“There may be starving artists out there, but we don’t see them in our data.” That was the sunny summation of Peter Rupert — a UCSB professor and perhaps Santa Barbara’s most ubiquitous and prolific public economist — describing the size, scope, and scale of Santa Barbara’s so-called “creative” economy at this Tuesday’s county Board of Supervisors meeting.
According to Rupert’s research, no fewer than 4,136 people are directly employed by Santa Barbara’s creative economy and another 7,100 other workers are indirectly employed by this creative market. Altogether, he said, these people take home $1.3 billion a year; many, he said, are paid 10 to 15 percent higher than the county’s average income. Cumulatively they belong to a burgeoning sector of the economy that generates $3.8 billion a year from which no less than $469 million in taxes — state, federal and local — are extracted a year.
Rupert’s report was commissioned by the County Office of Arts and Culture in partnership with UCSB’s Economic Forecast Project and the County of Ventura to quantify the dollars and cents generated by enterprises that seem primarily fixated on extruding the qualitative and subjective aspects of human existence.
Reports like Rupert’s help the county’s reigning arts czar, Sarah York Rubin, compete for state and federal arts grants, like the state grant she recently landed for $4.7 million to help provide workforce development training and public artist training to up-and-coming artists and others employed in the creative economy. In Santa Barbara County, that includes people engaged in digital media, architecture, and interior design. In lesser numbers, it also includes visual and performing artists, publishing, entertainment, and communication arts.
Supervisors Joan Hartmann and Laura Capps responded enthusiastically to the report. “It is what makes us quintessentially human,” said Hartmann of art and culture in general. “It’s at the core of culture.”
But more specifically, she recalled asking Lompoc’s most recent teacher of the year what made her move to the area. “The murals,” the woman replied.
Capps recalled growing up in Santa Barbara as a child of the ’70s where the prevailing cultural vibe was predominantly hippie, Solstice, and monoculturally white. Today, she said, the county’s arts scene has grown infinitely more lively and much more diverse.
Supervisor Bob Nelson expressed concern that too many of the public art dollars are spent on South County projects and not nearly enough in North County where he lives. He termed it “a glaring example of inequity” and vowed to keep banging that drum until the problem is resolved.
York Rubin said her department is doubling down on just this issue and will continue to do so. Many of the arts-related nonprofits are headquartered in the south, she conceded, but many of the projects being funded occur up north. The recent theater renovation projects in Lompoc and Guadalupe, both major efforts, would be just two. In addition, York Rubin said her department recently opened offices in Santa Maria.
Jesús Armas, director of the Community Services Department (and up the organizational food chain from York Rubin), described how many artists find themselves drawn to blighted and semi-blighted neighborhoods because they’re affordable. By the liveliness these artists inject, property values tend to go up, often displacing the artists who animated a sense of coolness to the place. That process — some call it redevelopment, others gentrification — generates economic value and activity, Armas noted. This process lay considerably outside the scope of Rupert’s study and is much harder to quantify.
Closing out the discussion, an arts development promoter from Ventura noted that in 2020, the combined art and culture GDP for the counties of Santa Barbara and Ventura was $6.5 billion. Today, he noted, it had jumped to $8.4 billion. When asked if artists could be from being displaced by the forces of redevelopment they triggered, he suggested the enactment of zooming modifications that allowed artists to live and work in the same space.
You must be logged in to post a comment.