proved bigger than their stomachs or wallets.
Careful calibration is required to a large degree because of the shaky nature of the business model used by most arts organizations (and other nonprofits) and a changing environment that has made both earned and contributed incomes significantly less reliable.

The Hybrid Business Model Used by Arts Organizations Has Major Inherent Problems

A Structural Propensity to Have Deficit Annual Budgets. Roland J. Kushner and Randy Cohen in their National Arts Index 2016 paint a picture of arts organizations that should be carefully considered by any downtown leaders who are thinking about making the arts or an arts project a central component of their revitalization efforts. A very large number of arts organizations do not have break-even budgets and consequently, raise concerns about their long-term sustainability. According to Kushner and Cohen:

“Arts nonprofits continued to experience financial challenges: The percentage of arts organizations operating at a deficit has ranged from 36 percent in 2007 (during a strong economy) to 45 percent in 2009 (the deepest part of the recession). In 2013, a time of improved economic health, 42 percent of arts nonprofits still failed to generate positive net income—a figure that raises concerns about the long-term sustainability of arts organizations that are unable to achieve a break-even budget. Larger-budget organizations were more likely to run a deficit, though no specific arts discipline is particularly more likely to run a deficit…. (I)t is clear that the budget fortunes of nonprofit arts organizations got worse during the Great Recession and have been very slow to recover.” (2)

Consequently, it would seem very reasonable and very prudent for downtown leaders to be extremely cautious about using an economic sector populated by organizations with a very high propensity for financial instability as an engine of downtown revitalization.

The Proven Long-Term Uncertainty of Their Revenue Streams. The hybrid model is based on revenues coming from many very different sources and obtained through different means. According to Americans for the Arts: “Support for the nonprofit arts is a mosaic of funding sources – a delicate 60-30-10 balance of earned revenue, private sector contributions and government support.” (3) Here’s a more precise breakdown by AftA:

60 % Earned Income
31% Private Sector Contributions
- 24% Individuals
- 4% Foundations
- 3% Corporations
9% Government support
- 4% Local Government
- 2% State Government
- 3% Federal Government

Other research has found a slightly different funding mix. The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), using data from the Urban Institute and Census Bureau for 2006-2010, found that the revenue sources for nonprofit performing arts groups and museums were:

55.1% Earned Income, Interest And Endowment Income
38.2% Contributions From Individuals, Foundations & Corporations
- 20.3% Individuals
- 9.5% Foundations
- 8.4% Corporations
6.7% government grants
- 3.3% local government
- 2.2% state government
- 1.2% federal government (4)

Earlier, pre-Great Recession estimates showed that earned incomes accounted for about 50% of the revenues of nonprofit arts organizations.

Perhaps it is best to amend AftA’s statement to read that arts organization funding has been a delicate balance of 50% to 60% earned income, 30% to 40% private sector contributions and 10% or less from government support.

In any case, there is general agreement on the types of funding sources and the fact that there are many of them. In a 2012 study of the factors that challenge the financial sustainability of nonprofit organizations, the RAND Corporation’s authors placed at the top of their list:

“Risk of reliance on external funding sources and streams. In contrast to for-profit organizations, nonprofits in the United States depend on diverse sets of funding sources and streams of funding to sustain their operations. Most nonprofits receive funds from multiple sources (e.g., government, foundations, private donors) and streams (e.g., grants, contracts, membership fees). Substantial cutbacks in both government and foundational funds suggest that nonprofits should develop or revisit their fundraising plans to support financial sustainability.” (5)

At the level of the individual organizations, there can be additional variation. For example, The Goodspeed Theater in East Haddam, CT, gets about 26% of its revenues from contributions and about 57% earned income, while the Weston Playhouse Theater, in Weston, VT, gets 63.4% of its revenues from contributions and about 29% from earned income (6).

Both theater managements will differ from for-profit arts organizations in their need of staff and board members who are adept at marketing to individuals and organizations that are potential financial donors. The skills involved are quite different from marketing tickets to a movie, Broadway play or ice show to the public. Even the skills needed for obtaining grants from government agencies can be quite distinct from those required to network with and cultivate very wealthy donors.

Does the Weston Playhouse’s greater reliance on contributed income over earned incomes make it structurally more financially vulnerable than the Goodspeed that relies more on its earned income? It seems very likely to me.

Demographics Really Count

Annual Contributions to the Arts by Household Income (table from a report done for Google)

Re: Contributed Incomes. After earned incomes, contributions by individuals are the most important source of revenues for arts organizations nationally. Research has shown that contributions to the arts correlate with household incomes. The table above was generated in a 2007 report for Google that was done by the Center for Philanthropic Giving at Indiana University. It shows that 93.4% of all charitable giving to arts organizations is from households with annual incomes over $200,000. Among the vast number of households with incomes beneath $100,000, just 6.2% contributed to the arts, and they accounted for just 4.4% of all contributions to the arts by individuals.

While I strongly suspect that this report might have met with criticisms, I think it is possible to more generally restate its findings to the more certainly defensible conclusions that:

Most of the dollars contributed by individuals to the arts come from rather affluent households
Financial contributions to the arts increase with household incomes, and the increases get larger as the incomes get bigger.

Poor and small- and medium-sized communities will likely have below average percentages of very affluent households who are either year-round residents or second home owners. The ability of their arts organizations to have 30% to 40% of their revenues come from private sector contributions is consequently strongly impeded. Moreover, they consequently are relatively more dependent on winning contributions through grants from foundations, businesses and, especially, government agencies.

Re: Earned Incomes. The potential consumer dollars that arts organizations can tap is calculated by the number of people in their market area and their annual expenditures for arts performances, exhibitions, and products. Small- and medium-sized communities probably will have the obvious inherent problem of a market area that is not densely populated. An additional potential problem is, again, their probable comparatively low household incomes.

As can be seen in the above table, nationally, households with incomes over $103,057 account for 54.8% of all expenditures for entertainment fees and admissions, which includes admissions to arts and cultural venues such as theaters, cinemas, PACs, concert halls, etc. Adding the households with incomes over $62,587 shows that the most affluent 40% of our households account for 75% of the expenditures for entertainment fees and admissions. Arts venues in market areas lacking substantial numbers of such households, especially those in the top income quintile, will be hard pressed to have substantial revenues from their paid admissions. Small- and medium-sized communities are likely to have such market areas with relatively few affluent households. They are likely to be absent in poor communities.

Endowment and Interest Incomes. The NEA’s study found that 14% of the annual revenues of performing arts groups and museums come from these two sources. Such arts venues in poor or small- and medium-sized towns, with relatively small budgets and in perennial hand-to-mouth financial situations are not likely to have much interest income and are even less likely to have any endowments.

The Ups and Downs of Business, Foundation and Government Funding for the Arts Matters. Arts organizations are very sensitive to even slight variations in their philanthropic funding levels. As Randy Cohen at Americans for the Arts wrote in 2015: “We pay close attention to philanthropy because even small fluctuations in contributed revenue can be the difference between an arts organization broadening its reach or facing a deficit.” (7)

Moreover, charitable giving for the arts has a history of significant fluctuations. Here, again, is an astute observation from Cohen: “The arts compete well for charitable dollars in good times, but tend to struggle in a down economy as many funders move their giving to what they perceive are more pressing human service needs.” (8)

The above table shows how total contributions to arts nonprofits varied annually from 2008 to 2016 (9). In two years there were decreases, but even when there were increases, the amounts could vary from just 1.6% to a more robust 15%.

Funding From Foundations. After individuals, foundations are the next most important source of contributions to arts organizations. The National Arts Index for 2016 found that:

“Along with the number of grants, foundation dollar amounts increased from 2001 through 2012 only modestly, by six percent to $2.2 billion, when measured in current dollars; this leads to a decrease of about 18 percent when adjusted for inflation.” (10)

Major Corporate Giving. Data from the Conference Board indicate that contributions from large corporations declined by about 51% from $418 million in constant dollars in 2006 to about $215 million in 2010. However, it has rebounded somewhat lately, about 27% between 2013 and 2015 (11). Smaller firms, of course also contribute to the arts, but at lower levels in terms of numbers and amounts (12).

Government Funding. At this point in time, June 2017, the future of the NEA is again very much in doubt. However, as some conservative political observers have been quick to note. It accounts for only a relatively small percentage, about 1.2%, of the funding of our arts organizations.

State and local government arts funding responded to the Great Recession by dipping significantly between 2008 and 2012, but they have followed a positive, if uneven, trajectory since then.

However, looking at a longer time frame shows a different picture. As Ryan Stubbs, another astute observer of the arts funding scene, has noted about the 1994-2014 period:

“Although the nominal increase over the past twenty-one years is positive, the landscape for public funding for the arts in this time period is much bleaker when accounting for inflation. In fact, after adjusting for inflation, public funding for the arts has decreased by more than 30 percent in this same period.” (13)

Concerns about government funding are arguably diminished because they account for fewer than 10% of all arts organizations’ funding. However, my observations suggest that, in many small- and medium-sized communities, when a significant local art organization is on the brink of financial collapse, it is a municipal or county government that steps in to save the day. Such interventions can have critical impacts on the arts organization and the whole community it serves. I wonder what would happen if local governments really did stop making such bailouts?

One thing seems certain: any arts organization that predicates its future financial well-being on continually receiving government grants has placed itself in a very risky situation.

Budget Size Matters.

Most arts organizations are small, with revenues under $25,000. In 2012, about 63% of the nation’s estimated 110,000 arts organizations had revenues below $25,000. (14). A study done in 2017 estimates that there were 39,292 nonprofit arts and cultural organizations in the USA that had revenues over $50,000 (15). This means most art nonprofits will have little or no staff and will very likely either have very few performances or very few hours when they are open to the public. If they rent street level storefronts, when closed, they function as dead spaces that detract from their block faces walkability, while also signaling a lack of vibrancy.

Even when budgets get somewhat higher, the impacts are not likely to be significantly large. For example, the Wyoming Territorial Prison, a museum in Laramie, WY, (population 32,000) reported revues of $90,290 on its IRS Form 990 in 2015, but its annual visitation is about 16,000 (averaging about 2,700 per month) during a season that lasts from May 1^st through October 31^st. To put that attendance in perspective, consider that the Laramie Main Street Alliance holds seven one-day events that attract a total of around 8,250 people (16).

Small arts venues can have some meaningful benefits for their communities, though their economic impacts in terms of bringing in more dollars to the downtown district are relatively small. Some may be vanity expressions of a local resident, while others may have significant community impacts by celebrating a local scenic feature, historic local event or a famous local resident that is important to the community’s pride and cohesion. They also can fill vacant downtown spaces and add variety to the district’s store mix. However, their economic impacts still are likely to be negligible. Their budgets are too low and their customer magnetism just too weak for them to have significant direct and indirect economic impacts. Moreover, the small number of merchants in these downtowns also means that there are fewer that can be impacted positively by the arts activities.

It hard to say what the budget threshold is that has to be exceeded for arts organizations to have significant economic impacts. However, bigger budgets certainly increase the potential for having stronger and better arts “products” – e.g., performances, exhibitions, items created by artisans, etc. — and they can have more significant economic impacts.

The Quality of the Arts “Product” and Its “Packaging” Really Matter.

A Strong Cautionary Note: Do Not Allow Attention to Arts Buildings Dwarf Proper Attention to the Programs and Events That Will Occur Within Them. Since the early 1980s, I have come across several projects to either build or restore an existing theater or PAC. All of the completed buildings were physically attractive. However, a good number struggled financially after they opened because they were not attracting the audiences their advocates had said would appear. While enormous efforts were made to properly design and fund the building or renovation project, too often insufficient attention was paid to what would happen once the venue opened to the public. Their creators had not properly thought through what their product was, which market segments they would be sold to, how they would be marketed or how much money and personnel would be needed to do all of this. Sometimes those managing the new venues had little or nor prior appropriate professional experience.

Many of these projects were sold as bastions of the Arts, with a capital A, carrying the implication that they would be venues for performances of classy “highbrow” arts such as operas, ballets, and symphonic music. They soon found out, the hard way, that it was popular entertainment acts that paid the bills, not high culture arts performances. Furthermore, expectations about the types of acts that could be attracted were doused when board members and novice managers learned that their facility was too small to generate the revenues needed to pay the entertainers they wanted on their stages. Yes, they could have the occasional concert pianist, chamber music ensemble, dance group, touring Broadway play or even plays performed by local drama groups, but it has been the performances by pop singers, salsa bands, rap groups, rock bands, screened broadcasts of NFL games, classic films and comedians that paid the bills.

The folks at the Paramount Theater in Rutland, VT, have been wonderfully frank about their initial problems after a major renovation that enabled the theater to reopen after decades of darkness. That frankness is probably enabled because, after a few years of struggling and an important management change, the theater finally got on track by finding the right programming and pricing. Learning about the local market was critical. Eric Mallette, the programming director of the Paramount, says: “that he pays a lot of attention to what the local market responds to and tries to book shows and adjust ticket costs to fit those trends.” For many years that meant popular music and family entertainment, including the booking of a lot of comedians. According to Bruce Bouchard, who runs the Paramount Theater: “We started booking comedians and it just took off.”

What a Strong Arts Product Can Do for Arts Venues in Smaller Towns. The importance and power of the products that arts venues offer is perhaps best demonstrated by some venues I have visited that have substantial budgets, strong regional or national reputations and draw a significant number of patrons from relatively large market areas — even though they are located in small and medium sized towns. Below are four examples.

The Norman Rockwell Museum. Stockbridge, MA, is a very small town, with a population around 1,700 people. It has a wonderful old building stock, including a famous old hotel and inn. Located on Route 7, it has long been a significant tourist destination in the Berkshire Mountains. The famed artist/illustrator Norman Rockwell lived there. Local residents were models in many of his paintings. The Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge is the primary repository for the artist’s paintings.

For decades his paintings were the covers of well-known national magazines. Most of his work presented an idealized version of small town, Main Street America and was very patriotic. The museum, from its inception, had name recognition and was able to build upon Rockwell’s national fame and popularity.

It has a substantial annual budget of about $4.3 million, though that is well below the average of about $8 million for art museums nationally that have annual incomes above $50,000. About 28% of its revenue comes from contributions and 52% from program services. The museum attracts around 125,000 visitors a year – about average nationally for an art museum — mostly from NY and New England, as well as another 200,000 to its traveling exhibitions. It is professionally operated with 27 full time employees, 38 part-timers, and 30 volunteers.

This museum has gravitas: lots of a high-quality arts products (i.e., many Rockwell paintings) that are packaged in a charming town in the attractive Berkshires. The area attracts many well to do second home owners and even day-trippers from the heavily populated Northeast Corridor. Its budget and visitor appeal infuse this museum with the potential to have meaningful economic impacts even though it is located in a small community. How much of those benefits go to Stockbridge and its charming Main Street and how much goes elsewhere in its region is another issue.

Brandywine River Museum of Art. It is located in Chadds Ford, PA, population 3,640. The township is about 40 miles from Philadelphia in a scenic river valley, where the DuPont family has had a big influence. The township’s population is affluent, with the median household income being $117,961 and the mean $165,971.

Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, PA

Its core attractions are Andrew Wyeth’s studio and a very large collection of his paintings. Wyeth is also one of America’s best-known artists. His painting, Christina’s World, achieved almost iconic status nationally. The museum attracts 200,000 visitors annually, double that of the average art museum. Wyeth’s fame and popularity are enormous marketing assets for the museum. Its annual revenues are relatively very substantial, around $24.6 million. That’s about three times the average art museum in the USA. It has 164 employees. Its total assets are valued at a relatively hefty $156.7 million. The museum’s operational strategy is unique since most of its annual revenues come from asset sales — probably the sales of Wyeth lithographs and paintings for which there is still a big demand.

One gets the impression that the management of this museum is trying to run it as a business as much as is possible. Its revenues, employment, and visitation indicate that it has considerable potential to exert positive economic impacts, within its county, though where and who within it would benefit are other issues.

Goodspeed Musicals. This organization is famed nationally for developing musicals, with many of its productions going on to stages in New York City and London, e.g., Annie. It owns and operates an impressive cluster of artistic facilities located in East Haddam, CT, population 9,126. The town has a median household income of $82,117 and a mean of $103,376. The town is on the scenic Connecticut River and has many historic buildings. The Goodspeed Musical’s facilities include:

The Goodspeed Opera House
The Terris Theatre
Artists Village
The Chauncey Stillman Production Facility
Larry A. McMillian Rehearsal Studios
The Alice Rehearsal Studios Barrington Costume Center
The Factory Building (17).

At the functional core of this cluster is the historic Goodspeed. Built in 1876, after a long period of decline, it was restored and reopened in 1963. Attendance at the Goodspeed for 2014 was about average for an American nonprofit theater company: 105,368 patrons at 297 performances. About 26% of its revenues are from contributions, about 57% program services. Its total revenues in 2014 were an above average $13,159,845, while expenses were relatively robust at $11,708,637.

The Artists Village is an interesting and relatively recent addition. It is within walking distance of the Goodspeed Opera House and includes 17 new and five older homes. All have three or six bedrooms, with shared kitchens and living rooms. The new houses were designed specifically with artists in mind: “every bedroom has a private bathroom, extra insulation was added between walls to ensure quiet rooms, and large common areas were provided to encourage camaraderie and a sense of community” (18). The project cost for the Artists Village was $5.5 million, with $2.5 million provided by a grant from the Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development, and the rest from private donors.

Weston Playhouse Theater. The Playhouse is located in a very attractive building in Weston, VT, population 566, one of the most charming villages in the state. A running stream and the town green abut the theater. Route 100, one of the state’s most scenic highways, runs through the town. Also located in the town is the very popular Vermont Country Store that literally draws busloads of tourists. Weston’s median household income is $62,500, the mean is $100,796. The area surrounding Weston attracts lots of second homeowners because of its famed scenery and nearby ski resorts, such as Okemo. The Town of Ludlow, population around 1,900, is about a 15-minute drive from Weston and close to Okemo. It has had a notable downtown revitalization in recent years, driven by an attractive cluster of restaurants and bars.

The Weston Playhouse Theater

The Playhouse is Vermont’s longest running professional theater, though it only operates for about 10 weeks during the summer months. While it does the classics, it also prides itself on nurturing new plays. Its total revenues in 2014 were an above average $2.45 million. An astonishing 63.4% came from contributions, only about 29% from ticket sales. Its annual expenditures in 2014 were $1,835,630. Its annual attendance, based on just a summer stock type operating season, is above average at about 20,000. However, its operating expenditure per visitor is quite high, $91.78, and most of it cannot be covered by ticket sales. This has placed it in potential financial jeopardy.

The Playhouse has a bar and restaurant inside, probably because there are so few other eating and drinking places in this very small town or even further out in this very rural area.

I have been following the Playhouse and visiting Weston since the early 1990s. To my ken, during that time, it has had two significant bouts with financial stress. The most recent occurred a few years ago and was probably due to the impacts of the Great Recession on donors combined with the Playhouse’s strong dependency on contributed income.

The people in the Playhouse company appear to live and work most of the year in big cities in the northeast, where they are theater professionals and/or academics. Perhaps they also have second homes in or near Weston. In many respects, what they have done reminds me of the Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney films where someone says: “ let’s put on a show” and they do. The folks that run the Playhouse company want to put on their kind of plays in Weston, a town they obviously like, during the summer, when they are more likely to have available time. They largely have been willing and able to do the hard work of attracting a substantial amount of contributions. I suspect that a lot, if not most, of those contributions, come from outside Weston’s region. If the picture I just painted is correct, then the very small town of Weston has a well-known theater because it has been able to attract a group of outside theater professionals who then have been able to attract a good deal of outside money. To my mind, that’s like Weston filling an inside straight. It’s a wonderful story, but a model that is very hard to emulate.

The Playhouse probably does not have much potential to have favorable impacts on other Weston businesses, because there just are not that many of them and it is only open for about 10 weeks a year. On the other hand, the Vermont General Store is so strong that anything the Playhouse could add to it probably would be like chump change. The most likely potentially positive economic impacts are probably felt at a county or regional level – in Ludlow, for example — and probably more on residential property values than business revenues.

Some Hypotheses About the Characteristics of Arts Venues in Small- and Medium-Sized Towns That Are More Likely to Be Successful and Have a Strongly Appealing Arts Product. Based on my research and field visits, I have generated the following hypotheses:

Their arts product, while reflecting strong local roots, also appeals to many people outside the local area. They attract tourists.
Their arts product is packaged in an attractive building that is located in a very attractive town that often is in a very attractive region.
These successful venues usually do not create the tourist traffic but take advantage of, and then help grow existing traffic.
Their towns have significant numbers of solidly middle income and/or affluent households, their percentages often greatest in the towns with the smaller populations.
The arts venues are professionally managed and their board members are knowledgeable about the art form the organization is engaged in.
The venues have significant budgets. (This not to say that they are always safely in the black financially.)
The venues have leaders and managers with strong working connections, one way or another, to the arts community outside of their local areas. Such networks of personal connections are valuable for accessing talent, fund-raising, earning income and marketing. Many have come to the area as tourists, second home owners or as visitors to friends and family who are residents. That means that tourism, once it reaches a certain level, can simulate local arts projects by bringing in people who work in the arts. I think such links are far more important than is commonly realized.

ENDNOTES

1) See, for example: N. David Milder. “The New Normal’s Challenges to Developing a Downtown Entertainment Niche Based on Formal Entertainments: Part 1.” March 9, 2014 https://www.ndavidmilder.com/2014/03/the-new-normals-challenges-to-developing-a-downtown-entertainment-niche-based-on-formal-entertainments-part-1 and N. David Milder. “Based on Formal Entertainments: Part 2 the audiences; revised 041214.” March 28, 2014 https://www.ndavidmilder.com/2014/03/the-new-normals-challenges-to-developing-a-downtown-entertainment-niche-based-on-formal-entertainments-part-2-the-audiences N. David Milder. “Downtown Formal Entertainment Venues: Part 3.” April 24, 2014. Revised April 26, 2014. https://www.ndavidmilder.com/2014/04/downtown-formal-entertainment-venues-part-3 N. David Milder. “Downtown Formal Entertainment Venues Part 4: Movie Theaters.” May 25, 2014 https://www.ndavidmilder.com/2014/05/downtown-formal-entertainment-venues-part-4-movie-theaters

2) Roland J. Kushner and Randy Cohen. National Arts Index 2016, p.2; Americans for the Arts. http://www.americansforthearts.org/sites/default/files/2016%20NAI%20%20Final%20Report%20%202-23-16.pdf

They did not look at arts organizations with annual revenues under $50,000 so their finding that larger arts organizations are more prone to having deficits should be treated with caution. The 2016 version of the NAI will be its last and that is a real shame. It has been a treasure of data that arts organizations should use not only for advocacy, but also for planning their budgets and programs.

3) See: http://www.americansforthearts.org/sites/default/files/ArtsFacts_ArtsOrganizationRevenues2014.pdf

4) NEA. “How the United States Funds the Arts.” 2012. P 1. https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/how-the-us-funds-the-arts.pdf

5) Lisa M. Sontag-Padilla, Lynette Staplefoote and Kristy Gonzalez Morganti. RESEARCH REPORT. Financial Sustainability for Nonprofit Organizations: A Review of the Literature. Rand Corporation, 2012. http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR100/RR121/RAND_RR121.pdf

6) Data on the revenues and expenditures of the specific arts organizations described in this article come from the Form 990 filed with the IRS and available from online sources.

7) Randy Cohen. “What’s Measured Matters . . . Private Giving to Arts &

Culture: Way Up in 2014.” ARTSBLOG, July 10, 2015. http://blog.americansforthearts.org/2015/07/10/what%E2%80%99s-measured-matters-private-giving-to-arts-culture-way-up-in-2014

8) Ibid.

9) Giving USA. “Data Tables for Charts in The Numbers

Giving by source, 1976–2016.”

10) See endnote 2, p.24

11) The Conference Board. “TCB Giving Numbers 2016.” https://www.conference-board.org/publications/publicationdetail.cfm?publicationid=7297&centerId=1

12) See Endnote 2

13) Ryan Stubbs, “Public Funding for the Arts: 2014 Update.” GIA Reader

Vol. 25 No. 3, Fall 2014 http://www.giarts.org/article/public-funding-arts-2014-update

14) Andy Horwitz, “Who Should Pay for the Arts in America?” The Atlantic, Jan 31, 2016. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/01/the-state-of-public-funding-for-the-arts-in-america/424056/

15) Zannie Voss and Glenn B. Voss, “Arts and Culture Are Closer Than You Realize: U.S. Nonprofit Arts and Cultural Organizations Are a Big Part of Community Life, Economy, and Employment —and Federal Funding Enhances the Impact.” National Center for Arts Research, SMU. Pp.7. https://sites.smu.edu/Meadows/NCARPaperonNationalArtsandCultural%20Field_FINAL.PDF

16) Information kindly provided by Trey Sherwood, Executive Director of the Main Street Alliance in 2016.

17) Information about these facilities was obtained from the Goodspeed Musicals website: http://www.goodspeed.org/?gclid=CJ7Tqp6sxdQCFYaPswodusULkQ

18) See the Artist Village pages on Goodspeed’s website.

UP NEXT IN PART 2 OF THIS ARTICLE

Part 2 of this article will focus on the changing characteristics of our population’s participation in the arts and the impacts of the arts on downtowns. Failure to understand the altered arts participation landscape is leading to bad project and program choices by arts organizations. Failure to understand the impacts the arts really have on our downtowns has led to some very disappointing results for downtown leaders and stakeholders who worked hard to bring arts projects to their districts.

* The Forthcoming “Let’s Get Real About…” Series of Articles.

My recent article on pedestrian activity concludes the large number of articles I’ve done on the New Normal for Downtowns that I have been working on since 2008. I will, of course, again return at times to that topic in the future, but I also want to write about many other subjects. At this moment, that means describing and trying to spark debate about a number of subjects I believe are being mishandled by downtown revitalization leaders and experts because either unproven assumptions are being made or the subject is simply not being properly understood. This will be done in a new series of articles that I have dubbed “Let’s Get Real About…”. I have already taken on one of these subjects in my articles about leakage analyses. Above, is the first article in that series. It details the challenges presented by trying to use the arts as a key downtown revitalization tool. Other topics I plan to address in future articles, though not in the order in which I probably will take them on, include:

Are lots of people strolling, window-shopping and browsing in stores what makes downtown retailers successful? I already broached this subject with some detail in my pedestrian activity article, but I want to do a deeper dive on this subject because I think this behavior pattern holds such a pivotal position in our conventional wisdom about how downtowns work.
Are the uses of best practices/success stories usually beneficial?
Are small businesses always revitalization assets — and big businesses bad for the small ones as well the community at large?
Are new retail spaces not needed because the market is already glutted?
Eyes on the street: is that what really makes people feel safe?
Are most downtown retail market analyses on the mark?
How the Internet is eroding the legendary importance of location, location, location.

I welcome suggestions about other topics and articles from other authors on them.

34TH STREET: A FABLED SHOPPING DISTRICT AND WINDOW ON THE FUTURE OF DOWNTOWN RETAILING

Posted on April 15, 2017 by DANTH

N. David Milder

OVERVIEW

The 34^th Street Shopping District, a 31-block area in Midtown Manhattan, is legendary both in the USA and throughout the world. It is the place where Macy’s, the world’s largest department store, famously battled Gimbel’s, and Hollywood showed that miracles can happen. Since around 1900, with its 2.2 million SF, 12 level mother store that occupies a whole city block, Macy’s has epitomized what a department store is all about. Its national chain has taken that brand and all of its connotations across the nation, helped by national TV coverage of its Thanksgiving Day Parade.

The district has several other famed and strong attractions: e.g., the Empire State Building, Madison Square Garden, Korea Way, Penn Station and the Farley Post Office – and the movies to prove it: e.g., An Affair to Remember, Sleepless in Seattle. It also has scores of mass-market national retail chain stores. Some of them are among the best performing in their chains. About 23 retail and food operations like the district so much that they have more than one location in it. According to the directory on the 34^th Street Partnership’s website Starbucks, Duane Reade and Subway each have six!

Importantly, the district has some retail locational assets that are rivaled by only a few other districts worldwide. They are almost like paradigms. Consequently, the district is an excellent window on the future of brick and mortar mass-market retailing. How it develops in the district over the coming decade also will reveal much about whether or not the old dictum about “location, location, location” is still broadly operative.

For example, the district strongly benefits from access to many subway and commuter rail stations that have incredibly high daily passenger use levels. They help support daytime populations within 10-minute walks of 200,000+ for the district’s many street level retailers. The resulting high pedestrian traffic has become a crucial factor in attracting national retailers. Retailers don’t have to bring customers into the district, just into their stores.

Also, since 1995, when DANTH, Inc. first researched the district, tourism and tourist retail spending have become even more important for district merchants, and Macy’s became a well-established major international tourist destination.

The 34^th Street Partnership’s website does a nice job of describing the district’s dynamic, if sometimes turbulent, history. It has had ups and downs and significant changes in some of its dominant uses, but it always rebounded.

Today, the district seems to again be facing an unsettled environment that offers opportunities for growth as well as for serious bumps in the road. On one hand, the nation’s retail industry, especially the middle-market portion of it, is facing serious challenges. Nationally, 2017 looks like it will be a banner year for store closings. Over the years, department stores such as B. Altman’s, Gimbel’s Stern’s, A&S, Saks and Korvettes have come and gone in the district. The Macy’s and JCPenney chains are now struggling nationally, as are most department store chains. This is also the case for many of the specialty retail chains that might favor a 34^th Street location, though some of those already in the district are reportedly doing very well there. Importantly, 34^th Street is attracting many of today’s most popular and successful fast fashion retailers: e.g., H&M, Zara, Forever 21, Superdry and Uniqlo. Significantly, Target has recently announced the opening of a 43,000 SF store right across 34^th Street from Macy’s. On the other hand, the district so far has not attracted many of today’s successful off-price/discount retailers such as TJ Maxx, Marshall’s, Ross for Less, Nordstrom Rack, Century 21, etc. though it does have a DSW. Also an Amazon bookstore will open soon across from the Empire State Building on 34^th Street.

Additionally, many areas within the district and surrounding it are undergoing substantial and meaningful redevelopment:

The creation of well activated, densely used public spaces at Herald and Greely Squares as well as on a part of W33rd Street by Penn Station
The construction of Moynihan Station and Manhattan West on 8^th and 9^th Avenues
The development of the massive Hudson Yards project to the west of 10^th Avenue
The transition of Chelsea to the south and the Garment District to the north into neighborhoods where large numbers of creatives/knowledge workers live and work. They and nearby Murray Hill are also attracting a lot of venture capital investment. (1)

Furthermore, several properties in the district near Penn Station appear to be poised for major redevelopment.

How the district will traverse this period of uncertainty is now a very interesting, if still unanswerable question. What will its retailing look like ten years from now? Will brick and mortar shops still be important and what roles in the retail consumer purchasing process will they play? Can its strong locational assets keep its retail healthy when it is shrinking significantly in malls and other downtowns? Will traditional department stores still be around? Will the district’s growing central social district functions become even stronger and more important? More certain is that the district will pass through this transitional period with the incredibly strong assets described above as well as with a bevy of strong stakeholders that includes major retailers, heavily invested and deep-pocketed real estate companies, state and federal agencies and a proven and tested district steward, the 34^th Street Partnership.

That the district again faces uncertainty should not be surprising. After all, it sits in one of the world’s largest CBDs, where change and turbulence are everyday expectations.

SOME WORLD CLASS RETAIL LOCATIONAL ASSETS

The incredibly strong locational assets of the 34^th Street District make it a great place to see if such strong assets can still help keep brick and mortar retailing alive and well in our downtowns. Consequently, it is worthwhile detailing what those strengths are and how, in some instances, they are becoming even stronger.

Transportation. Rail travel, both commuter and inter-city, brings into the district a staggering number of people. For example, there are three major city subway stations in the district at 6^th, 7^th and 8^th Avenues that:

Provide access to 13 subway lines
Have a combined total weekday average of 303,730 passengers entering the stations
Rank 3,5, and 6 among NYC’s 421 stations in ridership.

Map 1. Zip codes where 70% of the interviewed 1,186 subway riders at 34th Street stations live. (From a 1995 DANTH, Inc report)

The map above and the interviews on which it is based were done back in 1995, but it is still of strong heuristic value. It shows how the district’s subways allow it to easily tap a vast proportion of NYC’s population: about 4.7 million people then lived in the shaded zip code areas. If anything, today that number is probably somewhat higher. An even larger number of people live in the district’s overall mass transit travel shed which also reaches into NJ, CT, Long Island and parts of upstate NY. The subway is just one part of this travel shed.

The three railroads that use Penn Station – Amtrak, New Jersey Transit and the Long Island Rail Road – bring in passengers from suburban communities and other parts of the nation. They report an average weekday ridership of 487,764.

In addition, the PATH 33^rd Street Station has a reported daily ridership of 36,410. Path’s passengers largely come from NJ.

The district has benefited from Transit Oriented Development for many decades! Macy’s, Manhattan Mall (the old Gimbel’s location), Herald Center, the Penn Plaza office cluster and Madison Square Garden all virtually sit on top of one of these stations and are less than a five minute walk from the others.

Daytime Population. These transportation statistics indicate that the 34^th Street district still draws lots of outer borough and suburban residents into the region’s urban core, but since WWII and the growth of the suburbs, that no longer means that it is the main retail shopping district for these suburbanites and outer borough residents. First the malls, then the big boxes and the Internet, have brought lots of retail purchasing opportunities out to the suburbs. Also, the city’s outer boroughs, once badly “under stored,” have experienced significant retail growth. There is less need among outer borough residents to do their retail shopping in Manhattan than in decades past. Consequently, the critical market area for the 34^th Street District retailers is increasingly the 10-minute walk shed that surrounds each of their stores. The people who live, work and “play” within those walk sheds will most likely be their most frequent customers. They are often grouped together under the daytime population rubric. This population also will account for the vast majority of the district’s pedestrian traffic. The subway and rail passengers passing through the district are part of this daytime population, as are the tourists. Some may be transient members, though their aggregate numbers may be relatively stable and be dependably counted upon. Others, such as those who live within the walk shed and who work or study there are more likely to be regularly in the district and have greater knowledge of its retailers.

The importance of the commuters and tourists to the district’s retail recruitment was recently demonstrated when they were strongly underscored by Target’s Senior Vice President Mark Schindele, as he explained Target’s decision to open a new store in the district (2).

The Daytime Workforce. The map below shows what a roughly 10-minute walkshed centered on the Herald Square entrance of Macy’s looks like. Because of Manhattan’s street grid, it looks mostly like a diamond, not a ring. Because of the way Broadway cuts across the grid, the top and bottom points of the rectangle are snipped off. Retail locations in different parts of the district will have different walk sheds. They may also have slightly different shapes depending on how Broadway cuts through their neighborhood.

Map 2. A roughly 10-minute walkshed centered on Macy’s Herald Square entrance. (Generated in Census Bureau’s On-the-Map)

In 2014, about 239,528 people had primary jobs that were located in this walkshed. About 10% were in the retail trade industry, and about 13.2% were in Wholesale Trade. Another 3.7% were in manufacturing. A sign that important changes have been happening in and near the district are the significant number of knowledge worker type jobs: 15.8% in professional, scientific and technical services; 10.5% in administration & support, waste management and remediation and 10.4% in health care and social assistance. The influx of knowledge workers/creatives is happening not only in Chelsea and the old Garment District but in the 34^th Street district as well. The Empire State Building has attracted some major high-tech firms such as LinkedIn and Shutterstock as well as a number of start-ups. Parsons Brinckerhoff has long been headquartered at 1 Penn Plaza, where Cisco Systems and a number of other high-tech and consulting firms also have offices.

The Manhattan West and Hudson Yards projects may develop about 9.68 million SF of office space in or adjacent to the district. If the office workers averaged occupying 200 SF of space per worker, these new projects would be bringing in a total of about 48,000 workers; at 175 SF per worker, the total would be about 55,000 new workers. Their potential impact on existing retail locations probably would be mostly in the western portion of the 34^th Street District, though filtered by the 750,000 SF retail center (supposedly anchored by a Neiman Marcus) planned for Hudson Yards and at least 100,000 SF of retail space (including a Whole Foods) scheduled for Manhattan West.

Overnight Tourists. According to the 34^th Street Partnership, there are six hotels in the district with 4,006 keys and another 17 hotels adjacent to it that have 2,965 keys. Together, the 23 hotels have 6,971 keys. At Manhattan’s current occupancy rate, around 88%, that translates into about 6,134 rooms or suites being occupied each night. Assuming that there are, on average, 1.4 guests per key then generates an estimate of about 8,587 tourists each day staying in or very near the district.

The district probably draws even more overnight tourists who are staying elsewhere in the city or metropolitan region. They tend to act like day trip visitors to the district who go to Macy’s and/or other retailers, the Garden, the Empire State Building, etc.

Day Trip Visitors. These are people who do not live or work in the district or who do not visit it on a consistent, multiple times a week basis, e.g., a student. They can be shoppers from the district’s extended trade area or other visitors who are in NYC for the day and visit one or more of the 34^th Street district’s attractions.

Macy’s and other district retailers. I have not been able to find any really good data on this subject. However, I think a useful, though certainly not definitive, ballpark answer can be cobbled together about Macy’s which undoubtedly has the strongest draw among the retailers:
An interesting article in New York Magazine back in June of 2007 stated that 40,000 shoppers pass through Macy’s every day – 120,000 during the holidays (3). That’s, at a minimum, about 14.4 million shoppers per year. Most knowledgeable observers I’ve talked to feel that, regardless of the current problems facing the Macy’s chain, customer traffic at its 34^th Street store has not dropped off appreciably (sales are another issue)
A high-levelMacy’s executive told me some years ago that tourists had grown to account for a very substantial portion of the mother store’s shoppers and sales. At the chain level, international tourists have accounted for about 5% of revenues (4). All tourist transactions then probably accounts for about 10% of the chain’s sales. But, most of the chain’s tourist sales occur at a few of its 730 stores, e.g., Herald Square and the former Marshall Fields store in downtown Chicago. On that basis, let’s stipulate that “substantial” means between 25% and 40% of the Herald Square store’s shoppers are tourists
That would then suggest that between 10,000 and 16,000 of Macy’s daily shoppers are probably tourists
Based on data presented in a very interesting article by Mitchell L. Moss and Carson Qing, it seems reasonable to assume that about 51.93% of Manhattan’s tourists are out-of-towners who are staying overnight, while the remaining 40.07% are “day trippers” (5)
In turn, that would suggest that on a normal day between 5,192 and 8,308 of Macy’s shoppers are probably out of town tourists staying overnight. They will spend more on retail than other tourists
Korea Way. Much like Korea Town in LA and Chinatowns and Little Italys all over the nation, this cluster of businesses along 32nd Street between Fifth and Broadway featuring Korean cuisine, shopping and culture can draw people from a very wide area. The subway and Path lines on Greely Square greatly facilitate this. The number of people who visit annually is unknown, but its pedestrian traffic suggests it is substantial
The Empire State Building. Though no longer the tallest building in the USA or the world, its views continue to draw about 3.5 million visitors annually
Madison Square Garden. It holds about 320 events annually including professional basketball and hockey games as well as concerts. Its annual paid attendance is about 4 million.

Residents. According to data provided by the 34^th Street Partnership, the district has 17 residential buildings with 2,813 units. Another nine buildings with 767units are on adjacent streets.

Map 3. Zip Codes Relevant to the 34^th Street District.

The district is embedded almost entirely in Zip Code 10001 that contains a part of Chelsea, Korea Town and the Penn Station area. Most of this zip code is within a 10-minute walk of some part of the district. To the north is Zip Code 10018. It contains the Garment District and parts of the Bryant Park area and the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood. Most of it is also within a 10-minute walk of some part of the 34^th Street district. (Note: zips 10199 and 10119 shown on the map have just a handful of residents).

To the east is Murray Hill’s Zip Code 10016 that runs along 34^th Street to the East River in a path that goes up to 15 blocks wide north and south. The part of the 34^th Street District east of Fifth Avenue is in this zip code.

Many parts of zip 10016, especially near 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd Avenues, are not within 10-minute walks of some point in the district. However, New Yorkers tend to walk much longer distances than folks in other cities and a 20-minute walkshed from some point in the district would cover almost all of these three zip code areas.

Within these three zip code areas are 44,741 households with 63,351 residents – the equivalent of a medium-sized city. Most are in Murray Hill, a traditional residential neighborhood. Zips 10001 and 10018 have been dominated by non-residential uses. Notably, the residents of all three zip codes:

Have a high labor force participation rate
Are largely in creative class/knowledge worker occupations
Have median household incomes above $86,000/yr
Have very high rates of walking to work, 39.3% to 41.3%.

As best as can be determined from Internet searches, the Manhattan West and Hudson Yards development projects will produce between 5,900 and 6,700 new residential units and households in and very near the district. That would be a 13% to 15% increase in the number of zip code households. Moreover, given the expected unit costs or rents, their occupants will probably have average household incomes well above $100,000/year.

It is important to note that, as financially comfortable as the households in the 34^th Street’s neighborhoods may be, their average household incomes are about 30% below those found in the zip codes in which the luxury retailing along Madison Avenue is embedded. The latter are also now more densely populated.

The 34^th Street District’s close-in residential population of roughly 87,000 people is certainly an enviable and growing asset. However, that number is still dwarfed by the roughly 230,000 people who work within the 10-minute walksheds of district locations every weekday.

Pedestrian Traffic Levels. Given this density of major transit hubs, retailers, tourist attractions, employees, tourists and residents, one might expect high levels of pedestrian traffic. In this regard, the 34^th Street District certainly does not disappoint!

The above table is taken from data published by NYCDOT for pedestrian counts it did in 2016 at 55 locations in NYC. The table shows the results for the 10 locations that had the highest counts. The top two – West 34^th Street between Seventh Avenue and Broadway and Seventh Avenue between W32nd St and W33rd St – are in the 34^th Street District. Given that, for some unknown reason, locations in the heart of the Times Square District that probably have extremely high pedestrian counts were not studied by NYCDOT, it is prudent to conclude that pedestrian traffic flows in the 34^th Street District are among the very highest in Manhattan, NYC and the USA.

The 34^th Street counts are by Macy’s and close to several subway stations and an entrance to Penn Station. To put the 4-7pm count of 33,102 in perspective, that is larger than the total populations of Westfield NJ, Monterey, CA, Gloucester, MA or Sandusky OH. My “guesstimate” is that for the 12 hour 7:00 am to 7:00 pm period, at least 75,000 pedestrians passed along this block on 34^th Street.

The 31,856 count on Seventh Avenue is right by Penn Station and reflects a large number of commuters on their way home.

The 34 Street Partnership has long done its own pedestrian counts and at many more locations in the district than NYCDOT. Its data give a much clearer picture of where the pedestrian flows are strongest (see the table above).

How pedestrian counts impact retailer locational decisions is not easy to deduce from the situation in the 34^th Street District. While I have been told by retail site selectors, commercial brokers and BID managers that pedestrian counts are now a critical factor, other considerations such as rents, the character of available spaces, lease timings and landlord behaviors can also strongly shape locational decisions. Here are some aspects of the current situation on the ground in the district that I believe are worthy of attention:

The highest pedestrian counts, in the 10,000 to 12,000 per hour range, are for a north-south flow in front of a Citibank on the NW corner of 34^th Street and Seventh Avenue. They are substantially higher than the counts for east –west flows in front of this bank. While the bank is directly across Seventh Avenue from an important entrance to Macy’s and across 34^th Street from a busy entrance to Penn Station, until very recently this area has not been able to attract a lot of strong retailers. A Swarovski has replaced a Tourneau on the SW corner, an H&M has opened on the SE corner and a DSW opened a few stores west of the bank on 34^th
W34th Street between 5^th Avenue and Broadway/6thAvenue has average pedestrian counts during the pm rush in the 4,000 to 5,000 range, but it has attracted a host of well-regarded retailers, many of which appear to be doing well under the new normal: e.g., Zara, Forever 21, Uniqlo, Superdry, Victoria’s Secret, Banana Republic, Gap and AEO. This cluster of strong national retailers suggests that this is the most desirable block for them in the district. The rents they pay suggest the same conclusion.
W34th Street on the block between Broadway/6^th Avenue and Seventh Avenue directly across from Macy’s has average pedestrian counts that are significantly higher, in the 6,000 to 8,000 per hour range, but the above chains did not locate there. However, this block recently has become extremely hot. It is where the new Target store will locate in a redevelopment that will also include Sephora, Footlocker and Swatch stores. H&M must really want to be in the district and on this block: it has opened two stores on its eastern and western ends. Long leases with relatively cheap rents apparently were, in the past, a barrier to recruiting stronger retail tenants to this block.
Pedestrian counts along 34^th Street west of Seventh Avenue seem to decline appreciably and in the past so has the quality of the retail. However, the properties across from Penn Station seem to be either getting better tenants or awaiting redevelopment. That will probably be impacted by Manhattan West and Hudson Yards.
Major retailers seem to appreciate high pedestrian counts close to Macy’s and other major retailers more than high pedestrian counts close to Penn Station.

The Partnership’s pedestrian counts were also conducted in front of some newly vacated retail spaces. While the sample was admittedly small, comparing their counts with those in front of still active retailers showed no significant differences. Furthermore, when looking at the retailers who left, most were either in chains that were in retreat or that targeted market segments that have had a significantly weakened presence in the district in recent years. There were also some moves within the district, e.g., H&M and Modell’s, where the new locations had higher counts.

There is little doubt in my mind that strong pedestrian traffic is now, and will be in the future, an important factor in the retail recruitment process. However, the situation in the 34^th Street District indicates to me that its impact is not solitary or simple or linear.

Retail Spaces: Sizes, Rents, Vacancies and Who to Attract. All too often on my consulting assignments I have found that a downtown’s revitalization was being impeded by a lack of appropriate office, entertainment or retail spaces. In the course of my research for this article, I was surprised when four observations provoked me to ask if the 34^th Street District has the available store spaces needed to attract the retailers who today are thriving under the new normal and who would probably find locations in the district attractive:

The Manhattan Mall reportedly has twice the sales PSF of the typical mall of its size. However, observers have argued that its large atrium design wastes a lot of potentially leasable retail space and that it cannot accommodate retail tenants with really large space requirements
Is H&M at two locations on a block across from Macy’s on 34^th Street because they thought that would enable them to capture more customers or because they could not find the much larger sized single space on that block that they really wanted?
Observers have argued that from a real estate perspective, the Macy’s store could produce greater revenues if its retail space was reduced and other uses were brought to the property. It was also noted that customer traffic drops appreciably at each floor as you go up in the store.
I recently saw that on Market Street in Center City Philadelphia the old Galleria Mall was being converted by PREIT and Macerich into the Fashion Outlets of Philadelphia. Sitting over a major SEPTA station in a downtown that attracts loads of tourists and has a very large number of office workers, the location reminded me of 34^th While the full tenant list has not been released, the two I was able to identify, Ross for Less and Century 21, suggest the developers are going after the off-price brick and mortar retailers that have been doing very well under the new normal for retailing. Where, I wonder, could a similar project be developed in the 34^th Street District? Or where, I wonder, could retailers such as Nordstrom Rack, Saks Off-Fifth, Century 21, TJ Maxx, Ross for Less, Ann Taylor Factory, and outlets stores of Polo Ralph Lauren, Armani, Lululemon, Orvis, Kate Spade, Coach, Columbia, Theory, etc. locate as a cluster in the district?

The off-price concept already has been introduced by Macy’s. It has created a new off-price chain, Backstage, that has both its own stores (e.g., on Fordham Road in the Bronx) and departments within existing Macy’s stores. Heavily discounted apparel merchandise was certainly evident at the mother store at Christmas time.

Today, the district’s most likely shoppers –the new workforce and residents in the walk sheds as well as its tourist visitors — are substantially more affluent than the shoppers drawn to the district over the prior three decades. As noted above, this affluence probably cannot support another luxury retail corridor like Madison Avenue – even with the addition of Hudson Yards and Manhattan West. However, developing an “upscale off-price” project or cluster would position the district to tap the new affluence in its neighborhoods – especially the surprisingly many deliberate consumers among them –as well the relatively high spending potential of its many tourists. Tourists love getting value bargains and visiting off-price, outlet and factory stores.

Another reason that off-price retailers may not have entered the district in greater numbers is the existence of agreements or behavioral patterns that keep them from being located too close to their existing stores — or Macy’s, JCPenney, Manhattan Mall, Herald Center, etc. If so, the future of the district’s retail may depend on the removal of such barriers to entry.

Also, a number of them – e.g., TJ Maxx and Burlington –already have locations along 6^th Avenue about a mile south of the district.

Macy’s and JCPenney will probably struggle for some time to find a successful operational formula, as will the other traditional department store chains such as Nordstrom and Neiman Marcus. The Hudson’s Bay Company has reportedly been interested in acquiring both Macy’s and Neiman Marcus since both have become weakened and vulnerable to takeovers. Consequently, it seems very doubtful that other traditional department stores will be interested in locating in or near the 34^th Street District anytime soon.

Ironically, the specialty retail chains may still be very good tenant prospects for the district:

While the entire GAP chain has been searching for a new winning formula for many years now, the GAP store on 34^th St is reportedly the highest grossing in the chain. In recent years, I also have heard reports that several other specialty retailers are doing very well in the district. It may be that the district’s locational assets are so strong that these retailers can thrive in the district, though they are struggling today in many other locations.
Significantly, many of these chains are converting their existing stores into “outlet” or “factory” stores. Ann Taylor, Banana Republic, Gap, American Eagle and Nine West are among those that have followed this path.

The opening of an Amazon Bookstore on 34^th Street suggests other e-retail companies that are opening brick and mortar stores also may find locations in the 34^th Street District very attractive: e.g., Athleta (another Gap brand), Bonobos, Dyson, Duluth Trading Co., Shinola, Nasty Girl and Warby Parker. Soho has attracted many “one-off” versions of such stores that should be watched for growth and expansion.

Vacancies and Rents. A Marketbeat report for Manhattan for Q4 2016 by Cushman & Wakefield noted that:

“Rising annual availability rates in every major Manhattan retail submarket continues to generate uncertainty, as new stores come to market daily. Further compounding this trend is a slowdown in leasing, as tenants taper demand due to overall margins constricted by pressure from e-commerce retailers. Asking rents continue to decline, and it may take some time before activity increases and available retail space is leased faster than it comes to market.” (6)

The report found that the Herald Square West 34^th Street submarket followed this pattern.

A vacancy survey of locations on 34^th Street between Park and 10^th Avenues done in late January 2017 by the 34^th Street Partnership showed that of 122 storefronts there were 13 vacancies, 9.84% of the total. The highest vacancy rate was for the blocks between Park and Fifth Avenues, where 30.8% of the 13 stores were vacant. However, these two blocks have little of the GAFO type retailing that is so vulnerable to Internet sales losses. Only one of the four tenants that left was in this category. Also, the block face on the north side of 34^th between Madison and Fifth has a large non-retail use that is a huge pedestrian discontinuity.

Surprisingly, the lowest vacancy rate was between 7^th and 10^th Avenues where just 2% of the 51 stores were vacant. Other stores in this area were vacant, but they reportedly were being held off the market for potential redevelopment reasons. In the core area between 5^th and 7^th Avenues, 13.8% of the stores were vacant. Of the six tenants that left from the block between 5^th and 6^th/Bway, four were GAFO stores and one of them, H&M, moved into a new location elsewhere in the district. Two of the other GAFO retailers were in chains that were generally in retreat. Again on this block, the influence of the Internet was confined to possibly affecting three of the six departing tenants. On the block between 6^th Ave/Bway and 7^th Avenue, only one of the two departing tenants may have done so because of e-commerce competition, and it was a relatively weak chain, to begin with.

While the Cushman & Wakefield report is probably right that vacancies in retail-prone spaces have risen in all of Manhattan’s major retail submarkets, they may have overstated the impact of the Internet in some of them where non-GAFO tenants were vacating many spaces. This seems to have been the case in the 34^th Street District. In turn, if this is a trend in the district, and if its GAFO retailers are doing better than the district’s fast food and convenience operations and their GAFO peers elsewhere in Manhattan, that would be a very important finding. It would support the hypothesis that, even in the face of growing e-retail sales, the district’s exceptionally strong locational assets still make it a great place for GAFO retailers to do business.

According to the Cushman & Wakefield report, asking rents in the Herald Square 34^th Street submarket averaged $783 PSF in Q4 of 2016 and had decreased by 4.3% since the prior year. Data published by REBNY showed that in 2016 dollars, back in the Fall of 2008, on West 34^th Street from 5^th to 7^th Avenues, the average asking rent was $720 PSF and that during the Great Recession it fell to $472. By Fall 2016 it was $745, about 3% above pre-recession levels.

While the rents along 34^th Street are certainly hefty, they are well behind other Manhattan submarkets along Fifth Avenue, in Times Square and along Madison Avenue. Also, within the district, there is considerable variation: asking rents east of 5^th Avenue and west of 7^th Avenue are about half of those from 5^th to 7^th. It will be interesting to see how the completions of Hudson Yards and Manhattan West influence both rent levels west of 7^th Avenue and the redevelopment of more properties in that area.

Small retailers, even the really good ones, will likely find these rents unaffordable – even the lower ones in the “shoulder” areas. Within the district, they may find more affordable locations on the quieter side streets. As for the retail chains, unless they are opening “billboard” stores, their location in the district will have to bring in comparatively large sales to justify the costs of the space they are leasing. The district’s strong locational assets promise that such strong sales numbers can be achieved. However, they still have to be damned good merchants to realize their location’s sales potentials.

LOOKING TO THE FUTURE

I certainly do not know how retail will develop in the 34^th Street District over the coming decade. However, I do feel certain that it will be very thought provoking and have important implications for retail development in downtowns elsewhere in the nation.

That said, I hope that in the above analysis I have developed some plausible hypotheses relevant to its future. Retail, nationally, has been hurt by two major factors: Internet commerce and deliberate consumers. It seems to me that my analysis supports the conjectures that:

The 34^th Street District’s strong locational assets might make it significantly less vulnerable to Internet sales, though some retail formats will continue to fail
Its increasingly more affluent and large potential walk-in customer base makes it significantly less susceptible to deliberate consumer constraints, especially if the district can attract more upscale off-price/outlet retailers.

Other factors, notably the district’s central social district functions, will also probably have a strong influence on how many people it attracts and how “sticky” it will be keeping them there. I have not been able to properly research these functions, though my suspicion is that, in particular, how the district’s existing and new public spaces perform will have important impacts on nearby retail.

I certainly will continue to keep an eye on this fabled retail district to see how the next chapter in its story unfolds.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Special thanks to Dan Pisark, Vice President, Retail Services at the 34th Street Partnership for providing some very essential data.

ENDNOTES

1-Richard Florida and Charlotta Mellander. “Rise of the Startup City: The Changing Geography of the Venture Capital Financed Innovation.” California Management Review. January 27, 2017. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0008125616683952?journalCode=cmra

2-Lois Weiss, “Massive Target Store Coming to Midtown,” New York Post, March 19, 2017.

3-Arianne Cohen. “A Department store: Macy’s Herald Square. New York Magazine. June 3, 2007. http://nymag.com/news/features/2007/profit/32899/

4-Anne D’innocenzio. “Lower Spending From International Tourists Hurts Macy’s 1Q Sales And Profit.” US News. May 13, 2015. https://www.usnews.com/news/business/articles/2015/05/13/macys-misses-street-1q-forecasts

5-Mitchell L. Moss and Carson Qing. “The Dynamic Population of Manhattan.” Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management . New York University. March, 2012

6-Cushman & Wakefield. Marketbeat Manhattan: Retail Q4 2016. http://www.cushmanwakefield.com/en/research-and-insight/unitedstates/manhattan-retail-snapshot/

N. David Milder at DANTH, Inc.

Downtown Revitalization Specialist

Category Archives: Creative Class