Editor’s note: This story is part of our Affordability for Artists package, which explores the impact of Seattle’s soaring cost of living on the local arts scene, why it matters and what may help.
Basic income, affordable housing and free health care for artists. These may sound like pie-in-the-sky ideas, but multiple organizations here and across the country are making it happen. These are among the many solutions and ideas King County-based artists, in our Seattle Times 2024 Affordability for Artists Survey, say could help address the affordability crisis cramping local arts — while noting that those things should be available to everyone.
Below, we’re highlighting a few promising programs while acknowledging that individual programs can only do so much to remedy a structural issue (which requires structural solutions). These are by no means a panacea, but a Band-Aid can still stem some bleeding.
Piloting basic income for artists
Artistic income and the cost of living in Seattle (or any high-cost-of-living city) rarely align. What if cities, understanding the social, cultural and economic value of artists enriching their communities, helped directly alleviate that financial insecurity?
In San Francisco; St. Paul, Minn.; and New York state, programs testing the feasibility of a guaranteed income for artists have launched in the last few years.
“Our communities need a lot of things to be healthy, and they aren’t all valued by our economy,” said Laura Zabel, executive director of Springboard for the Arts, the independent nonprofit behind St. Paul’s basic income for artists program. “Cultural work, creative work, community organizing, care work — those are all forms of labor that are really important to the health of our communities and our neighborhoods, but our economy doesn’t value them financially.”
A 2024 report on cultural trends by World Cities Culture Forum, a network of civic and cultural leaders from more than 40 cities around the world, pointed to a basic income for artists as a feasible solution to this creative financial strain. In Seattle, 71% of respondents to The Seattle Times 2024 Affordability for Artists Survey who chose to answer a question about possible solutions selected a basic income as one of the solutions they thought would have the biggest impact. A 2022 report by the Puget Sound Regional Council — an association of local governments and state agencies — recommended piloting a guaranteed income program for creative workers as one of the solutions to make the sector more sustainable and equitable.
In San Francisco, the city partnered with Yerba Buena Center for the Arts to administer an 18-month pilot program (called San Francisco’s Guaranteed Income Pilot for Artists), which launched in May 2021 and gave 130 area artists monthly subsidies of $1,000; funding came from a mix of public and private sources.
Creatives Rebuild New York’s Guaranteed Income for Artists program launched in November 2022; anchored by $115 million from the Mellon Foundation and $5 million each from the Ford and Stavros Niarchos foundations, it supports 2,400 artists from nearly every county in New York state, with subsidies of $1,000 a month for 18 months.
In St. Paul, the Guaranteed Income Pilot for Artists was launched in 2021 by Springboard for the Arts, with support from the McKnight Foundation and the Bush Foundation. The program now supports 75 “artists, culture bearers, and creative workers” — 50 in two urban St. Paul neighborhoods and 25 in rural Otter Tail County, Minn. — with subsidies of $500 per month.
“It is, for many people, a relatively small amount of money,” Zabel said. “But it really has this stabilizing effect, and the thing that people do when they’re stable is contribute to their community in new ways, and that benefits all of us.”
Zabel said there is research showing that people who receive guaranteed income spend it on basic needs — housing, groceries, health care — and artists are no different. Increased stability, she said, also allows artists to make the work that they want to make, not driven by the creative marketplace or the whims of philanthropic funding. “Guaranteed income can be a tool for supporting the kind of work that we know needs to exist to help us to connect to one another, to give us outlets for healing and processing, for talking about hard issues, to help us find ways to understand each other better.”
— Gemma Wilson, arts and culture writer
Striving to pay artists a fair wage
It seems like such a basic thing: paying working artists a living wage. But it’s not something that most arts organizations, particularly smaller ones, find easy to do. That’s why it’s unusual that The Feast, a small nonprofit theater company in Seattle whose audiences number approximately 2,200 people per season (over two productions), aims to do so, paying its actors $825 a week per production, regardless of the size of the role or the actor’s union affiliation.
It’s not a huge amount, but it’s much higher than what most small theaters can offer. A recent look at audition postings on Theatre Puget Sound’s website showed smaller theater companies offering stipends to nonunion actors of $1,500 on the higher end and $50-$200 on the lower end (both for approximately two months’ work), with some paying nothing at all.
“It’s a pretty stark difference,” said local actor Dedra D. Woods, who has appeared in four productions at The Feast. “When Ryan first approached me … and told me how much they paid, I was like, ‘What?’”
Founding director Ryan Guzzo Purcell, who started The Feast as The Williams Project in 2014, said that paying artists fairly was part of his plan from the beginning. He’d been working at a San Francisco theater, and “just started noticing that actors who were working all the time were quitting the field, and the actors that could stay were the ones who were working part time and had other jobs. It seemed off to me.”
Purcell said The Feast has made their financial challenges work by “prioritizing people over things”: their production budgets are small, they only do a few shows a year, and “we spend more time fundraising than a lot of theaters our size.”
Even at that, Woods points out, the wage is not an easy one to live on in Seattle. “I don’t know an artist in town who isn’t struggling,” she said. “Even if you’re working at one of the highest-paid theater companies, we’re all thinking about the next gig. You’re making money now; what’s going to happen when you’re not?”
Olivier Wevers, artistic director and founder of Seattle contemporary dance company Whim W’Him, had similar concerns for the dancers in his company. “The contemporary dance industry in this country is very exploitative with artists,” he said. “I knew that when I started the company, I wanted to change that and pay artists better — not just paying them better, but creating a safer environment, a healthier environment, as well as offering more opportunities.”
Dancers in Whim W’Him’s seven-member company have employee contracts for a minimum of 35 weeks of work per year, paid at $31.35 an hour for 35 hours a week, with opportunities to earn more through touring and teaching. They receive cost of living raises, full employment benefits, a health care stipend, physical therapy and other perks.
Karl Watson, who danced with Whim W’Him for seven years and is now the company manager, said that the company is “locally and nationally, definitely a leader” among contemporary dance companies in terms of artist pay, specifically in the hourly rate and the number of weeks employed. He noted that many companies hire dancers as independent contractors, rather than employees, on a per-project basis. As a dancer, he remembered that the steady income allowed him to really focus on the work of making art. “You might still have some financial stress from time to time,” he said, “but you know that the work you’re doing is being compensated in a way that feels fair.”
Wevers spoke of extra fundraising, and “a lot of hard work and dedication to make it happen.” It’s interesting, he noted, that when an audience member buys a ticket, they generally don’t know how much the artists are paid. “I’m surprised that no one is asking that question,” he said.
— Moira Macdonald, arts critic
Helping Seattle musicians with health care and career expenses
With the cost of living ever increasing, two Seattle nonprofits are dedicated to easing the burden for local musicians. Founded in 2015 by musicians Ian Moore and Steph Fairweather, Seattle Musicians Access to Sustainable Healthcare (better known as SMASH) has been connecting Seattle-area musicians — who rarely have access to employer-sponsored health insurance like many nine-to-fivers — to free or low-cost health services for nearly a decade.
Respondents to The Seattle Times 2024 Affordability for Artists Survey indicated that health care is one of the top costs that have become more burdensome in the past two years, after housing, food and studio/rehearsal space. About 7.5% of 637 respondents who answered a question about health care indicated they do not have health insurance, while about a quarter of respondents self-funded their health care. About 22% had health care through a spouse, partner or other family member.
Membership in SMASH, which tripled at the onset of the pandemic in 2020, is free for working musicians who meet certain income requirements and includes annual visits with a primary care physician, dental and mental health services, as well as hearing screenings and physical therapy.
SMASH’s operations are funded through donations and events throughout the year, highlighted by an annual fall tribute show that’s become one of the city’s best concert traditions uniting local legends and the next generation of homegrown talents.
Seattle music vet Ben London, who’s helped curate those SMASH benefit shows over the years, has also been busy growing his own nonprofit, Sonic Guild, for the last five years. For developing artists still growing their fan base, there’s typically more money going out the door than there is coming in. Originally launched under the name Black Fret, Sonic Guild provides grants intended for artists to put toward career expenses — things like costly studio time, making music videos or buying new gear. But it’s not set in stone.
“Our hope is that people will use it for studio [time], professional services, buying merch — a lot of that stuff,” London said. “But … sometimes moving your career forward means paying your rent or your phone bill.”
Sonic Guild is coming off its biggest year yet, awarding 10 local artists with $10,000 grants at a Triple Door gala in February. It’s a sweet deal for supporters, too. Members who contribute $75 a month (or $750 per year) gain access to exclusive shows throughout the year and help with the grant selection process. The nonprofit, which also raises money via donations and fundraisers, has expanded its reach beyond the core grants with various education programs and professional development panels for artists. Later this year, Sonic Guild plans to roll out two new grant lines, including one intended to help musicians offset touring costs at a time when crisscrossing the country in a van has gotten prohibitively expensive for young bands.
— Michael Rietmulder, music writer
Creating affordable housing for artists
Housing. Time and again, survey respondents indicated affording housing was one of the main challenges they faced and the No. 1 cost that had become more burdensome in the past two years.
It could also be the key to unlocking solutions. More artist-specific housing developments, according to a 2022 Arts and Culture Economic Recovery Strategy report by the Puget Sound Regional Council, could help the struggling sector.
While Seattle’s home to a handful of affordable housing projects for artists, there isn’t enough to fill the need. “Not even close,” said longtime developer and local arts advocate Ben Rankin.
Rankin is working with former Seattle City Councilmember and developer Richard Conlin and Sam Farrazaino of Equinox Studios, a longtime art studio enclave in Georgetown, to create more than 600 affordable apartments in the neighborhood. Under Watershed Community Development, a new nonprofit, half of these new units will be set aside for artists, Rankin said. If all goes well, construction on the first building should start early next year.
The rent prices will be capped so that they’re affordable to people who make no more than 40% to 80% of the area median income.
A combination of philanthropy and social-impact investment should help the math on the development pencil out, Rankin said. (Plus, working as a nonprofit brings a host of other tax benefits.) There is a “big network of generous people who want to find ways to support the arts and to support housing affordability,” Rankin said.
A brand-new program 800 miles south is trying to do the same. Launched last year, Artist Space Trust, based in the Bay Area — where artists are facing a similarly high-pitched affordability crisis — is one of the first community land trusts in the country entirely devoted to acquiring and stewarding permanently affordable housing and creative space for artists.
The nonprofit acquires homes and buildings via purchase or donation. While it holds on to ownership of the land in perpetuity, it can rent or sell the buildings to low-income artists at below-market rate.
AST’s financial model rests on a few pillars. One: property owners willing to donate or bequeath their houses to the trust. Two, as a nonprofit, it can offer sellers advantageous tax write-offs. Three, philanthropic support from foundations that undergird the nonprofit’s day-to-day operations. Four: a subsidiary social-impact loan fund that allows wealthy individuals and foundations to invest money (they just have to be OK with a lower rate of return on their loan).
Often, AST Director Meg Shiffler said, the property owners who bequeath their homes are elderly artists who purchased years before the housing boom. “They’ve likely paid off their home, and have been benefiting from that stability” — and want to build a legacy with their largest asset, she said.
In Missouri, a similar program called St. Louis Art Place Initiative is developing at least 18 units of single-family housing for low-to-moderate-income artists who are first-time homebuyers. The development will also be home to an artist residency and green and community art spaces. Like AST, the program works via a land trust model. It also relies on municipal development funds, private donations, financing from Community Development Financial Institutions and other funding sources.
Artists have already moved into two homes, with 10 more currently in development and slated for completion in 2024 and 2025, said API’s co-director Jennifer Allen.
The nonprofit is in talks to expand into other St. Louis neighborhoods and hopes to share best practices around the country. Similarly, AST’s Shiffler indicated she’s interested in expanding (or replicating) the model elsewhere in the U.S. For now, though, we don’t have art-focused programs like these in the Puget Sound region.
There may be other options in our backyard — literally. A couple of survey respondents who could afford to do so noted that they rent out their extra space (whether that’s a newly built accessory dwelling or downstairs space) to other artists at below-market rates.
But, several artists pointed out, individual efforts barely scratch the surface. Local designer and sculptor Rachel Ravitch called out the need for systemic change and pointed to Initiative 137, a (likely) future ballot measure that would tax companies with employees making over $1 million (by enacting a 5% marginal payroll tax on compensation above $1 million) to fund the construction of social housing.
Matthew Richter, co-founder and former director of Seattle’s Cultural Space Agency also stressed the need for a structural solution — for everyone. “I want affordable housing for artists,” he wrote in an email, ”and for Lyft drivers, and for grocery baggers, and for all my neighbors working below the Area [Median] Income.”
— Margo Vansynghel, arts economy reporter
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This coverage is partially underwritten by the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust. The funder plays no role in editorial decision making and The Seattle Times maintains editorial control over this and all its coverage.