Local Economy

Philadelphia Cut Its Arts Funding Further Than Any City in the Study

A ten city study of municipal arts funding put Philadelphia at the bottom. Forty seven percent of full time arts jobs are gone. That is an economic story.

By Harry Hayman 6 min read
Philadelphia Cut Its Arts Funding Further Than Any City in the Study

Larry Platt has a piece in The Philadelphia Citizen called “What Arts Funding?” and everybody who gives a damn about this city should read it. I am going to do something slightly different here. I want to walk through the study underneath his argument, because the numbers are worse than the headline suggests, and because they are economic numbers rather than cultural ones.

That distinction is the whole point, and I will come back to it.

The study underneath the argument

The research is from SMU DataArts, which spent the last several years collecting comparable financial data from cultural organizations in ten American cities: Atlanta, Cleveland, Des Moines, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Sacramento and Seattle. The window runs from 2019 to 2024, which means it covers the shutdown, the federal relief money, and the years after that money ran out.

The finding across all ten cities is blunt. Where a city’s own government kept investing in its cultural sector, that sector held up. Where it did not, the sector contracted. Local public money is a small share of any given organization’s budget, around five percent of average expenses in 2024, and it still turns out to be the variable that separates the cities that recovered from the cities that did not.

That is a strange and useful result. Five percent should not decide anything. It decides quite a lot, and I suspect the reason is that municipal money is the money that signals to everybody else, including foundations, corporate sponsors and boards, whether a city considers its own culture worth backing.

Where Philadelphia landed

Bottom.

Coverage of the study puts Philadelphia at the steepest decline in per capita local arts funding of any city in the group. Expenses across the city’s cultural organizations fell by about a third. Revenue fell by more than a quarter. And the staffing numbers are the ones I cannot get past: full time positions down 47 percent, part time positions down 71 percent, the worst on both counts in the study.

Read those last two again as employment figures rather than arts figures, because that is what they are. Nearly half the full time jobs in an entire sector of this city’s economy are gone. If we lost 47 percent of full time positions in logistics, or in hospitality, or in anything with a lobbyist, there would be hearings.

Larry’s piece puts the collapse in per capita terms, from about ten cents a head to roughly one, and in the share of organizational expenses covered by local government, from around seven percent to one. Those are the figures I have been quoting and they came from his reporting rather than from my own reading of the study, so I am attributing them to him rather than presenting them as mine. The direction is not in dispute either way. Philadelphia cut, and cut harder than anyone.

The cities that did the opposite

This is the part that removes the excuse.

Every city in this study lived through the same shutdown, the same relief programs and the same collapse in attendance. Attendance across all ten is still running around 44 percent below where it was in 2019. Nobody had an easy five years.

And yet Atlanta, Cleveland and Phoenix came out of it with stable or growing revenue, while Los Angeles, New York, Seattle and Philadelphia contracted. The cities that treated municipal arts money as an investment through the hard years have sectors that work. The cities that treated it as a discretionary line item have sectors that are shrinking.

Phoenix. I have nothing against Phoenix, and I am not throwing shade. But if Phoenix is putting more into its culture than we are putting into ours, then something has gone badly wrong with the story we tell about this city, and possibly with the story we tell ourselves.

Arts and culture is not charity, and I mean that literally

Here is where I want to be precise rather than rousing, because the rousing version of this argument has been made for thirty years and it has not worked.

When a city funds a cultural organization it is not making a donation. It is buying a set of specific, measurable things. It is buying jobs, and we have just established what happens to those when the money stops. It is buying tourism, because visitors do not fly in for a tax abatement. It is buying neighborhood foot traffic, which is the difference between a corridor with open storefronts and a corridor without. It is buying talent retention, because the twenty six year old choosing between here and somewhere else is choosing on what there is to do on a Thursday night. And it is buying the thing that makes a city legible to itself, which has no line on a spreadsheet and is the reason anybody stays.

Those are returns. They can be counted. DataArts exists precisely because somebody decided the sector should be measured rather than merely praised, and the Philadelphia Cultural Fund publishes what it gives and to whom.

So the case does not need better adjectives. It needs to be made in the language every other economic development conversation in this city is already conducted in: investment, infrastructure, customers, growth, return, accountability.

What I keep coming back to

I have been spending a lot of time recently with artists, cultural leaders, policymakers and technologists, and the thing I keep circling is not the funding number. It is the absence of connective tissue.

Ask a simple set of questions about this sector and watch how hard they are to answer. Who is doing what. Where the money actually is. Where the audiences are. What is working. What is quietly disappearing. Who is not connected to any of it.

We have extraordinary artists, extraordinary institutions, extraordinary independent organizations, extraordinary venues, extraordinary history and extraordinary neighborhoods. What we do not have is a way for that ecosystem to see itself. Nobody holds the map. And you cannot make an economic argument about a thing you cannot measure, which is exactly why the cultural sector loses the budget fight every single year while sectors with better data win it. That is not a failure of passion. There is no shortage of passion. It is a failure of accounting, and accounting is fixable.

That is the piece I think is missing, and it is the piece I have been exploring with some very smart people: whether better data and shared civic infrastructure could let this ecosystem finally see its own shape.

Larry’s article makes one thing painfully clear. This is not a theoretical problem. Forty seven percent of the full time jobs are already gone.

So read it. Actually read it. And then ask the only question that matters now.

What are we prepared to do about it?

Sources and references

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