Arts Districts Bring Challenges Along With New Investment

Our office is closed today as the country’s largest free arts festival, Artscape, opens on our doorstep. Up to 400,000 people are expected to attend the festival over the course of the weekend to experience Baltimore’s diverse arts culture, supporting many neighborhood businesses in the process.

Artscape 2014. Photo by Jaymang via Creative Commons license.

Artscape is the largest annual event in Baltimore’s Station North Arts and Entertainment District, one of about 20 arts districts around the state, most often created to bring new investment into a certain neighborhood. Arts-related businesses can get tax breaks and grants to support their efforts in those communities.

This type of public investment can create new opportunities, particularly for people pursuing careers in the arts, and also for other types of businesses that serve the visitors and residents of the community. At the same time, rapidly rising property values and rents can price out the people and businesses that were there before the arts district.

Maryland’s arts districts supported about 6,000 jobs and contributed nearly $200 million to the state’s economy in 2014, according to a study conducted for the Maryland State Arts Council. That includes an estimated 340 jobs and $29.7 million in economic activity in Station North.

The transformation of the neighborhoods that make up the Station North district is ongoing. The median home price in one of those neighborhoods, Greenmount West, went from $10,000 in 2002 to $184,900 in 2013, a trend that is likely to continue.

A comment by the owner of the Perfect Touch barber shop as part of a local photo project, Close Up Baltimore, exemplifies the challenges these changes – while positive for the city’s economy as a whole – create for individuals:

“We’ve been on North Ave and Charles Street for over 10 years and have seen the steady change before it was Station North. The people and businesses in the area were predominantly black and now there’s only about two or three of us left. … There has been no real attempt to include us, the black business community, in building Station North.”

Bringing new investment into a community is a good thing, and it must be done with care. Policies that protect and create new affordable housing, support local entrepreneurs, and unite the older and newer residents are essential to making these efforts successful for everyone.