New Jersey suburbs working to provide affordable, attractive housing for arts professionals

By Leonardo Vazquez

It's not just major cities that want to attract artists.  There are efforts in Rahway and South Brunswick to provide affordable housing for arts professionals.  And you can influence what that housing might look like or offer: developers in both communities are looking for input from artists now.

Rahway, a small, older suburb about 35 minutes from New York City,  has been working to attract arts for two decades.  Leaders there have helped convert an old vaudeville theater into the Union County Performing Arts Center (and an old truck repair garage into the Hamilton Stage), attracted a hotel, and built up a thriving downtown.  These were among the biggest projects in a wide-ranging effort to make Rahway an arts center in North Jersey.

The latest effort -- affordable housing for artists -- is designed to address a common problem when the arts revitalize communities:  the places get too expensive for artists.  Rahway is collaborating with the Actors Fund and other partners to find out what working artists want in quality, affordable housing.

Take the Rahway Artists Housing Survey.

In South Brunswick, about halfway between New York City and Philadelphia, the Aging in Place Partnership is seeking to develop an arts-oriented community for artists and those who enjoy creative works.   The partnership is also looking for ideas for how to design the community.

Take the South Brunswick arts community survey.

One of the more interesting aspects about these efforts is that they are not in the places where you typically see concentrations of artists -- such as struggling city neighborhoods, university towns or hidden-away artist colonies.  Rahway and South Brunswick are very similar to a lot of suburban towns that developed their characters in the middle to late decades of the 20th century.

It will be interesting to see if these places attract artists who on paper are more like their professional counterparts in traditional arts-oriented communities or who are more like their neighbors in the suburbs.

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NJ Arts and the ethnoburbs

Northern New Mexico has the Native American/Spanish Colonial/High Desert vibe.  Western North Carolina has the American crafts/mountain people thing. Los Angeles has a reputation for being cool and laid back.

A good way to get more people in New Jersey to spend their arts dollars in the state, and attract more dollars from outside is to develop a distinct arts identity for New Jersey.

The best way to do that is to build on the state's distinct qualities and assets.  Among them is ethnic and cultural diversity.  New Jersey is one of the most culturally diverse regions in the United States. Nearly 41% of residents are Latino, African-American, Asian-American, of multiple races, or of other minority ethnicities.  (Even the term "White" may be misleading, because there are plenty of people of European descent who have more in common with the cultures of the Old World than of the American Midwest.)  New Jersey is also among the wealthiest -- and those two can go hand-in-hand to expand the market for arts and tourism in the state.

According to the latest Census Bureau estimates, there are more than 371,000 minority/multicultural households in New Jersey with incomes of at least $75,000.  There were nearly 244,000 minority/multicultural households with incomes of at least $100,000.  (This represents, respectively, 11% and 8% of New Jersey's households, and 36% and 23% of minority/multicultural households in New Jersey.)

As New Jersey has gotten more diverse, it has also gotten wealthier.  Estimated total household income in New Jersey in the last half of the 2000s was $1.8 billion more than in 1999. (This is in inflation-adjusted dollars, to compare apples to apples.)  According to the Selig Center for Economic Growth, between 2000 and 2010, New Jersey's total buying power grew more than 19% to $399 billion.  Much of that wealth was driven by the growing numbers of Hispanics and Asian-Americans in the state.  (Hispanic buying power grew nearly 58% in New Jersey, while White Non-Hispanic buying power grew 7%)

The diversity of the diversity also creates opportunities for arts organizations and communities that want to engage in creative placemaking.  East Orange is surrounded by a number of arts centers in Essex County -- Orange, Maplewood, South Orange, Montclair, and of course, Newark.  But East Orange has something those other towns don't -- a high density of people of Carribbean and West Indian descent.  Highlighting the art and culture of these cultures can help East Orange compete with its neighbors for the dollars spent in restaurants, shows, galleries and gift shops.  Similarly, Linden can build an arts and cultural environment on the high concentration of people of Eastern European origin.  Along Bloomfield Avenue from Verona to North Caldwell? -- an Italian-American heritage trail.  Woodbridge, Edison and other towns in Middlesex County could be the "capital" of South Asia in New Jersey, and perhaps the Northeast Corridor.

The Latino and Portuguese-language populations are so diverse that several communities can -- and do -- have districts that showcase the culture of different nationalities:  Peruvians in Paterson, Colombians in Elizabeth; Portuguese in the Ironbound section of Newark.

By the way, diversity means everyone.  The towns that promote 19th century Americana are as much a part of the diversity mix as every other community mentioned above.

How can creative placemakers build on the diversity in their communities?

• The first step is to build good relationships among members of the local arts communities and members of the local ethnic communities.  
• The second is to develop strategies that benefit as many members of those communities as possible. 

-- Leonardo Vazquez, AICP/PP

Director, Arts Build Communities 

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How to grow a local arts scene: The story of Woodbridge, NJ

Editor’s note: NJ ArtiFacts invites creative economy professionals to share stories about creative placemaking in their communities. In this essay, Lawrence McCullough, the Grants Officer for Woodbridge Township, NJ and a musician and author, shares insights about creative placemaking in Woodbridge.  He also shares tips for anyone who wants to build the presence and influence of the arts in their community. 

YOU…

… are a thoughtful, forward-looking municipal official who’s decided your community would benefit from having a lively Arts scene.

You’ve heard it boosts the local economy and aids in revitalizing low-income neighborhoods and faded commercial districts. And gives your town a little p-zazz and ka-shay.

Darn tootin’. The arts have proven to be a useful destination enticement for visitors — visitors who supply revenue to your local shops, restaurants, lodging sites, parking meters. And you’ve also taken note of the scores of case studies demonstrating the significant role arts have played in jump-starting and stabilizing genuine urban renewal throughout North America over the last three decades.

You ask: "What are the Goldilocks Conditions for breeding the arts in my town — i.e., the optimum conditions (not too hot, not too cold) that will allow local arts to thrive?”

Let’s look at a New Jersey suburb and see how it was able to get some arts activity up and running.

Woodbridge Township in Middlesex County is a collection of hamlets and subdivisions strung together with commercial highways connecting its more than 99,000 residents with Newark, New Brunswick, and other cities to the north and south, and the growing suburbs in Staten Island and central Jersey.  Though Woodbridge is now New Jersey’s 6th-largest municipality, it looks and feels more like a typical New Jersey suburb than the cities where you tend to expect the arts to grow.

Woodbridge has a blue-collar labor history as a clay mining, brick-and-ceramics manufacturing, coal shipping, chemical processing center. It does not have a university or a major cultural institution like a large museum, plush performing arts center or professional orchestra or theatre company. Or arts-devoted private foundation, arts service organization or huge corporate benefactor.

Yet in the last three years Woodbridge Township has seen the following cultural initiatives emerge out of seemingly nowhere:

·        Music on Main Street

·        Woodbridge Wednesdays

·        Barron Arts Center’s Nutz About Art Fest

·        10 Towns Sculpture Project

·        Woodbridge Artisan Guild Co-op & Gallery

·        Woodbridge Teen Idol

·        Woodbridge Senior Idol

·        New Horizons Band & Community Chorus

·        International Dance Fest

·        Woodbridge Community Youth Players

·        Holiday Stroll

·        Festival of Contemporary Immigration Writing

·        Jazz & Sketch Night

·        Woodbridge Brew Fest

·        Woodbridge Chili Cookoff

·        Historic Downtown Ghost Walk

·        Woodbridge History Trail

·        Woodbridge Farmers Market

·        Avenel Community Day

·        Earth Day Faire

… and the Greenable Woodbridge Museum of the Future.

Add all of those to a solid base of culture-linked events already in existence over the years:

• Mayor’s Summer Concerts
• Movies in the Park
• St. James Street Fair
• Main Street Mayfest
• Waterfront Festival
• Downtown Car Cruise
• Civil War Living History Camp
• St. Patrick’s Parade
• Barron Arts Center Holiday Train Show
• PoetsWednesday

• India Day Parade                                 

… and you’ve got an increasing number of local folks venturing out of their homes to mingle with curious out-of-towners dropping by to see what’s going on at Exit 11.  It’s the fabled Traffic Crossroads of New Jersey, which no one has ever considered an Arts Crossroads of New Jersey, until maybe now.

While Woodbridge has yet to attain bonafide Arts Mecca status, the recent flurry of grass-roots arts activity involving hundreds of residents and thousands of visitors certainly benefits the local economy. And it’s expanding.

How do we get our local arts scene started?

Recall that phrase above:  “cultural initiatives emerge out of seemingly nowhere”. The seeds for those initiatives already existed in Woodbridge and likely exist in your town. The seeds are called artists. They can lay fallow and invisible for years. Your task is to bring them into the light, feed them basic nutrients and get them to sprout.

Step 1. Invite local artists to meet each other, because most of them never have. Invite them to town hall where they start absorbing the idea that the municipality sees them as legitimate business people and useful stakeholders in the community’s future. Solicit their concrete ideas on how to make your town more arts-filled and arts-active.

Step 2. Have them form an ad hoc Local Arts Advisory Committee with the meetings chaired by someone from the mayor’s office who can guide discussion and add perspective on questions of zoning, municipal ordinances, future development trends, etc. Keep things loose. Articulate, motivated leaders will emerge.

Step 3.  After everyone’s arts wish lists have been aired, watch as new projects bubble up and take shape, gather steam and end up as new community events or even new arts organizations. Ideas that gestated in individual minds for years will achieve solid form when a collective energy gets churning. Individual Artists who felt isolated will now feel empowered to bring their work to a more public sphere and contribute to the community.

Example:  in mid-2007, shortly after entering his first full term in office, Mayor John McCormac convened the Woodbridge Committee for the Arts. It was a diverse group of 30 or so arts-involved people from the Township comprising a music store owner, sculptor, choral director, recording studio engineer, dance teacher, ceramicist, painter, digital animator, CD producer, theatre education director, photographer, graphic designer, jewelry maker, singer, poet, chef and more.

Within a few months from this chance assemblage there arose the two dozen Arts initiatives cited above. And those initiatives have generated their own spin-offs involving more residents, students and businesses.

How do we find these arts-involved people?

You take a thorough arts inventory that identifies every single Arts-related person, business or activity in the community no matter what their size or level of professionalism or commerciality.

Mayor McCormac directed staff to create a basic survey that identified local Artists and asked 15 questions about their work, career needs and ways they believed Arts could be promoted in Woodbridge Township. The survey was posted on the township web site, displayed in flyer form at municipal buildings, mailed to Arts teachers in the schools. Artists were also located via extensive googling, contacted by letter and email and asked to fill out the survey.

After a couple hundred surveys were returned, the Mayor brought in folks with solid academic cred:  the National Center for Neighborhood and Brownfields Redevelopment at Rutgers University. They compiled the survey results and wrote up a cogent 64-page report that not only gave a snapshot of the Township’s current state of the Arts but analyzed future options for Arts-based redevelopment, needs of local Artists and organizations, viability of a cultural district, Arts promotion strategies and Arts education programs.

Do we really need a 64-page academic report like The Arts Community, Arts Village Development and Promotion of Arts in Woodbridge Township?

Such a report does 4 things: 
(1) It gives you a better handle on what your local arts community is actually like in terms of resources and active members,
(2) it gets artists in your community interested in being part of what you’re trying to get started,
(3) it’s the kind of official document that shows potential funders or development partners you’re serious about utilizing your local arts as economic leverage, and

(4) it’s a way to begin letting the general community know you’ve got something in the works likely to bring economic benefits and recognition to town.

Do we need major arts facilities to have a thriving arts milieu?

No. Community-based Arts in the 21^st century isn’t about Monodirectional Centralized Edifice Hierarchy. It’s about Multidimensional De-Centralized Content Diffusion … your task is to develop horizontal not vertical relationships among artists, arts venues and arts audiences … i.e., relationships that engage a large number of people as creators come in close contact with consumers.

Because art doesn’t start with facilities. Art starts with programming. Or, Content, if we’re speaking the jargon of Our Modern World 2.0. Art comes from people, not buildings. Buildings are hardware; they disperse art, but they don’t create it. If you’ve got artists doing art, the right spaces will appear and function as conduits for circulating art.

However, having an established arts “anchor” institution is a definite asset. You may already have such an anchor actively involved in fostering various forms of arts in the community; this institution will be a valuable partner in your efforts to grow and spread arts locally.

Woodbridge is fortunate to possess an excellent and versatile arts anchor that is also a National Register of Historic Places site. The Barron Arts Center has functioned as the Township’s de facto arts center since 1977, offering a year-round schedule of exhibits, concerts, literary readings, films, theatre works, lectures, classes and workshops. Almost every program is admission free. Almost every program features local or New Jersey artists.

The Barron’s acclaimed monthly PoetsWednesday series is the longest-running poetry series in the U.S. (since 1978) and has featured the cream of contemporary American poets along with an open mike segment for budding writers. The annual Holiday Train Display draws thousands of visitors from across the state and region, many of whom return for other events during the year. Though it isn’t geared to generate a large amount of earned revenue, the Barron Arts Center helps define Woodbridge Township’s arts identity.

If we don’t have an arts anchor institution, or what we have is too limited in size or scope, where do we fit all this art we’re cooking up?

Harness the awesome power of the sustainability mantra:  recycle, re-use and re-purpose your existing public and private spaces.

·        Woodbridge doesn’t have a dedicated space for large theatre productions. So the Woodbridge Community Youth Players present their plays at a school and an ethnic association bingo hall. If, as Shakespeare wrote, “all the world’s a stage” — then that stage can be just about anywhere you can rig up lights, sound and seating for the groundlings.

·        Woodbridge doesn’t have a performing arts center, so the Music on Main Street series holds its concerts in a church sanctuary, a middle school auditorium and a downtown park also used for the Historic GhostWalk, Halloween Hayrides, Easter Egg Hunt and Civil War Living History Camp.

·        The Senior Idol is held at Woodbridge Community Center, Teen Idol at a high school … Battle of the Bands and competitions for Best Dance Crew are at the Youth Center at Evergreen (a former grade school) … International Dance Fest occurs at a banquet hall that has featured trade shows, weddings and the Miss India USA pageant.

·        The new visual arts co-op, the Woodbridge Artisan Guild, couldn’t afford a brand new building. So they opened a gallery in a former consignment clothing storefront off Main Street between a popular restaurant and a nail salon; their Holiday Sale Shop comes to seasonal life in a former shoe store.

·        Greenable Woodbridge Museum of the Future isn’t tucked away in the woods; it’s in the Woodbridge Center Mall (2^nd floor, JC Penney wing), where thousands of shoppers pass by weekly and no doubt benefit by taking a few minutes to ponder ways to Green their consumption.

Big anchor institutions are great because they provide a visible, year-round advertisement for local Arts, have professional, experienced staff and can help guide new partnerships for new Arts programming.

But you can still start growing your local Arts without one.

Do we need a local arts council?

At the start of your arts development, no. But ultimately, it’s a very useful tool to help sustain and grow the Arts community. A local arts council is in essence a marketing organization that promotes all Arts activity in your community — promotion geared both to local residents and outsiders. It should have a professional, paid staff and be a 501(c)(3) corporation that can serve as a grants applicant to bring funds to local Arts groups and Arts initiatives.

Do we need arts education programs?

In the short-term, arts education programs are an excellent way to involve schools and thereby get more publicity and audience for your local arts activities. Long-term, they lay the foundation for a strong future for arts in your community by cultivating young artists and future arts audiences. Many teachers — even if they’re not employed specifically as arts teachers — are artists and will do what they can to facilitate collaborations between students and your arts programming.

How do we get the public to pay attention to this arts stuff?

It helps if you have a written arts plan that states what the municipal government and partner groups hope to accomplish and how.

After the Woodbridge Committee for the Arts had met a few times and the arts report from Rutgers was complete, Mayor McCormac created a 10-point Arts Plan that sought to implement many of the report recommendations and Committee goals. The 10 objectives put forth were modest, focusing on finding ways to develop more local Arts organizations to present more public Arts events and have more people attend them.

Even expressed as an outline, an arts plan serves as a benchmark to measure your progress in critical action areas. Three years later, each of the 10 points in the Woodbridge Township Arts Plan have been implemented, signaling the time is due for a fresh look at the next set of objectives.

How much do we need to get the general public involved?

Ultimately, a lot. Visualize your successful local Arts community as a three-legged stool:  Institutions-Audiences-Artists.

It’s a symbiotic triangle; one leg missing, no stool … one leg weak or unstable, stool is unusable. All elements must support each other, or you have nothing.

Yet, the truly fundamental interaction here (fundamental as in “foundation”) derives from the strength of the connection between local Audiences and Artists.

Community building isn’t a top-down exercise that can be installed or implanted; it rises from the ground up. Institutions are important in expanding local arts by providing resources, seed money, program guidance, facilities, outreach … but Artists and Audiences have to find each other at the most basic local level for a community Arts structure to evolve toward strong Institutions … no Institution can mandate this bond if it isn’t there.

As a municipal official representing the long-term interests of your residents (audiences), you must make certain they are not only along for the ride but in the passenger seat helping navigate — even taking an occasional turn at the wheel.

Can we recap all this?

Sure. Growing your Local Arts Scene boils down to six essential ingredients:

1)  municipal officials willing to offer support, direction and resources; most importantly, they serve as the means of introducing this concept to non-arts residents and businesses

2)  local Artists willing to extend their arts activity to a more public, more collaborative level

3)  flexible venues such as churches, schools, storefronts, restaurants that can accommodate Arts events in their space; contact the owner/operators of these spaces — they are often thrilled to have you do the work of bringing attention to their space

4)  local business support from landlords who will cut a break on rent for galleries and performance space, restaurants and bars that offer event-related specials, merchant associations who cash-sponsor or donate in-kind to programs, etc.

5)  community groups willing to provide volunteers and host events and come up with new ways to use Arts activity for their benefit

6)  massive and continuous media outreach via  news releases, flyers, ads, web and social media sites, e-blasts, tweets — simple, frequent outreach informing the public in your town and elsewhere about all this amazing Arts activity you’ve got

Where does #6 come from?

There’s no hard-and-fast rule, but it better come from somebody and often, or your arts growth will be maddeningly slow. Possibly the Arts Committee in its glorious ad hoc-ness can appoint a person or sub-committee to commit to handling what is in essence a marketing campaign for your efforts: writing and sending out releases, maintaining a web directory of local Artists and Arts events, making sure all your community arts activities are known to your community Arts consumers by whatever publicity channels are available.

Is that it?

There’s the Final Super-Essential Core Ingredient... so critical it goes beyond mere numbers: 

The unshakable belief that 

our community’s quality of life 

benefits enormously when 

— more citizens interact in public 

— in ways that foster collaboration 

— and expand our understanding 

of what each of us can contribute 

to that shared quality of life.

Which is to say, participating in a vibrant local arts scene can momentarily extract us from our private, cocooned worlds of television and online comment forums to actually converse with each other about what’s of importance in our community.

* Arts express our individuality and emphasize our similarity…

* Arts let us walk in someone else’s moccasins and feel their pain and joy, enthusiasm and apprehension…

* Arts help disparate elements of a community connect and build something bigger than the sum of individual parts…

* Arts are a vehicle for articulating pressing community issues and reaching consensus on those issues …

* Arts can help municipal officials mobilize the community to move forward with necessary change.

Bottom Line:  when your community is starting to plan economic revitalization strategies, make sure the Arts have a place “at the table”.

In truth, artists will be the ones who help you craft that table and set the groundwork for success.

# # #

—    Lawrence E. McCullough, Ph.D. is the Grants Officer for Woodbridge Township. He has been an an active organizer of Arts and non-profit community ventures since 1973. Dr. McCullough is a musician/composer and author of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, plays and film scripts – see www.lemccullough.com for full publication/performance details. He is married to the actress Lisa Bansavage, with whom he operates an educational film and theatre organization, Pages of History, Inc. (www.pagesofhistory.org).

© 2011 Lawrence E. McCullough

Reprinted by permission of the author

The opinions expressed by guest contributors are their own, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Arts Build Communities or Rutgers University  Guest contributors are responsible for copyright clearance of all images published and the accuracy of the content they provide.

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Want more government support? Ask for some in-kindness

Over the past two years, Arts Build Communities has been interviewing local cultural professionals to find out what works in getting communities to be more supportive of the arts.


Not surprisingly, it's hard to get direct financial support from local governments, unless they have a history of supporting the arts.  But in-kind support can be easier to get.  The types of in-kind support that some municipalities in New Jersey provide include:


*Promotional support for local arts activities through official newsletters and websites
*Low lease rates or donations of unused government facilities.  In one case, a local arts group got an old boathouse that they turned into a gallery.  In another case, a local arts group got office space in an underused municipal building.
*The addition of an arts facility on a government's insurance policy.

(Because the comments were made in focus groups or interviews in which we offered confidentiality, we are not going to reveal the names of these communities.)

It is easier to ask for in-kind support because, as one cultural professional put it, these kinds of requests tend to "fly under the radar" in public meetings where budget line items are challenged or defended.

Easier doesn't always mean easy. Success in getting any support depends on the kind of relationships the local arts community and local arts organizations have with local officials and the communities they care most about.  (Yes, it all comes back to having good relationships with the most influential people.)

If you manage an arts organization, think about all of the administrative costs your organization faces.  What would you like your local government to help with?

--Leonardo Vazquez, AICP/PP

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NEA report on creative placemaking offers good ideas for cultural professionals and artists

Creative Placemaking is an interesting and informative white paper from the Mayors Institute for City Design at the National Endowment for the Arts.  Cultural professionals, civic-minded artists, economic development professionals and urban planners can get a lot of good ideas from it.  But be careful when reading it.

The authors highlight impressive numbers to show the benefits of arts-based community and economic development.  They talk about the key ingredients to be successful at creative placemaking.  And they tell inspiring stories of wonderful projects and places.

You might think that creative placemaking would be easy.   After all, the numbers should speak for themselves. If you put the ingredients together, good things should happen.  Other places did it, and from what's in the stories, it doesn't seem that hard to repeat their successes, no?

Unfortunately, no.  Creative placemaking -- like any kind of community and economic development -- takes patience, persistence, commitment and adaptation. People who are otherwise reasonable may seem irrational when you just show numbers.  There is no paint-by-numbers approach to placemaking that works for everyone. (In fact, placemaking is like painting on a moving canvas with paints that fade and blend in ways you can't predict.)  Short success stories tend to be glossy.  Even when they're not, the combination of things that worked for one place won't automatically work for another.

Placemaking is rarely as easy or as fast as it seems in the slide shows and success stories.  But if you're willing to share the time, energy, resources and credit -- and you're willing to be both grounded and flexible -- you'll be more likely to succeed.

Arts Build Communities in partnership with the Bloustein Online Continuing Education Program offers courses in creative placemaking.  These courses help you learn skills and get deeper insights into how places connect the arts with community and economic development.  You can earn a Bloustein Professional Certificate in Cultural Planning and Development.  All of these can help you influence leaders and lawmakers, artists and economic developers.

Upcoming courses in the Cultural Planning and Development track include:

• Building Creative Communities
• Building Sustainable Creative Communities
• Programming Cultural Uses
• Cultural Heritage Tourism

To learn more about these classes, visit the BOCEP course catalog.  

You can learn more about Arts Build Communities (and join our mailing list) here

Oh, and you probably also want to read Creative Placemaking.  

--Leonardo Vazquez, AICP/PP

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Diversity creates more opportunities for New Jersey arts

To cultural visitors, Northern New Mexico is known for its connections to the Pueblo people and colonial Spanish heritage.  Western North Carolina has a mountain crafts chic.  South Florida has a subtropical, Caribbean vibe.  What's Jersey's "brand" as an arts market?

I don't know either.  Nestled between two of the biggest arts cities in the country, New Jersey faces both major challenges and opportunities.  The biggest challenge is distinguishing the arts in the state's communities and regions from that in New York City and Philadelphia.   A big opportunity is the wide range of diversity in such a small area.

New Jersey is more diverse in more ways than most other areas of the United States.  From most parts of the Garden State, you are within an hour of both a historic, international city and a classic American farm.  New Jersey is one of the most ethnically diverse areas of the country.  Millions of people with ties to dozens of countries live in the state.  According to the American Community Survey, an estimated 97% of the state's population reported having ancestries other than "American."

Some other good reasons to build on the state's diversity:  Buying power in New Jersey grew more than 19% in the last 10 years, and a big part of the growth is from the multicultural economy  (African-Americans, Latinos and anyone else not considered ethnically "White." )  Buying power is the amount of money available after taxes.  According to the Selig Center for Economic Growth at the University of Georgia, ethnic minorities in the New Jersey hold about $109 billion in buying power -- about 27% of the $399 billion in buying power in the state.

Latinos in New Jersey have about $39 billion in buying power -- about 10% of the state total -- and their buying power has increased by nearly 58% since 2000.  African-Americans control about $32 billion, and their buying power has increased by nearly 14%.  Asian-Americans hold about $30 billion in buying power, and their buying power has increased by about 55%.  Non-Hispanic Whites still hold the most amount of buying power -- $290 billion -- but the increase there is less than 8%.  (The changes reported account for inflation).

More than 371,000 minority households in New Jersey have incomes of more than $75,000; nearly 244,000 have incomes of more than $100,000, according to the most recent American Community Survey estimate.

These kinds of numbers create real opportunities for small and mid-sized communities to get more involved with the creative economy.  In older industrial communities like Paterson, Perth Amboy and Camden, the arts can play a bigger role in their economic development strategies.

Even in Essex County, one of the busiest arts areas in New Jersey (Think about Newark, Montclair, Maplewood, Orange and South Orange) diversity creates opportunities.  With its large West Indian and Black population, East Orange could focus on Afro-Caribbean arts.  About 15% of New Jersey's population has Italian ancestry. Imagine an Italian-American arts and heritage trail along Bloomfield Avenue from North Newark to West Caldwell.

But if these and other communities want to make this happen, they should plan to work for it.  It would be a mistake to expect that a group of artists by themselves will create an arts environment that attracts visitors and supports businesses.  It might happen, but probably won't.  Communities that help local artists are likely to be more successful sooner than those that don't.

While arts communities compete with one another for artists and visitors, having more arts districts and communities benefits everyone. The more different types of arts activities and experiences there are, the longer visitors will stay and the more artists a region will attract.  More people and more artists can bring even more people and more artists.  All that means more money going into and staying in a region. The longer people stay, the more likely they are to buy food and gifts and rent hotel rooms. Tourists who enjoy the arts tend to be wealthier, spend more and stay longer than other types of visitors.  In Santa Fe, Asheville and other places, arts and cultural activities attract buyers of second and retirement homes. (In other words, people who pay property taxes but don't have children in the school system.)

In other words: More arts can lead to more prosperity, even for people who have no connection to the arts. New Jersey's diversity not only creates more opportunities for more communities, it creates the potential to generate more distinct and distinctive art.

--Leonardo Vazquez, AICP/PP

Arts Build Communities offers several courses and events to help communities make better decisions in connecting the arts with community and economic development. See upcoming classes here.

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The arts: business sector, infrastructure or social good?

In one of the most artsy towns in one of the most artsy areas of New Jersey, the South Orange Performing Arts Center is struggling to pay back a $3.9 million loan to the township. One South Orange official openly questioned whether SOPAC will ever be able to pay back its debt.  This author has heard SOPAC called a failure.

South Orange Performing Arts Center

Well, that depends on how you look at it. As a business, SOPAC is not doing well, and might not for years to come.  (The "bad economy" argument is not compelling.  While we might expect subscriptions and donations to go down, local theaters should be a more attractive alternative to those who want to enjoy performances and save money.)

On the other hand, there are plenty more stores and restaurants in South Orange Village than were there in 2005, a year before SOPAC opened.  (In other words, there were more places to shop, eat and visit in the worst years of this recession than there were in the best years before the crash.)

And SOPAC adds several benefits for South Orange and surrounding communities: A large event space, more opportunities to highlight community and student performers in a professional setting, and more choices for movies -- all within walking distance of the train.

So the question for South Orange and other communities looking to the arts for community and economic development is:  Should an arts center be considered a business sector, infrastructure or a social good?

The answer can help determine whether a municipality supports the arts, or just allows it to happen.  The answer also can help officials decide whether arts activities supported by communities should be managed by economic development, community development, or parks and recreation agencies.

If the arts are just another business sector, then a community should judge their success by their return on investment to the public.  Nonprofit institutions don't pay property taxes, but they can give a Payment In Lieu Of Taxes (PILOT).  Community leaders should negotiate for a PILOT that covers the center's share of municipal services, plus extra to make up for the fact that a tax-paying business could be on the site.  If, as in the case of South Orange, the community invests in a center, the community should demand that the center generate as much revenue as possible.  But the center should be free to charge as much as the market will bear, without any consideration for community arts or events that wouldn't bring in much revenue.

If the arts are seen as community infrastructure -- like a road or a storm drain system -- then their success should be measured in how many businesses, revenue-generating development or self-supporting residents it attracts and supports.   To make it work financially, communities could support the arts with some of the revenue that would be generated by new development.  That's what Rahway did in March, when its City Council unanimously approved an $8.5 million bond to propel its growing arts district.

It can make sense to take on this much debt for large projects that generate enough revenue to pay back their costs  That's why tax increment financing is successful around the country.  (In New Jersey, it's known as a Revenue Allocation District.)  But there are other ways to support small initiatives.  Governments could reserve a portion of the added tax revenues or fees that come about because of the arts.  Or perhaps Special Improvement Districts could dedicate a percentage to the arts from the revenues they receive from restaurants, shops and other businesses that benefit from all the people coming to enjoy the arts -- then staying to shop and eat.

Under the infrastructure scenario, cultural organizations and artists that receive support should be encouraged -- if not obligated -- to promote local businesses and projects who can bring more revenue to the municipality.

A third option is to see the arts like parks -- an overall benefit to society that are not expected to pay for themselves. School-based  and community arts programs, small community theaters and the like are probably not going to be self-supporting over the long term. (Especially not in north and central Jersey, where there are so many options for arts lovers.)

In this view, the community supports the arts through its property taxes or other fees. As with other social goods, measures of success include the number of people served and how those people feel they benefit from the arts.

The responsibility of cultural organizations and artists in this scenario would be to serve as many people as possible, and especially those who do not have as much access to art.

The three options are not mutually exclusive.  Larger cities like Newark and Jersey City might be able to do all three.  But in smaller communities like South Orange and Rahway, the choices are more difficult.

By choosing among these options, community and cultural leaders can make better choices about how public resources should be spent, and reduce the type of controversy now facing initiatives like the South Orange Performing Arts Center.

 Leonardo Vazquez, AICP/PP

For more on the SOPAC struggles, see this report in NJ.com


For more on Rahway's support for the arts, see this report in NJ.com

Photo credit: David Gard, New Jersey Local News Service.  The image was published in NJ.com on October 10, 2010.

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