everyone.
Thank you for joining our Seattle Within Reach conversation.
I'm Tammy Morales, Seattle City Council member representing District 2. This is a series of conversations we've been having for about the last year, and we are really trying to have discussions about how we intentionally create well-resourced neighborhoods that are connected, that offer essential goods and services that people can access without having to drive to them.
And the idea is really to talk with local and national practitioners about how we build healthy neighborhoods, how we make sure that those services, those amenities are within reach of every Seattle home, without having to get into a car.
Throughout the series we've been focusing on particular topics, particularly as it relates to our comprehensive plan and the intersection of different chapters of our plan.
We've talked about the planning process itself.
We've talked about housing, mobility, economic development.
We've talked about climate justice.
So if there are particular topics that you're interested in and would like to hear more about, please make sure to let us know.
We're doing our scheduling for the year as we speak.
Today's topic is arts and culture.
I am very excited to have some very well respected folks joining our conversation today.
So I'm going to introduce them before we get started.
So Chico Phillips is the Heritage Program Director at for culture, which is the cultural funding agency for King County, where she supports organizations and practitioners who preserve and share the history and material culture of King County, Washington.
previously the director of Black Past, an online resource for global African and African-American history.
She's also held positions at the Northwest African-American Museum, the United Negro College Fund, and the Photographic Center Northwest.
Chico sits on the board of the Association of King County Historical Organizations and the Washington Museum Association, and has previously served as a Seattle Arts Commissioner.
She's a graduate of Davidson College and holds a BA in history and a master's in museum studies from the University of Washington.
We also have with us Randy Engstrom, who has been a passionate advocate and organizer of cultural and community development for over 20 years.
Randy is currently the owner and principal of Third Way Creative, a collaborative consulting studio focused on cultural policy, racial equity, and creative economy.
He's also an adjunct faculty at Seattle University's Arts Leadership Program and a regular lecturer at the Evans School of Governance and Public Policy at the University of Washington.
Most recently, Randy served as director of the Office of Arts and Culture for the City of Seattle, where he established new programs and policies in arts education, cultural space affordability, and racial equity.
So thank you both for being here really excited to have you.
As I mentioned, you know the the series that we're doing here has been focused on different elements of our comprehensive plan and and different ways to talk about land use.
So I want to just start with a really broad question for both of you, which is.
What does it mean to consider that intersection of arts and culture sector as it relates to land use?
And maybe if you can talk about some specifics of the sector, how they're impacted by something like a comprehensive plan.
I'll just open it up for both of you to chime in.
Do you want to go first?
Randy, go for it.
All right, I'll go first.
Well, first, thank you for having us.
I appreciate the opportunity to sort of be a little bit of an evangelist for our cultural sector and the creative workers of our city and our region.
The first thing I'll say is that I don't think culture is optional in a comp plan.
I think it gets treated like something that is nice to have, but whether you look at it from the lens of sort of belonging and social cohesion, or whether you look at it from the lens creative economy and sort of growing the workforce of our region, I think it's actually essential.
The best way I've ever heard it put, I think was the inaugural civic poet, Claudio Castroluna, when she spoke at the Mayor's Arts Awards, I think it was 2014, maybe 2013. And she said, Seattle is a house and everyone who lives here belongs here.
And to me, arts and culture is central to how we foster belonging in a region.
Nobody visits Seattle to marvel at our cloud computing.
Nobody visits Seattle to take in the wonder of office towers.
They come here because of our culture.
So our culture is essential to our identity in like a social, emotional way.
And our culture is also, I think, central to the economic development future of our city and our region.
So I hope the comp plan, you know, integrates that in whatever way they can.
What do you think, Chieko?
Yeah, and maybe going literal with the question but when I think of land use and the art sector of think of the, you know, the buildings and the spaces and even the cultural landscapes that might be, you know, outdoor meeting space, and even.
you know, for profit businesses where arts happens, where culture happens, where histories are shared, where stories are shared.
And so when I think of land use, you know, I'm thinking of those buildings where the sector happens.
And that also, you know, I'm from the heritage field, so I'm also specifically always thinking about our older spaces, our spaces that have cultural significance that might be beyond architectural integrity.
And also, I've been thinking a lot about conservation, like land conservation, especially in terms of like, Native led ecosystem restoration and how can kind of some of those like conservation efforts, you know, intersect with the cultural sector and so I have a lot of things floating around around what it how exactly does land use intersect with the arts, but I'll start there.
Yeah, well, thank you for that.
And I guess I should say, as somebody who's trained as a neighborhood planner, I definitely have kind of a zoning in on the land use question in particular.
But I am thinking about what it means for individual artists in terms of affordability and the ability to stay here in the city and ability to create their art, and also in terms of, I guess, maybe more to Randy's point about, you know, what's the impact on community of being able to retain our artists in the city because they're not getting pushed out.
So maybe I'll ask you to talk a little bit about the sort of the affordability impact on artists and what they need to be able to stay and thrive in the community.
Do you want to take that one first, Chieko?
No.
Well, to me, there's an interesting tension of the fact that artists and our creative ecology is such a central driver to this city and this region.
And we are grappling with a really overwhelming affordability crisis that's pushing creative workers and, and, and, you know, modest income families out of the city.
And there's a whole host of reasons for that I know you did a whole session on on the housing issue which is everyone's issue, but I will say that, you know, when, when, when folks were engaged by the office plan and community development around the comp plan and around what was important to them, they talked about having a third place and having cultural homes, like those buildings and those histories that Chieko talked about.
Often those cultural organizations are in the old buildings because they're the old weird buildings that find themselves as magnets for cultural activity and community activity.
And so if those are the things that are most important to people, we've got to find a way through policy through resources to retain the folks that drive those spaces and those organizations.
And something I know we'll talk about in the course of the conversation is around sort of what does it mean to support a creative workforce?
What does it look like to provide, for example, healthcare for independent artists that are working 1099 gigs here and there?
What does it look like to support, to have a transportation system that allows people to get to and from work that has odd hours, because artists keep odd hours, because that's often the nature of their work.
I'm super excited that Eric's joined us, because I think that his work in San Francisco, in the Mission District, is instructive in this, right?
Like, how do you build policies and programs that can center cultural and creative workers who have an authentic connection to their community, and allow for, you know, allow for those folks to stay and be part of their work.
I've seen too many people I love relocate to Los Angeles or New York in the last five years.
I'd really love to stem that tide.
And I think we actually have many of the tools and resources to do that if we have the political will to do that.
So hope.
I'll leave it at that.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Well, and thank you.
We have been joined by Eric Arguello.
Good to see you, Eric.
I'm glad you were able to.
Yes, my apologies.
The technology, not a problem.
The rain, the weather here in San Francisco is a little unsettling things here on the Internet.
Well, I want to go ahead and introduce you then.
So Eric is joining us from San Francisco, where he's the advocacy manager under the Center for Social Justice at GLIDE.
Eric's work spans over 25 years advocating to preserve and protect the mission's Latinx cultural assets and the Latinx immigrant community.
He's the founder and president of Calle 24, the Latino Cultural District.
There are now 10 throughout San Francisco, and they're aiming to preserve San Francisco's cultural diversity.
And Eric is the recipient of many awards, including the 2011 KQED Latino Heritage Month Local Hero Award, 2014 Cesar Chavez Legacy Award, 2014 San Francisco Latino Heritage Award, the 2008 LGBTQ Individual Community Grand Marshal, and the 2003 Instituto Familiar de la Raza Oyin Rodrigo Reyes Award.
Thank you for joining us, Eric.
We're just getting started talking a little bit about the intersection of land use and comprehensive planning and the arts and culture sector.
But I wonder if I might just ask you a little bit to talk a little bit about how Calle 24 began.
How did the community decide to move towards the idea of a cultural district and how is the city's planning process incorporating your goals of preservation there?
Sure, sure, no, thank you for inviting me to speak with the group.
The reason we started the Cultural District is because of displacement and gentrification that was happening in the Mission District.
As of 2022, we lost about 14,000 Latinx individuals from the Mission District, and that includes artists, that includes people who are running small businesses, people who are vendors, You know, everything that makes up a community in the Mission District.
And so we were looking at ways to be able to slow that down or stop it and to be able to protect our cultural assets because with you know, with that many people leaving, you know, it's just not people.
It's also the arts that goes with it.
It's also the events that go with it, right?
It's all connected.
If we don't have the people, then we don't have those cultural assets that we're trying to protect, right?
So we looked at other cities, you know, to see what they were doing.
We looked at Little Tokyo, LA.
We visited Chinatown here in San Francisco.
to kind of get an idea of the things that they were doing to preserve the arts and culture and community in their areas.
What we learned is that every neighborhood is different.
Every neighborhood is unique, and we had to take a little bit from everywhere and see how we can make it work for our neighborhood and kind of customize it, right?
One of the first things we thought about was an arts district, right?
But we didn't feel that that covered everything that we needed to do in order to, you know, keep that diversity, that diversity here in San Francisco, protect the community.
Because there's a lot of different aspects to keeping a community.
So we wanted it broader.
You know, we thought about just a cultural district, but we wanted to be more specific.
And then we went with the Latino, Cayente Cuatro Latino Cultural District, because we wanted to focus on a certain ethnicity in the area.
We wanted to be clear to folks what that was.
So that's how it became because of the gentrification displacement.
And we had to work with, of course, with our district supervisors and the San Francisco Heritage and the San Francisco Latino Association that works on preservation, to work as a team to be able to put this together.
We learned a lot and we're still learning as we're going.
There's layers to it.
It's not a magic bullet.
We realized that being acknowledged is a great step, but then gentrification displacement still happens.
Our artists are still being removed.
The culture is disappearing.
And so we had to layer it with, you know, special use districts, with preservation strategies, and also making sure that there's people on the ground to work with that because it doesn't work alone.
It has to work together, all these different pieces.
Yeah, it starts to get complicated.
And the market forces certainly play into this.
And that's part of the challenge here for sure, especially when you're talking about wanting to make sure people can afford to stay, that there is preservation and not the sort of complete displacement of what you're trying to protect.
And economic development is a big piece of it too.
Yeah, for sure.
Yeah, trying to make sure as you were, as you were saying and Randy had referred to as well people have the ability to support themselves and their family ability to create small businesses and keep them thriving in the community and that the customer base the folks that they are trying to serve and provide services to are also able to stay in a neighborhood so.
Lots of layers of complexity there.
And even the economic component, the economic development, we really had to even define it even further.
We call it a cultural economy, right?
Because that's what keeps things going in the neighborhood.
Our vendors, our events, they're generating revenue for the community, they're creating jobs, and they're also creating revenue for the city as a whole.
Right and we've had long study here in Seattle, about our creative economy and the impact that it has on our city.
Chico I wonder if you could talk a little bit about for culture.
So, you know, this is part of the King County and they recognize and celebrate the contributions of our very diverse community to the cultural landscape.
Can you talk about why 4Culture offers cultural facilities grants?
How communities of color benefit from that?
And, you know, just sort of what you're doing to ensure that there is representation in the work that is happening in our cultural landscape.
Yes, absolutely.
So for culture, yes, we're King County's Cultural Development Authority, specifically for cultural services.
And so we receive the 1% for art funds, as well as a percentage of the lodging tax to support just culture and what's happening here in King County.
And we have a broad definition of culture, which includes historic preservation, We're expanding into equitable development heritage which is where I work, arts and public arts.
So we have historically had a facilities program, which, until maybe around 2018 was mostly used to support shovel ready capital projects.
As it, you know, as it sounds a, you know, the organization, a nonprofit cultural nonprofit has done all the work the feasibility studies, you know, began to stack their cash and are ready to start.
the construction of the project within, you know, the next year or two.
And so that's a program that we have run for for a while.
And we did realize that there were some disparities in the way that that that funding was being allocated.
It was a lot of similar organizations that we had coming back every year with every other year program.
And so we started to just interrogate that with some help from the King County Council.
We were through bond funding and some interagency loan initiatives we were able to start a program called building for equity.
And the point of this program was actually to look at the disparities within our facilities funding.
and try to create a program that would allow us to get funds to more diverse applicants, you know, organizations that were led by people of color and other groups that have historically not had access to our cultural facilities funds.
One of the reasons that we realized that my my colleague at the time, Elton Tam, helped us to put into words that we weren't getting funding to a more diverse group was that requirement that the project be ready to start, you know, shovel ready within such a short period of time.
There was some capacity building, opportunity to provide capacity building to help groups that maybe they just have facility acquisition or building as an idea.
you know, as something that their community would really like, but they're not quite sure how to get from point A to point B.
So we started thinking about different ways that communities need funding to help them get to the point where they can start a capital project and build a funding program around those different needs.
And so that is our Building for Equity program in summary.
Yeah, that's great.
I mean, we do a similar thing at the city for mostly for kind of mixed in mixed use buildings.
But, you know, in communities of color, neighborhoods, neighborhood based organizations that are looking to build, for example, senior housing for their community, the Ethiopian community, for example.
But they don't necessarily, they're not developers.
They don't have the experience and the capacity and the technical expertise, but they still wanna do this project.
And so that's why we have now the Equitable Development Initiative in the city to allow for pre-development funding, capacity building funding, to help them get to the stage where they can actually acquire and help design and at least lead a project like that.
And I think it's so important to be thinking about community led community driven projects in this way and very often it does mean that we need to kind of back up a little bit and make sure that they have the capacity to get to where they want to go so that they can serve their community better.
That's great.
I want to talk a little bit about.
So, you know, the issues of housing, cultural space, even career opportunities, these all these things intersect.
These are issues that the COMP plan addresses, as we will continue to discuss here.
Lots of cities we know are kind of relying on the arts and culture sector to support downtown recovery efforts.
And that's certainly true here in Seattle, especially after the pandemic, when lots of downtowns are sort of emptying out.
Because we know that so many of our cities have, you know, sort of big cultural institutions downtown.
And we know that with the pandemic, attendance is way down.
So I want to talk a little bit about how we should be supporting the sector.
If you have ideas, it sounds like all of you do, for investment, for policy support.
So that's a broad question, I know, but I want to just sort of have, tease that out a little bit to see as we're thinking about how we support a downtown recovery and make sure that our downtown arts sector can bounce back.
And then I also want to talk about, and what does it mean for neighborhoods?
Because it is equally important that our neighborhoods have thriving cultural space and activity.
And that is very often where a lot of our creatives live out in the neighborhoods, not downtown.
So that's a big question, but I wonder if anybody wants to sort of dive into that.
Yeah, in San Francisco, we're seeing data that's showing traffic going more into the neighborhoods now than downtown.
So we have to really reimagine downtown.
It's a new world after COVID, right?
A lot of people are working at home.
A lot of people are eating in their neighborhoods.
They're going to the restaurants where they work, which is home.
I think one of the things that that would really help these areas is to have them partner up with different neighborhoods in the city.
Pull from those examples of the neighborhoods and what they're doing in the neighborhoods to try to do it downtown.
So using that history, talking to those artists, you know, to brainstorm and see what they can come up to, to kind of revitalize downtown, you know.
And that'll start getting, you know, it'll be a different, it'll be centered differently, you know, than the way we have seen downtown in the past.
I think that's a really, yeah.
Well, I'm just building off of what Eric was saying.
We have a cultural districts program in Seattle.
We have seven cultural districts throughout the city.
And we have a downtown that's desperately in need of more activity, more space utilization, more festivals, more block parties.
And what if we thought of our city as like a circulatory system?
The one thing that downtown has that no other neighborhood has is that every mode of transportation that goes there.
And so you can get downtown, from any neighborhood in the city, from any of the cultural districts, from anywhere in King County, really.
And if we wanted to, we could incentivize those districts to bring programming downtown.
That could look like festivals and block parties.
I think the Welcome Back concerts that happened in the summer of 2021 were like a really inspiring example of that.
You see 1,000 people come to see Digable Planets at Westlake Center, and then you see every restaurant and store full of human beings before and after.
Like those are promising models that I think could be explored for further implementation.
And then, you know, you could even, I think what's gonna be really interesting is that we have all this office space downtown and the reality is we're not, everyone's not coming back to work, not like they were.
Like we're in a brave new world.
As much as I have, I think a little bit of an allergy to the re-imagination word from the pandemic, I agree with Eric.
Like we do have to re-imagine downtown because it's not gonna be, activated by thousands of people coming to the office every day.
People will still come to the office, but what are the other reasons people come downtown?
It is where we have a lot of really rich cultural institutions.
It is where we're building one of the most phenomenal waterfront parks in the world.
It's an exciting opportunity to intentionally resource culture as the driver, as the attractor, to bring people out.
And then they will go shopping at Nordstrom and they will go eat at the restaurants and they will, you know, take, participate in their city.
But I think, I think Eric's right.
I also have seen a ton of return to neighborhoods.
I am a proud Beacon Hill resident, District 2 for life.
And, you know, I saw, what I saw in our neighborhood was really phenomenal during the pandemic.
I lived kitty corner to what is now known as Feed the People Plaza, where local artists, chef, entrepreneur, creative, brilliant human chef, Tariq Abdullah, just started doing a mural that said, feed the people.
And then by the end of that summer of 2020, this is like deep COVID time, right?
When no one can do anything.
Like this entire building, a hundred plus artists participated in this mural that wound up wrapping the whole building.
And then there was like pop-up markets and performances when it was safe to do that.
And then there was movie nights.
It was really, you know, we had to stay in our neighborhood because We weren't supposed to go anywhere else, but I really saw culture as the lifeline and the through line of how we held it together in the hardest of times.
And I think we can bring that spirit from our neighborhoods to our downtown if we want to.
Right.
And in the cultural districts too, Calle 24, we have the largest number of cultural events in the city.
and it really generates revenue.
It brings visibility to the businesses, so they'll come for the event and then they'll explore the businesses in the area, you know, and they'll come back in the future, right?
They find a restaurant they like or a shop that they like to come back and shop and take more time looking into.
So it really generates jobs for the artists, brings people in, and it kind of gets the economy moving.
So if that's, you know, if those events are created more in downtown, Then it just brings you know those people in there and and it benefits the businesses to in the area.
Eric, can you talk a little bit about how partnerships can be structured to make sure that you know sort of under resourced neighborhoods have a say in.
planning and development of these cultural facilities and what you know or these cultural districts like, how, how did that what is a relationship with local government or with nonprofits or with the philanthropy, how do those partnerships get built up.
That has to be re-imagined also.
I think government tends to have ideas that they'll bring to the community to give input into.
But I think we have to actually start with the community.
Let the community lead the process to be able to re-imagine things.
You know, we're really pushing that here in San Francisco, especially when we talk about equity, right?
So making sure that those voices are put in the forefront, right?
So in those partnerships, that process has to be changed.
You know, again, we're in a new world, right?
So we have to make sure that those processes change in that way to focus on the community and being led by community and centered in race and equity, right?
So those partnerships, that structure itself would have to change.
Yeah, you're talking to a city council member who, you know.
I mean, I totally get it, right?
Like that is a big part of how my office operates.
We really do try to bring the voice of community into city hall, bring ideas and, you know, the brilliance that comes from folks who are closest to the things they're trying to address.
And, you know, it is, it is maybe just within our nature to think that there's a policy solution to something.
And I think what I hear you saying is that's not always the answer.
Correct.
I think you have to bring people in at the very beginning before anything's really even thought out.
Have it come from there.
Yeah.
I had a thought to that.
Is it OK if I jump in?
Sure, please.
Yeah, thanks for that idea, Eric, and just thinking about the different ways of what I feel like when I'm hearing about the conversations with COMP Plan, it's community engagement, right?
There's the plan for the community engagement, which is how citizens, constituents are supposed to be giving their feedback.
But it made me think about like the arts sector right and the way that we engage with people, the way that our creatives think.
And if there's a possibility of like having almost like an art plan for the community engagement part of comprehensive planning.
when we actually have like artists planners thinking, and not just for the arts and culture section of the plan, but for the whole plan and kind of helping to come up with different ways to forge partnerships and get that feedback that is, you know, from the very beginning and goes throughout the process.
It's like a multi-year process, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So just, yeah, some way of using a practice from the cultural sector within the actual planning process.
And I thought that would be really cool.
There's a great example of that, Chieko.
In St. Paul, Minnesota, they have an artist in residence in their planning department.
And that's not like an artist to paint landscapes in a studio.
That's the example.
Amanda Lovely, who was the artist that I have been fortunate to work with over the last couple of years, created a popsicle truck.
like designed a popsicle truck and then would go to parks and use popsicles as the incentive to get families to come engage in a conversation about planning in their city and engaged hundreds of people who had never, ever been part of a city planning conversation before.
And I think one of the problems with the way we do planning to Eric's point is the folks who know how to go to neighborhood meetings, how to go to neighborhood meetings.
The folks who are represented in the city's outreach are the folks who know how to engage, you know what I mean?
It's not the underrepresented voices.
It's not the folks who have to stitch together 10 side hustles to make rent in an expensive city.
It's the folks who like have it on their calendar to go to the neighborhood meeting to say the thing about whatever, dog parks or family housing or whatever they wanna talk about.
If you wanna make room for more voices, you have to find innovative ways to engage them.
And that's to Chieko's point, a thing that artists do every day.
Like that's how they're wired.
And that's, you know, that's an investment of like one, part-time position in a department that is responsible for charting a course for our city for the next, what, 20 years, 10 years?
I think that's totally a fascinating thing to explore.
Yeah, I love that idea.
And as we launched into this series, part of the catalyst for me was reading my planning magazine, where I learned that in other, In other cities, I don't think it's an artist, but they did this sort of, you know, there was a huge priority on making sure they engage young people, like elementary school students, high school students.
And so they created games and they took these board games, basically, you know, sort of life-size board games out to different neighborhoods, to parks, to, you know, to play fields.
and engaged people in that way, not sitting around a table with, you know, charts and graphs, but with sort of real life or, you know, life size.
What's the word I'm looking for?
You know, cushions and toys and and styrofoam towers and things so that people could really authentically engage and start to understand some of the concepts that people are talking about.
And so, you know, This was my answer doing a streaming, but we're working on it.
But I really think what you're saying is important is if we want people who don't have time to come to a bunch of community meetings, but will benefit or not benefit from the decisions that are being made on behalf of the entire city, then it's really important that we find new ways to engage with them and to make sure that their ideas get heard.
Yes, absolutely.
We had a gentleman in San Francisco who actually created all these different blocks and he will gather the community and basically just to sit around to build a little town.
What does your town look like?
And he would bring in little trees and little cars and plastic people.
And it was an exercise for the community just to start that conversation.
What does it look like to you kind of thing?
So it's what we're talking about.
Well, I think Shako, I want to get back to a point you were making.
And I will say, I kind of have this question, but I'm struggling with if I'm asking what I think I'm asking.
But I want to know kind of what role art and cultural events can play in fostering community.
I think we all understand that that actually happens and is key.
But I'm trying to understand how all of that gets integrated into our city's urban design and planning processes, right?
So I think there needs to be an intentionality, and I think this is what we're talking about.
There needs to be an intentionality for the role of art in community building.
And that needs to happen throughout a planning process.
So, you know, whether it's an artist in residence or some other mechanism, I'll stop there because I feel like I'm rambling, but I think you're, I hope y'all can help me answer this and think through it.
Yeah, maybe.
I'll take a stab.
Okay.
Arts and culture, what role does arts and culture play in fostering community?
I think it looks different in every neighborhood or community, like what exactly that arts and culture is.
You know, it might be, you know, something like a film festival, you know, someplace and other places, you know, I'm thinking of, It could be a giant gathering that happens in the middle of the street and it's food and it's people coming and it's gathering and there's not a play or museum exhibit or something, but that is what culture is and that's what brings people together in that specific neighborhood.
So I do think kind of going back to listening to the people in the areas and understanding what culture means to them and how it is expressed.
And then codifying those broader definitions and helping and that allows for policies to be made and I guess the zoning decisions and everything that comes from a comprehensive plan to fall under that.
definition of culture and arts and community that has been defined by the places that you're trying to, you know, to support and, you know, in the heritage sector, you know, often, you know, when I came in, you know, I'm trained in museum so you know, I came in strong with like, okay, history, heritage, it happens in museums, but that's not the only place that it happens.
And so my six years at 4Culture has been a lot of learning from the people that apply to us and that reach out to us for help.
How do you actually express your heritage?
How do you preserve your heritage?
Because it's not, it's a very small percentage that actually happens in those physical buildings and those Eurocentric collections.
A lot of them completely different.
A lot of times it's a lot of practice traditions that happen in kitchens or that happen in dance studios, that happen in the street.
And so those types of spaces, those performance spaces, those community kitchen spaces, those need to be preserved and thought of as the places where culture happens.
And so my view of, you know, what is cultural space has really broadened because of, you know, listening to the constituents that, you know, reach out to 4Culture for help.
Yeah, I'm starting to think now that my daughter's Folklorico studio maybe needs a little support to be preserved.
Eric, did you want to add something to that?
Yeah, I mean, one exercise that we did in community was for us to define culture and what our cultural assets are, right?
So that we can have a good understanding of what that is.
And it includes people, it includes businesses, it includes events, it includes our law writers, and even trees, right?
But one thing that we did that was very intentional, we created the architecture design guidelines for the cultural district, which gives guidance to any development that's coming into the area or any storefront improvements.
It talks about the built environment, the cultural built environment, right, in design.
So it's required to have some elements of the culture that's in that neighborhood incorporated into the design, right, whether it's through a mural or a tile mosaic bench or wall or just the colors, you know, that ties it into the community, right.
So it's very intentional, very specific, you know, on what that design is gonna look like.
So if a new business comes in, you know, they follow the design guidelines and it also tells them, you know, make it more warmer, a lot warmer, you know, with the glass.
If it's too much glass, you know, maybe do a design on the glass or, you know, You can glaze the glass, you include art in it, right?
To incorporate it again to the neighborhood.
So those things, right?
So it was very intentional what we did to really incorporate the arts and culture in planning.
I totally agree, and boy, wouldn't it be amazing if we did other things besides glass, steel, and polished concrete as architectural forms.
But I think that the greatest asset culture can play to planning, to me, culture is an enabling strategy.
This became so clear to me during COVID.
It's the way in which we're going to accomplish all the other things we think are important.
How are you going to keep kids engaged in school?
How are you going to revitalize your neighborhood business district?
How are you going to make your neighborhood feel active and safe and alive?
You're going to use culture.
You're going to use art.
You're going to use murals.
You're going to use the authentic expression of a place.
I think Eric's point's well taken, and Chieko's as well.
Every place is different.
So don't bring a CID aesthetic and approach to a totally different neighborhood that doesn't want that.
And don't bring that other neighborhood's aesthetic to the CID.
They know what they are.
They know who they are.
They know what they want.
And so I think creating space for that cultural expression within a community can be really strategic in accomplishing larger planning goals.
And the other thing that I think culture can do is it can make it compelling.
Like what creates buy-in?
How many city planning meetings do you want to go to just by virtue of the, I'm a policy nerd, so I love city planning meetings, but like most people do not, right?
Like, and so I think how do you take something that's functional and make it compelling?
And I think that the artists and cultural workers and the cultural identity of our neighborhoods can make a planning process compelling.
And that fosters buy-in.
When people see themselves reflected authentically in a plan, they're more likely to support the implementation of that plan.
And I think if we're just going through a thought exercise about a theoretical planning something, why is anyone gonna buy into that?
Like, and I'm not suggesting, There's a lot of really wonderful people in the city of Seattle across all the departments who do very thoughtful community engagement.
I'm not beating up on the bureaucracy.
I just think that the integration of culture and creativity in that engagement will make it better.
And I think arts as the how versus arts as the what is a way forward in thinking about how we plan the future of our city.
Did you wanna say something here?
No, I just want to agree with what Randy and Shek were saying.
I think that's extremely important.
When we create design guidelines, it came from community.
That's where we started.
What they like to see, what they felt was important to them.
So yes, of course, again, starts with the community.
Well, and so I, I get what you're saying about arts is the how not the what, and part of what I also want to have a discussion about is how we.
how we invest in art so that we can create jobs, so we can stimulate the sector even more.
It is one of the largest sectors in the city of Seattle anyway.
So I would love to hear from all of you about the kinds of investments you think cities should be making.
to support the sector, to support individuals, and to really bring that vibrancy, ensure that we don't lose the vibrancy that the art sector can create.
I'll leave that there, and then maybe I'll have a follow-up.
Well, two examples.
I'll shout out Eric State in California, because I've been very fortunate to work with a number of organizations in LA and the Bay Area.
State legislature in California allocated $50 million for cultural districts throughout the state.
They meaningfully invested in the districts themselves, which Eric, I'd love to hear if that actually worked or not.
It's always well-intended resources, but that's a meaningful investment that can be transformative.
And we have a program in Seattle called Hope Corps that started just before I left the city.
The California version of that plan, the California Creative Corps, which we developed together collaboratively along with a number of other cities, The state legislature invested $50 million in the California Creative Corps, hiring artists to tackle complex social problems to help us recover from the pandemic.
There's two things you could resource that we already have the infrastructure and policy mechanisms for in Seattle that are being done, just two states to our south, that could be super impactful, I think.
Yes, Barrio 34 Latino Cultural District is two of the designated state cultural districts, Soma Filipinas and Calle.
And yeah, we are allocated 675,000 per each cultural district.
And so we're actually writing a proposal for those funds.
And we're looking at doing some arches into the entrance of the Latino Cultural District.
We call it the arch of resistance, right?
And some landmarking that we're looking to do with that money.
What we've seen in the past year that really helps the artists is small grants, individual grants for artists, and also grants for the arts organizations to produce events, to produce murals.
you know, to create events, you know, that's really helpful.
And that's where there's always challenges is, of course, the funds, you know, to be able to do this stuff.
And also to get really creative, you know, in these RFPs that are put out.
We once, a while back, we did a, like, storefront, empty storefront, art programs, so we found empty storefronts, spoke to the owners, and created some artwork in the windows, right, to activate that space.
So tied to the businesses, tied to, you know, beautification and creating more, you know, of a gallery scene.
you know, during the day.
And then one time we did another project that we call it the night gallery.
In San Francisco, we have all these roll downs and usually they get pulled graffiti at night, you know.
So each store, we got some funds and each store was able to design their own design on their roll down that reflected their business.
So it was like a little marketing and it also reflects the community too.
So those are just some examples that we've done to that really use, you know, funds to activate, you know, provide jobs, you know, which, you know, gives to the economy.
That's great.
And that that idea of you know, public art being incorporated into these spaces, the design of public spaces from the beginning, I think is also really important.
You know, how we beautify the public realm is something that I think we all benefit from and in so many different ways, especially as we're just navigating our way through community to see something like the murals that you're talking about or sculpture or anything else that we're,
Yeah, and being very strategic, yeah, being very strategic that it does, you know, includes everybody else in the neighborhood, the small businesses, you know, the service providers, the cultural districts.
Because sometimes we will, we tend to do like, you know, sculptures, you know, in the streets, which does help, you know, people come into the neighborhood to look at what we're creating, you know, but also tied into the businesses, you know, if we really want to activate the economy, you know, just looking at it that way, you know.
Can you talk a little bit more about that, Eric?
Because I think that's part of what we are really contemplating too.
Like, what is the economic development strategy here?
And how do we attract businesses and how do we support local businesses through art?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Part of it is some of the examples that I gave, right?
Connecting those empty storefronts with artists to create something there.
But we also have a special use district in our area that when there's a change of use in any of the businesses, that they have to meet four out of six conditions, right?
And the conditions are created by the community.
And the conditions include things like, how does your business relate to the culture in the area?
How do you connect to the arts?
So it gives them, you know, things that they can choose from to integrate them into the community.
And a lot of it is through the arts, you know, and then also working with, you know, other businesses in the area to, you know, instead of going outside to, if it's a restaurant, they buy all their produce outside the neighborhood to buy it from within the neighborhood, buy it within a certain radius.
So it includes that little economic development for monies to stay in the community.
But the art piece, right?
So, they will say, okay, I choose these four, right?
And then we give them some ideas of what they can do.
So they'll allow, say if it's a restaurant, artists to come in to place art on the walls and then rotate it, right?
And then they'll allow that artist to do an opening in their restaurant.
So it's bringing people into the restaurant, you know, it gives business to the restaurant, it's promoting the arts, it's promoting that artist, right?
So we included that, intentionally into the special use district anytime there's a change of use in the business.
And it helps integrate into the neighborhood too.
Does that help?
Yeah, that's great.
Great idea.
I mean, this is what we're trying to do is understand what tools we have available to us and how they can support community members and all the different work that we have to do as a city and as a neighborhood.
Sure, it's something that we've been doing and been working on.
Um, so I want to talk a little bit about ready at the beginning we started talking about workforce development.
So I wonder if we could talk a little bit about what kind of what specific workforce development strategies.
we can use to support the growth of creative industries.
I know, Randy, you and I have talked a lot about what it means for entrepreneurship, what it means for helping young people move into opportunities that they might not have thought about before.
But I'd love to hear from each of you a little bit if you have ideas about workforce development strategies as it relates to.
I'll offer a couple of like sort of macro examples, because I have, I've been very fortunate to work on a project for the last year or so, developing a creative economy strategic plan for the Department of Commerce in the state of Washington.
And, you know, we just did a pretty rigorous economic and policy analysis of like what are the conditions right now in our state.
top line takeaways, the creative economy in Washington generated $119 billion of economic impact last year.
That's almost 20% of the entire economic activity in Washington, which is like much bigger than aerospace and much bigger than construction and much bigger than agriculture.
It's like, that's like a huge number.
And 103 billion of that 119 is the mid sound region.
Seattle, King County, a little bit of Pierce County, a little bit of Snohomish County, Between 2011 and 2021, employment in the creative economy sector grew by 50% and creative tech, which is like the thing we have to talk about, grew by 130%.
And what's interesting is those are some of the best jobs being created in the economy today, but our young people who come up through our public school system are not the ones getting those 130% of the new jobs.
So those employers are hiring people from all over the world and bringing them to Seattle, which is great, except it creates downward pressure on the housing market because the people here can't get those jobs.
We have a limited amount of housing stock.
So if we could fix that circle, if we could prepare our young folks with the career connected learning skills they need to compete for those jobs, for the employers that are already here, we could take pressure off of the housing demand issue and the gentrification issue and create meaningful family wage jobs for young people in this city.
And I think about that, you know, I have a seven-year-old daughter at, you know, Kimball Elementary, and I'm like, what's the city she's going to try to enter the workforce into?
And, you know, we're just at the beginning of this whole AI conversation, which is probably a topic for another day, but the future of work is going to dramatically change again.
And I think the only things that will never be fully automated are the, is the work, the jobs, the experiences that are central to human creativity and human empathy and storytelling.
Those are the things the robots can't do.
And so if we can prepare our young people with those skills, K-12, post-secondary, if we can get our business community to invest in the kind of career training that's needed to get those jobs, the jobs of today and the jobs of the future, I think those are huge priorities.
And I think all of that lives in, a structure of equity, because we know which students have had those opportunities historically, we know which students are most likely to have those opportunities today, and we need to ensure that every student, particularly those who haven't historically had the opportunity, are prioritized in offering those opportunities.
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
No, sorry, I just a little bit of a rant.
This is like the information that's swimming around in my head all the time, so I'm like, I gotta tell someone.
Yeah, there's a lot.
You know, we look at workforce development in, I guess, a very different way.
You know, we look at land use, right?
And we're looking at PDR spaces where they provide a lot of jobs for working class folks.
You know, so we make sure in any plan, you know, that we provide that space for those workers.
We look at the neighborhood as a whole and see, you know, what the area median incomes are, Um, what sectors, uh, you know, uh, in, in, in the workforce we have, you know, um.
We have a lot of restaurant workers.
We have a lot of day laborers, you know, we have a lot of vendors.
You know, in the area, we have hundreds of vendors, so.
You know, this is what, uh, you know, a lot of the working class folks in the community are doing.
So we try to make sure that they're protected that our vendors are.
are, you know, working with permits, you know, we make sure that we have open space for them where they can work on, you know, again, the PDR spaces, we work with the city, like making sure that there's a percentage preserved, because that's disappearing, you know, because the PDRs, you know, are production distribution repair.
So that's auto shops, you know, a place where you can get your tires change or oil change, they're disappearing.
So we're looking at preserving spaces that provide those jobs.
It's a big one for us.
And then protecting the ones that are very rooted in community, like the day laborers.
Making sure that they have a space where they can gather and employers can come in to hire them in a safe way.
Our artists too, you make sure that there's, the arts, they are disappearing in San Francisco.
It's a constant struggle.
How do we keep them employed?
And that's for some of these grants, like we talked about earlier.
So we look at it that way.
Workforce development by preserving those spaces and preserving those jobs and those sectors.
Because sometimes there are movements of getting rid of the day laborers.
They don't want to be seen.
Folks in the community, they need to be somewhere, but their work is outside.
So we're in a constant battle of maintaining those and maintaining the workforce here.
Yeah, there are some very immediate challenges that need to be addressed on a day-to-day basis too, I can imagine.
Well, I have.
Oh, go ahead.
I'm just starting to kind of unravel the complexities of creative economy, cultural workforces and creative workforces but I'm just the thing that I really appreciate about it is that it.
It's moving away from like.
frameworks of like capacity building, which I feel like we use a lot in the cultural sector, which is really focused on like helping an individual within their career within probably, you know, a cultural industry.
And moving towards kind of what I see as a more holistic look at the humans that power our field, and also our you know, creative, but might be in other industries.
So just kind of that, that human approach to looking at all aspects of the people that make our work go and trying to figure out how to, how to support them using all the systems that are already available that might be, you know, just not being used by the cultural sector.
So just wanted to...
Right.
Important.
No, thank you for that.
I really, I appreciate it.
Well, I want to say thank you.
I do have time for, well, I probably don't have time, but I'm going to ask one more question anyway.
Just a quick one answer, one word.
What is the next cultural event that you are looking forward to attending in your community?
And I'm going to start with you, Eric.
Carnival San Francisco, May 27th.
Ooh, that sounds fun.
Jacob?
I'm actually going to the Nordic Museum on Sunday with a close friend to see, and I'm, Leslie is gonna be so upset with me.
I can't remember the name of the artist.
Sound installation that has something to do with the tide.
And so it's like this immersive situation.
So I'm really excited to go see it with my friend, Caitlin and her family.
That sounds fabulous.
Randy, you're muted.
Oh, of course I am, it's three years into the pandemic.
The Spectrum Dance Theater Movement Gala at the Museum of History and Industry on Friday night at 6.30.
Let's raise all the money for all the children and company members.
Thank you so much.
Thank you all for being here.
This was a great conversation.
I'm very excited to be in community with all of you.
That is the end of this series, this discussion of Seattle Within Reach.
As I said at the beginning, if you have suggestions for topics that you are interested in having us discuss, questions or comments, please send those to Evelyn Chow on my staff, and we will do our best to incorporate them.
You can follow us on social media.
If you want to watch this again, or you want to share it with somebody, you can find a link on my council website, which is seattle.gov slash council slash Morales.
Thanks so much for being here, everybody.
Have a great afternoon.
See you later.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.