So You Think that NY is Crowded?

1
Is Los Angeles more crowded than New York?
Using GIS to compare population density in Los Angeles & New York
Submitted by Sandra O’Flaherty, Andrea Osgood and Lara Regus
Introduction
This research was prepared for Livable Places, a nonprofit housing developer and policy advocate based in Los Angeles, California.
This organization was founded in 2000 by housing advocates and environmentalists who sought to make Los Angeles neighborhoods
more livable and environmentally sustainable by encouraging smart growth – or development that is denser, concentrated around
public transit, and includes a mix of both residential and commercial uses.
Because Livable Places advocates for higher density residential development along transit lines in Los Angeles, they often experience
neighborhood opposition to the idea of increasing density. A recent Los Angeles Times article by Robert Bruegmann entitled, “L.A.
The King of Sprawl? Not at all,” has reinforced neighborhood activists’ feeling that there are already too many people living in Los
Angeles and that Los Angeles is already very dense. In this article, Bruegmann reported that the Census data for the urbanized area of
Los Angeles indicated that it is the densest area in the United States — exceeding the population density of New York and other large
cities. He further argued that LA’s reputation as a low-density, sprawling city is inaccurate and undeserved.
We set out to examine this claim, understand how the Census Bureau defines the “urbanized area” for any given city and, finally,
analyze how the New York and Los Angeles populations are spatially dispersed within their respective urbanized areas. Our goal was
to create maps that could visually respond to Mr. Bruegmann’s article and help people get a handle on density in Los Angeles.
What is an “Urbanized Area”?
Although Bruegmann cites population densities for the Los Angeles and New York urbanized areas, he fails to define exactly what the
term “urbanized area” means. The 2000 U.S. Census defines urbanized areas as “core census block groups or blocks that have a
population density of at least 1,000 people per square mile and surrounding census blocks that have an overall density of at least 500
people per square mile.”1

Gooing to the Hamptons to Swim – or Why there are some many Swimming Pools

www.nycfuture.org DECEMBER 2005
From arts organizations to ad agencies,
New York’s vast creative sector is one of the
city’s most important, and least understood,
economic assets.
T A B O U T T H I S R E P O R T
I N S I D E
The Center for an Urban Future produced this report in partnership with Mt. Auburn Associates. The report builds
upon the Center’s 2002 report about the role of arts and culture in New York’s economy, titled “The Creative Engine,”
as well as Mt. Auburn’s considerable analysis of the creative economy.
The Center for an Urban Future is a New York City-based think tank dedicated to independent, fact-based research
about critical issues affecting New York’s future including economic development, workforce development, higher
education and the arts. For more information or to sign up for our monthly e-mail bulletin, visit www.nycfuture.org.
Mt.Auburn Associates is a Massachusetts-based consulting firm that focuses on economic development analysis and
strategy. For more information, visit www.mtauburnassociates.com.
The report was written by Robin Keegan and Neil Kleiman of the Center for an Urban Future with Beth Siegel and
Michael Kane of Mt. Auburn Associates. It was edited by Andrea Coller McAuliff, David Jason Fischer and Jonathan
Bowles and designed by Julia Reich with cover design by JEROME.Additional research assistance was provided by Tara
Colton, Doreen Jakob, Suman Saran,Alexis Frasz, Sascha Brinkoff and Dan Dray.We also acknowledge the helpful contributions
we received from the members of an advisory committee of creative sector leaders and many others.
The report was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, Deutsche Bank, the New York Community Trust, the
Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation and the Independence Community Foundation.
Special research support was provided by the British Consulate-General. Additional program support was provided
by the Bernard F. and Alva B. Gimbel Foundation and the Taconic Foundation.
The Center for an Urban Future is a project of City Futures, Inc. City Futures Board of Directors: Andrew Reicher
(Chair), Ken Emerson, Mark Winston Griffith, Marc Jahr, David Lebenstein, Ira Rubenstein, John Siegal, Karen Trella
and Peter Williams.
Key Findings p. 5
Inside New York’s Creative Economy p. 8
The creative city runs on talent, clusters, audience
and the interaction of non-profit and for-profit work.
Spotlight on City Hall p. 14
What has the Bloomberg administration
done to support the city’s creative ecosystem?
Show Stoppers? p. 17
Challenges to the city’s pre-eminence in the
creative sector include high costs, economic
insecurity and a lack of business skills.
Learning from London p. 25
London has done far more than New York
to harness its creative assets.
Recommendations p. 27
Creative activity may
be the closest thing to
a natural resource in
New York, but it is
also a little-understood
and long-overlooked
asset, and one that
can no longer be
taken for granted.
3
FFROM THE SOUTH BRONX TO MADISON AVENUE,
New York has long been an incubator for cutting-edge
artistic expression, a showcase for important art forms
and a home for dynamic creative companies. But
despite New York’s longstanding status as a global center
for creative activity, the alchemy that allows the city’s
creative economy to thrive is still largely a mystery.
Several scholars in the United States and abroad
have recently examined the role of the creative economy
as an engine of growth, with some studies exploring
the intricacies of various parts of the picture here in
New York. But none have gotten to the heart of what
makes this vital part of the economy work or provided
a blueprint for maintaining New York’s creative preeminence
in the face of intense competition.
Until now.
This study, for the first time, provides a full picture
of New York City’s “creative core”—encompassing both
non-profit arts and cultural organizations and forprofit
creative companies, such as advertising agencies,
film producers and publishers. The study also details
what is needed to ensure that this critical part of the
city’s economy continues to flourish, an important discussion
at a time when a growing number of cities and
states are building economic development strategies
around attracting the kind of creative people that have
long congregated in New York.
This report is the culmination of more than two
years of research into New York’s creative economy. The
Center for an Urban Future conducted this research in
full partnership with Mt.Auburn Associates, a nationally-
renowned consulting firm that previously produced
the first major sector analysis of the creative economy,
titled “The Creative Economy Initiative:The Role of Arts
and Culture in New England’s Competitiveness.” This
report also draws upon a handful of studies about the
impact of arts and culture on New York’s economy, from
the Center’s own 2002 report “The Creative Engine” to
the seminal study by the Port Authority and the Alliance
for the Arts in 1983 (updated in 1993).
While the combined strength of the city’s creative
sector may not trump the impact of the financial services
sector, it isn’t far off. The city’s “creative core” (see
page 6) consists of 11,671 businesses and non-profits
(5.7 percent of all employers in the five boroughs) and
provides employment to 309,142 people (8.1 percent of
all city workers). In recent years, creative industries
have added jobs at a considerably faster rate than the
overall city economy: between 1998 and 2002, employment
in New York’s creative core grew by 13.1 percent
(adding 32,000 jobs) while the city’s overall job totals
increased by 6.5 percent during this period.
Among the city’s nearly unparalleled concentration of
creative core enterprises, New York has more than 2,000
arts and cultural non-profits and over 500 art galleries,
roughly 2,300 design services businesses, more than 1,100
advertising-related firms, nearly 700 book and magazine
publishers and 145 film production studios and stages.
No other place in the U.S. even comes close to
matching the city’s creative assets. In fact, 8.3 percent
of all creative sector workers in the U.S. are based in
New York. The city is home to over a third of all the
country’s actors and roughly 27 percent of the nation’s
fashion designers, 12 percent of film editors, 10 percent
of set designers, 9 percent of graphic designers, 8 percent
of architects and 7 percent of fine artists.
The entities that comprise the creative core range
from mega-corporations such as Time Warner and
vaunted institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art
to small organizations and individual entrepreneurs
throughout the five boroughs. It includes non-profits and
for-profits, full-time workers and freelancers. Indeed, 28
percent of all those in the city’s creative workforce—
roughly 79,000 people—are self-employed.
People working in the creative core range from the
lighting designer who illuminates the Great White Way
to graffiti muralists from the South Bronx who are
commissioned not only to create murals and memorials
locally, but to provide their talent to ad campaigns for
major corporations. Their goals are variously artistic,
social, political and economic. And they draw upon an
unmatched set of strengths that has fueled New York
City’s cultural greatness—starting with abundant talent
in the creative fields.
“The best thing is the talent pool,” says Mara
Manus, executive director of the Public Theater. “It’s
incredible—from every kind of artist to crew member.”
The presence of so many creative people, in so many
different fields, has a significant ripple effect on the
city’s economy. For instance, Department of Cultural
CREATIVE NEW YORK
FROM ARTS ORGANIZATIONS TO AD AGENCIES, NEW YORK’S VAST CREATIVE SECTOR
IS ONE OF THE CITY’S MOST IMPORTANT, AND LEAST UNDERSTOOD, ECONOMIC ASSETS.
4
Affairs Commissioner Kate Levin says that New York is
home to numerous businesses that are here primarily so
they can easily service those in the city’s creative sector,
from the many curtain manufacturers that sell to local
theaters to firms like Freed of London, the United
Kingdom-based maker of ballet shoes that probably
wouldn’t have a location in Long Island City if not for the
large number of ballet dancers here. “There are a number
of industries that simply must be in New York City
and decide to locate here because of the arts,” says Levin.
But while creative activity may be the closest thing to
a natural resource in New York City, it is also a little-understood
and long-overlooked economic asset—and one that
can no longer be taken for granted. In recent years, consumers
have become ever more interested in content that
offers value beyond the merely functional. The creative
industries have attempted to respond by generating products—
from films and plays to books and computer
games—that speak to this growing consumer demand. But
this trend, combined with the technological changes that
are revolutionizing a number of creative fields (see page
24), also means that they don’t need to do it here.
The opportunity for growth within these industries—
and for the cities in which they are located—is
great. But as changes in communications and distribution
practices open these markets to entrants from all
corners of the globe, it is critical that New York first
begin to understand these industries and their workforce
collectively as a key contributor to the city’s
economy. Secondly, city leaders must begin to develop
programs and policies that address some of the real
obstacles facing the creative core—and potentially
undermining New York’s position as the national
leader of creative content production.
Some concerns, such as the high cost and limited
availability of appropriate work space, are perennial.
“When we work elsewhere in the country, even in D.C.,
people faint when they see the budget line for rent,” says
Muffie Meyer, co-founder and president of Middlemarch
Films, a documentary film production company. “And we
are paying below market. In many cases it affects how
we compete with other companies pitching for jobs.”
The worsening economic insecurity of creative sector
workers is another major challenge. “Health insurance is
definitely an issue,” says graphic designer Ari Moore. “I
can’t afford any of the options out there—there’s a freelancers
union, but it’s still very expensive to get health
insurance through that. I’ve had to not get care, and then,
since I waited so long, I had to get more expensive care.”
Other issues demand the attention of city policymakers
as well. While New York’s prominence in the
creative industries seems secure enough for the
moment, it is in no way guaranteed. In the film industry,
for example, many production companies have
passed over New York in favor of lower-cost locations
from Toronto and Vancouver to Louisiana. There is an
unfortunate precedent for this trend; during the 1960s,
the music industry saw a significant shift to Los
Angeles for the same reasons—lower costs for production
and other supports not available in New York.
This trend goes beyond one or two industries: from
architecture to dance, cities across the country and
throughout the world are eating into New York’s market
share and aggressively pursuing our creative talent.
As public policy expert Richard Florida and others
advance the argument that culture is an economic
development asset, cities and states in the U.S. and
abroad are developing policies designed to attract the
creative workers that many policymakers now believe
are key to sustained growth.
The importance of this shift goes far beyond the creation
of “arts districts” in Pittsburgh or artist live/work
space in Minneapolis. Twenty years ago, New York was
home to half of all advertising agency headquarters in
the world.Now it claims less than one third, according to
AdWeek’s “2004 Trends in Advertising” report.
Perhaps the biggest concern is that, as Time Out
New York senior editor Howard Halle puts it, “New York
is becoming more of a market for art, than an incubator.
It’s still a place people want to come and make it,
but more people say: ‘I’ll pass, and stay here in Berlin
and make art and if what I do catches on, then maybe
I’ll eventually come to New York.’”
New York isn’t the only creative capital facing
these challenges, but global competitors like London
and Toronto are ahead of the Big Apple in developing
public and private sector strategies to maintain and
grow their creative industries.
In this rapidly-changing landscape, without a forward-
thinking strategy to support creative endeavors,
the city that never sleeps may one day wake up to find
it has lost its edge. The good news is that the city and
major stakeholders throughout the creative economy
are eager to address these issues. But until now there
has been no roadmap. This report—more than two
years in the making, informed by over 200 interviews
with leaders in the creative industries, creative workers,
economists, officials, patrons and other stakeholders,
and conducted in partnership with the groundbreaking
research team at Mt. Auburn Associates (see
Technical Appendix, page 29)—should help guide policymakers
toward a holistic strategy to meet those challenges.
We present it with confidence that its findings
and recommendations can help preserve and expand
the city’s creative pre-eminence, the special creative
mix that makes New York New York. ❖
5 3
■ As of 2002, New York City’s creative workforce comprised
309,142 people, accounting for more than 8.1 percent of all
those employed in the five boroughs. The total includes
278,388 employed in the creative industries, as well as
another 30,754 involved in creative occupations, such as a
fashion designer working for an apparel manufacturer,
which our methodology does not consider part of the creative
industries (see Technical Appendix, page 29).
■ There are 11,671 businesses and non-profits—5.7 percent
of all city employers—in New York’s creative core. In addition
to this figure, the city’s creative core includes 79,761 sole
proprietorships, meaning that roughly 29 percent of the
309,142 in the creative workforce are self-employed.
■ In recent years New York has lost some of its market share in
certain industries, but it is still the unrivaled center of the creative
economy in the U.S., accounting for 8.3 percent of all
creative sector workers nationwide. Internationally, only
London, which counts its creative workforce near 525,000,
boasts a larger creative workforce than New York.
■ In recent years, the creative core has been one of the more
dependable growth areas for the city’s economy. Between
1998 and 2002, employment in New York’s creative core
grew by 13.1 percent (adding 32,000 jobs) while the city’s
overall job totals increased by 6.5 percent during this period.
■ Much of the recent growth in creative industries has been
among the self-employed. During 1998 and 2002, selfemployed
individuals accounted for nearly half (48 percent)
of all employment growth in the creative core.
■ Across the sector, the number one reason creative businesses
choose to operate in New York is access to the city’s tremendous
pool of talented and skilled workers.
■ New York’s creative core is bolstered by an unmatched support
infrastructure. This includes internationally-acclaimed
educational institutions—from The Juilliard School and NYU’s
Tisch School of the Arts to the Pratt Institute and the School of
American Ballet—as well as a large community of arts-friendly
philanthropic foundations and patrons, prominent trade
organizations and a local government that provides a significant
level of attention and support. The city also boasts more
than 15 unions and 50 locals that serve creative workers.
■ New York’s singular mix of both non-profit and for-profit
creative activity contributes enormously to the city’s success
as a creative center. This blend creates an environment in
which individuals can sustain a creative lifestyle, providing
both opportunities to make money and reach a broad audience
as well as opportunities to experiment, innovate—and
even fail.
■ New York faces a number of significant challenges to its creative
sector, including the high cost of appropriate work
space; a general lack of business skills among individual creative
entrepreneurs; pressures to conform to a traditional forprofit
business model; creative workers’ widespread lack of
benefits such as health insurance; barriers to reaching appropriate
markets; and the impact of changing technology.
■ Contrary to common wisdom, creative businesses and workers
in New York cannot simply “colonize” another cheap
space when they are priced out of an area. The continual loss
of work space is time consuming and costly, and significantly
impacts the production of creative products. If they are to
succeed, creative businesses require proximity to one another,
access to their markets and audiences, and most of all,
space that is appropriate to their work. These needs present
real restrictions on where creative businesses and their
employees can work.
■ Under Mayor Bloomberg, the city has demonstrated an
increased appreciation of the creative sector’s importance to
the New York’s economy and improved the delivery of services
to creative firms through agencies such as the Department
of Cultural Affairs and the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre and
Broadcasting. Yet, the administration has not sufficiently
addressed key affordability issues facing creative workers
and firms, such as the dearth of affordable work and rehearsal
space and the shortage of reasonably-priced housing.
■ Facing many of the same assets and challenges to its creative
sector as New York City, the city of London has created a
centralized body that convenes stakeholders from creative
industries, education and government to think strategically
about how to best promote and support its creative sector
through investments and program initiatives. The “Creative
London” initiative seeks to overcome the traditional fragmentation
of the field and devise common strategies for investment
in the creative sector.
KEY FINDINGS
6
I
THE BIG APPLE’S CREATIVE CORE
The numbers and notions behind New York City’s signature sector.
IN THIS REPORT, THE “CREATIVE CORE” REFERS TO
industries in which the creative element is central to
both the cultural and economic values of what they produce.
These include businesses and individuals
involved in all stages of the creative process—conception,
production and initial presentation of the product.
(See Technical Appendix, page 29 for a fuller discussion
of the methodology and definitions used in this report.)
As we have defined it, New York’s creative core
consists of nine industries—advertising; film and video;
broadcasting; publishing; architecture; design; music;
visual arts; and performing arts—and includes creative
workers ranging from architects to zither players.With
the charts that accompany this section, we have made
the first major attempt to pull together all the industry
and workforce data available in order to present as
accurate a picture as possible of one of the city’s most
complex assets.
Assembling a clear picture of the creative core is no
easy task. First, traditional data sets do not capture all of
the city’s creative activity in a discrete way: federal statistics
don’t treat the fashion industry, for example, as an
industry; instead, it’s subsumed under manufacturing,
wholesaling and retail.Thus, its workers do not get counted
as part of the creative industries, but as part of these
other industries. Federal employment data also doesn’t
count many of those in the creative sector who work on a
part-time or project-by-project basis; for instance, only
about 7,000 actors and 10,000 musicians and singers are
counted as “employed” in the city, though combined membership
in the American Federation of Television and
Radio Artists and the American Federation of Musicians
in New York is close to 30,000. In addition, a significant
percentage of the growth in the creative core over the last
decade has been in the area of sole proprietorships—that
is, one-person enterprises—yet not only are these “firms”
not captured in traditional business data sets, they are
typically omitted from analyses of this sector entirely.
In order to best capture the complexity of the creative
economy, we have used both County Business
Patterns and Non-employer data sets from the U.S.
Census to capture the firms and workers that are
employed in the creative industries. However, using
only these two sources, we were not able to capture the
significant amount of creative employment outside of
the creative industries—graphic artists employed by
Wall Street firms, for example. In order to include these
important workers, we also analyzed occupational statistics
from the 2000 Equal Employment Opportunity
data.This data also provides an important window into
the complex nature of workers in the sector.
Other researchers examining the creative economy
have broadly defined creative jobs to include everything
from scientists to hair salon operators, but we purposely
kept our numbers conservative. We include only those
businesses and workers whose main activity is the origination
and/or production of creative products. In an
effort to focus as sharply as possible on those businesses
and individuals that add creative value to the product,
we included only those “introducers” that do the initial
presentation of creative work, and thus are actually creators
and/or producers as well, such as ad agencies, and
museums or galleries that present curated shows.
Not included in our numbers is the secondary economic
activity related to the creative core. For instance,
we have not counted businesses, such as suppliers and
distributors, that do not add creative value, as described
above, even though they make a crucial contribution to
the creation of a finished good or service purchased by
a consumer. Similarly, our count of the establishments
and workers in New York’s creative core does not
include the vast support infrastructure of service
providers, educational institutions, financing and other
resources critical to meeting the needs of the core. ❖
Table 1:
NYC’S TOTAL CREATIVE WORKFORCE (2002)
The 309,142 workers in New York City’s creative workforce
include employees of creative firms, sole proprietors and those
employed in creative activity within non-creative businesses.
Creative workers employed in creative core businesses
Within firms with employees 198,627
Within firms without employees (sole proprietors) 79,761
Total creative workers employed within
creative core businesses 278,388
Creative workers employed outside
of creative industries 30,754
Total creative workforce in NYC 309,142
SOURCE: County Business Patterns, 2002; Non-employer Statistics, 2002;
Equal Employment Opportunity, 2000, U.S. Census.
7
Table 2: TOTAL CREATIVE EMPLOYERS IN NYC BY INDUSTRY (2002)
There are 11,671 businesses and non-profits in the creative core. Not surprisingly, there is a strong concentration of both news
syndicates as well as musical groups and artists.
NAICS Industry Number
Code of Firms
Publishing 51111 Newspaper publishers 209
51112 Periodical publishers 453
51113 Book publishers 233
51119 Other publishers 101
Film and Video 51211 Motion picture & video production 1,065
51212 Motion picture & video distribution 65
51219 Post-production & other movie & video industries 309
Music Production 51221 Record production 54
51222 Integrated record production, distribution 50
51223 Music publishers 116
51224 Sound recording studios 148
51229 Other sound recording industries 31
Broadcasting 51311 Radio broadcasting 107
51312 Television broadcasting 71
5132 Cable networks & program distribution 163
51411 News syndicates 62
Architecture 54131 Architectural services 1,138
54132 Landscape architectural services 68
Applied Design 54141 Interior design services 675
54142 Industrial design services 89
54143 Graphic design services 1,111
54149 Other specialized design services 340
541921 Photography studios, portrait studios 323
541922 Commercial photography 488
Advertising 54181 Advertising agencies 751
54185 Display advertising 83
54186 Direct mail advertising 124
54189 Other services related to advertising 213
Performing Arts 71111 Theater companies & dinner theaters 445
71112 Dance companies 104
71113 Musical groups & artists 364
71119 Other performing arts companies 51
Visual Arts 45392 Art dealers 535
71211 Museums 157
Other 7115 Independent artists, writers & performers 1,375
Total Creative Employers 11,671
Total New York City Employers 205,350
Source: 2002 County Business Patterns, U.S. Census.
8
INSIDE NEW YORK’S
CREATIVE ECONOMY
The secrets to New York’s creative sector’s success? Talent, proximity to audience and suppliers, a receptive public
and a unique environment in which for-profit and non-profit creative organizations provide mutual support. UUNDERSTANDING THE NUMERICAL DATA ALONE DOES
not give one a true picture of the richness and
complexity of the city’s creative core. The numbers
represent real businesses and real people, and in
order to get a view from the ground as well as one
from the air, we spoke to more than 200 individuals—
top executives at major corporations, heads of
non-profit groups, creative workers of every type, at
every stage in their careers.We asked them what New
York offers in terms of an environment conducive to
creative work.Their answers could be boiled down to:
the abundant talent the city boasts in virtually every
creative endeavor; unmatched concentration that
offers access not only to that talent, but to new ideas
and receptive audiences; and the chance to earn a living
while following their muse.
TALENT
The breadth and quality of New York’s talent pool
are the essential building blocks for the city’s creative
economy. New York’s creative workers are the originators,
producers and presenters of the vast amount of
content that fuels this sector. They are the artists, performers,
sound technicians, designers and many others
whose ideas and unique skills give form to the cultural
life of New York City.
For instance, Michael Pashby, general manager of
the Magazine Publishers Association of America, which
primarily represents consumer magazines, estimates
that 85 percent of the dollar value of the magazine
industry is concentrated in New York—mainly, he says,
because this is “where the talent is.”
The same goes for many other creative industries.
“You have to be here if you want to be in publishing,” says
Denice Oswald, an editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. “A
lot of writers that we in the industry are looking to court
are here because they are working for the literary press,
like the New Yorker or the New York Times.And New York
is just a breeding ground for young writers.They all want
to come here and seek their fortune.”
New York doesn’t simply attract talent, however,
it also creates it. The city’s top-notch schools and
training programs turn out some of the most highlyskilled
creative workers in the world, and the streets of
New York might offer the greatest laboratory, finishing
school and proving ground of all: a number of the most
important art forms of the last century, including
bebop jazz, abstract expressionism, spoken word poetry,
hip hop and rap, and pop art, to name a few, have
emerged from Gotham’s neighborhoods to achieve
worldwide recognition. Some of the city’s creative
workers are the best in their respective businesses;
some are among a handful with the expertise to do
what they do.
The economic realities of the sector, as well as the
need to match the right worker with the right project,
lead many employers to hire creative workers by the
gig, rather than as full-time employees. In part, this is
because creative workers—even equally talented
ones—are not always easily interchangeable.
Increasingly, creative businesses try to hold down
costs by hiring workers on a freelance or project basis,
even for what once were staff positions. The high rate
of self-employment across the creative core (see Table
5, page 23) reflects this trend.
Creative workers are also frequently called upon to
serve more than one function at a time, or to shift roles
from project to project, and may therefore need to be
proficient in a number of diverse skills. “We look for
what we call three-fers, people who have three professional
level skill sets,” says Kevin Cunningham, artistic
director of the non-profit theater and media company
3-Legged Dog. “We are always changing roles and need
people with multiple skill sets to do this. In one, I act as
a production lighting designer and a producer. In
another, someone else is the producer so I can be the
director. We also swap roles in production. I also
require that everyone put on a business hat and has an
understanding of the fundamentals of budgeting,
fundraising, et cetera.”
Some workers welcome this fluidity as an opportunity
to express their creativity in more than one arena:
Arin LoPrete, a freelance graphic designer, calls his
“day job” as creative director of a technology company,
9
Table 3: TOTAL WORKERS IN NYC’S CREATIVE INDUSTRIES (2002)
278,388 people work in New York’s nine creative industries, including nearly 80,000 sole proprietors. Another 30,754 creative
workers work in other sectors of the city’s economy.
People Working
NAICS People Working Within Within Firms
Code Industry Firms With Employees Without Employees Total
Publishing 5111 Publishing 3,747 3,747
51111 Newspaper publishers 11,845 0 11,845
51112 Periodical publishers 22,036 0 22,036
51113 Book publishers 13,080 0 13,080
51119 Other publishers 1,911 0 1,911
Film and Video 5121 Motion picture & video industries 3,761 3,761
51211 Motion picture & video production 5,825 0 5,825
51212 Motion picture & video distribution 1,958 0 1,958
51219 Post-production & other movie
& video industries 4,204 0 4,204
Music 5122 Sound recording industries 908 908
Production 51221 Record production 270 0 270
51222 Integrated record production, distribution 3,770 0 3,770
51223 Music publishers 904 0 904
51224 Sound recording studios 867 0 867
51229 Other sound recording industries 158 0 158
Broadcasting 51311 Radio broadcasting 4,332 0 4,332
51312 Television broadcasting 14,956 0 14,956
5132 Cable networks & program distribution 16,049 0 16,049
51411 News syndicates 2,255 0 2,255
Architecture 54131 Architectural services 10,505 2,785 13,290
54132 Landscape architectural services 302 140 442
Applied Design 5414 Specialized design services 11,226 9,569 20,795
54192 Photographic services 2,886 4,303 7,189
Advertising 54181 Advertising agencies 26,765 4,745 31,510
54185 Display advertising 1,367 0 1,367
54186 Direct mail advertising 3,458 0 3,458
54189 Other services related to advertising 1,585 0 1,585
Performing Arts 7111 Performing arts companies 1,764 1,764
71111 Theater companies & dinner theaters 10,972 0 10,972
71112 Dance companies 1,938 0 1,938
71113 Musical groups & artists 9,271 0 9,271
71119 Other performing arts companies 666 0 666
Visual Arts 45392 Art dealers 1,876 868 2,744
71211 Museums 8,053 327 8,380
Other 7115 Independent artists, writers
& performers in creative industries 3,337 46,844 50,181
Total Workers in Creative Industries 198,627 79,761 278,388
SOURCE: County Business Patterns, 2002 and Non-employers Statistics, 2002, U.S. Census. (Table includes sole proprietors, or firms in which the proprietor is the
sole worker. In the data source, this number is only tabulated for the top-level industrial code, not broken down as are numbers for firm-level employment.)
(Sole Proprietors)
10
“yet another stop on my endless quest to design as
many things as I possibly can.”
The creative core’s well-known hybrids—think
actor/dancer/singer, writer/director, singer/songwriter—
reflect these workers’ need for versatility of
employability as much as they do the need for artistic
fulfillment.This is especially important in today’s economy,
as a growing number of firms are starting to show
the same kind of label-defining versatility: high-profile
businesses such as Russell Simmons’ hip-hop lifestyle
company Def Jam and Martha Stewart Living
Omnimedia are branching out from traditional categories
like music, fashion and publishing to become
“entertainment” or “media” companies as a way of
reaching a larger market.
CLUSTERS
Because of the unstable and collaborative nature of
creative work, the creative economy is a fundamentally
social economy, in which connections among individuals
and businesses are crucial to success—and even to survival.
Some business owners and individuals we spoke to
belonged to industry associations or other formal organizations,
but all relied upon informal networks of peers,
competitors, suppliers and producers to help them find
fresh ideas, collaborators and employees, business tips,
sources of material and, of course, jobs. The benefits of
agglomeration include both the ready availability of support
infrastructure (see page 12), abundant opportunities
for formal and informal networking, and access to
patrons and financial backers.You simply can’t find this
level of concentration, for both workers and employers in
the creative field, anywhere else.
“We use and need and benefit from each other,”
says Morty Dubin, a producer of commercials and
chairman emeritus of the New York Production
Alliance. “We use Broadway a lot for the talent pool,
and Broadway actors need to be here because we give
them work. Otherwise they couldn’t afford to stay here
and keep at acting; we help them make a living.” And
it’s not just actors, he says; it’s musicians and writers
and designers and others as well.
“A lot of it is word of mouth, friends of friends or
colleagues,” adds photographer Stephanie Diamond. “I
will have a studio exhibit and people will bring friends
and then connect through their friends to curators or
other artists. Pitching cold to a gallery or a museum
doesn’t work. You need a name or a connection. It’s all
about developing a relationship.”
In order to facilitate these relationships, creative
workers and firms gravitate toward places within the city
that have particularly high concentrations of creative
activity. “You want to be within an arts community, a
creative cluster. This connection is why you’re paying
the price to be in New York City,” says Sara Garden
Armstrong, an artist and owner of Art Entrée, a small
company providing art-related entertainment and art
tours in Long Island City.
Clustering offers not only formal and informal networking
benefits, but also helps facilitate business partnerships
critical to getting a creative product developed.
In Greenpoint, Brooklyn, homewares and lighting
designer Babette Holland partnered with one of the few
remaining metal spinners in the city to collaborate on
the development of a new line of lighting that is now
sold to upscale furniture stores throughout the nation,
including Ethan Allen. Nearby in Williamsburg, Frank
Eagan, the former owner of Sounds Easy Studios saw
how it would benefit his business to be part of a creative
cluster. “Being a studio owner, location is very important,
because you want your collaborators close to you,”
he notes. “I remember instances where we would need
a certain musician—a violinist—for a project and we
just went into the subway station because we knew the
violinist playing down there.”
These creative clusters frequently have their own
unique characteristics, and some—like SoHo, Bleecker
Street, Williamsburg or Madison Avenue—have even
developed their own international reputations. Even
these clusters do not operate in isolation, however.
Creative work frequently requires individuals and
firms to connect to those in other creative industries,
and the city’s unique concentration of the entire range
of creative activity is essential to their ability to do so.
Advertising is perhaps the quintessential New York
creative industry for this very reason: For a single advertising
campaign, an ad agency may use film, television
and radio and employ the skills of writers, artists, photographers,
graphic designers, fashion designers, stylists,
directors, camera operators and producers—all of whom
can be found at the agency’s doorstep.
Even far more self-contained creative industries
such as architecture and book publishing rely upon the
connections to other businesses and industries that can
be made in New York. “Publishing is still a really intimate
business when you get down to it. The relationships at
lunch and so on are invaluable,” says Geoff Shandler, editor-
in-chief of publishing house Little, Brown and Co.
“I would prefer to be somewhere else to do this work, but
it would require everyone else to be there too.”
Perhaps the biggest cluster of all,however, is the city’s
non-profit arts community. These non-profits generate
content that serves as a magnet for tourists from all over
the world. They also regularly export New York-made
products to other parts of the country through touring
productions. Yet, perhaps even more importantly, the
11
presence of so many non-profit arts organizations helps
keep top creative talent in the city by allowing workers the
freedom and opportunity to experiment and innovate,and
to do projects they find exciting and rewarding—typically
the reasons they pursue creative work in the first place.
They also provide creative workers opportunities to hone
their craft—whatever it might be—in a potentially receptive
market, thus increasing their eventual salability.
MARKETS
Of course, every performer needs an audience.And
every creator of art, from writers to craftspeople, needs
a market. New York offers access to a large, diverse and
largely supportive audience.
Writers need readers; visual artists need viewers;
musicians need listeners; performing artists need people
in seats. And with its eight million residents, and
visitors from across the world, New York not only has
people to spare, it has the right kinds of people—a large
and eclectic mix of individuals, with varied tastes and
interests, who value creative work. This is one of the
things that make the city a fertile environment for creative
endeavors—which in turn helps attract and retain
the all-important talent.
Whether you’re a harpsichordist or a handbag
maker, an appreciative and discerning public stands
ready to appreciate quality work. “I am envious of
artists in Vienna sitting around smoking cigarettes in
cafés,” says artist Joseph Stashkevetch. “But because
there are no dealers there, they might as well sit in
cafés and smoke cigarettes… This is the best [art] market
in the world.”
MAKING ART WHILE MAKING RENT
Artists, performers, sound technicians, musicians,
architects, designers and ad teams give form to the cultural
and creative life of New York City. Despite the
uniquely important role the workforce plays in propelling
this part of the economy, New York demands a
lot of its creative workers. Even for the most soughtafter
individuals, the city’s full-time talent search rarely
translates into stable employment.
Indeed, an unusually large percentage of workers
who identify themselves as part of the creative core
report that they are not consistently engaged in creative
work. Musicians are one example: according to a
2000 report by the National Endowment for the Arts,
“More Than Once In A Blue Moon: Multiple
Jobholdings By American Artists,” more than 39 percent
of musicians nationally hold a second job in another
profession to make ends meet.The same holds true for
creative workers in general.
Theatrical press agent Bruce Cohen points out that
this has always been the case, noting that the city’s amazing
concentration of creative opportunities allows creative
workers at all levels to support themselves while pursuing
less remunerative passions. “George S. Kauffman used to
write play reviews for the New York Times and also wrote
plays,” says Cohen, who also serves as president of IATSE
Local 18032, the Association of Theatrical Press Agents
and Managers. “Look at Playhouse 90 on Channel 13 from
the 1950s, and you will see stage actors in those plays, and
they also did movies in New York. ”
One of the conclusions of this report is that a vibrant
mix of non-profit and for-profit ventures is fundamental
to both the quality and sustainability of the city’s creative
activity.While in most industries there is a distinct line
between non-profit and for-profit work—you are either
a corporate lawyer or a Legal Aid lawyer, not both—for
workers within the creative economy there is an almost
seamless fluidity between the two sides. “No one comes
to New York to be a non-profit or for-profit dancer; they
come to be a dancer,” says Kate Levin, Commissioner of
the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs.
In fact, many workers choose New York precisely
because they can be both. Says Mara Manus, executive
director of the Public Theater: “You just can’t make
enough in non-profit theater without working in other
disciplines. Most artists have to do voice-overs and
write for soaps or whatever.”
In New York, this relationship isn’t just about
struggling artists trying to make the rent. It is also
about providing those who have achieved commercial
success with opportunities to stretch their creative
legs—or prove their artistic chops. “There are dozens
and dozens of examples of a Willem Dafoe who
makes ‘Spiderman’ by day and works with experimental
theater at the Wooster Group at night,” adds
Cohen. “In the English-speaking world, the only
other place to do this is London, where you can work
on your movie in the morning, then at 4 p.m. get on
the Underground and go act in a theater. And this
dynamic applies not only to actors but playwrights,
set designers and costume designers.”
The other great value-add of New York’s dynamic
non-profit arts sector is that it offers venues for creative
products—such as plays and musicals—to prove their
appeal to audiences in smaller venues. In recent years,
productions like “Proof,” “Urinetown” and “Avenue Q”
have caught the attention of critics and theatergoers in
tiny Off-Broadway houses, then moved on to Broadway
and national acclaim. Dozens of actors, writers and
other creative workers have built careers for themselves
in the process; without the chance to refine their
work in non-commercial surroundings, they might
never have achieved that kind of success. ❖
12
SUPPORTING ACTORS
(AND GRAPHIC DESIGNERS. AND CREATIVE ENTREPRENEURS.)
New York’s universities, philanthropic institutions, unions and trade associations, suppliers and distributors, and city
government agencies all make it a bit easier for creative workers and entrepreneurs to “make it here.”
NNEW YORK’S CREATIVE SECTOR RELIES ON AN
array of support services—from research and advocacy
to training and financing opportunities. Indeed, the
city’s extraordinary support infrastructure for creative
industries is another major factor in fostering a hospitable
environment for creative work. It is both a reason
that creative individuals first locate in New York—to
avail themselves of training opportunities, including
the city’s outstanding higher education institutions—
and a key factor why these individuals are able to
remain in the city despite the high cost of live and work
space. Creative workers—whether employed within
firms or self-employed—rely on skills training and
upgrading, funding, networking opportunities, mentorships,
work and rehearsal space, business skills training,
and work supports like insurance and health benefits
in order to thrive in their career. In fact, the fluid
and unpredictable nature of these industries and workers—
the project-oriented nature of the work, and the
large numbers of freelancers, individual artists, sole
proprietors and small companies that populate the sector—
makes having a strong infrastructure of services
and supports all the more important.
EDUCATIONAL AND TRAINING INSTITUTIONS
The large number of top-flight and often highly specialized
educational and training institutions is one of the
key components of New York’s creative infrastructure.
The Juilliard School offers arguably the best
training in the world for dancers, musicians and
actors.Visual artists can look to NYU’s Tisch School of
the Arts, the School of Visual Arts and Pratt Institute
for instruction. If you’re an aspiring dancer, the
School of American Ballet is as good as it gets. Fashion
designers have the Fashion Institute of Technology
and Parsons School of Design, while architects can
turn to quality schools and institutes such as the
Architecture League, the Municipal Art Society, and
the Center for Architecture.
“We are blessed [in NYC] by a fairly extraordinary
institutional infrastructure for architecture,” says
Michael Sorkin, principal of the Michael Sorkin Studio
and the director of the Graduate Urban Design
Program at City College of New York. “This is important,”
he says. “One of the sources of good architecture
is a good architectural culture. If you believe that lifelong
learning and expanding creativity is important for
new work, then those institutions are important, the
same as viewing paintings in a museum are for artists,
or all of the rock-and-roll clubs are for musicians.”
As can be expected for such a central locale for
the creative industries, the educational and workforce
training scene for the creative sector is vibrant
and complex. New York City is home to dozens of
higher education institutions with arts programs.
Most of these focus on teaching the art form, though
several are increasingly teaching the business of art
alongside or in addition to these programs. These
schools, along with a host of vocational training institutions,
also provide a number of certificate and continuing
education programs to people in the creative
industries. Additionally, every primary and secondary
school within the New York City public system now
includes a newly instituted system-wide arts curriculum—
a great way to create not only tomorrow’s
artists, but their audience. And New York has a rich
array of arts services organizations and trade associations
that provide training to individual artists and
creative workers, arts organizations and firms—on a
myriad of topics.
At the same time, this educational infrastructure is
the training ground for new creative workers and the
testing ground for new art forms and products. The
schools offer ample venues through their galleries, theaters,
lecture halls and visual arts studios for emerging
and established artists across disciplines. Importantly,
higher education programs within the arts and creative
fields are, like the non-profits, akin to an informal R&D
arm for the creative industries as creators of new companies
and entrepreneurs; among their other functions,
the schools allow for new ideas to be tested before they
reach the marketplace. Professionals within the creative
industries serve as educators in many of the programs
and courses, passing on the benefits of their
experience while continuing to hone their crafts and
refine their ideas.
13
PHILANTHROPIC AND FINANCIAL COMMUNITY
New York’s creative enterprises and individuals
derive tremendous value from being located in a
nexus of strong philanthropic, government, corporate
and individual support. New York is home to
global foundations such as the Rockefeller
Foundation and the Ford Foundation as well as corporate
foundations at Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan
Chase, all of whom have a history of funding creative
endeavors both nationally and in New York. Another
critical element is the significant support of the individual
donor community.
The crucially important non-profit sub-sector
has been the greatest beneficiary of this philanthropic
support. According to a 1999 study by the Alliance
for the Arts, a prominent research and advocacy
organization for the cultural sector, of the $1.5 billion
operating income of 575 non-profit cultural organizations
in New York, more than 38 percent of this
income came from private sources and 11 percent
from government grants. (The remaining 51 percent
came from revenues for performances, exhibitions
and merchandise.)
In addition to private and corporate philanthropy,
New York has an unparalleled concentration of
investment banks, venture capital firms and other financiers
that are well-positioned to support the city’s
creative industries.
TRADE ASSOCIATIONS AND UNIONS
Trade associations like the American Institute of
Graphic Arts, the Association of American Advertising
Agencies, the National Visual Artists Guild and the
New York Production Alliance provide support services
to creative businesses and entrepreneurs. These services
range from training in new technologies and business
skills to advocacy for the industry and networking
events. Additionally, New York is home to myriad arts
services organizations, both national and local, that
provide a host of services from training in specific
skills, to developing art and audiences, to accessing
health care and financial support, to meeting the general
needs of a wide spectrum of creative workers and
arts organizations.
Labor unions also play an important role. Though
the creative sector probably isn’t the first field to
come to mind when New Yorkers think about unions,
organized labor has a powerful presence and an
important role within this cluster of industries.A large
portion of New York’s creative workers are represented
by unions, especially in the set of industries commonly
referred to as ‘entertainment’—film, theater,
and television.
More than 15 unions and at least 50 locals representing
creative workers operate in the five boroughs,
including the Actors’ Equity Association, the American
Guild of Musical Artists, the American Guild of Variety
Artists, the American Federation of Television and
Radio Artists, the American Federation of Musicians
Local 802, the Communications Workers of America,
the Directors Guild and the International Alliance of
Theatrical and Stage Employees.
While exact numbers are hard to come by, the
scope is large within certain segments of the creative
sector: virtually 100 percent of the work performed and
undertaken on Broadway alone is done with union
labor. Membership in the American Federation of
Television and Radio Artists and the American
Federation of Musicians in New York is close to 30,000
people, though many of these are members of other
unions and may be working under this union only on a
part-time basis.
These unions and their locals support the creative
workforce by providing skills training, organizing
around intellectual property issues, health insurance
and other social supports. Notably, union contracts
allow the legions of creative workers who are employed
on a project-by-project or freelance basis to enjoy most
of the same benefits that are available to “9 to 5”
employees—including pensions, health insurance and
workman’s compensation.
At the same time, many industry leaders say certain
unions drive up costs of many events and productions
in New York. This places a particular burden
on small venues, organizations and companies trying
to deliver a product while keeping their costs in
check. And in some cases, it has caused business to
flee the city for cheaper locales. For example, it is a big
reason why dozens of film and television production
companies opt to shoot New York scenes in Montreal,
Vancouver and other locales.
SUPPLIERS AND DISTRIBUTORS
Another strength of New York’s creative core is
the depth of the city’s “value chain,” or production
cycle. The presence of suppliers, distributors and
other providers of economic support for the creative
industries are a major reason those industries are so
strong here.
For instance, filmmakers and photographers
depend on the array of film and camera supply companies
that make it possible to get a new lens for a
camera within an hour, allowing companies to save
both time and money. Similarly, New York theater
companies have access to some of the finest costume
making companies in the country. ❖
14
SPOTLIGHT ON CITY HALL
The Bloomberg administration has provided key support and assistance to the non-profit arts and film industries, but
could do more to support the broader creative economy. CCITY GOVERNMENT ITSELF IS ANOTHER KEY PIECE OF THE
infrastructure that supports New York’s creative industries.
Businesses and workers in the city’s creative core
have long enjoyed a much higher level of attention and
support from city government than is the case in most
other American cities. Indeed, the NYC Department of
Cultural Affairs (DCA) has a larger annual budget than
the National Endowment for the Arts.
Under Mayor Bloomberg, the city has demonstrated
an increased appreciation of the creative sector’s
importance to New York’s economy and improved the
delivery of services to creative firms through agencies
such as DCA and the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre
and Broadcasting. But the administration has done little
to address the key affordability issues facing creative
workers and firms—most notably the lack of both
affordable work and rehearsal space and reasonablypriced
housing.
New York City’s budget for arts and culture nonprofits
and individual artists is unrivaled in the country.
In fiscal year 2006, DCA’s expense budget is $131 million,
the bulk of which gets disbursed in the form of
grants to the city’s Cultural Institutions Group, the 34
museums and other institutions across the five
boroughs that are located on city-owned property. A
smaller, but still significant, chunk of the DCA pie provides
program support to more than 600 arts and cultural
groups across the city.
DCA also has an $803 million capital budget to
spend over the next four years, a sum that will support
infrastructure-related projects at 169 cultural
organizations around the city. This is more than double
the number of groups that received capital funds
from the city five years ago. In recent years, DCA capital
funds have helped support the development of a
76,000 square foot facility for the Alvin Ailey
American Dance Theater and the restoration of the
Brooklyn Academy of Music’s landmark building on
Lafayette Avenue.
In recent years, the Bloomberg administration
supplemented city government’s longstanding support
for non-profits with increased support for several
key creative sectors. City agencies like the
Department of Small Business Services (SBS) have
improved their delivery of services to creative businesses,
showing a greater understanding of the role
creative industries play not only in the city’s economy,
but also in developing strong communities throughout
the five boroughs.
There have also been new partnerships between
agencies. For instance, the Department of Cultural
Affairs worked with the city’s Economic Development
Corporation (EDC) to redesign the Industrial
Development Authority Bond program to better allow
non-profit cultural institutions to take advantage of the
program’s benefits. Groups like the Dance Theater
Workshop have already made use of the IDA program
to finance a new facility. EDC also teamed with SBS and
the Mayor’s Office of Film,Theatre and Broadcasting to
spur development of Steiner Studios, the city’s first
built-from-the-ground-up production facility, in the
Brooklyn Navy Yard.
Importantly, as the Center for an Urban Future
recently described in its June 2005 report “Beyond the
Olympics,” the film office also has shortened the wait
time for permits and created new incentives packages
for production companies that film in New York. Many
believe these enhancements have already begun to help
the city’s film industry remain competitive with Canada,
New Zealand and other lower-priced locations.
Silvercup Studios CEO Alan Suna says that his
Long Island City-based studios produced five television
pilots for the Fall 2005 season. “New York [has]
never had five pilots for a season, let alone our company,”
says Suna. “[Only] one of them would have been
done in New York City if it wasn’t for those tax credits.”
Smaller production companies in the city offer
praise as well. Muffie Meyer of Middlemarch Films, a
documentary company, says the city’s film office has
practically rolled out the red carpet. “We were working
on a children’s history series. For a segment on
1870, the point we were making was about how there
was no garbage collection in all of the city.There were
100,000 horses in the city, dumping manure on the
streets. There was no mechanism to get rid of it,” says
Meyer. “The city actually let us take over a street and
helped us to access tons of manure from the police
stables and put it on the streets. And then, because we
were a non-profit, shooting for public television, they
helped us pick it up.We weren’t paying big fees. But
they did it.”
Even as the city has earned praise for this level of
15
responsiveness, some in the field worry that New
York has left itself vulnerable to changing conditions
and new technologies. “Government orientation to
production seems to be all in old media like feature
films and TV shows that are conventional,” says
Richard Winkler, partner and executive producer at
Curious Pictures, a production and animation studio.
“We do a lot of digital, and we’re in a blind spot. The
city and state seem slow to recognize the existence of
what my company does.” Even though small businesses,
artists and sole proprietors have driven much
of the creative core’s growth in recent years, many
among these smaller firms and individual creators
feel that city officials don’t understand their needs as
they do the needs of exhibition-oriented institutions
and larger companies.
On a broad level, Mayor Bloomberg has pushed
for the creation of 65,000 units of new housing across
the city and his administration has supported the creation
of space for cultural organizations as part of new
developments in lower Manhattan and other parts of
the city. In addition, DCA has made it a priority to support
non-profits that are developing studio or
rehearsal work space for artists. Still, many believe
the administration could be doing more to address the
lack of affordable space to live and work.
“What has historically been the incubator for this
talent pool has been cheap space,” says Theodore
Berger of the New York Foundation for the Arts. “Not
that there aren’t pockets left, but they are going fast.
The creative economy always has to replenish itself
with new talent. I am not sure that talent coming out of
schools these days is heading to New York. And mature
artists are more and more likely to leave. If we can’t
keep them here, then we will have real problems keeping
this sector strong.” ❖
SOURCE: 2000 Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) Special Tabulation, U.S. Economic Census;
and New York State Department of Labor (occupation numbers are based on workers residing in NYC.)
17-1011 Architects, except landscape and naval 1,079 12.21%
27-1011 Art directors 610 12.70%
27-1013 Fine artists, including painters, sculptors and illustrators 235 14.42%
27-1014 Multi-media artists and animators 691 18.33%
27-1021 Commercial and industrial designers 398 51.02%
27-1022 Fashion designers 2,596 63.63%
27-1024 Graphic designers 2,991 33.12%
27-1025 Interior designers 568 34.02%
27-1027 Set and exhibit designers 304 26.17%
27-2011 Actors 9,557 33.52%
27-2012 Producers and directors 833 13.35%
27-2031 Dancers 692 54.93%
27-2032 Choreographers 769 78.52%
27-2042 Musicians and singers 4,543 41.08%
27-3041 Editors 3,540 27.55%
27-3043 Writers and authors 866 12.81%
27-4021 Photographers 179 6.06%
27-4032 Film and video editors 303 12.32%
30,754
Table 4: CREATIVE WORKERS EMPLOYED OUTSIDE OF NYC’S CREATIVE INDUSTRIES
In addition to the 198,627 workers employed by firms within the nine “creative core” industries and 79,761 freelancers and sole
proprietors working within those industries, we found that there are 30,754 creative workers who are embedded in other (non-creative)
industries. For instance, fashion designers merit inclusion within the creative workforce, but are normally counted as part of
the apparel manufacturing, wholesaling or retail sector. As the chart below shows, we determined that roughly 64 percent of all
fashion designers and 51 percent of all commercial and industrial designers work in non-creative industries. (For more details,
please see the technical appendix on page 29.)
SOC
Code
Total Creative Workers
in Non-Creative Industries
Who Are Not Self-Employed
Percentage of
Creative Workers in
Non-Creative Industries
16
Chart 2: GROWTH IN NYC’S CREATIVE WORKFORCE (employees within firms and non-employers) (1998-2002)
The creative core added approximately 32,000 workers between 1998 and 2002, a growth rate of 13.1 percent compared to a
rate of 6.5 percent for the city during this period. Notably, self-employed creative workers accounted for nearly half (48 percent) of
the creative core’s growth, with the biggest increase among specialized design services; independent artists, writers and performers;
musical groups and artists; newspaper publishers and specialized design firms.
SOURCE: County Business Patterns and Non-employers Statistics, U.S. Census, 1998 & 2002.
50%
45%
40%
35%
30%
25%
20%
15%
10%
5%
0%
Actors
Fashion designers
Film and video editors
Editors
Set and exhibit designers
Art directors
Graphic designers
Producers and directors
Architects, except landscape and naval
Fine artists, including painters,
sculptors and illustrators
Musicians and singers
Dancers
Choreographers
Multi-media artists and animators
Writers and authors
Photographers
Commercial and industrial designers
Interior designers
Independent artists,
writers & performers
Musical groups & artists
Cable networks & program distribution
Newspaper publishers
Specialized design services
Radio broadcasting
Architectural services
Book publishers
Integrated record production, distribution
Motion picture & video distribution
Post-production & other movie & video
Museums
Art dealers
News syndicates
Advertising agencies
Other publishers
Other performing arts companies
Dance companies
Landscape architectural services
Sound recording studios
% of the U.S. Jobs in Occupations Held by NYC Residents
12,000
10,000
8,000
6,000
4,000
2,000
0
Chart 1: CREATIVE OCCUPATIONS WHERE NYC HAS A LARGE SHARE OF THE NATIONAL MARKET
More than a third of the nation’s actors are based in New York, as are roughly 27 percent of the fashion designers, 12 percent of
film editors, 10 percent of set designers, 9 percent of graphic designers, 8 percent of architects and 7 percent of fine artists.
SOURCE: 2000 Equal Employment Opportunity, U.S. Census.
Growth in Number of Workers
B
17
BOTH THE STATISTICAL AND ANECDOTAL RESEARCH
show that New York’s creative core is a thriving and
complex creative ecosystem. But within even the most
vibrant ecosystem, relatively small changes can have
unexpected and broad-ranging effects, and the creative
economy is facing more than small changes—it is
undergoing a veritable revolution, spurred by factors
including new technology, globalization and business
conglomeration.
The city has begun to feel the consequences of
these changes in its diminishing market share within
creative fields like advertising. Twenty years ago, New
York was home to half of all advertising agency headquarters
in the world. Now it hosts less than one third,
according to AdWeek’s “2004 Trends in Advertising”
report, London, where creative stakeholders have come
together to expand that sector’s economic reach (see
“Learning from London,” page 25), has quietly claimed
much of what NYC has lost. In the field of motion picture
and sound recording, New York faces risk from the
introduction of new technologies and cheaper equipment,
which have allowed both individuals and major
studios to perform these functions themselves.
Certainly each industry and area within the creative
core has its own complex structure and unique
needs. And non-profit arts organizations and for-profit
creative companies undoubtedly contend with different
obstacles. Nonetheless, as we began to look at the
creative economy as a whole, we found that all of these
businesses, non-profits and individuals faced some
common challenges and shared some collective needs
that seemed well-suited to a broad-based, sector-style
economic development approach.
Below we have identified some of the major challenges
that industries and individuals are facing across
the sector.
COST OF APPROPRIATE WORK SPACE
It is hard to run a business if you can’t afford a place
to work. In New York, complaints about high real-estate
costs and too little space are hardly unique to the creative
industries, but these issues are particularly acute for a
sector with such specific space requirements and such a
high percentage of small enterprises and self-employed
workers. The high cost and scarcity of studio time for
musicians and visual artists, and rehearsal space for performing
artists, regularly requires them to make heroic
efforts to pursue their art in the city. In a worrisome
trend, increasing numbers of artists and creative workers
are deciding it’s simply not worth it to stay—especially as
other cities, from London to Paducah, Kentucky, are
bending over backward to get them to relocate.
Doug Culhane is one such creative worker.A sculptor
by trade, Culhane is also a freelance legal copy editor
in his day job. Most years he makes approximately 15
percent of his living off of his artwork, which is shown in
galleries nationally. He has been living in Williamsburg
for the last 12 years, and is now moving out of the city
because he can no longer afford to meet his need for a
live/work space. “When I moved into the neighborhood,
there was one store, some prostitutes and crack dealers
on my block. Twelve artists moved into this building.
Now we are being evicted.” He is not sure exactly where
he will go, but feels confident that it will be better than
New York. “Cities everywhere want artists and are making
room for them. I will probably go to Troy or Hudson,
New York, or maybe Providence or Pawtucket, Rhode
Island. There is a lot of live/work space available there
and there is a really nice-sized artists community.”
Culhane is not the only one from the building planning
to leave the city. Many of his neighbors, who
include an architect, a video artist, a painter and a couple
that own a design company and employ a few workers
in their firm, are considering a relocation from New
York. One particular neighbor, a successful painter from
Beijing who has been in the U.S. for more than 18 years,
is planning to return because he feels that it is better for
artists to be in Beijing than in New York right now.
SHOW STOPPERS?
Despite everything New York’s creative sector has going for it, a number of daunting challenges—most notably the high
cost of work space, the expense and difficulty of “market-making” and the widespread lack of health insurance and other
benefits for creative workers—threaten the city’s pre-eminence.
Twenty years ago, New York was home to half of all advertising agency
headquarters in the world. Now it hosts less than one third.
London has quietly claimed much of what New York has lost.
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Hope Forstenzer, a graphic designer and glass
blower, worked for more than a decade in creative
industries in New York until she left two years ago for
Seattle, where the cost of living—and, importantly for
her, the cost of studio space for glass blowing—is considerably
cheaper. Many of Forstenzer’s graphic design
clients are still based in New York, but in today’s digital
age she is able to live in Seattle—where she can practice
her glass blowing relatively cheaply—and work
remotely. She comes to the city for a few days every
month to meet individually with clients.
Before she left the city, studio space she rented at a
facility in Brooklyn was going for $45 to $50 an hour. In
Seattle, the price is $30 a hour, a rate that goes down if the
space is booked for an entire day.
“I love New York. I had enough work. I was making
a living,” says Forstenzer. “But I couldn’t change my life
in any way to make it more secure. I couldn’t even move
apartments because I couldn’t find one that I could
afford. That is true of a lot of small business and independent
contractors in New York. You can get by okay,
but you can’t get ahead.”
To be sure, a dance company may have different
physical space needs than a woodworker or crafts artisan.
And while affordable space is key, it is often more
important for certain companies—non-profit or for-profit—
to know that they have a long-term lease arrangement.
For many, this stability is worth the price.
Further complicating matters is the fact that much
of the areas where creative types were able to ‘pioneer’
space ten years ago, simply are no longer available.The
rapid escalation of real-estate prices in the late 1990s,
which continues today, caused a well-known migration
of creative and other businesses from their more
expensive Manhattan locales to areas throughout
Brooklyn, Queens and the South Bronx.The city’s decision
to rezone several longtime industrial neighborhoods
around the five boroughs—from downtown
Brooklyn and Port Morris to Long Island City—for residential
development threatens to displace creative individuals
and the businesses whose presence initially
helped transform these areas into creative destinations.
These businesses need to be near their markets,
and their workers have to be in reasonable proximity to
the businesses. Brian Coleman, CEO of the Greenpoint
Manufacturing and Design Center (GMDC), a nonprofit
that developed a facility full of woodworkers and
small furniture-making businesses, says of his tenants:
“They need to be in the marketplace they are serving.
They cannot be on exit 8 in New Jersey.They need to be
in New York City.”
Unfortunately, the reality is that these critical clusters
of creative producers—from the more than 300 visual
and performing artists that occupy more than 24 buildings
in Long Island City to the dense creative fabric of
Williamsburg—are in immediate danger of being lost to
speculative real-estate developers.
Over the last decade, city government has helped to
spur the development of new buildings for the creative
industries throughout the five boroughs, such as the
Brooklyn Academy of Music Local Development
Corporation (BAM LDC) cultural district’s first building,
80 Arts, a shared office space for non-profit arts and cultural
organizations. But the sustained increase in realestate
costs means that many of these projects are likely
no longer replicable without the city playing a key role.
For instance, GMDC developed three other factory buildings
in Brooklyn for light manufacturing companies and
artisans in addition to their flagship facility for woodworkers,
but then the organization could not acquire any
additional factory buildings in Greenpoint or East
Williamsburg, since private developers solely interested
in converting those properties to apartments were always
outbidding them. “Buildings in this area are going for $20
million. We just cannot do these deals and still offer
affordable rates to our tenants,” says Coleman.
“Studio space and shooting space are a huge issue,”
says photographer Eric White. “Because, a darkroom, it’s
a pretty small thing. [But] a studio is a lot of space to do
a shoot. I don’t have a studio. I have a fairly large space in
Brooklyn, where I live. So, I’ll move everything in this
room, which is like the living room/kitchen—I’ll move
everything to one wall and shoot in my apartment.”
Cost is not the only consideration involved, however.
Not all work space is equally appropriate to all creative
pursuits. Common wisdom on the subject is that
artists traditionally “pioneer” areas with few amenities
and large amounts of cheap space, and when they are
priced out of a neighborhood, they simply forge another.
However, in a survey conducted for this report of 71 creative
workers and business owners in three of the city’s
creative hotspots—Williamsburg, Long Island City and
the South Bronx—we found that the reasons creative
activity clusters in certain areas are more complex.
The high cost of work space and housing in New York has prompted increasing numbers
of artists and creative workers to decide it’s simply not worth it to stay here—especially as
other cities offer enticements to relocate.
19
When asked how they chose their particular location,
availability of appropriate space—not necessarily
cheap space—was the number one factor among all
those surveyed in each neighborhood. Among the
three areas, however, rent was considered least important
in Long Island City, which is dominated by visual
artists, designers and architects. These workers and
businesses frequently put a premium on space that
can accommodate industrial production methods, such
as glass blowing and metalsmithing.
Take Michael Davis, a former dancer who owns a
stained glass studio, and who needs to run his glass oven
24 hours a day, seven days a week. For him, finding Long
Island City, with its industrial zoning, was a tremendous
relief after a long period of rejection. Before he found his
current space, he says, he had looked for space in
Harlem, but landlords refused to rent to him as soon as
he mentioned what type of business he wanted to set up.
While there have been some successful attempts to
address this problem—such as GMDC and the Alliance
of Resident Theatres/New York and BAM LDC’s shared
office spaces for arts non-profits—as space in the city
becomes scarcer and more expensive, and more and
more industrial space close to Manhattan is rezoned for
residential use, the creative economy is increasingly
feeling the squeeze.
ACCESS TO MARKETS
Answering the question of how to ensure that a creative
product will reach the right market or audience
goes way beyond the simple formula of physically “being
there”—in Manhattan, or in the city at all.When we started
our research, we expected to hear that workers “had”
to be in New York to have any chance of capturing the
attention of the city’s critics and tastemakers, and to
improve their chances of advancing in the city’s market.
What we learned, however, was much more complex.
Apparently,New York’s tremendous talent pool and artistic
community can be a double-edged sword: though the
city boasts a large number of exhibition spaces, bars, galleries,
retail outlets, restaurants and media that provide
access to new markets, the reality is that the costs of running
these outlets mean that they are often too expensive
for emerging talent to enter. Further complicating matters
is that interviewees across every creative discipline
observed that this unmatched density also creates an
environment of unparalleled competition for opportunities
to reach those markets. Admittedly, this competition
is simply a part of doing business in New York City, but it
translates into a lot of very marketable and potentially
lucrative arts businesses never gaining the attention or
spotlight they need to turn a profit.
“When I was in Minneapolis/St. Paul, I was one of
four artists doing my type of work,” says Elaine Giffney,
a textile artist, designer and high-end bag maker. “Here
I am one of 500.”
This level of competition for access to consumers
undoubtedly helps preserve the high quality of the city’s
creative offerings. But it also drives down wages, making
it extremely difficult, even for those with great talent but
no trust fund, to sustain themselves long enough to find
their audience. As if the competition within a crowded
market weren’t enough, creative workers in field after
field now fret that the traditional “entry points”—opportunities
for them to reach an audience—are closing up.
“You don’t have as many places to go as you used to,”
says Sam Pollard, documentary filmmaker and CEO of
Two Dollars and a Dream production company. “There
are plenty of subdivisions of major companies so there
are actually many more channels, but they all report to
the same set of CEOs. Before there were something like
eight places to pitch; now there are five. For example,
A&E is now under the same umbrella as the History
Channel, so now I can only pitch once to them.”
Jonah Zuckerman, owner of City Joinery, a furniture
design firm in Brooklyn, says that there is “a lack
of a place to show products,” but also cites a need for
businesses to do their own collective marketing. “It is
often too expensive to do a shared showroom or enter
another retail outlet,” he explains. He wants to see
something for furniture designers similar to the collectives
of fashion and accessories designers that have
been popping up in NoLita and the Lower East Side.
These collectives—including Emerge NYC,TrunKt and
the Market—share space and do collective marketing.
The city’s craft and artisan community echoes this
need for market access. In a 2004 survey by NY Creates
of more than 619 crafts and folk artists and artisans, 61
percent of respondents said that access to sales and marketing
outlets was their biggest need. In response to this
feedback, NY Creates, a collaborative research effort of
the New York Foundation on the Arts, the New York City
Arts Coalition, the Municipal Art Society and the
Consortium for Worker Education, has begun to establish
a number of fairs that showcase the wares of crafts and
folk artisans—most recently at Atlas Park in Queens—
Despite an increased focus on the economic potential of creative content,
the city’s creative workers frequently lack even basic business skills,
as well as information about how to develop them.
20
Brooklyn Designs, a project of the Brooklyn Chamber of
Commerce, has emerged as a successful model for showcasing
new designers along the same lines as the Creative Industries
Development Service (CIDS) in the United Kingdom (See
“Learning from London,” page 25), even though CIDS is aimed
at supporting all of London’s creative industries, while Brooklyn
Designs is singularly focused on the design industry.
Part of the challenge for emerging and even established
creative entrepreneurs is tapping into the marketplace and
accessing new audiences for their products. The Brooklyn
Chamber had been doing this for years with Brooklyn Goes
Global and Brooklyn Eats, programs that market the borough’s
food businesses. When the Chamber identified a growing sector
of furniture and homewares designers, it created Brooklyn
Designs as a way of showcasing these businesses.
Started three years ago, Brooklyn Designs is already a
must-attend show for Brooklyn’s designers. The show provides
access to a growing audience of more than 4,000 buyers,
architects and consumers. Participation in Brooklyn Designs
also gives designers access to editors from top design magazines
like Interior Design and Metropolitan Home, who serve
on the jury to select entries into the show and provide a critical
audience for designers aspiring to launch a product from
Brooklyn to international prominence.
Brooklyn Designs offers the opportunity to get a product to
market with minimal investment. Other trade shows like the
International Contemporary Furniture Fair costs $7,200 for a
200 square foot booth. Brooklyn Designs’ fee is $1,000 for the
same square footage.
In addition to participation in the show, participating designers
who are also members of the Chamber have access to services
including help finding space, employment assistance, business
advice and evaluations on business development. Karen
Auster, coordinator of Brooklyn Designs, often assists designers in
helping them to evaluate how to balance the business end of their
design work. According to Auster, she finds that, “as a creative
person they often need help to gauge how much of their time they
need for business tasks, how much for the creative part.”
BROOKLYN DESIGNS A MARKET
and is exploring the possibility of a more permanent
storefront for these artists.
As the recent rent roil over the future of the iconic
rock venue CBGBs shows, there is a shrinking number
of music venues in New York that provide a testing
ground for new musicians. Ed Greer, a musician and
former senior vice president of club operations with
the Knitting Factory and now an independent festival
producer, explains how the economics of his industry
have changed: “Venues are not making money on ticket
sales. This all goes to pay the band, if you’re lucky.
Venues make money off the bar and increasingly on
spin off products like recordings. They can’t take a
chance on the unknowns as freely.”
As with many of the challenges facing creative
enterprises in New York, the problem of marketing
crosses virtually all industry lines. The many trade
shows and festivals held in the city each year offer such
collective marketing opportunities, but these forums
are often prohibitively expensive, especially for individual
designers. The Architectural Design show, for
example, costs upwards of $3,500 to enter. And the
International Contemporary Furniture Fair, the standard
fair at which to launch a furniture design business,
is not only too pricey for most emerging designers
and other creative producers, but it is also not geared
towards marketing products to the public.
Some creative workers and businesses are coming
up with innovative solutions to the problem, such as
independent music producers distributing niche music in
local bodegas. But the bottleneck at the market-entry
level not only drives down compensation—any band that
won’t accept $100 for a three-hour gig is sure to see a
half-dozen other groups that will—it also makes it
unnecessarily difficult for niche products and businesses,
which are not backed by large corporate distribution
networks, to reach appropriate consumer bases.
MARKET FORCES
As the economic value of creative content and products
has become more evident, New York’s creative community
has become increasingly entrepreneurial, looking
for business opportunities.This greater focus on the
commercial potential of creative enterprises is important,
but efforts to apply a rigid traditional business paradigm
also pose a real threat to the vitality and viability
of the sector. Successful creative products cannot simply
be “cranked out” on a fixed schedule, and even the
largest firms in the city’s creative economy struggle to
generate quality products while meeting investors’ or
shareholders’ expectations about profitability. Creative
workers often see the world, and their work, differently.
Investors commonly struggle with this reality.
“In New York City, most big creative businesses
here are very established, have a lot at stake and are
really focused on minimizing risk,” says Bill Mesce,
manager of corporate affairs at HBO. “We will take a
risk on material, but need [established] talent behind
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camera or in front of the camera.We don’t hire someone
who came straight from really small ‘black-box’
theaters when we’re bankrolling a $30 million series.”
“If you’re casting [an actor], you know who is good,
who is a known quantity and who will make studios
happy,” he says, “Why take a risk on the invisible?”
Pressure to produce a product or a profit in short
order is exactly the opposite of what creative endeavors
need to succeed, say those we interviewed.What these
ventures need most, they say, is the one thing the business
world won’t give them—a chance to fail. The logic
of “research and development” that drives experimentation
in fields like pharmaceutical research and the hard
sciences rarely seems to exist in the world of the arts.
“There are many,many failed scientific experiments,
and they say it’s a waste of money if it’s artistic,” says
press agent Bruce Cohen.“Well, when I was at LaMaMa
[theater club] we had a guy named Harvey Fierstein, and
he had three failed plays before he reworked them and
made them into ‘Torch Song Trilogy.’ Somehow the
stuffed shirts can’t understand that you have to fail nine
out of ten times in the arts. Art is supposed to be perfect
all of the time while medical and industrial development
can afford and is allowed to fail.”
Karen Brooks Hopkins, president of the Brooklyn
Academy of Music, believes there is a general impatience
with the pace of the creative process, which
makes it difficult to give new ideas a fighting chance to
succeed. “The problem in America is if you or your venture
is not brilliant in the first 15 minutes, everyone
wants to throw it out.” To really try something new, she
says, you need three years: “The first year to figure out
what’s wrong, the second year to start to figure out how
to really do it, and the third year to really get it going,
really have a well-oiled machine.” Decision-makers with
non-profit creative groups noted that this time frame is
similar for their ventures as it is for small businesses.
Adding to the challenge is the fact that there often
seems to be an unintended disconnect between the
financial community and the creative community on
how to overcome this risk. Mary Howard, executive
director of NY Designs, a business center for designers
established in 2003 by the CUNY Economic
Development Corporation and LaGuardia Community
College, says “New York has an ineffective capital market
for design. Here is this $5 billion industry concentrated
here. Some of the most talented designers are
here, but no one has any money to run their businesses.
People are winning all of these awards for design and
there is no money.”
Part of the problem is that there is a lack of
financing models to help minimize the risk. Banks frequently
fail to understand that the typical financing
mechanism in fashion is for a designer to factor products—
or pay for the cost of a sample run—up front.
This requires a different type of lending tool for the
designers to keep them from defaulting on their loan.
Corporate pressures of conglomeration in certain
creative industries also mean that a more modest shortterm
payoff often takes precedent over long-term risk.
“Consolidation in the book business is not new, but it is
different now,” says Geoff Shandler, editor-in-chief at
Little Brown. His company was owned by Time, Inc. in
the 1950s, while RCA owned rival Random House. The
difference now, he argues, is that as these subsidiaries
have broadened to include other media businesses, “the
expectations of what is considered profitable have
changed.” According to Shandler, these short-term pressures
have meant “you do not take chances on authors
who may take time to be successful. Some very successful
literary authors, if they started now as opposed to
1963, would not make it.There is just not the time to let
the author grow.There is not time to take the risk.”
In addition to changing funders’ and investors’
expectations about the time frame for success, industry
leaders like Mara Manus of the Public Theater suggest
that what the sector needs is not venture capital but
something more like “adventure capital”: a cross
between investment and philanthropy, somewhat like
charity raffle tickets.
The lack of investment readiness on the part of the
designers and other creative entrepreneurs themselves,
discussed further below, is also part of the problem.
This is certainly not to say that creative ventures
cannot become profitable businesses. But as we
described above, opportunities for innovation are also
essential to the city’s creative ecology, and too much
pressure to succeed on business’ terms could threaten
that delicate balance.
LACK OF BUSINESS SKILLS AND INFORMATION
Given the highly competitive market for creative
products and services, small businesses and aspiring
entrepreneurs need honed business skills to succeed. But
The fierce competition to be seen, heard and appreciated helps preserve the
high quality of the city’s creative offerings—but it also drives down wages and
makes it extremely difficult, even for those with great talent but no
trust fund, to stay afloat long enough to find an audience.
22
despite an increased focus on the economic potential of
creative content, the city’s creative workers frequently
lack even basic business skills, as well as information
about how to develop them. These individuals typically
go about learning to run a business the same way they
conduct their other activities: by trying to “figure it out”
using information gained through word of mouth, the
Internet, and whatever other resources they can scrape
up. Many spend a tremendous amount of time and energy
on this kind of trial-and-error approach—and frequently
all they end up doing is reinventing the wheel.
Rachele Dorsinville, founder and executive director
of BAD (Bright Aspiring Designers) Association, Inc.,
says she started her organization to help fill the tremendous
need for business skills and information she saw
when she worked as an attorney for creative workers. “I
was representing independent contractors and realized
most desperately needed the basics—employer ID,
financials. I saw a lot of designers were opening themselves
up to liability because they had no insurance.
Many of them were not even able to use the [technology]
that they needed to design. They thought that just
being a fabulous talent was supposed to be enough.“
Indeed, part of the problem is that many creative
workers are uncomfortable with or resistant to even
thinking or talking about their work as a business.
“With rare exceptions, artists can’t go out and raise
money for themselves,” says Meg Fagan, an oboist and
former development director for The Kitchen, a group
that supports the creative efforts of performing artists.
“This is an intimate process and plays to insecurities to
describe who you even are, and what you can contribute.
I ran a workshop on fundraising for individual
artists and said ‘tell me about yourself’ and only one in
20 could do it.”
Even those who overcome the psychological barriers
typically waste a tremendous amount of energy
casting about for basic information. And despite a vast
assortment of trade associations, educational institutions
and arts service organizations that exist to provide
exactly this training, our research turned up
numerous accounts of budding creative entrepreneurs
spending late nights searching for answers on business
sites on the Internet, talking to friends in the business—
and making a lot of mistakes.
It also means the potential of losing viable businesses
because the producers do not know how to take
their businesses to the next level. According to Mary
Howard of NY Designs, the lack of investment readiness
on the part of many creative entrepreneurs is a
serious barrier: “People show up here [NY Designs]
and they are ‘burnt out’ physically and mentally.A lot of
them come here and want to declare bankruptcy. And
these are successful businesses. Some of them have
grown 40 percent in a year. But they can’t manage it.
They do not know how to get the investment they need
to grow and they want to quit entirely.”
The irony is that New York has a multitude of organizations
that provide technical assistance to entrepreneurs
and small businesses. But evidently, many of these
business entities are not connecting to those attempting
to start firms in creative fields. Meanwhile, non-profits
that provide services to those in artistic fields are not
doing enough to partner with these business assistance
organizations or create their own programs.
Indeed, many creative businesses and individual
workers don’t know what resources are available. “We
have been around for twenty years and I still run into
people who should be working with us but don’t know
anything about us,” says Steve Gross, co-director of The
Field, an arts service organization founded in 1985 to
assist artists in both creating new artwork and managing
the business of being an artist. “Another problem is that
there is no central source to tap all of the various
resources available, and even if there was, many artists
and individual producers would want assurance that this
source could communicate how useful or appropriate a
given service might be for their needs.”
Also missing is a service that connects the business
needs of creative workers across both non-profit and
for-profit sides of the creative industries. Theodore
Berger of NYFA admits that NYFA Source, an online and
print service that provides one of the most comprehensive
resource listings for artists and arts organizations in
the nation, does not provide information for people in all
creative industries. “We have an extensive information
service, but it is primarily non-profit resources.What we
don’t have enough of is information about resources for
the for-profit side of these industries,” he says.
Hugo Barreca, board member of the cutting-edge
string quartet Ethel and former executive at Time, Inc.,
suggests that city government help centralize information
about what kind of business services are available
for people in various creative industries. Some kind of
central knowledge bank, he says, would “make the
process much less of an ad-hoc, every-time-is-thefirst-
time, experience.” This and other policies that
supported the fundamental structure of the lives of
What creative ventures need most, according to those who conceive and support them, is
the one thing the business world won’t give them: a chance to fail.
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artists would pay big dividends, he believes, helping to
draw talent to the city, stabilize the creative economy
and the lives of artists and even relieve pressure on the
health care system.
Another solution would be for arts organizations to
create partnerships and other connections with business
assistance organizations, educational institutions and the
business world. Some of the city’s educational institutions
are beginning to respond to this need: the Fashion
Institute of Technology recently added a new component
to its course offerings which will train top fashion
designers in new technologies, financing and other skills
to keep their businesses thriving in an increasingly competitive
market. But much more can be done.
WORK SUPPORTS AND ECONOMIC INSECURITY
In contrast with other fields that follow a more traditional
employment and business model, work in the
creative industries is heavily project-oriented and in
some sense, almost always “temporary.” Freelance
workers and the self-employed are far more prevalent
as a result, and much of the work is done by small companies
and non-profits that rarely offer benefits—like
health insurance, retirement accounts or pension
plans—that similarly skilled workers in other professions
would take for granted. Other needs more specific
to the sector, such as access to ongoing professional
or technical training and intellectual property protections,
are almost as likely to go unmet.While the unions
and other organizations such as the Freelancers Union
provide some of these supports for workers and help
arts organizations and small firms access better services
and benefits for their employees, the lack of health
insurance in particular has many creative workers living
in fear that one sustained illness or fluke injury will
lead to financial ruin.
Creative workers who lack health insurance are living in fear that one sustained
illness or fluke injury might lead to financial ruin.
Authors 67.9% 57.9% 10.0%
Artists & related workers 53.8% 47.6% 6.3%
Photographers 52.5% 41.4% 11.1%
Musicians & singers 38.6% 26.4% 12.2%
Announcers 34.4% 23.2% 11.2%
Producers & directors 32.8% 28.5% 4.3%
Designers 31.8% 25.0% 6.8%
Agents 27.0% 22.9% 4.1%
Film and video editors
& operators 23.0% 15.0% 8.1%
Architects 21.8% 17.5% 4.3%
Dancers
& choreographers 18.1% 18.1% 0.0%
Actors 17.4% 15.5% 1.9%
Editors 12.9% 9.4% 3.5%
Broadcasting
technicians 9.3% 6.3% 2.9%
Reporters 6.3% 3.7% 2.6%
SOURCE: Occupational Employment Statistics, Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2002. (Note: Rows that do not add up are a result of rounding.)
Table 5: SELF-EMPLOYMENT LEVELS FOR CREATIVE WORKERS IN THE U.S.
Nationally, nearly 68 percent of authors and more than 50 percent of both artists and photographers are self-employed.
Self-employed workers,
all jobs
Self-employed workers,
primary job
Self-employed workers,
Occupations secondary job
24
Says photographer Eric White, who is not insured: “I
think about all the time. I think a lot of people think about
it all the time. Especially, living in New York, one false step,
you step in front of a cab and you have huge problems.”
Because many uninsured creative workers earn
relatively low wages or have unstable incomes, they
frequently cannot afford private health care, and rely
on public clinics. Many more simply forgo care until
they need to go to a hospital emergency room.
According to a 2004 survey of over 4,000 independent
workers in New York City conducted by Working
Today, a national non-profit organization that advocates
on behalf of freelance workers, 84 percent of
freelancers cannot afford health care. Roughly 13 percent
of those surveyed worked in arts and culture. Of
those, more than eight in ten said they could not
afford health insurance.
Small business owners and non-profit leaders
alike feel these pressures as well, in some cases even
changing their business model as a result. Press
agent Bruce Cohen says: “I used to employ a staff,
and now I use only freelancers instead of employees
because of the health care bureaucracy. I used to
spend a third of my day dealing with personnel matters.
Now I farm out editing and marketing and even
phone work, and let everyone else deal with health
care.” As head of IATSE Local 18032, the Association
of Theatrical Press Agents and Managers, Cohen saw
half the organization’s time go toward dealing with
issues of health care costs.
CHANGES IN TECHNOLOGY
Fast-moving technological changes that have
brought great benefit to consumers, like the introduction
of the iPod and desktop movie editing, are rapidly
transforming a number of creative industries. While
these technological innovations have created opportunities
for small firms to compete with larger entities,
they also present unique challenges for many of New
York’s creative companies.
In fact, advances in digital technology have
already significantly altered the way in which film is
produced. The new film technology is relatively
small, inexpensive, easy to operate and requires
fewer camera technicians and support crew. This is
good news for independent filmmakers trying to
make art with limited time and resources, but this
revolution is beginning to have a major impact on
filmmaking and the extensive and skilled workforce
infrastructure that supported it.
Similarly, the music recording industry is currently
facing changes akin to the desktop publishing revolution
of past years. “‘Desktop audio’ has really hurt commercial
studios as it has evolved to offer higher audio
resolution, track count and additional features once
found only in the professional studio,” says Christopher
Walsh, a writer for Billboard magazine. “Commercial
studios use this workstation equipment…but so do producers
and engineers in their homes and, increasingly,
purpose-built home studios. That has taken so much
money out of the commercial studio market.The entire
overdub process of an album’s production can be done
outside a professional studio. And it largely is.”
Seeking to adapt, many studios have diversified
their services. Some have even become recording
schools, teaching desktop audio production. Many have
started production companies to entice unsigned
artists, hoping for back-end profits if the artist’s
recordings lead to a record contract or otherwise produce
revenue. And many studios have dramatically
reduced their rates, especially in traditional downtime
periods, allowing artists on limited budgets an opportunity
once out of their reach.
“Some studio owners reason that an occupied
room generating some revenue is better than an empty
one generating none; others feel that once you start
cutting rates, you may as well close, because there’s no
bottom,” says Walsh.
An additional wrinkle is that the advance of new
technologies has generated a fight for the ownership
of intellectual property.This has put tremendous pressure
on both large multi-media enterprises, which are
consolidating rapidly in order to own the means of distributing
these new technological forms, and on small
creative businesses and the independent creators
responsible for generating this new content.
Currently, there is a lack of visible, accessible,
affordable training opportunities geared toward helping
those in the creative fields adapt their products and
skills to changes in the marketplace. The development
of such opportunities—whether by non-profits in the
creative fields or by local government—could help
ensure that New York keeps its edge in the global creative
economy. ❖
A 2004 survey of independent workers in New York City by the non-profit advocacy
group Working Today found that 84 percent of freelancers, including more than eight in
ten arts and culture workers, could not afford health insurance.
A
25
LEARNING FROM LONDON
As New York takes on the challenges facing its creative sector, industry leaders here can look to London and other UK
cities for some useful models.
AS THIS REPORT HAS DETAILED, CREATIVE STAKEHOLDERS
in New York City face a fairly daunting set of challenges
to maintain Gotham’s current dominant position in the
creative sector. But these challenges are not unique to
New York.
Consider London, the one city in the world where
more people work in creative industries than New York.
The similarities are unmistakable: as in New York, space in
London is limited, costs are high and competition is fierce.
And like New York, London has a dense network of governmental,
educational and private organizations focused
on serving the creative industries, but this network has
traditionally been rather fragmented and duplicative.
But where London, and the United Kingdom as a
whole, is arguably ahead of their American cousins, is
that government is actively crafting tools to support and
grow these industries. Since 1997, the UK has made its
creative sectors a major focus of economic planning,
with particular emphasis on supporting its workforce
and entrepreneurs to spur future economic growth.
The Center recently visited London and several
other cities across the UK to see what is being done
there to encourage the growth of creative industries and
better support the creative workforce. By the time we
returned to the five boroughs, it was clear that New York
could learn a great deal from its rival across the pond.
COORDINATION
Creative London
Aligning and rationalizing the resources available to
support creative work is no easy task. But in London, for
the first time, all of the highest-level creative stakeholders
in the city—arts, business, higher education and government—
have begun to collaborate around a common
mission to support creative industries. The field is being
assessed and assisted as a whole, not in distinct parts.
The coordinated effort began in 2003, when
London Mayor Ken Livingstone set up a commission to
undertake a major assessment of the creative industries
in London. Spearheaded by the London
Development Agency (LDA), the equivalent of New
York City’s Economic Development Corporation, the
commission brought together business executives from
creative industries, government officials and leaders of
arts and cultural organizations to identify the economic
potential of the city’s creative sector, as well as the
major barriers that might impede its future growth.
“As an economic development agency, we are saying
this is a sector we are fully backing,” Graham Hitchen,
head of the LDA’s Creative London initiative. “In our
review, we found it has a huge and major growth potential.
For example, one in five new jobs created each year
in London are in the creative industries. So in 2003, we
started a commission to see what we should do about
supporting the creative industries at the LDA.We did a
lot of investigation: site visits, open forums, research.We
focused on the barriers to growth.”
LDA’s research yielded two major findings. First,
the same entrepreneurial spirit that makes the creative
sector so dynamic would have to inform the collaboration.
And secondly, the coordination and buy-in among
other government agencies would be critical to the success
of these programs.
The most important result of the commission’s work
to date was the creation, in 2004, of Creative London, a
strategic group administered by LDA, and run as a publicprivate
partnership that is advised by executives of major
creative companies, leaders of arts organizations and government
officials to promote, support and grow London’s
vast creative sector. The goal of Creative London is to
tackle the multiplicity of barriers facing the creative sector,
from investment and financing to real-estate and talent
development. Since its inception, Creative London has
developed a series of concrete programs including financing
and investment, talent development, real estate and
promotion—perennial needs of the creative sector. Most
notably, the LDA is supporting the development of ten
“creative hubs”—locally-based partnerships that lead the
creative industries agenda by pulling together community
and cultural groups with government, education and
real-estate partners, and driving forward a long-term program
of investment and growth.
The London initiative is already showing promise,
and some in that city’s creative sector say it is because
the LDA understands and appreciates how employment
is different within the sector, compared to most industries.
“What the LDA and Creative London finally got
their head around was the definition of a job,” says Harry
26
Leckstein, managing director of Freeport Records and
chairman of the London Urban Collective, an organization
that trains youth in the multiple skills required for
entry into the music industry. “They accepted that work
happens differently in the creative arts. In music, television,
film, media, these are all short-term jobs. It used to
be that they defined a job as a permanent position with
a company. The acknowledgement of these projectbased
jobs where you move from one project to another,
maybe in the same company, maybe not, has led to a
whole new way of the government being able to provide
training, infrastructure and funding for projects.”
MARKET-MAKING
Creative Industries Development
Services, Manchester
As noted earlier in this report, accessing markets is
one of the most critical and difficult challenges facing any
creative business. In the UK, the Creative Industries
Development Service (CIDS), a new organization based in
the old industrial city of Manchester, has taken on this
challenge by finding ways to expose artists and arts-based
businesses to new markets, both locally and abroad.
Formed by Manchester’s City Council in 1999,
CIDS was developed to meet the needs of the creative
industries. CIDS provides general business assistance
as well, but their core focus is to bring art to new and
expanded markets.
CIDS provides trade development resources such
as research and strategic planning that target sectors
and key markets, building capacity through information
and training and helping companies to access trade
events. Perhaps most importantly, CIDS has developed a
series of trade shows and travel opportunities to market
creative companies both within the UK and abroad.
In many cases, businesses in the creative industries
do not have resources to explore international opportunities
and might not know about the sources of funding
available. CIDS actively works to open up new markets
for firms in creative industries. “We actively go out and
try and form trade association-like entities,” explains
CIDS executive director Lyn Barbour. “This looks different
in each area because we are driven by the sub-sector
and what their needs are. Often there are projects
like joint marketing or trade shows to New York City.”
The Transatlantic Express, a trade mission to NYC,
is one of two recent trade tours coordinated by CIDS. In
the fall of 2003, CIDS organized a trade mission of a
group of Manchester-based fashion designers, musicians
and other artists to New York to connect them
with New York-based venues and producers in order to
foster new market opportunities for their creative
enterprises. CIDS worked with the Manchester Music
Company, a firm that advocates for the creative sector, to
produce a CD of Manchester’s emerging musicians.
CIDS then arranged for these musicians to perform at
two top music festivals in the U.S., CMJ Music Marathon
in New York and South by Southwest in Austin,Texas.
CIDS stands out for its broad focus: unlike most
groups of this kind, they are not limited to one creative
industry.They are motivated to work with any viable sector
in Manchester and tailor the exact business assistance
needed to elevate the work to a larger, global market.
WORK SPACE
The Round Foundry Media Centre, Leeds
London and other major UK cities rival even New
York for off-the-charts real-estate prices. Addressing
the space issue has become one of the top priorities for
government and creative developers.
One solution to the space issue can be to place similar
companies under the same roof and support their
growth through a mix of services and shared resources.
In Leeds, the Round Foundry Media Centre, developed
and run by the Media Centre Network, a non-profit
management company, is home to an array of small
creative companies including IT, computer animation,
new media trade association and television. The
Centre, established with government support as a flagship
project of Yorkshire Forward, the local Regional
Development Agency, with support from the City
Council, provides shared office space and administrative
functions, flexible lease terms, as well as a host of
business training for the area’s creative entrepreneurs.
“A lot of what attracts the businesses is being all in
the same place. They feed off of that,” says operations
manager Cherry Salt.“Some people have false perception
that they will be competitive, but, quite the contrary, they
are here to be near one another.The Media Centre facilitates
the networking—for example, they set up a four-digit
number for them to call one another so that calling another
company in the building is like an internal call.”
The combination of services is meant to help these
companies thrive and grow stable enough to move out
into the wider marketplace; the expectation is that tenants
won’t stay forever. “We want these companies to
grow and move out. This is everything that we’re
about,” says Salt.“We provide all of this but we are very
careful not to push it. It’s available and if people don’t
want it, that’s fine. We are not here to nanny anyone
and that is the last thing these companies want.”
Proving that there is pent-up demand for the Media
Centre’s cluster model, companies from other sectors,
including a debt collection agency and a law firm, are
constantly trying to parlay their work into a creative
enterprise in order to be housed at the Round Foundry.❖
27
RECOMMENDATIONS
This report details the tremendous importance and daunting complexity of New York City’s creative sector. Just as the
field boasts unmatched assets, it also faces formidable challenges that threaten the city’s current pre-eminence. To meet
these challenges will require a much greater commitment to organization and collaboration between different actors
than has ever previously been the case, and as in London, it will likely fall to the public sector to take a lead role. But
while government, with its resources and influence, is best positioned to play that part, and can provide the initial
impetus to convene the sector’s constituencies, the public sector cannot sustain any effort to which the other actors—
including creative businesses, workers and support institutions—are less than fully committed. Without this sustained
commitment from all involved parties, any progress on the thorny issues we discuss below, from the cost of work space
to ensuring health care for creative workers, will remain piecemeal and precarious at best.
TREAT NEW YORK’S CREATIVE CORE AS A SECTOR.
New York’s creative economy spans a number of different
industries and includes everyone from freelancers
and sole proprietors to small non-profits and multinational
corporations. Traditionally, the sector has broken
down along lines of size, specialty and purpose (for-profit
vs. non-profit); different creative groups have been
more likely to compete—for funding, audience and
favorable treatment from government—than to cooperate.
Undoubtedly, the needs of a non-profit dance group
aren’t always the same as a large publishing firm, and
the primary obstacles facing an up-and-coming fashion
designer are often very different from the hurdles
encountered by a film production company.Yet, the individuals,
firms and non-profits working in the city’s creative
industries—from film editors and music producers
to graphic artists and publishing companies—share
many common traits, challenges and opportunities. To
exploit the opportunities and address the challenges,
non-profit arts organizations, creative businesses, trade
associations and local government officials should begin
to recognize the commonalities within the for-profit and
non-profit creative industries and design strategies
around supporting this remarkable creative core.
CREATE A CENTRALIZED COORDINATING BODY
MODELED AFTER CREATIVE LONDON.
Leaders in New York’s non-profit and for-profit creative
communities should take the lead in creating a centralizing
entity that would bring together the disparate
stakeholders within New York’s creative economy and
advocate on behalf of the sector’s shared needs. Such an
entity should be modeled on Creative London and would
include high-level leaders from creative industries and
representatives from trade associations, unions and arts
service organizations that provide services to the creative
core; government, philanthropic, educational and
financial communities; and leaders from the real estate,
economic and workforce development fields.
This coordinating body would act as a sector association
to strategize around supporting and growing
the city’s vast creative sector, similar to other city-based
industry associations in fields like finance and information
technology. Initial activities could include creating
a unified voice for the creative core and developing
policies that begin to address the issues and recommendations
addressed in this report as well as other
needs identified by the sector. The council would also
be responsible for developing a research program to
further track the trends and opportunities stemming
from the creative sector.
ESTABLISH AN INDUSTRY DESK FOR CREATIVE INDUSTRIES
AT THE NYC ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION.
City government currently supports the creative core
primarily through the Department of Cultural Affairs—
which largely works with non-profit cultural institutions
and arts organizations—and the Mayor’s Office of
Film, Theatre and Broadcasting. While these agencies
have done good work, they were never charged with
supporting large pockets of the creative core; partially
as a result of this oversight, these fields aren’t currently
a meaningful part of the city’s economic development
strategy. The city’s Economic Development
Though the needs of a non-profit dance group aren’t always the same as a
large publishing firm, the individuals, firms and non-profits working in the city’s
creative industries share many common traits, challenges and opportunities.
28
Corporation (EDC) ought to play a larger role in supporting
this sizable and growing part of the economy. It
could start by developing an industry desk that supports
the city’s creative core. (EDC already has industry
desks designed to support a number of key sectors,
including life sciences; financial services; professional
services; media, technology and telecommunications;
airlines; and consumer products.)
BEGIN TO ADDRESS AFFORDABILITY ISSUES FACING
INDIVIDUAL ARTISTS AND CREATIVE ENTERPRISES.
As this report has detailed, the lack of affordable space
to live and work is the single largest challenge facing
New York’s creative core.With so many other residents
and businesses struggling to afford the cost of real estate
in New York, it’s neither practical nor politically feasible
to create real-estate incentives that single out artists and
creative businesses.Yet there are things city officials can
begin to do in partnership with philanthropic foundations,
businesses and real-estate developers. One idea is
for policymakers to push for new cluster buildings for
arts groups and creative businesses, possibly modeled
after public/private initiatives by the Alliance of
Resident Theatres/New York and the Greenpoint
Manufacturing Design Center. Another suggestion is
for the city to encourage real-estate developers, universities
and large cultural institutions to include space
for artists or creative firms in their new developments.
MORE FLEXIBLE SUPPORT FROM THE PHILANTHROPIC
COMMUNITY.
Philanthropic foundations and private donors already
provide invaluable support to New York’s arts organizations
and cultural institutions.Yet, some of these philanthropists
could further leverage their giving by
being more flexible in how they support creative
organizations. Specifically, instead of providing funds
that are highly restricted to specific projects, the philanthropic
community should allow for more general
operating support and planning grants. Doing so would
go a long way toward stabilizing many non-profit
groups, thereby allowing them to focus on their core
mission of creating art, cultural ideas and content. In
addition, funders should consider making longer-term
commitments that recognize a truth too rarely
acknowledged in the creative world: the time it takes to
develop a new product is often longer than a typical
one-year funding cycle.
EXPAND MARKET ACCESS FOR LOCALLY-MADE
CREATIVE PRODUCTS.
While New York has no shortage of locally-based creative
talent, many creative individuals and enterprises
need help with marketing and getting access to a larger
audience. Non-profit arts organizations and trade
associations should work with city officials to enhance
promotion and marketing of creative businesses, which
all too often don’t have the resources to meet the costs
of getting their product to a wider marketplace. Specific
activities could include:
• Expansion of the “Made in New York” trademark
beyond films that are shot in the city to other
locally-developed and produced creative goods.
• Continued support, from foundations and city officials,
for “market-making” initiatives like NY
Creates, a project that serves the marketing needs
of the city’s vast crafts and folk artisan community.
HELP CREATIVE INDIVIDUALS AND ENTERPRISES GET
ACCESS TO BUSINESS ASSISTANCE SERVICES.
Arts service organizations should take the lead in creating
better linkages between the many entities—
including government, small business assistance
organizations, higher education, unions and trade associations—
that provide entrepreneurial assistance to
creative businesses and individuals.While the city has
a large number of non-profit arts service organizations
that offer general business development to artists and
arts organizations, these entities are rarely connected
to the vast array of services available to entrepreneurs
and small businesses provided by the city and other
economic development organizations; their assets
remain under-utilized.
IMPROVE ACCESS TO HEALTH INSURANCE AND
OTHER WORK SUPPORTS FOR CREATIVE WORKERS
AND ENTERPRISES.
As this report has detailed, there is a great need for
strategies that address the woeful lack of health insurance
facing creative workers and the businesses that
employ them. Non-profits, unions and industry associations
should look to expand efforts to pool freelancers
into larger groups that could purchase insurance at
more affordable rates.
BEGIN TO ADDRESS THE CREATIVE CORE’S WORKFORCE
DEVELOPMENT NEEDS.
City leaders and industry stakeholders share a strong
interest in developing talented and skilled workers and
should look to better align workforce organizations,
industry leaders, trade associations and unions to coordinate
the skills development needed for creative
industries. These entities should also collaborate with
the city’s network of workforce training providers and
educational institutions to develop programs to meet
these multiple needs. ❖
29 TECHNICAL APPENDIX
NOTES ON METHODOLOGY
Unlike most previous studies of New York City’s creative industries, we have attempted to view the sector
through an economic development lens, counting enterprises and workers and focusing on the scope of the creative
industries. The approach looks solely at the direct employment associated within the city’s creative activity, rather
than attempting to capture all of the indirect economic activity connected to it, as is the practice when trying to measure
the economic impact of a specific event or investment.
Both this conceptual approach and many of the specific methodological decisions detailed below were based on
the pioneering research of Mt. Auburn Associates, who conducted similar assessments of creative sector economic
activity in New England in June 2000 and in Louisiana in August 2005. Their approach to analyzing the creative
sector conforms to the methods used to analyze other economic sectors such as life sciences, manufacturing or
natural-resource-based industries.
One important way that this study differs from traditional arts-related economic impact studies is its inclusion
of both non-profit and for-profit enterprises within the creative sector. Our contention is that these enterprises,
despite their tax status, have the same underlying goal: to generate content, as both goods and services, that transmits
symbolic and cultural meaning to a marketplace, whether an audience in a theater or a group of high school
boys waiting for the next video game. Another major distinction is the inclusion of sole proprietorships, which are
particularly important in the creative sector. Studies which do not include the number of individuals who earn all,
or a substantial portion, of their income through self-employment would seriously underestimate the relative economic
importance of the creative sector.
Our first task was defining what and who should be included in New York’s creative core.The second, more difficult
assignment was to measure it.
One of the key components of the Mt.Auburn approach is that every region has a distinct creative economy and
that a definition used in New England would not necessarily be relevant to New York City.The Center for an Urban
Future, Mt.Auburn Associates and an advisory board of creative sector leaders helped us come up with a definition
of the “creative core” that comprises nine industries:
• Advertising
• Film and Video
• Broadcasting
• Publishing
• Architecture
• Design
• Music
• Visual Arts
• Performing Arts
The first step in measuring the creative core was to identify the number of enterprises involved in these creative
core industries and the number of individuals who make all or part of their living through employment in a nonprofit
or for-profit enterprise, or through self employment.
The U.S. Census’ County Business Patterns includes information on employment for enterprises with wage
employees. The 2002 version, the most recent available, indicates 198,627 workers in the city employed by firms within
the nine “creative core” industries. A separate data set tracking “non-employers” indicated an additional 79,761
freelancers and sole proprietors within the core, for a total of 278,388. (See Table 3, page 9 for the breakdown by
creative industry.)
30
This count is extremely conservative for three major reasons:
1) We focused primarily on those enterprises involved in the creation or production of creative content. While
we included some activities involved in the distribution of creative content, we only included these activities
if the distribution-related activity also involved production or was a core activity in terms of the market in
New York. For example, media (a distribution channel), art galleries and museums were included in the definition
of the core. Movie theaters, CD stores and book stores were not.
2) Our count does not include many of the suppliers to the creative core. For example, art supply stores, legal
firms specializing in entertainment and other similar firms are clearly part of the broader “creative economy”
in New York City. However, they were not considered part of the creative core, under the definition set forth
in this report.
3) There is a significant amount of “embedded” activity within the creative sector which is very difficult to quantify.
The best examples of embedded activities would be public libraries (which are important distribution
channels for creative content, as well as important venues for creative work) and are considered part of local
government employment. Similarly, jobs in museums and performance venues owned and operated by government
or colleges and universities are classified under the economic code of their parent organization.
Finally, many “crafts”-related businesses are included in manufacturing under the current economic codes.
Thus, an artisan furniture maker would be included under the economic code for furniture manufacturer. It
was impossible to disaggregate within manufacturing those enterprises that were more design-intensive.
While it was not possible to capture all of the embedded activities, the methodology tried to make some estimate
of creative workers employed in industries outside of the “creative core.” Perhaps the best example is fashion. We
did not want to count all 30,000 apparel jobs in New York City within the creative workforce, but it’s clear that there
is a “creative” element to some number of these positions. Fashion designers working in manufacturing all merit
inclusion within the creative workforce; the question was how to come up with an estimate of their numbers in New
York City.
We used national estimates of the percentage within each creative occupation that were neither self-employed
nor working within the creative sector.Then we applied those percentages to the number of individuals in that creative
occupation in NYC. For example, in the fashion industry, we found that there were 4,080 fashion designers
working in the city in 2000. Of these, 22 percent were working in apparel manufacturing, 30 percent in apparel
wholesaling and about 6 percent in apparel retail. Some additional 6 percent work in other miscellaneous industries
like government or education.We took this percentage (64 percent) and applied it to the 4,080 fashion designers to
come up with another 2,600 creative jobs.
Applying this process to the numerous creative workers employed in non-creative industries as indicated in
Table 4 (see page 15), we identified an additional 30,754 creative workers in the city. As Table 1 shows (see page 6),
adding these three figures yields the 309,142 total for New York’s creative workforce.
The U.S. Census’ County Business Patterns (2002) has information on employment for enterprises with wage
employees.This is the most recent data set that has detailed information on employment at the level of enterprises.
The U.S. Census’ data on “Non-employers” supplements the enterprise employment data. This data included
individuals who file returns to the IRS that indicate that they earn income from a sole proprietorship, an enterprise
whose only employee is the owner.
A third set of data, the 2000 Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) Special Tabulation of the 2000 U.S. Census
was used to complete the measure of the creative workforce by comparing the other two data sets against the number
of individuals living in New York City who reported working in “creative” occupations.
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Manchester Metropolitan University.
Office of NYC Council Member Alan J. Gerson (May 2004). “Campuses & Corridors: A Strategy for a Multi-campus
Cultural District in Lower Manhattan.”
Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and the Alliance for the Arts (1993). “The Arts as an Industry: Their
Economic Importance to the New York—New Jersey Metropolitan Region.”
Price Waterhouse Coopers (2001). “2001 New York New Media Industry Survey: Climate Study.”
Scanlon, Rosemary (February 2003). “The Importance of Arts to New York City’s Economy.”
Seley, John E. and Wolpert, Julian (May 2002). “New York City’s Nonprofit Sector.”The New York City Nonprofits
Project, Community Studies of New York and the Nonprofit Coordinating Committee of New York.
Slaff, Jonathan and Veaudor, Delphine (2004). “The Continuing Impact of 9/11 Upon Individual Artists of all
Disciplines in NYC: 2004 Artist Write In.”
U.S. Census Bureau (2002). County Business Patterns.
U.S. Census Bureau (2002). Non-employer Statistics.
U.S. Census Bureau (2000). Equal Employment Opportunity.
ADDITIONAL SOURCES AND RESOURCES
This report and all other publications issued by
the Center for an Urban Future can be viewed
at www.nycfuture.org. Please subscribe to our
monthly e-mail bulletin by contacting us at
cuf@nycfuture.org or (212) 479-3341.
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PERMIT #3372

New York’s Creative Culture

www.nycfuture.org DECEMBER 2005
From arts organizations to ad agencies,
New York’s vast creative sector is one of the
city’s most important, and least understood,
economic assets.
T A B O U T T H I S R E P O R T
I N S I D E
The Center for an Urban Future produced this report in partnership with Mt. Auburn Associates. The report builds
upon the Center’s 2002 report about the role of arts and culture in New York’s economy, titled “The Creative Engine,”
as well as Mt. Auburn’s considerable analysis of the creative economy.
The Center for an Urban Future is a New York City-based think tank dedicated to independent, fact-based research
about critical issues affecting New York’s future including economic development, workforce development, higher
education and the arts. For more information or to sign up for our monthly e-mail bulletin, visit www.nycfuture.org.
Mt.Auburn Associates is a Massachusetts-based consulting firm that focuses on economic development analysis and
strategy. For more information, visit www.mtauburnassociates.com.
The report was written by Robin Keegan and Neil Kleiman of the Center for an Urban Future with Beth Siegel and
Michael Kane of Mt. Auburn Associates. It was edited by Andrea Coller McAuliff, David Jason Fischer and Jonathan
Bowles and designed by Julia Reich with cover design by JEROME.Additional research assistance was provided by Tara
Colton, Doreen Jakob, Suman Saran,Alexis Frasz, Sascha Brinkoff and Dan Dray.We also acknowledge the helpful contributions
we received from the members of an advisory committee of creative sector leaders and many others.
The report was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, Deutsche Bank, the New York Community Trust, the
Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation and the Independence Community Foundation.
Special research support was provided by the British Consulate-General. Additional program support was provided
by the Bernard F. and Alva B. Gimbel Foundation and the Taconic Foundation.
The Center for an Urban Future is a project of City Futures, Inc. City Futures Board of Directors: Andrew Reicher
(Chair), Ken Emerson, Mark Winston Griffith, Marc Jahr, David Lebenstein, Ira Rubenstein, John Siegal, Karen Trella
and Peter Williams.
Key Findings p. 5
Inside New York’s Creative Economy p. 8
The creative city runs on talent, clusters, audience
and the interaction of non-profit and for-profit work.
Spotlight on City Hall p. 14
What has the Bloomberg administration
done to support the city’s creative ecosystem?
Show Stoppers? p. 17
Challenges to the city’s pre-eminence in the
creative sector include high costs, economic
insecurity and a lack of business skills.
Learning from London p. 25
London has done far more than New York
to harness its creative assets.
Recommendations p. 27
Creative activity may
be the closest thing to
a natural resource in
New York, but it is
also a little-understood
and long-overlooked
asset, and one that
can no longer be
taken for granted.
3
FFROM THE SOUTH BRONX TO MADISON AVENUE,
New York has long been an incubator for cutting-edge
artistic expression, a showcase for important art forms
and a home for dynamic creative companies. But
despite New York’s longstanding status as a global center
for creative activity, the alchemy that allows the city’s
creative economy to thrive is still largely a mystery.
Several scholars in the United States and abroad
have recently examined the role of the creative economy
as an engine of growth, with some studies exploring
the intricacies of various parts of the picture here in
New York. But none have gotten to the heart of what
makes this vital part of the economy work or provided
a blueprint for maintaining New York’s creative preeminence
in the face of intense competition.
Until now.
This study, for the first time, provides a full picture
of New York City’s “creative core”—encompassing both
non-profit arts and cultural organizations and forprofit
creative companies, such as advertising agencies,
film producers and publishers. The study also details
what is needed to ensure that this critical part of the
city’s economy continues to flourish, an important discussion
at a time when a growing number of cities and
states are building economic development strategies
around attracting the kind of creative people that have
long congregated in New York.
This report is the culmination of more than two
years of research into New York’s creative economy. The
Center for an Urban Future conducted this research in
full partnership with Mt.Auburn Associates, a nationally-
renowned consulting firm that previously produced
the first major sector analysis of the creative economy,
titled “The Creative Economy Initiative:The Role of Arts
and Culture in New England’s Competitiveness.” This
report also draws upon a handful of studies about the
impact of arts and culture on New York’s economy, from
the Center’s own 2002 report “The Creative Engine” to
the seminal study by the Port Authority and the Alliance
for the Arts in 1983 (updated in 1993).
While the combined strength of the city’s creative
sector may not trump the impact of the financial services
sector, it isn’t far off. The city’s “creative core” (see
page 6) consists of 11,671 businesses and non-profits
(5.7 percent of all employers in the five boroughs) and
provides employment to 309,142 people (8.1 percent of
all city workers). In recent years, creative industries
have added jobs at a considerably faster rate than the
overall city economy: between 1998 and 2002, employment
in New York’s creative core grew by 13.1 percent
(adding 32,000 jobs) while the city’s overall job totals
increased by 6.5 percent during this period.
Among the city’s nearly unparalleled concentration of
creative core enterprises, New York has more than 2,000
arts and cultural non-profits and over 500 art galleries,
roughly 2,300 design services businesses, more than 1,100
advertising-related firms, nearly 700 book and magazine
publishers and 145 film production studios and stages.
No other place in the U.S. even comes close to
matching the city’s creative assets. In fact, 8.3 percent
of all creative sector workers in the U.S. are based in
New York. The city is home to over a third of all the
country’s actors and roughly 27 percent of the nation’s
fashion designers, 12 percent of film editors, 10 percent
of set designers, 9 percent of graphic designers, 8 percent
of architects and 7 percent of fine artists.
The entities that comprise the creative core range
from mega-corporations such as Time Warner and
vaunted institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art
to small organizations and individual entrepreneurs
throughout the five boroughs. It includes non-profits and
for-profits, full-time workers and freelancers. Indeed, 28
percent of all those in the city’s creative workforce—
roughly 79,000 people—are self-employed.
People working in the creative core range from the
lighting designer who illuminates the Great White Way
to graffiti muralists from the South Bronx who are
commissioned not only to create murals and memorials
locally, but to provide their talent to ad campaigns for
major corporations. Their goals are variously artistic,
social, political and economic. And they draw upon an
unmatched set of strengths that has fueled New York
City’s cultural greatness—starting with abundant talent
in the creative fields.
“The best thing is the talent pool,” says Mara
Manus, executive director of the Public Theater. “It’s
incredible—from every kind of artist to crew member.”
The presence of so many creative people, in so many
different fields, has a significant ripple effect on the
city’s economy. For instance, Department of Cultural
CREATIVE NEW YORK
FROM ARTS ORGANIZATIONS TO AD AGENCIES, NEW YORK’S VAST CREATIVE SECTOR
IS ONE OF THE CITY’S MOST IMPORTANT, AND LEAST UNDERSTOOD, ECONOMIC ASSETS.
4
Affairs Commissioner Kate Levin says that New York is
home to numerous businesses that are here primarily so
they can easily service those in the city’s creative sector,
from the many curtain manufacturers that sell to local
theaters to firms like Freed of London, the United
Kingdom-based maker of ballet shoes that probably
wouldn’t have a location in Long Island City if not for the
large number of ballet dancers here. “There are a number
of industries that simply must be in New York City
and decide to locate here because of the arts,” says Levin.
But while creative activity may be the closest thing to
a natural resource in New York City, it is also a little-understood
and long-overlooked economic asset—and one that
can no longer be taken for granted. In recent years, consumers
have become ever more interested in content that
offers value beyond the merely functional. The creative
industries have attempted to respond by generating products—
from films and plays to books and computer
games—that speak to this growing consumer demand. But
this trend, combined with the technological changes that
are revolutionizing a number of creative fields (see page
24), also means that they don’t need to do it here.
The opportunity for growth within these industries—
and for the cities in which they are located—is
great. But as changes in communications and distribution
practices open these markets to entrants from all
corners of the globe, it is critical that New York first
begin to understand these industries and their workforce
collectively as a key contributor to the city’s
economy. Secondly, city leaders must begin to develop
programs and policies that address some of the real
obstacles facing the creative core—and potentially
undermining New York’s position as the national
leader of creative content production.
Some concerns, such as the high cost and limited
availability of appropriate work space, are perennial.
“When we work elsewhere in the country, even in D.C.,
people faint when they see the budget line for rent,” says
Muffie Meyer, co-founder and president of Middlemarch
Films, a documentary film production company. “And we
are paying below market. In many cases it affects how
we compete with other companies pitching for jobs.”
The worsening economic insecurity of creative sector
workers is another major challenge. “Health insurance is
definitely an issue,” says graphic designer Ari Moore. “I
can’t afford any of the options out there—there’s a freelancers
union, but it’s still very expensive to get health
insurance through that. I’ve had to not get care, and then,
since I waited so long, I had to get more expensive care.”
Other issues demand the attention of city policymakers
as well. While New York’s prominence in the
creative industries seems secure enough for the
moment, it is in no way guaranteed. In the film industry,
for example, many production companies have
passed over New York in favor of lower-cost locations
from Toronto and Vancouver to Louisiana. There is an
unfortunate precedent for this trend; during the 1960s,
the music industry saw a significant shift to Los
Angeles for the same reasons—lower costs for production
and other supports not available in New York.
This trend goes beyond one or two industries: from
architecture to dance, cities across the country and
throughout the world are eating into New York’s market
share and aggressively pursuing our creative talent.
As public policy expert Richard Florida and others
advance the argument that culture is an economic
development asset, cities and states in the U.S. and
abroad are developing policies designed to attract the
creative workers that many policymakers now believe
are key to sustained growth.
The importance of this shift goes far beyond the creation
of “arts districts” in Pittsburgh or artist live/work
space in Minneapolis. Twenty years ago, New York was
home to half of all advertising agency headquarters in
the world.Now it claims less than one third, according to
AdWeek’s “2004 Trends in Advertising” report.
Perhaps the biggest concern is that, as Time Out
New York senior editor Howard Halle puts it, “New York
is becoming more of a market for art, than an incubator.
It’s still a place people want to come and make it,
but more people say: ‘I’ll pass, and stay here in Berlin
and make art and if what I do catches on, then maybe
I’ll eventually come to New York.’”
New York isn’t the only creative capital facing
these challenges, but global competitors like London
and Toronto are ahead of the Big Apple in developing
public and private sector strategies to maintain and
grow their creative industries.
In this rapidly-changing landscape, without a forward-
thinking strategy to support creative endeavors,
the city that never sleeps may one day wake up to find
it has lost its edge. The good news is that the city and
major stakeholders throughout the creative economy
are eager to address these issues. But until now there
has been no roadmap. This report—more than two
years in the making, informed by over 200 interviews
with leaders in the creative industries, creative workers,
economists, officials, patrons and other stakeholders,
and conducted in partnership with the groundbreaking
research team at Mt. Auburn Associates (see
Technical Appendix, page 29)—should help guide policymakers
toward a holistic strategy to meet those challenges.
We present it with confidence that its findings
and recommendations can help preserve and expand
the city’s creative pre-eminence, the special creative
mix that makes New York New York. ❖
5 3
■ As of 2002, New York City’s creative workforce comprised
309,142 people, accounting for more than 8.1 percent of all
those employed in the five boroughs. The total includes
278,388 employed in the creative industries, as well as
another 30,754 involved in creative occupations, such as a
fashion designer working for an apparel manufacturer,
which our methodology does not consider part of the creative
industries (see Technical Appendix, page 29).
■ There are 11,671 businesses and non-profits—5.7 percent
of all city employers—in New York’s creative core. In addition
to this figure, the city’s creative core includes 79,761 sole
proprietorships, meaning that roughly 29 percent of the
309,142 in the creative workforce are self-employed.
■ In recent years New York has lost some of its market share in
certain industries, but it is still the unrivaled center of the creative
economy in the U.S., accounting for 8.3 percent of all
creative sector workers nationwide. Internationally, only
London, which counts its creative workforce near 525,000,
boasts a larger creative workforce than New York.
■ In recent years, the creative core has been one of the more
dependable growth areas for the city’s economy. Between
1998 and 2002, employment in New York’s creative core
grew by 13.1 percent (adding 32,000 jobs) while the city’s
overall job totals increased by 6.5 percent during this period.
■ Much of the recent growth in creative industries has been
among the self-employed. During 1998 and 2002, selfemployed
individuals accounted for nearly half (48 percent)
of all employment growth in the creative core.
■ Across the sector, the number one reason creative businesses
choose to operate in New York is access to the city’s tremendous
pool of talented and skilled workers.
■ New York’s creative core is bolstered by an unmatched support
infrastructure. This includes internationally-acclaimed
educational institutions—from The Juilliard School and NYU’s
Tisch School of the Arts to the Pratt Institute and the School of
American Ballet—as well as a large community of arts-friendly
philanthropic foundations and patrons, prominent trade
organizations and a local government that provides a significant
level of attention and support. The city also boasts more
than 15 unions and 50 locals that serve creative workers.
■ New York’s singular mix of both non-profit and for-profit
creative activity contributes enormously to the city’s success
as a creative center. This blend creates an environment in
which individuals can sustain a creative lifestyle, providing
both opportunities to make money and reach a broad audience
as well as opportunities to experiment, innovate—and
even fail.
■ New York faces a number of significant challenges to its creative
sector, including the high cost of appropriate work
space; a general lack of business skills among individual creative
entrepreneurs; pressures to conform to a traditional forprofit
business model; creative workers’ widespread lack of
benefits such as health insurance; barriers to reaching appropriate
markets; and the impact of changing technology.
■ Contrary to common wisdom, creative businesses and workers
in New York cannot simply “colonize” another cheap
space when they are priced out of an area. The continual loss
of work space is time consuming and costly, and significantly
impacts the production of creative products. If they are to
succeed, creative businesses require proximity to one another,
access to their markets and audiences, and most of all,
space that is appropriate to their work. These needs present
real restrictions on where creative businesses and their
employees can work.
■ Under Mayor Bloomberg, the city has demonstrated an
increased appreciation of the creative sector’s importance to
the New York’s economy and improved the delivery of services
to creative firms through agencies such as the Department
of Cultural Affairs and the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre and
Broadcasting. Yet, the administration has not sufficiently
addressed key affordability issues facing creative workers
and firms, such as the dearth of affordable work and rehearsal
space and the shortage of reasonably-priced housing.
■ Facing many of the same assets and challenges to its creative
sector as New York City, the city of London has created a
centralized body that convenes stakeholders from creative
industries, education and government to think strategically
about how to best promote and support its creative sector
through investments and program initiatives. The “Creative
London” initiative seeks to overcome the traditional fragmentation
of the field and devise common strategies for investment
in the creative sector.
KEY FINDINGS
6
I
THE BIG APPLE’S CREATIVE CORE
The numbers and notions behind New York City’s signature sector.
IN THIS REPORT, THE “CREATIVE CORE” REFERS TO
industries in which the creative element is central to
both the cultural and economic values of what they produce.
These include businesses and individuals
involved in all stages of the creative process—conception,
production and initial presentation of the product.
(See Technical Appendix, page 29 for a fuller discussion
of the methodology and definitions used in this report.)
As we have defined it, New York’s creative core
consists of nine industries—advertising; film and video;
broadcasting; publishing; architecture; design; music;
visual arts; and performing arts—and includes creative
workers ranging from architects to zither players.With
the charts that accompany this section, we have made
the first major attempt to pull together all the industry
and workforce data available in order to present as
accurate a picture as possible of one of the city’s most
complex assets.
Assembling a clear picture of the creative core is no
easy task. First, traditional data sets do not capture all of
the city’s creative activity in a discrete way: federal statistics
don’t treat the fashion industry, for example, as an
industry; instead, it’s subsumed under manufacturing,
wholesaling and retail.Thus, its workers do not get counted
as part of the creative industries, but as part of these
other industries. Federal employment data also doesn’t
count many of those in the creative sector who work on a
part-time or project-by-project basis; for instance, only
about 7,000 actors and 10,000 musicians and singers are
counted as “employed” in the city, though combined membership
in the American Federation of Television and
Radio Artists and the American Federation of Musicians
in New York is close to 30,000. In addition, a significant
percentage of the growth in the creative core over the last
decade has been in the area of sole proprietorships—that
is, one-person enterprises—yet not only are these “firms”
not captured in traditional business data sets, they are
typically omitted from analyses of this sector entirely.
In order to best capture the complexity of the creative
economy, we have used both County Business
Patterns and Non-employer data sets from the U.S.
Census to capture the firms and workers that are
employed in the creative industries. However, using
only these two sources, we were not able to capture the
significant amount of creative employment outside of
the creative industries—graphic artists employed by
Wall Street firms, for example. In order to include these
important workers, we also analyzed occupational statistics
from the 2000 Equal Employment Opportunity
data.This data also provides an important window into
the complex nature of workers in the sector.
Other researchers examining the creative economy
have broadly defined creative jobs to include everything
from scientists to hair salon operators, but we purposely
kept our numbers conservative. We include only those
businesses and workers whose main activity is the origination
and/or production of creative products. In an
effort to focus as sharply as possible on those businesses
and individuals that add creative value to the product,
we included only those “introducers” that do the initial
presentation of creative work, and thus are actually creators
and/or producers as well, such as ad agencies, and
museums or galleries that present curated shows.
Not included in our numbers is the secondary economic
activity related to the creative core. For instance,
we have not counted businesses, such as suppliers and
distributors, that do not add creative value, as described
above, even though they make a crucial contribution to
the creation of a finished good or service purchased by
a consumer. Similarly, our count of the establishments
and workers in New York’s creative core does not
include the vast support infrastructure of service
providers, educational institutions, financing and other
resources critical to meeting the needs of the core. ❖
Table 1:
NYC’S TOTAL CREATIVE WORKFORCE (2002)
The 309,142 workers in New York City’s creative workforce
include employees of creative firms, sole proprietors and those
employed in creative activity within non-creative businesses.
Creative workers employed in creative core businesses
Within firms with employees 198,627
Within firms without employees (sole proprietors) 79,761
Total creative workers employed within
creative core businesses 278,388
Creative workers employed outside
of creative industries 30,754
Total creative workforce in NYC 309,142
SOURCE: County Business Patterns, 2002; Non-employer Statistics, 2002;
Equal Employment Opportunity, 2000, U.S. Census.
7
Table 2: TOTAL CREATIVE EMPLOYERS IN NYC BY INDUSTRY (2002)
There are 11,671 businesses and non-profits in the creative core. Not surprisingly, there is a strong concentration of both news
syndicates as well as musical groups and artists.
NAICS Industry Number
Code of Firms
Publishing 51111 Newspaper publishers 209
51112 Periodical publishers 453
51113 Book publishers 233
51119 Other publishers 101
Film and Video 51211 Motion picture & video production 1,065
51212 Motion picture & video distribution 65
51219 Post-production & other movie & video industries 309
Music Production 51221 Record production 54
51222 Integrated record production, distribution 50
51223 Music publishers 116
51224 Sound recording studios 148
51229 Other sound recording industries 31
Broadcasting 51311 Radio broadcasting 107
51312 Television broadcasting 71
5132 Cable networks & program distribution 163
51411 News syndicates 62
Architecture 54131 Architectural services 1,138
54132 Landscape architectural services 68
Applied Design 54141 Interior design services 675
54142 Industrial design services 89
54143 Graphic design services 1,111
54149 Other specialized design services 340
541921 Photography studios, portrait studios 323
541922 Commercial photography 488
Advertising 54181 Advertising agencies 751
54185 Display advertising 83
54186 Direct mail advertising 124
54189 Other services related to advertising 213
Performing Arts 71111 Theater companies & dinner theaters 445
71112 Dance companies 104
71113 Musical groups & artists 364
71119 Other performing arts companies 51
Visual Arts 45392 Art dealers 535
71211 Museums 157
Other 7115 Independent artists, writers & performers 1,375
Total Creative Employers 11,671
Total New York City Employers 205,350
Source: 2002 County Business Patterns, U.S. Census.
8
INSIDE NEW YORK’S
CREATIVE ECONOMY
The secrets to New York’s creative sector’s success? Talent, proximity to audience and suppliers, a receptive public
and a unique environment in which for-profit and non-profit creative organizations provide mutual support. UUNDERSTANDING THE NUMERICAL DATA ALONE DOES
not give one a true picture of the richness and
complexity of the city’s creative core. The numbers
represent real businesses and real people, and in
order to get a view from the ground as well as one
from the air, we spoke to more than 200 individuals—
top executives at major corporations, heads of
non-profit groups, creative workers of every type, at
every stage in their careers.We asked them what New
York offers in terms of an environment conducive to
creative work.Their answers could be boiled down to:
the abundant talent the city boasts in virtually every
creative endeavor; unmatched concentration that
offers access not only to that talent, but to new ideas
and receptive audiences; and the chance to earn a living
while following their muse.
TALENT
The breadth and quality of New York’s talent pool
are the essential building blocks for the city’s creative
economy. New York’s creative workers are the originators,
producers and presenters of the vast amount of
content that fuels this sector. They are the artists, performers,
sound technicians, designers and many others
whose ideas and unique skills give form to the cultural
life of New York City.
For instance, Michael Pashby, general manager of
the Magazine Publishers Association of America, which
primarily represents consumer magazines, estimates
that 85 percent of the dollar value of the magazine
industry is concentrated in New York—mainly, he says,
because this is “where the talent is.”
The same goes for many other creative industries.
“You have to be here if you want to be in publishing,” says
Denice Oswald, an editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. “A
lot of writers that we in the industry are looking to court
are here because they are working for the literary press,
like the New Yorker or the New York Times.And New York
is just a breeding ground for young writers.They all want
to come here and seek their fortune.”
New York doesn’t simply attract talent, however,
it also creates it. The city’s top-notch schools and
training programs turn out some of the most highlyskilled
creative workers in the world, and the streets of
New York might offer the greatest laboratory, finishing
school and proving ground of all: a number of the most
important art forms of the last century, including
bebop jazz, abstract expressionism, spoken word poetry,
hip hop and rap, and pop art, to name a few, have
emerged from Gotham’s neighborhoods to achieve
worldwide recognition. Some of the city’s creative
workers are the best in their respective businesses;
some are among a handful with the expertise to do
what they do.
The economic realities of the sector, as well as the
need to match the right worker with the right project,
lead many employers to hire creative workers by the
gig, rather than as full-time employees. In part, this is
because creative workers—even equally talented
ones—are not always easily interchangeable.
Increasingly, creative businesses try to hold down
costs by hiring workers on a freelance or project basis,
even for what once were staff positions. The high rate
of self-employment across the creative core (see Table
5, page 23) reflects this trend.
Creative workers are also frequently called upon to
serve more than one function at a time, or to shift roles
from project to project, and may therefore need to be
proficient in a number of diverse skills. “We look for
what we call three-fers, people who have three professional
level skill sets,” says Kevin Cunningham, artistic
director of the non-profit theater and media company
3-Legged Dog. “We are always changing roles and need
people with multiple skill sets to do this. In one, I act as
a production lighting designer and a producer. In
another, someone else is the producer so I can be the
director. We also swap roles in production. I also
require that everyone put on a business hat and has an
understanding of the fundamentals of budgeting,
fundraising, et cetera.”
Some workers welcome this fluidity as an opportunity
to express their creativity in more than one arena:
Arin LoPrete, a freelance graphic designer, calls his
“day job” as creative director of a technology company,
9
Table 3: TOTAL WORKERS IN NYC’S CREATIVE INDUSTRIES (2002)
278,388 people work in New York’s nine creative industries, including nearly 80,000 sole proprietors. Another 30,754 creative
workers work in other sectors of the city’s economy.
People Working
NAICS People Working Within Within Firms
Code Industry Firms With Employees Without Employees Total
Publishing 5111 Publishing 3,747 3,747
51111 Newspaper publishers 11,845 0 11,845
51112 Periodical publishers 22,036 0 22,036
51113 Book publishers 13,080 0 13,080
51119 Other publishers 1,911 0 1,911
Film and Video 5121 Motion picture & video industries 3,761 3,761
51211 Motion picture & video production 5,825 0 5,825
51212 Motion picture & video distribution 1,958 0 1,958
51219 Post-production & other movie
& video industries 4,204 0 4,204
Music 5122 Sound recording industries 908 908
Production 51221 Record production 270 0 270
51222 Integrated record production, distribution 3,770 0 3,770
51223 Music publishers 904 0 904
51224 Sound recording studios 867 0 867
51229 Other sound recording industries 158 0 158
Broadcasting 51311 Radio broadcasting 4,332 0 4,332
51312 Television broadcasting 14,956 0 14,956
5132 Cable networks & program distribution 16,049 0 16,049
51411 News syndicates 2,255 0 2,255
Architecture 54131 Architectural services 10,505 2,785 13,290
54132 Landscape architectural services 302 140 442
Applied Design 5414 Specialized design services 11,226 9,569 20,795
54192 Photographic services 2,886 4,303 7,189
Advertising 54181 Advertising agencies 26,765 4,745 31,510
54185 Display advertising 1,367 0 1,367
54186 Direct mail advertising 3,458 0 3,458
54189 Other services related to advertising 1,585 0 1,585
Performing Arts 7111 Performing arts companies 1,764 1,764
71111 Theater companies & dinner theaters 10,972 0 10,972
71112 Dance companies 1,938 0 1,938
71113 Musical groups & artists 9,271 0 9,271
71119 Other performing arts companies 666 0 666
Visual Arts 45392 Art dealers 1,876 868 2,744
71211 Museums 8,053 327 8,380
Other 7115 Independent artists, writers
& performers in creative industries 3,337 46,844 50,181
Total Workers in Creative Industries 198,627 79,761 278,388
SOURCE: County Business Patterns, 2002 and Non-employers Statistics, 2002, U.S. Census. (Table includes sole proprietors, or firms in which the proprietor is the
sole worker. In the data source, this number is only tabulated for the top-level industrial code, not broken down as are numbers for firm-level employment.)
(Sole Proprietors)
10
“yet another stop on my endless quest to design as
many things as I possibly can.”
The creative core’s well-known hybrids—think
actor/dancer/singer, writer/director, singer/songwriter—
reflect these workers’ need for versatility of
employability as much as they do the need for artistic
fulfillment.This is especially important in today’s economy,
as a growing number of firms are starting to show
the same kind of label-defining versatility: high-profile
businesses such as Russell Simmons’ hip-hop lifestyle
company Def Jam and Martha Stewart Living
Omnimedia are branching out from traditional categories
like music, fashion and publishing to become
“entertainment” or “media” companies as a way of
reaching a larger market.
CLUSTERS
Because of the unstable and collaborative nature of
creative work, the creative economy is a fundamentally
social economy, in which connections among individuals
and businesses are crucial to success—and even to survival.
Some business owners and individuals we spoke to
belonged to industry associations or other formal organizations,
but all relied upon informal networks of peers,
competitors, suppliers and producers to help them find
fresh ideas, collaborators and employees, business tips,
sources of material and, of course, jobs. The benefits of
agglomeration include both the ready availability of support
infrastructure (see page 12), abundant opportunities
for formal and informal networking, and access to
patrons and financial backers.You simply can’t find this
level of concentration, for both workers and employers in
the creative field, anywhere else.
“We use and need and benefit from each other,”
says Morty Dubin, a producer of commercials and
chairman emeritus of the New York Production
Alliance. “We use Broadway a lot for the talent pool,
and Broadway actors need to be here because we give
them work. Otherwise they couldn’t afford to stay here
and keep at acting; we help them make a living.” And
it’s not just actors, he says; it’s musicians and writers
and designers and others as well.
“A lot of it is word of mouth, friends of friends or
colleagues,” adds photographer Stephanie Diamond. “I
will have a studio exhibit and people will bring friends
and then connect through their friends to curators or
other artists. Pitching cold to a gallery or a museum
doesn’t work. You need a name or a connection. It’s all
about developing a relationship.”
In order to facilitate these relationships, creative
workers and firms gravitate toward places within the city
that have particularly high concentrations of creative
activity. “You want to be within an arts community, a
creative cluster. This connection is why you’re paying
the price to be in New York City,” says Sara Garden
Armstrong, an artist and owner of Art Entrée, a small
company providing art-related entertainment and art
tours in Long Island City.
Clustering offers not only formal and informal networking
benefits, but also helps facilitate business partnerships
critical to getting a creative product developed.
In Greenpoint, Brooklyn, homewares and lighting
designer Babette Holland partnered with one of the few
remaining metal spinners in the city to collaborate on
the development of a new line of lighting that is now
sold to upscale furniture stores throughout the nation,
including Ethan Allen. Nearby in Williamsburg, Frank
Eagan, the former owner of Sounds Easy Studios saw
how it would benefit his business to be part of a creative
cluster. “Being a studio owner, location is very important,
because you want your collaborators close to you,”
he notes. “I remember instances where we would need
a certain musician—a violinist—for a project and we
just went into the subway station because we knew the
violinist playing down there.”
These creative clusters frequently have their own
unique characteristics, and some—like SoHo, Bleecker
Street, Williamsburg or Madison Avenue—have even
developed their own international reputations. Even
these clusters do not operate in isolation, however.
Creative work frequently requires individuals and
firms to connect to those in other creative industries,
and the city’s unique concentration of the entire range
of creative activity is essential to their ability to do so.
Advertising is perhaps the quintessential New York
creative industry for this very reason: For a single advertising
campaign, an ad agency may use film, television
and radio and employ the skills of writers, artists, photographers,
graphic designers, fashion designers, stylists,
directors, camera operators and producers—all of whom
can be found at the agency’s doorstep.
Even far more self-contained creative industries
such as architecture and book publishing rely upon the
connections to other businesses and industries that can
be made in New York. “Publishing is still a really intimate
business when you get down to it. The relationships at
lunch and so on are invaluable,” says Geoff Shandler, editor-
in-chief of publishing house Little, Brown and Co.
“I would prefer to be somewhere else to do this work, but
it would require everyone else to be there too.”
Perhaps the biggest cluster of all,however, is the city’s
non-profit arts community. These non-profits generate
content that serves as a magnet for tourists from all over
the world. They also regularly export New York-made
products to other parts of the country through touring
productions. Yet, perhaps even more importantly, the
11
presence of so many non-profit arts organizations helps
keep top creative talent in the city by allowing workers the
freedom and opportunity to experiment and innovate,and
to do projects they find exciting and rewarding—typically
the reasons they pursue creative work in the first place.
They also provide creative workers opportunities to hone
their craft—whatever it might be—in a potentially receptive
market, thus increasing their eventual salability.
MARKETS
Of course, every performer needs an audience.And
every creator of art, from writers to craftspeople, needs
a market. New York offers access to a large, diverse and
largely supportive audience.
Writers need readers; visual artists need viewers;
musicians need listeners; performing artists need people
in seats. And with its eight million residents, and
visitors from across the world, New York not only has
people to spare, it has the right kinds of people—a large
and eclectic mix of individuals, with varied tastes and
interests, who value creative work. This is one of the
things that make the city a fertile environment for creative
endeavors—which in turn helps attract and retain
the all-important talent.
Whether you’re a harpsichordist or a handbag
maker, an appreciative and discerning public stands
ready to appreciate quality work. “I am envious of
artists in Vienna sitting around smoking cigarettes in
cafés,” says artist Joseph Stashkevetch. “But because
there are no dealers there, they might as well sit in
cafés and smoke cigarettes… This is the best [art] market
in the world.”
MAKING ART WHILE MAKING RENT
Artists, performers, sound technicians, musicians,
architects, designers and ad teams give form to the cultural
and creative life of New York City. Despite the
uniquely important role the workforce plays in propelling
this part of the economy, New York demands a
lot of its creative workers. Even for the most soughtafter
individuals, the city’s full-time talent search rarely
translates into stable employment.
Indeed, an unusually large percentage of workers
who identify themselves as part of the creative core
report that they are not consistently engaged in creative
work. Musicians are one example: according to a
2000 report by the National Endowment for the Arts,
“More Than Once In A Blue Moon: Multiple
Jobholdings By American Artists,” more than 39 percent
of musicians nationally hold a second job in another
profession to make ends meet.The same holds true for
creative workers in general.
Theatrical press agent Bruce Cohen points out that
this has always been the case, noting that the city’s amazing
concentration of creative opportunities allows creative
workers at all levels to support themselves while pursuing
less remunerative passions. “George S. Kauffman used to
write play reviews for the New York Times and also wrote
plays,” says Cohen, who also serves as president of IATSE
Local 18032, the Association of Theatrical Press Agents
and Managers. “Look at Playhouse 90 on Channel 13 from
the 1950s, and you will see stage actors in those plays, and
they also did movies in New York. ”
One of the conclusions of this report is that a vibrant
mix of non-profit and for-profit ventures is fundamental
to both the quality and sustainability of the city’s creative
activity.While in most industries there is a distinct line
between non-profit and for-profit work—you are either
a corporate lawyer or a Legal Aid lawyer, not both—for
workers within the creative economy there is an almost
seamless fluidity between the two sides. “No one comes
to New York to be a non-profit or for-profit dancer; they
come to be a dancer,” says Kate Levin, Commissioner of
the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs.
In fact, many workers choose New York precisely
because they can be both. Says Mara Manus, executive
director of the Public Theater: “You just can’t make
enough in non-profit theater without working in other
disciplines. Most artists have to do voice-overs and
write for soaps or whatever.”
In New York, this relationship isn’t just about
struggling artists trying to make the rent. It is also
about providing those who have achieved commercial
success with opportunities to stretch their creative
legs—or prove their artistic chops. “There are dozens
and dozens of examples of a Willem Dafoe who
makes ‘Spiderman’ by day and works with experimental
theater at the Wooster Group at night,” adds
Cohen. “In the English-speaking world, the only
other place to do this is London, where you can work
on your movie in the morning, then at 4 p.m. get on
the Underground and go act in a theater. And this
dynamic applies not only to actors but playwrights,
set designers and costume designers.”
The other great value-add of New York’s dynamic
non-profit arts sector is that it offers venues for creative
products—such as plays and musicals—to prove their
appeal to audiences in smaller venues. In recent years,
productions like “Proof,” “Urinetown” and “Avenue Q”
have caught the attention of critics and theatergoers in
tiny Off-Broadway houses, then moved on to Broadway
and national acclaim. Dozens of actors, writers and
other creative workers have built careers for themselves
in the process; without the chance to refine their
work in non-commercial surroundings, they might
never have achieved that kind of success. ❖
12
SUPPORTING ACTORS
(AND GRAPHIC DESIGNERS. AND CREATIVE ENTREPRENEURS.)
New York’s universities, philanthropic institutions, unions and trade associations, suppliers and distributors, and city
government agencies all make it a bit easier for creative workers and entrepreneurs to “make it here.”
NNEW YORK’S CREATIVE SECTOR RELIES ON AN
array of support services—from research and advocacy
to training and financing opportunities. Indeed, the
city’s extraordinary support infrastructure for creative
industries is another major factor in fostering a hospitable
environment for creative work. It is both a reason
that creative individuals first locate in New York—to
avail themselves of training opportunities, including
the city’s outstanding higher education institutions—
and a key factor why these individuals are able to
remain in the city despite the high cost of live and work
space. Creative workers—whether employed within
firms or self-employed—rely on skills training and
upgrading, funding, networking opportunities, mentorships,
work and rehearsal space, business skills training,
and work supports like insurance and health benefits
in order to thrive in their career. In fact, the fluid
and unpredictable nature of these industries and workers—
the project-oriented nature of the work, and the
large numbers of freelancers, individual artists, sole
proprietors and small companies that populate the sector—
makes having a strong infrastructure of services
and supports all the more important.
EDUCATIONAL AND TRAINING INSTITUTIONS
The large number of top-flight and often highly specialized
educational and training institutions is one of the
key components of New York’s creative infrastructure.
The Juilliard School offers arguably the best
training in the world for dancers, musicians and
actors.Visual artists can look to NYU’s Tisch School of
the Arts, the School of Visual Arts and Pratt Institute
for instruction. If you’re an aspiring dancer, the
School of American Ballet is as good as it gets. Fashion
designers have the Fashion Institute of Technology
and Parsons School of Design, while architects can
turn to quality schools and institutes such as the
Architecture League, the Municipal Art Society, and
the Center for Architecture.
“We are blessed [in NYC] by a fairly extraordinary
institutional infrastructure for architecture,” says
Michael Sorkin, principal of the Michael Sorkin Studio
and the director of the Graduate Urban Design
Program at City College of New York. “This is important,”
he says. “One of the sources of good architecture
is a good architectural culture. If you believe that lifelong
learning and expanding creativity is important for
new work, then those institutions are important, the
same as viewing paintings in a museum are for artists,
or all of the rock-and-roll clubs are for musicians.”
As can be expected for such a central locale for
the creative industries, the educational and workforce
training scene for the creative sector is vibrant
and complex. New York City is home to dozens of
higher education institutions with arts programs.
Most of these focus on teaching the art form, though
several are increasingly teaching the business of art
alongside or in addition to these programs. These
schools, along with a host of vocational training institutions,
also provide a number of certificate and continuing
education programs to people in the creative
industries. Additionally, every primary and secondary
school within the New York City public system now
includes a newly instituted system-wide arts curriculum—
a great way to create not only tomorrow’s
artists, but their audience. And New York has a rich
array of arts services organizations and trade associations
that provide training to individual artists and
creative workers, arts organizations and firms—on a
myriad of topics.
At the same time, this educational infrastructure is
the training ground for new creative workers and the
testing ground for new art forms and products. The
schools offer ample venues through their galleries, theaters,
lecture halls and visual arts studios for emerging
and established artists across disciplines. Importantly,
higher education programs within the arts and creative
fields are, like the non-profits, akin to an informal R&D
arm for the creative industries as creators of new companies
and entrepreneurs; among their other functions,
the schools allow for new ideas to be tested before they
reach the marketplace. Professionals within the creative
industries serve as educators in many of the programs
and courses, passing on the benefits of their
experience while continuing to hone their crafts and
refine their ideas.
13
PHILANTHROPIC AND FINANCIAL COMMUNITY
New York’s creative enterprises and individuals
derive tremendous value from being located in a
nexus of strong philanthropic, government, corporate
and individual support. New York is home to
global foundations such as the Rockefeller
Foundation and the Ford Foundation as well as corporate
foundations at Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan
Chase, all of whom have a history of funding creative
endeavors both nationally and in New York. Another
critical element is the significant support of the individual
donor community.
The crucially important non-profit sub-sector
has been the greatest beneficiary of this philanthropic
support. According to a 1999 study by the Alliance
for the Arts, a prominent research and advocacy
organization for the cultural sector, of the $1.5 billion
operating income of 575 non-profit cultural organizations
in New York, more than 38 percent of this
income came from private sources and 11 percent
from government grants. (The remaining 51 percent
came from revenues for performances, exhibitions
and merchandise.)
In addition to private and corporate philanthropy,
New York has an unparalleled concentration of
investment banks, venture capital firms and other financiers
that are well-positioned to support the city’s
creative industries.
TRADE ASSOCIATIONS AND UNIONS
Trade associations like the American Institute of
Graphic Arts, the Association of American Advertising
Agencies, the National Visual Artists Guild and the
New York Production Alliance provide support services
to creative businesses and entrepreneurs. These services
range from training in new technologies and business
skills to advocacy for the industry and networking
events. Additionally, New York is home to myriad arts
services organizations, both national and local, that
provide a host of services from training in specific
skills, to developing art and audiences, to accessing
health care and financial support, to meeting the general
needs of a wide spectrum of creative workers and
arts organizations.
Labor unions also play an important role. Though
the creative sector probably isn’t the first field to
come to mind when New Yorkers think about unions,
organized labor has a powerful presence and an
important role within this cluster of industries.A large
portion of New York’s creative workers are represented
by unions, especially in the set of industries commonly
referred to as ‘entertainment’—film, theater,
and television.
More than 15 unions and at least 50 locals representing
creative workers operate in the five boroughs,
including the Actors’ Equity Association, the American
Guild of Musical Artists, the American Guild of Variety
Artists, the American Federation of Television and
Radio Artists, the American Federation of Musicians
Local 802, the Communications Workers of America,
the Directors Guild and the International Alliance of
Theatrical and Stage Employees.
While exact numbers are hard to come by, the
scope is large within certain segments of the creative
sector: virtually 100 percent of the work performed and
undertaken on Broadway alone is done with union
labor. Membership in the American Federation of
Television and Radio Artists and the American
Federation of Musicians in New York is close to 30,000
people, though many of these are members of other
unions and may be working under this union only on a
part-time basis.
These unions and their locals support the creative
workforce by providing skills training, organizing
around intellectual property issues, health insurance
and other social supports. Notably, union contracts
allow the legions of creative workers who are employed
on a project-by-project or freelance basis to enjoy most
of the same benefits that are available to “9 to 5”
employees—including pensions, health insurance and
workman’s compensation.
At the same time, many industry leaders say certain
unions drive up costs of many events and productions
in New York. This places a particular burden
on small venues, organizations and companies trying
to deliver a product while keeping their costs in
check. And in some cases, it has caused business to
flee the city for cheaper locales. For example, it is a big
reason why dozens of film and television production
companies opt to shoot New York scenes in Montreal,
Vancouver and other locales.
SUPPLIERS AND DISTRIBUTORS
Another strength of New York’s creative core is
the depth of the city’s “value chain,” or production
cycle. The presence of suppliers, distributors and
other providers of economic support for the creative
industries are a major reason those industries are so
strong here.
For instance, filmmakers and photographers
depend on the array of film and camera supply companies
that make it possible to get a new lens for a
camera within an hour, allowing companies to save
both time and money. Similarly, New York theater
companies have access to some of the finest costume
making companies in the country. ❖
14
SPOTLIGHT ON CITY HALL
The Bloomberg administration has provided key support and assistance to the non-profit arts and film industries, but
could do more to support the broader creative economy. CCITY GOVERNMENT ITSELF IS ANOTHER KEY PIECE OF THE
infrastructure that supports New York’s creative industries.
Businesses and workers in the city’s creative core
have long enjoyed a much higher level of attention and
support from city government than is the case in most
other American cities. Indeed, the NYC Department of
Cultural Affairs (DCA) has a larger annual budget than
the National Endowment for the Arts.
Under Mayor Bloomberg, the city has demonstrated
an increased appreciation of the creative sector’s
importance to New York’s economy and improved the
delivery of services to creative firms through agencies
such as DCA and the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre
and Broadcasting. But the administration has done little
to address the key affordability issues facing creative
workers and firms—most notably the lack of both
affordable work and rehearsal space and reasonablypriced
housing.
New York City’s budget for arts and culture nonprofits
and individual artists is unrivaled in the country.
In fiscal year 2006, DCA’s expense budget is $131 million,
the bulk of which gets disbursed in the form of
grants to the city’s Cultural Institutions Group, the 34
museums and other institutions across the five
boroughs that are located on city-owned property. A
smaller, but still significant, chunk of the DCA pie provides
program support to more than 600 arts and cultural
groups across the city.
DCA also has an $803 million capital budget to
spend over the next four years, a sum that will support
infrastructure-related projects at 169 cultural
organizations around the city. This is more than double
the number of groups that received capital funds
from the city five years ago. In recent years, DCA capital
funds have helped support the development of a
76,000 square foot facility for the Alvin Ailey
American Dance Theater and the restoration of the
Brooklyn Academy of Music’s landmark building on
Lafayette Avenue.
In recent years, the Bloomberg administration
supplemented city government’s longstanding support
for non-profits with increased support for several
key creative sectors. City agencies like the
Department of Small Business Services (SBS) have
improved their delivery of services to creative businesses,
showing a greater understanding of the role
creative industries play not only in the city’s economy,
but also in developing strong communities throughout
the five boroughs.
There have also been new partnerships between
agencies. For instance, the Department of Cultural
Affairs worked with the city’s Economic Development
Corporation (EDC) to redesign the Industrial
Development Authority Bond program to better allow
non-profit cultural institutions to take advantage of the
program’s benefits. Groups like the Dance Theater
Workshop have already made use of the IDA program
to finance a new facility. EDC also teamed with SBS and
the Mayor’s Office of Film,Theatre and Broadcasting to
spur development of Steiner Studios, the city’s first
built-from-the-ground-up production facility, in the
Brooklyn Navy Yard.
Importantly, as the Center for an Urban Future
recently described in its June 2005 report “Beyond the
Olympics,” the film office also has shortened the wait
time for permits and created new incentives packages
for production companies that film in New York. Many
believe these enhancements have already begun to help
the city’s film industry remain competitive with Canada,
New Zealand and other lower-priced locations.
Silvercup Studios CEO Alan Suna says that his
Long Island City-based studios produced five television
pilots for the Fall 2005 season. “New York [has]
never had five pilots for a season, let alone our company,”
says Suna. “[Only] one of them would have been
done in New York City if it wasn’t for those tax credits.”
Smaller production companies in the city offer
praise as well. Muffie Meyer of Middlemarch Films, a
documentary company, says the city’s film office has
practically rolled out the red carpet. “We were working
on a children’s history series. For a segment on
1870, the point we were making was about how there
was no garbage collection in all of the city.There were
100,000 horses in the city, dumping manure on the
streets. There was no mechanism to get rid of it,” says
Meyer. “The city actually let us take over a street and
helped us to access tons of manure from the police
stables and put it on the streets. And then, because we
were a non-profit, shooting for public television, they
helped us pick it up.We weren’t paying big fees. But
they did it.”
Even as the city has earned praise for this level of
15
responsiveness, some in the field worry that New
York has left itself vulnerable to changing conditions
and new technologies. “Government orientation to
production seems to be all in old media like feature
films and TV shows that are conventional,” says
Richard Winkler, partner and executive producer at
Curious Pictures, a production and animation studio.
“We do a lot of digital, and we’re in a blind spot. The
city and state seem slow to recognize the existence of
what my company does.” Even though small businesses,
artists and sole proprietors have driven much
of the creative core’s growth in recent years, many
among these smaller firms and individual creators
feel that city officials don’t understand their needs as
they do the needs of exhibition-oriented institutions
and larger companies.
On a broad level, Mayor Bloomberg has pushed
for the creation of 65,000 units of new housing across
the city and his administration has supported the creation
of space for cultural organizations as part of new
developments in lower Manhattan and other parts of
the city. In addition, DCA has made it a priority to support
non-profits that are developing studio or
rehearsal work space for artists. Still, many believe
the administration could be doing more to address the
lack of affordable space to live and work.
“What has historically been the incubator for this
talent pool has been cheap space,” says Theodore
Berger of the New York Foundation for the Arts. “Not
that there aren’t pockets left, but they are going fast.
The creative economy always has to replenish itself
with new talent. I am not sure that talent coming out of
schools these days is heading to New York. And mature
artists are more and more likely to leave. If we can’t
keep them here, then we will have real problems keeping
this sector strong.” ❖
SOURCE: 2000 Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) Special Tabulation, U.S. Economic Census;
and New York State Department of Labor (occupation numbers are based on workers residing in NYC.)
17-1011 Architects, except landscape and naval 1,079 12.21%
27-1011 Art directors 610 12.70%
27-1013 Fine artists, including painters, sculptors and illustrators 235 14.42%
27-1014 Multi-media artists and animators 691 18.33%
27-1021 Commercial and industrial designers 398 51.02%
27-1022 Fashion designers 2,596 63.63%
27-1024 Graphic designers 2,991 33.12%
27-1025 Interior designers 568 34.02%
27-1027 Set and exhibit designers 304 26.17%
27-2011 Actors 9,557 33.52%
27-2012 Producers and directors 833 13.35%
27-2031 Dancers 692 54.93%
27-2032 Choreographers 769 78.52%
27-2042 Musicians and singers 4,543 41.08%
27-3041 Editors 3,540 27.55%
27-3043 Writers and authors 866 12.81%
27-4021 Photographers 179 6.06%
27-4032 Film and video editors 303 12.32%
30,754
Table 4: CREATIVE WORKERS EMPLOYED OUTSIDE OF NYC’S CREATIVE INDUSTRIES
In addition to the 198,627 workers employed by firms within the nine “creative core” industries and 79,761 freelancers and sole
proprietors working within those industries, we found that there are 30,754 creative workers who are embedded in other (non-creative)
industries. For instance, fashion designers merit inclusion within the creative workforce, but are normally counted as part of
the apparel manufacturing, wholesaling or retail sector. As the chart below shows, we determined that roughly 64 percent of all
fashion designers and 51 percent of all commercial and industrial designers work in non-creative industries. (For more details,
please see the technical appendix on page 29.)
SOC
Code
Total Creative Workers
in Non-Creative Industries
Who Are Not Self-Employed
Percentage of
Creative Workers in
Non-Creative Industries
16
Chart 2: GROWTH IN NYC’S CREATIVE WORKFORCE (employees within firms and non-employers) (1998-2002)
The creative core added approximately 32,000 workers between 1998 and 2002, a growth rate of 13.1 percent compared to a
rate of 6.5 percent for the city during this period. Notably, self-employed creative workers accounted for nearly half (48 percent) of
the creative core’s growth, with the biggest increase among specialized design services; independent artists, writers and performers;
musical groups and artists; newspaper publishers and specialized design firms.
SOURCE: County Business Patterns and Non-employers Statistics, U.S. Census, 1998 & 2002.
50%
45%
40%
35%
30%
25%
20%
15%
10%
5%
0%
Actors
Fashion designers
Film and video editors
Editors
Set and exhibit designers
Art directors
Graphic designers
Producers and directors
Architects, except landscape and naval
Fine artists, including painters,
sculptors and illustrators
Musicians and singers
Dancers
Choreographers
Multi-media artists and animators
Writers and authors
Photographers
Commercial and industrial designers
Interior designers
Independent artists,
writers & performers
Musical groups & artists
Cable networks & program distribution
Newspaper publishers
Specialized design services
Radio broadcasting
Architectural services
Book publishers
Integrated record production, distribution
Motion picture & video distribution
Post-production & other movie & video
Museums
Art dealers
News syndicates
Advertising agencies
Other publishers
Other performing arts companies
Dance companies
Landscape architectural services
Sound recording studios
% of the U.S. Jobs in Occupations Held by NYC Residents
12,000
10,000
8,000
6,000
4,000
2,000
0
Chart 1: CREATIVE OCCUPATIONS WHERE NYC HAS A LARGE SHARE OF THE NATIONAL MARKET
More than a third of the nation’s actors are based in New York, as are roughly 27 percent of the fashion designers, 12 percent of
film editors, 10 percent of set designers, 9 percent of graphic designers, 8 percent of architects and 7 percent of fine artists.
SOURCE: 2000 Equal Employment Opportunity, U.S. Census.
Growth in Number of Workers
B
17
BOTH THE STATISTICAL AND ANECDOTAL RESEARCH
show that New York’s creative core is a thriving and
complex creative ecosystem. But within even the most
vibrant ecosystem, relatively small changes can have
unexpected and broad-ranging effects, and the creative
economy is facing more than small changes—it is
undergoing a veritable revolution, spurred by factors
including new technology, globalization and business
conglomeration.
The city has begun to feel the consequences of
these changes in its diminishing market share within
creative fields like advertising. Twenty years ago, New
York was home to half of all advertising agency headquarters
in the world. Now it hosts less than one third,
according to AdWeek’s “2004 Trends in Advertising”
report, London, where creative stakeholders have come
together to expand that sector’s economic reach (see
“Learning from London,” page 25), has quietly claimed
much of what NYC has lost. In the field of motion picture
and sound recording, New York faces risk from the
introduction of new technologies and cheaper equipment,
which have allowed both individuals and major
studios to perform these functions themselves.
Certainly each industry and area within the creative
core has its own complex structure and unique
needs. And non-profit arts organizations and for-profit
creative companies undoubtedly contend with different
obstacles. Nonetheless, as we began to look at the
creative economy as a whole, we found that all of these
businesses, non-profits and individuals faced some
common challenges and shared some collective needs
that seemed well-suited to a broad-based, sector-style
economic development approach.
Below we have identified some of the major challenges
that industries and individuals are facing across
the sector.
COST OF APPROPRIATE WORK SPACE
It is hard to run a business if you can’t afford a place
to work. In New York, complaints about high real-estate
costs and too little space are hardly unique to the creative
industries, but these issues are particularly acute for a
sector with such specific space requirements and such a
high percentage of small enterprises and self-employed
workers. The high cost and scarcity of studio time for
musicians and visual artists, and rehearsal space for performing
artists, regularly requires them to make heroic
efforts to pursue their art in the city. In a worrisome
trend, increasing numbers of artists and creative workers
are deciding it’s simply not worth it to stay—especially as
other cities, from London to Paducah, Kentucky, are
bending over backward to get them to relocate.
Doug Culhane is one such creative worker.A sculptor
by trade, Culhane is also a freelance legal copy editor
in his day job. Most years he makes approximately 15
percent of his living off of his artwork, which is shown in
galleries nationally. He has been living in Williamsburg
for the last 12 years, and is now moving out of the city
because he can no longer afford to meet his need for a
live/work space. “When I moved into the neighborhood,
there was one store, some prostitutes and crack dealers
on my block. Twelve artists moved into this building.
Now we are being evicted.” He is not sure exactly where
he will go, but feels confident that it will be better than
New York. “Cities everywhere want artists and are making
room for them. I will probably go to Troy or Hudson,
New York, or maybe Providence or Pawtucket, Rhode
Island. There is a lot of live/work space available there
and there is a really nice-sized artists community.”
Culhane is not the only one from the building planning
to leave the city. Many of his neighbors, who
include an architect, a video artist, a painter and a couple
that own a design company and employ a few workers
in their firm, are considering a relocation from New
York. One particular neighbor, a successful painter from
Beijing who has been in the U.S. for more than 18 years,
is planning to return because he feels that it is better for
artists to be in Beijing than in New York right now.
SHOW STOPPERS?
Despite everything New York’s creative sector has going for it, a number of daunting challenges—most notably the high
cost of work space, the expense and difficulty of “market-making” and the widespread lack of health insurance and other
benefits for creative workers—threaten the city’s pre-eminence.
Twenty years ago, New York was home to half of all advertising agency
headquarters in the world. Now it hosts less than one third.
London has quietly claimed much of what New York has lost.
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Hope Forstenzer, a graphic designer and glass
blower, worked for more than a decade in creative
industries in New York until she left two years ago for
Seattle, where the cost of living—and, importantly for
her, the cost of studio space for glass blowing—is considerably
cheaper. Many of Forstenzer’s graphic design
clients are still based in New York, but in today’s digital
age she is able to live in Seattle—where she can practice
her glass blowing relatively cheaply—and work
remotely. She comes to the city for a few days every
month to meet individually with clients.
Before she left the city, studio space she rented at a
facility in Brooklyn was going for $45 to $50 an hour. In
Seattle, the price is $30 a hour, a rate that goes down if the
space is booked for an entire day.
“I love New York. I had enough work. I was making
a living,” says Forstenzer. “But I couldn’t change my life
in any way to make it more secure. I couldn’t even move
apartments because I couldn’t find one that I could
afford. That is true of a lot of small business and independent
contractors in New York. You can get by okay,
but you can’t get ahead.”
To be sure, a dance company may have different
physical space needs than a woodworker or crafts artisan.
And while affordable space is key, it is often more
important for certain companies—non-profit or for-profit—
to know that they have a long-term lease arrangement.
For many, this stability is worth the price.
Further complicating matters is the fact that much
of the areas where creative types were able to ‘pioneer’
space ten years ago, simply are no longer available.The
rapid escalation of real-estate prices in the late 1990s,
which continues today, caused a well-known migration
of creative and other businesses from their more
expensive Manhattan locales to areas throughout
Brooklyn, Queens and the South Bronx.The city’s decision
to rezone several longtime industrial neighborhoods
around the five boroughs—from downtown
Brooklyn and Port Morris to Long Island City—for residential
development threatens to displace creative individuals
and the businesses whose presence initially
helped transform these areas into creative destinations.
These businesses need to be near their markets,
and their workers have to be in reasonable proximity to
the businesses. Brian Coleman, CEO of the Greenpoint
Manufacturing and Design Center (GMDC), a nonprofit
that developed a facility full of woodworkers and
small furniture-making businesses, says of his tenants:
“They need to be in the marketplace they are serving.
They cannot be on exit 8 in New Jersey.They need to be
in New York City.”
Unfortunately, the reality is that these critical clusters
of creative producers—from the more than 300 visual
and performing artists that occupy more than 24 buildings
in Long Island City to the dense creative fabric of
Williamsburg—are in immediate danger of being lost to
speculative real-estate developers.
Over the last decade, city government has helped to
spur the development of new buildings for the creative
industries throughout the five boroughs, such as the
Brooklyn Academy of Music Local Development
Corporation (BAM LDC) cultural district’s first building,
80 Arts, a shared office space for non-profit arts and cultural
organizations. But the sustained increase in realestate
costs means that many of these projects are likely
no longer replicable without the city playing a key role.
For instance, GMDC developed three other factory buildings
in Brooklyn for light manufacturing companies and
artisans in addition to their flagship facility for woodworkers,
but then the organization could not acquire any
additional factory buildings in Greenpoint or East
Williamsburg, since private developers solely interested
in converting those properties to apartments were always
outbidding them. “Buildings in this area are going for $20
million. We just cannot do these deals and still offer
affordable rates to our tenants,” says Coleman.
“Studio space and shooting space are a huge issue,”
says photographer Eric White. “Because, a darkroom, it’s
a pretty small thing. [But] a studio is a lot of space to do
a shoot. I don’t have a studio. I have a fairly large space in
Brooklyn, where I live. So, I’ll move everything in this
room, which is like the living room/kitchen—I’ll move
everything to one wall and shoot in my apartment.”
Cost is not the only consideration involved, however.
Not all work space is equally appropriate to all creative
pursuits. Common wisdom on the subject is that
artists traditionally “pioneer” areas with few amenities
and large amounts of cheap space, and when they are
priced out of a neighborhood, they simply forge another.
However, in a survey conducted for this report of 71 creative
workers and business owners in three of the city’s
creative hotspots—Williamsburg, Long Island City and
the South Bronx—we found that the reasons creative
activity clusters in certain areas are more complex.
The high cost of work space and housing in New York has prompted increasing numbers
of artists and creative workers to decide it’s simply not worth it to stay here—especially as
other cities offer enticements to relocate.
19
When asked how they chose their particular location,
availability of appropriate space—not necessarily
cheap space—was the number one factor among all
those surveyed in each neighborhood. Among the
three areas, however, rent was considered least important
in Long Island City, which is dominated by visual
artists, designers and architects. These workers and
businesses frequently put a premium on space that
can accommodate industrial production methods, such
as glass blowing and metalsmithing.
Take Michael Davis, a former dancer who owns a
stained glass studio, and who needs to run his glass oven
24 hours a day, seven days a week. For him, finding Long
Island City, with its industrial zoning, was a tremendous
relief after a long period of rejection. Before he found his
current space, he says, he had looked for space in
Harlem, but landlords refused to rent to him as soon as
he mentioned what type of business he wanted to set up.
While there have been some successful attempts to
address this problem—such as GMDC and the Alliance
of Resident Theatres/New York and BAM LDC’s shared
office spaces for arts non-profits—as space in the city
becomes scarcer and more expensive, and more and
more industrial space close to Manhattan is rezoned for
residential use, the creative economy is increasingly
feeling the squeeze.
ACCESS TO MARKETS
Answering the question of how to ensure that a creative
product will reach the right market or audience
goes way beyond the simple formula of physically “being
there”—in Manhattan, or in the city at all.When we started
our research, we expected to hear that workers “had”
to be in New York to have any chance of capturing the
attention of the city’s critics and tastemakers, and to
improve their chances of advancing in the city’s market.
What we learned, however, was much more complex.
Apparently,New York’s tremendous talent pool and artistic
community can be a double-edged sword: though the
city boasts a large number of exhibition spaces, bars, galleries,
retail outlets, restaurants and media that provide
access to new markets, the reality is that the costs of running
these outlets mean that they are often too expensive
for emerging talent to enter. Further complicating matters
is that interviewees across every creative discipline
observed that this unmatched density also creates an
environment of unparalleled competition for opportunities
to reach those markets. Admittedly, this competition
is simply a part of doing business in New York City, but it
translates into a lot of very marketable and potentially
lucrative arts businesses never gaining the attention or
spotlight they need to turn a profit.
“When I was in Minneapolis/St. Paul, I was one of
four artists doing my type of work,” says Elaine Giffney,
a textile artist, designer and high-end bag maker. “Here
I am one of 500.”
This level of competition for access to consumers
undoubtedly helps preserve the high quality of the city’s
creative offerings. But it also drives down wages, making
it extremely difficult, even for those with great talent but
no trust fund, to sustain themselves long enough to find
their audience. As if the competition within a crowded
market weren’t enough, creative workers in field after
field now fret that the traditional “entry points”—opportunities
for them to reach an audience—are closing up.
“You don’t have as many places to go as you used to,”
says Sam Pollard, documentary filmmaker and CEO of
Two Dollars and a Dream production company. “There
are plenty of subdivisions of major companies so there
are actually many more channels, but they all report to
the same set of CEOs. Before there were something like
eight places to pitch; now there are five. For example,
A&E is now under the same umbrella as the History
Channel, so now I can only pitch once to them.”
Jonah Zuckerman, owner of City Joinery, a furniture
design firm in Brooklyn, says that there is “a lack
of a place to show products,” but also cites a need for
businesses to do their own collective marketing. “It is
often too expensive to do a shared showroom or enter
another retail outlet,” he explains. He wants to see
something for furniture designers similar to the collectives
of fashion and accessories designers that have
been popping up in NoLita and the Lower East Side.
These collectives—including Emerge NYC,TrunKt and
the Market—share space and do collective marketing.
The city’s craft and artisan community echoes this
need for market access. In a 2004 survey by NY Creates
of more than 619 crafts and folk artists and artisans, 61
percent of respondents said that access to sales and marketing
outlets was their biggest need. In response to this
feedback, NY Creates, a collaborative research effort of
the New York Foundation on the Arts, the New York City
Arts Coalition, the Municipal Art Society and the
Consortium for Worker Education, has begun to establish
a number of fairs that showcase the wares of crafts and
folk artisans—most recently at Atlas Park in Queens—
Despite an increased focus on the economic potential of creative content,
the city’s creative workers frequently lack even basic business skills,
as well as information about how to develop them.
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Brooklyn Designs, a project of the Brooklyn Chamber of
Commerce, has emerged as a successful model for showcasing
new designers along the same lines as the Creative Industries
Development Service (CIDS) in the United Kingdom (See
“Learning from London,” page 25), even though CIDS is aimed
at supporting all of London’s creative industries, while Brooklyn
Designs is singularly focused on the design industry.
Part of the challenge for emerging and even established
creative entrepreneurs is tapping into the marketplace and
accessing new audiences for their products. The Brooklyn
Chamber had been doing this for years with Brooklyn Goes
Global and Brooklyn Eats, programs that market the borough’s
food businesses. When the Chamber identified a growing sector
of furniture and homewares designers, it created Brooklyn
Designs as a way of showcasing these businesses.
Started three years ago, Brooklyn Designs is already a
must-attend show for Brooklyn’s designers. The show provides
access to a growing audience of more than 4,000 buyers,
architects and consumers. Participation in Brooklyn Designs
also gives designers access to editors from top design magazines
like Interior Design and Metropolitan Home, who serve
on the jury to select entries into the show and provide a critical
audience for designers aspiring to launch a product from
Brooklyn to international prominence.
Brooklyn Designs offers the opportunity to get a product to
market with minimal investment. Other trade shows like the
International Contemporary Furniture Fair costs $7,200 for a
200 square foot booth. Brooklyn Designs’ fee is $1,000 for the
same square footage.
In addition to participation in the show, participating designers
who are also members of the Chamber have access to services
including help finding space, employment assistance, business
advice and evaluations on business development. Karen
Auster, coordinator of Brooklyn Designs, often assists designers in
helping them to evaluate how to balance the business end of their
design work. According to Auster, she finds that, “as a creative
person they often need help to gauge how much of their time they
need for business tasks, how much for the creative part.”
BROOKLYN DESIGNS A MARKET
and is exploring the possibility of a more permanent
storefront for these artists.
As the recent rent roil over the future of the iconic
rock venue CBGBs shows, there is a shrinking number
of music venues in New York that provide a testing
ground for new musicians. Ed Greer, a musician and
former senior vice president of club operations with
the Knitting Factory and now an independent festival
producer, explains how the economics of his industry
have changed: “Venues are not making money on ticket
sales. This all goes to pay the band, if you’re lucky.
Venues make money off the bar and increasingly on
spin off products like recordings. They can’t take a
chance on the unknowns as freely.”
As with many of the challenges facing creative
enterprises in New York, the problem of marketing
crosses virtually all industry lines. The many trade
shows and festivals held in the city each year offer such
collective marketing opportunities, but these forums
are often prohibitively expensive, especially for individual
designers. The Architectural Design show, for
example, costs upwards of $3,500 to enter. And the
International Contemporary Furniture Fair, the standard
fair at which to launch a furniture design business,
is not only too pricey for most emerging designers
and other creative producers, but it is also not geared
towards marketing products to the public.
Some creative workers and businesses are coming
up with innovative solutions to the problem, such as
independent music producers distributing niche music in
local bodegas. But the bottleneck at the market-entry
level not only drives down compensation—any band that
won’t accept $100 for a three-hour gig is sure to see a
half-dozen other groups that will—it also makes it
unnecessarily difficult for niche products and businesses,
which are not backed by large corporate distribution
networks, to reach appropriate consumer bases.
MARKET FORCES
As the economic value of creative content and products
has become more evident, New York’s creative community
has become increasingly entrepreneurial, looking
for business opportunities.This greater focus on the
commercial potential of creative enterprises is important,
but efforts to apply a rigid traditional business paradigm
also pose a real threat to the vitality and viability
of the sector. Successful creative products cannot simply
be “cranked out” on a fixed schedule, and even the
largest firms in the city’s creative economy struggle to
generate quality products while meeting investors’ or
shareholders’ expectations about profitability. Creative
workers often see the world, and their work, differently.
Investors commonly struggle with this reality.
“In New York City, most big creative businesses
here are very established, have a lot at stake and are
really focused on minimizing risk,” says Bill Mesce,
manager of corporate affairs at HBO. “We will take a
risk on material, but need [established] talent behind
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camera or in front of the camera.We don’t hire someone
who came straight from really small ‘black-box’
theaters when we’re bankrolling a $30 million series.”
“If you’re casting [an actor], you know who is good,
who is a known quantity and who will make studios
happy,” he says, “Why take a risk on the invisible?”
Pressure to produce a product or a profit in short
order is exactly the opposite of what creative endeavors
need to succeed, say those we interviewed.What these
ventures need most, they say, is the one thing the business
world won’t give them—a chance to fail. The logic
of “research and development” that drives experimentation
in fields like pharmaceutical research and the hard
sciences rarely seems to exist in the world of the arts.
“There are many,many failed scientific experiments,
and they say it’s a waste of money if it’s artistic,” says
press agent Bruce Cohen.“Well, when I was at LaMaMa
[theater club] we had a guy named Harvey Fierstein, and
he had three failed plays before he reworked them and
made them into ‘Torch Song Trilogy.’ Somehow the
stuffed shirts can’t understand that you have to fail nine
out of ten times in the arts. Art is supposed to be perfect
all of the time while medical and industrial development
can afford and is allowed to fail.”
Karen Brooks Hopkins, president of the Brooklyn
Academy of Music, believes there is a general impatience
with the pace of the creative process, which
makes it difficult to give new ideas a fighting chance to
succeed. “The problem in America is if you or your venture
is not brilliant in the first 15 minutes, everyone
wants to throw it out.” To really try something new, she
says, you need three years: “The first year to figure out
what’s wrong, the second year to start to figure out how
to really do it, and the third year to really get it going,
really have a well-oiled machine.” Decision-makers with
non-profit creative groups noted that this time frame is
similar for their ventures as it is for small businesses.
Adding to the challenge is the fact that there often
seems to be an unintended disconnect between the
financial community and the creative community on
how to overcome this risk. Mary Howard, executive
director of NY Designs, a business center for designers
established in 2003 by the CUNY Economic
Development Corporation and LaGuardia Community
College, says “New York has an ineffective capital market
for design. Here is this $5 billion industry concentrated
here. Some of the most talented designers are
here, but no one has any money to run their businesses.
People are winning all of these awards for design and
there is no money.”
Part of the problem is that there is a lack of
financing models to help minimize the risk. Banks frequently
fail to understand that the typical financing
mechanism in fashion is for a designer to factor products—
or pay for the cost of a sample run—up front.
This requires a different type of lending tool for the
designers to keep them from defaulting on their loan.
Corporate pressures of conglomeration in certain
creative industries also mean that a more modest shortterm
payoff often takes precedent over long-term risk.
“Consolidation in the book business is not new, but it is
different now,” says Geoff Shandler, editor-in-chief at
Little Brown. His company was owned by Time, Inc. in
the 1950s, while RCA owned rival Random House. The
difference now, he argues, is that as these subsidiaries
have broadened to include other media businesses, “the
expectations of what is considered profitable have
changed.” According to Shandler, these short-term pressures
have meant “you do not take chances on authors
who may take time to be successful. Some very successful
literary authors, if they started now as opposed to
1963, would not make it.There is just not the time to let
the author grow.There is not time to take the risk.”
In addition to changing funders’ and investors’
expectations about the time frame for success, industry
leaders like Mara Manus of the Public Theater suggest
that what the sector needs is not venture capital but
something more like “adventure capital”: a cross
between investment and philanthropy, somewhat like
charity raffle tickets.
The lack of investment readiness on the part of the
designers and other creative entrepreneurs themselves,
discussed further below, is also part of the problem.
This is certainly not to say that creative ventures
cannot become profitable businesses. But as we
described above, opportunities for innovation are also
essential to the city’s creative ecology, and too much
pressure to succeed on business’ terms could threaten
that delicate balance.
LACK OF BUSINESS SKILLS AND INFORMATION
Given the highly competitive market for creative
products and services, small businesses and aspiring
entrepreneurs need honed business skills to succeed. But
The fierce competition to be seen, heard and appreciated helps preserve the
high quality of the city’s creative offerings—but it also drives down wages and
makes it extremely difficult, even for those with great talent but no
trust fund, to stay afloat long enough to find an audience.
22
despite an increased focus on the economic potential of
creative content, the city’s creative workers frequently
lack even basic business skills, as well as information
about how to develop them. These individuals typically
go about learning to run a business the same way they
conduct their other activities: by trying to “figure it out”
using information gained through word of mouth, the
Internet, and whatever other resources they can scrape
up. Many spend a tremendous amount of time and energy
on this kind of trial-and-error approach—and frequently
all they end up doing is reinventing the wheel.
Rachele Dorsinville, founder and executive director
of BAD (Bright Aspiring Designers) Association, Inc.,
says she started her organization to help fill the tremendous
need for business skills and information she saw
when she worked as an attorney for creative workers. “I
was representing independent contractors and realized
most desperately needed the basics—employer ID,
financials. I saw a lot of designers were opening themselves
up to liability because they had no insurance.
Many of them were not even able to use the [technology]
that they needed to design. They thought that just
being a fabulous talent was supposed to be enough.“
Indeed, part of the problem is that many creative
workers are uncomfortable with or resistant to even
thinking or talking about their work as a business.
“With rare exceptions, artists can’t go out and raise
money for themselves,” says Meg Fagan, an oboist and
former development director for The Kitchen, a group
that supports the creative efforts of performing artists.
“This is an intimate process and plays to insecurities to
describe who you even are, and what you can contribute.
I ran a workshop on fundraising for individual
artists and said ‘tell me about yourself’ and only one in
20 could do it.”
Even those who overcome the psychological barriers
typically waste a tremendous amount of energy
casting about for basic information. And despite a vast
assortment of trade associations, educational institutions
and arts service organizations that exist to provide
exactly this training, our research turned up
numerous accounts of budding creative entrepreneurs
spending late nights searching for answers on business
sites on the Internet, talking to friends in the business—
and making a lot of mistakes.
It also means the potential of losing viable businesses
because the producers do not know how to take
their businesses to the next level. According to Mary
Howard of NY Designs, the lack of investment readiness
on the part of many creative entrepreneurs is a
serious barrier: “People show up here [NY Designs]
and they are ‘burnt out’ physically and mentally.A lot of
them come here and want to declare bankruptcy. And
these are successful businesses. Some of them have
grown 40 percent in a year. But they can’t manage it.
They do not know how to get the investment they need
to grow and they want to quit entirely.”
The irony is that New York has a multitude of organizations
that provide technical assistance to entrepreneurs
and small businesses. But evidently, many of these
business entities are not connecting to those attempting
to start firms in creative fields. Meanwhile, non-profits
that provide services to those in artistic fields are not
doing enough to partner with these business assistance
organizations or create their own programs.
Indeed, many creative businesses and individual
workers don’t know what resources are available. “We
have been around for twenty years and I still run into
people who should be working with us but don’t know
anything about us,” says Steve Gross, co-director of The
Field, an arts service organization founded in 1985 to
assist artists in both creating new artwork and managing
the business of being an artist. “Another problem is that
there is no central source to tap all of the various
resources available, and even if there was, many artists
and individual producers would want assurance that this
source could communicate how useful or appropriate a
given service might be for their needs.”
Also missing is a service that connects the business
needs of creative workers across both non-profit and
for-profit sides of the creative industries. Theodore
Berger of NYFA admits that NYFA Source, an online and
print service that provides one of the most comprehensive
resource listings for artists and arts organizations in
the nation, does not provide information for people in all
creative industries. “We have an extensive information
service, but it is primarily non-profit resources.What we
don’t have enough of is information about resources for
the for-profit side of these industries,” he says.
Hugo Barreca, board member of the cutting-edge
string quartet Ethel and former executive at Time, Inc.,
suggests that city government help centralize information
about what kind of business services are available
for people in various creative industries. Some kind of
central knowledge bank, he says, would “make the
process much less of an ad-hoc, every-time-is-thefirst-
time, experience.” This and other policies that
supported the fundamental structure of the lives of
What creative ventures need most, according to those who conceive and support them, is
the one thing the business world won’t give them: a chance to fail.
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artists would pay big dividends, he believes, helping to
draw talent to the city, stabilize the creative economy
and the lives of artists and even relieve pressure on the
health care system.
Another solution would be for arts organizations to
create partnerships and other connections with business
assistance organizations, educational institutions and the
business world. Some of the city’s educational institutions
are beginning to respond to this need: the Fashion
Institute of Technology recently added a new component
to its course offerings which will train top fashion
designers in new technologies, financing and other skills
to keep their businesses thriving in an increasingly competitive
market. But much more can be done.
WORK SUPPORTS AND ECONOMIC INSECURITY
In contrast with other fields that follow a more traditional
employment and business model, work in the
creative industries is heavily project-oriented and in
some sense, almost always “temporary.” Freelance
workers and the self-employed are far more prevalent
as a result, and much of the work is done by small companies
and non-profits that rarely offer benefits—like
health insurance, retirement accounts or pension
plans—that similarly skilled workers in other professions
would take for granted. Other needs more specific
to the sector, such as access to ongoing professional
or technical training and intellectual property protections,
are almost as likely to go unmet.While the unions
and other organizations such as the Freelancers Union
provide some of these supports for workers and help
arts organizations and small firms access better services
and benefits for their employees, the lack of health
insurance in particular has many creative workers living
in fear that one sustained illness or fluke injury will
lead to financial ruin.
Creative workers who lack health insurance are living in fear that one sustained
illness or fluke injury might lead to financial ruin.
Authors 67.9% 57.9% 10.0%
Artists & related workers 53.8% 47.6% 6.3%
Photographers 52.5% 41.4% 11.1%
Musicians & singers 38.6% 26.4% 12.2%
Announcers 34.4% 23.2% 11.2%
Producers & directors 32.8% 28.5% 4.3%
Designers 31.8% 25.0% 6.8%
Agents 27.0% 22.9% 4.1%
Film and video editors
& operators 23.0% 15.0% 8.1%
Architects 21.8% 17.5% 4.3%
Dancers
& choreographers 18.1% 18.1% 0.0%
Actors 17.4% 15.5% 1.9%
Editors 12.9% 9.4% 3.5%
Broadcasting
technicians 9.3% 6.3% 2.9%
Reporters 6.3% 3.7% 2.6%
SOURCE: Occupational Employment Statistics, Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2002. (Note: Rows that do not add up are a result of rounding.)
Table 5: SELF-EMPLOYMENT LEVELS FOR CREATIVE WORKERS IN THE U.S.
Nationally, nearly 68 percent of authors and more than 50 percent of both artists and photographers are self-employed.
Self-employed workers,
all jobs
Self-employed workers,
primary job
Self-employed workers,
Occupations secondary job
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Says photographer Eric White, who is not insured: “I
think about all the time. I think a lot of people think about
it all the time. Especially, living in New York, one false step,
you step in front of a cab and you have huge problems.”
Because many uninsured creative workers earn
relatively low wages or have unstable incomes, they
frequently cannot afford private health care, and rely
on public clinics. Many more simply forgo care until
they need to go to a hospital emergency room.
According to a 2004 survey of over 4,000 independent
workers in New York City conducted by Working
Today, a national non-profit organization that advocates
on behalf of freelance workers, 84 percent of
freelancers cannot afford health care. Roughly 13 percent
of those surveyed worked in arts and culture. Of
those, more than eight in ten said they could not
afford health insurance.
Small business owners and non-profit leaders
alike feel these pressures as well, in some cases even
changing their business model as a result. Press
agent Bruce Cohen says: “I used to employ a staff,
and now I use only freelancers instead of employees
because of the health care bureaucracy. I used to
spend a third of my day dealing with personnel matters.
Now I farm out editing and marketing and even
phone work, and let everyone else deal with health
care.” As head of IATSE Local 18032, the Association
of Theatrical Press Agents and Managers, Cohen saw
half the organization’s time go toward dealing with
issues of health care costs.
CHANGES IN TECHNOLOGY
Fast-moving technological changes that have
brought great benefit to consumers, like the introduction
of the iPod and desktop movie editing, are rapidly
transforming a number of creative industries. While
these technological innovations have created opportunities
for small firms to compete with larger entities,
they also present unique challenges for many of New
York’s creative companies.
In fact, advances in digital technology have
already significantly altered the way in which film is
produced. The new film technology is relatively
small, inexpensive, easy to operate and requires
fewer camera technicians and support crew. This is
good news for independent filmmakers trying to
make art with limited time and resources, but this
revolution is beginning to have a major impact on
filmmaking and the extensive and skilled workforce
infrastructure that supported it.
Similarly, the music recording industry is currently
facing changes akin to the desktop publishing revolution
of past years. “‘Desktop audio’ has really hurt commercial
studios as it has evolved to offer higher audio
resolution, track count and additional features once
found only in the professional studio,” says Christopher
Walsh, a writer for Billboard magazine. “Commercial
studios use this workstation equipment…but so do producers
and engineers in their homes and, increasingly,
purpose-built home studios. That has taken so much
money out of the commercial studio market.The entire
overdub process of an album’s production can be done
outside a professional studio. And it largely is.”
Seeking to adapt, many studios have diversified
their services. Some have even become recording
schools, teaching desktop audio production. Many have
started production companies to entice unsigned
artists, hoping for back-end profits if the artist’s
recordings lead to a record contract or otherwise produce
revenue. And many studios have dramatically
reduced their rates, especially in traditional downtime
periods, allowing artists on limited budgets an opportunity
once out of their reach.
“Some studio owners reason that an occupied
room generating some revenue is better than an empty
one generating none; others feel that once you start
cutting rates, you may as well close, because there’s no
bottom,” says Walsh.
An additional wrinkle is that the advance of new
technologies has generated a fight for the ownership
of intellectual property.This has put tremendous pressure
on both large multi-media enterprises, which are
consolidating rapidly in order to own the means of distributing
these new technological forms, and on small
creative businesses and the independent creators
responsible for generating this new content.
Currently, there is a lack of visible, accessible,
affordable training opportunities geared toward helping
those in the creative fields adapt their products and
skills to changes in the marketplace. The development
of such opportunities—whether by non-profits in the
creative fields or by local government—could help
ensure that New York keeps its edge in the global creative
economy. ❖
A 2004 survey of independent workers in New York City by the non-profit advocacy
group Working Today found that 84 percent of freelancers, including more than eight in
ten arts and culture workers, could not afford health insurance.
A
25
LEARNING FROM LONDON
As New York takes on the challenges facing its creative sector, industry leaders here can look to London and other UK
cities for some useful models.
AS THIS REPORT HAS DETAILED, CREATIVE STAKEHOLDERS
in New York City face a fairly daunting set of challenges
to maintain Gotham’s current dominant position in the
creative sector. But these challenges are not unique to
New York.
Consider London, the one city in the world where
more people work in creative industries than New York.
The similarities are unmistakable: as in New York, space in
London is limited, costs are high and competition is fierce.
And like New York, London has a dense network of governmental,
educational and private organizations focused
on serving the creative industries, but this network has
traditionally been rather fragmented and duplicative.
But where London, and the United Kingdom as a
whole, is arguably ahead of their American cousins, is
that government is actively crafting tools to support and
grow these industries. Since 1997, the UK has made its
creative sectors a major focus of economic planning,
with particular emphasis on supporting its workforce
and entrepreneurs to spur future economic growth.
The Center recently visited London and several
other cities across the UK to see what is being done
there to encourage the growth of creative industries and
better support the creative workforce. By the time we
returned to the five boroughs, it was clear that New York
could learn a great deal from its rival across the pond.
COORDINATION
Creative London
Aligning and rationalizing the resources available to
support creative work is no easy task. But in London, for
the first time, all of the highest-level creative stakeholders
in the city—arts, business, higher education and government—
have begun to collaborate around a common
mission to support creative industries. The field is being
assessed and assisted as a whole, not in distinct parts.
The coordinated effort began in 2003, when
London Mayor Ken Livingstone set up a commission to
undertake a major assessment of the creative industries
in London. Spearheaded by the London
Development Agency (LDA), the equivalent of New
York City’s Economic Development Corporation, the
commission brought together business executives from
creative industries, government officials and leaders of
arts and cultural organizations to identify the economic
potential of the city’s creative sector, as well as the
major barriers that might impede its future growth.
“As an economic development agency, we are saying
this is a sector we are fully backing,” Graham Hitchen,
head of the LDA’s Creative London initiative. “In our
review, we found it has a huge and major growth potential.
For example, one in five new jobs created each year
in London are in the creative industries. So in 2003, we
started a commission to see what we should do about
supporting the creative industries at the LDA.We did a
lot of investigation: site visits, open forums, research.We
focused on the barriers to growth.”
LDA’s research yielded two major findings. First,
the same entrepreneurial spirit that makes the creative
sector so dynamic would have to inform the collaboration.
And secondly, the coordination and buy-in among
other government agencies would be critical to the success
of these programs.
The most important result of the commission’s work
to date was the creation, in 2004, of Creative London, a
strategic group administered by LDA, and run as a publicprivate
partnership that is advised by executives of major
creative companies, leaders of arts organizations and government
officials to promote, support and grow London’s
vast creative sector. The goal of Creative London is to
tackle the multiplicity of barriers facing the creative sector,
from investment and financing to real-estate and talent
development. Since its inception, Creative London has
developed a series of concrete programs including financing
and investment, talent development, real estate and
promotion—perennial needs of the creative sector. Most
notably, the LDA is supporting the development of ten
“creative hubs”—locally-based partnerships that lead the
creative industries agenda by pulling together community
and cultural groups with government, education and
real-estate partners, and driving forward a long-term program
of investment and growth.
The London initiative is already showing promise,
and some in that city’s creative sector say it is because
the LDA understands and appreciates how employment
is different within the sector, compared to most industries.
“What the LDA and Creative London finally got
their head around was the definition of a job,” says Harry
26
Leckstein, managing director of Freeport Records and
chairman of the London Urban Collective, an organization
that trains youth in the multiple skills required for
entry into the music industry. “They accepted that work
happens differently in the creative arts. In music, television,
film, media, these are all short-term jobs. It used to
be that they defined a job as a permanent position with
a company. The acknowledgement of these projectbased
jobs where you move from one project to another,
maybe in the same company, maybe not, has led to a
whole new way of the government being able to provide
training, infrastructure and funding for projects.”
MARKET-MAKING
Creative Industries Development
Services, Manchester
As noted earlier in this report, accessing markets is
one of the most critical and difficult challenges facing any
creative business. In the UK, the Creative Industries
Development Service (CIDS), a new organization based in
the old industrial city of Manchester, has taken on this
challenge by finding ways to expose artists and arts-based
businesses to new markets, both locally and abroad.
Formed by Manchester’s City Council in 1999,
CIDS was developed to meet the needs of the creative
industries. CIDS provides general business assistance
as well, but their core focus is to bring art to new and
expanded markets.
CIDS provides trade development resources such
as research and strategic planning that target sectors
and key markets, building capacity through information
and training and helping companies to access trade
events. Perhaps most importantly, CIDS has developed a
series of trade shows and travel opportunities to market
creative companies both within the UK and abroad.
In many cases, businesses in the creative industries
do not have resources to explore international opportunities
and might not know about the sources of funding
available. CIDS actively works to open up new markets
for firms in creative industries. “We actively go out and
try and form trade association-like entities,” explains
CIDS executive director Lyn Barbour. “This looks different
in each area because we are driven by the sub-sector
and what their needs are. Often there are projects
like joint marketing or trade shows to New York City.”
The Transatlantic Express, a trade mission to NYC,
is one of two recent trade tours coordinated by CIDS. In
the fall of 2003, CIDS organized a trade mission of a
group of Manchester-based fashion designers, musicians
and other artists to New York to connect them
with New York-based venues and producers in order to
foster new market opportunities for their creative
enterprises. CIDS worked with the Manchester Music
Company, a firm that advocates for the creative sector, to
produce a CD of Manchester’s emerging musicians.
CIDS then arranged for these musicians to perform at
two top music festivals in the U.S., CMJ Music Marathon
in New York and South by Southwest in Austin,Texas.
CIDS stands out for its broad focus: unlike most
groups of this kind, they are not limited to one creative
industry.They are motivated to work with any viable sector
in Manchester and tailor the exact business assistance
needed to elevate the work to a larger, global market.
WORK SPACE
The Round Foundry Media Centre, Leeds
London and other major UK cities rival even New
York for off-the-charts real-estate prices. Addressing
the space issue has become one of the top priorities for
government and creative developers.
One solution to the space issue can be to place similar
companies under the same roof and support their
growth through a mix of services and shared resources.
In Leeds, the Round Foundry Media Centre, developed
and run by the Media Centre Network, a non-profit
management company, is home to an array of small
creative companies including IT, computer animation,
new media trade association and television. The
Centre, established with government support as a flagship
project of Yorkshire Forward, the local Regional
Development Agency, with support from the City
Council, provides shared office space and administrative
functions, flexible lease terms, as well as a host of
business training for the area’s creative entrepreneurs.
“A lot of what attracts the businesses is being all in
the same place. They feed off of that,” says operations
manager Cherry Salt.“Some people have false perception
that they will be competitive, but, quite the contrary, they
are here to be near one another.The Media Centre facilitates
the networking—for example, they set up a four-digit
number for them to call one another so that calling another
company in the building is like an internal call.”
The combination of services is meant to help these
companies thrive and grow stable enough to move out
into the wider marketplace; the expectation is that tenants
won’t stay forever. “We want these companies to
grow and move out. This is everything that we’re
about,” says Salt.“We provide all of this but we are very
careful not to push it. It’s available and if people don’t
want it, that’s fine. We are not here to nanny anyone
and that is the last thing these companies want.”
Proving that there is pent-up demand for the Media
Centre’s cluster model, companies from other sectors,
including a debt collection agency and a law firm, are
constantly trying to parlay their work into a creative
enterprise in order to be housed at the Round Foundry.❖
27
RECOMMENDATIONS
This report details the tremendous importance and daunting complexity of New York City’s creative sector. Just as the
field boasts unmatched assets, it also faces formidable challenges that threaten the city’s current pre-eminence. To meet
these challenges will require a much greater commitment to organization and collaboration between different actors
than has ever previously been the case, and as in London, it will likely fall to the public sector to take a lead role. But
while government, with its resources and influence, is best positioned to play that part, and can provide the initial
impetus to convene the sector’s constituencies, the public sector cannot sustain any effort to which the other actors—
including creative businesses, workers and support institutions—are less than fully committed. Without this sustained
commitment from all involved parties, any progress on the thorny issues we discuss below, from the cost of work space
to ensuring health care for creative workers, will remain piecemeal and precarious at best.
TREAT NEW YORK’S CREATIVE CORE AS A SECTOR.
New York’s creative economy spans a number of different
industries and includes everyone from freelancers
and sole proprietors to small non-profits and multinational
corporations. Traditionally, the sector has broken
down along lines of size, specialty and purpose (for-profit
vs. non-profit); different creative groups have been
more likely to compete—for funding, audience and
favorable treatment from government—than to cooperate.
Undoubtedly, the needs of a non-profit dance group
aren’t always the same as a large publishing firm, and
the primary obstacles facing an up-and-coming fashion
designer are often very different from the hurdles
encountered by a film production company.Yet, the individuals,
firms and non-profits working in the city’s creative
industries—from film editors and music producers
to graphic artists and publishing companies—share
many common traits, challenges and opportunities. To
exploit the opportunities and address the challenges,
non-profit arts organizations, creative businesses, trade
associations and local government officials should begin
to recognize the commonalities within the for-profit and
non-profit creative industries and design strategies
around supporting this remarkable creative core.
CREATE A CENTRALIZED COORDINATING BODY
MODELED AFTER CREATIVE LONDON.
Leaders in New York’s non-profit and for-profit creative
communities should take the lead in creating a centralizing
entity that would bring together the disparate
stakeholders within New York’s creative economy and
advocate on behalf of the sector’s shared needs. Such an
entity should be modeled on Creative London and would
include high-level leaders from creative industries and
representatives from trade associations, unions and arts
service organizations that provide services to the creative
core; government, philanthropic, educational and
financial communities; and leaders from the real estate,
economic and workforce development fields.
This coordinating body would act as a sector association
to strategize around supporting and growing
the city’s vast creative sector, similar to other city-based
industry associations in fields like finance and information
technology. Initial activities could include creating
a unified voice for the creative core and developing
policies that begin to address the issues and recommendations
addressed in this report as well as other
needs identified by the sector. The council would also
be responsible for developing a research program to
further track the trends and opportunities stemming
from the creative sector.
ESTABLISH AN INDUSTRY DESK FOR CREATIVE INDUSTRIES
AT THE NYC ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION.
City government currently supports the creative core
primarily through the Department of Cultural Affairs—
which largely works with non-profit cultural institutions
and arts organizations—and the Mayor’s Office of
Film, Theatre and Broadcasting. While these agencies
have done good work, they were never charged with
supporting large pockets of the creative core; partially
as a result of this oversight, these fields aren’t currently
a meaningful part of the city’s economic development
strategy. The city’s Economic Development
Though the needs of a non-profit dance group aren’t always the same as a
large publishing firm, the individuals, firms and non-profits working in the city’s
creative industries share many common traits, challenges and opportunities.
28
Corporation (EDC) ought to play a larger role in supporting
this sizable and growing part of the economy. It
could start by developing an industry desk that supports
the city’s creative core. (EDC already has industry
desks designed to support a number of key sectors,
including life sciences; financial services; professional
services; media, technology and telecommunications;
airlines; and consumer products.)
BEGIN TO ADDRESS AFFORDABILITY ISSUES FACING
INDIVIDUAL ARTISTS AND CREATIVE ENTERPRISES.
As this report has detailed, the lack of affordable space
to live and work is the single largest challenge facing
New York’s creative core.With so many other residents
and businesses struggling to afford the cost of real estate
in New York, it’s neither practical nor politically feasible
to create real-estate incentives that single out artists and
creative businesses.Yet there are things city officials can
begin to do in partnership with philanthropic foundations,
businesses and real-estate developers. One idea is
for policymakers to push for new cluster buildings for
arts groups and creative businesses, possibly modeled
after public/private initiatives by the Alliance of
Resident Theatres/New York and the Greenpoint
Manufacturing Design Center. Another suggestion is
for the city to encourage real-estate developers, universities
and large cultural institutions to include space
for artists or creative firms in their new developments.
MORE FLEXIBLE SUPPORT FROM THE PHILANTHROPIC
COMMUNITY.
Philanthropic foundations and private donors already
provide invaluable support to New York’s arts organizations
and cultural institutions.Yet, some of these philanthropists
could further leverage their giving by
being more flexible in how they support creative
organizations. Specifically, instead of providing funds
that are highly restricted to specific projects, the philanthropic
community should allow for more general
operating support and planning grants. Doing so would
go a long way toward stabilizing many non-profit
groups, thereby allowing them to focus on their core
mission of creating art, cultural ideas and content. In
addition, funders should consider making longer-term
commitments that recognize a truth too rarely
acknowledged in the creative world: the time it takes to
develop a new product is often longer than a typical
one-year funding cycle.
EXPAND MARKET ACCESS FOR LOCALLY-MADE
CREATIVE PRODUCTS.
While New York has no shortage of locally-based creative
talent, many creative individuals and enterprises
need help with marketing and getting access to a larger
audience. Non-profit arts organizations and trade
associations should work with city officials to enhance
promotion and marketing of creative businesses, which
all too often don’t have the resources to meet the costs
of getting their product to a wider marketplace. Specific
activities could include:
• Expansion of the “Made in New York” trademark
beyond films that are shot in the city to other
locally-developed and produced creative goods.
• Continued support, from foundations and city officials,
for “market-making” initiatives like NY
Creates, a project that serves the marketing needs
of the city’s vast crafts and folk artisan community.
HELP CREATIVE INDIVIDUALS AND ENTERPRISES GET
ACCESS TO BUSINESS ASSISTANCE SERVICES.
Arts service organizations should take the lead in creating
better linkages between the many entities—
including government, small business assistance
organizations, higher education, unions and trade associations—
that provide entrepreneurial assistance to
creative businesses and individuals.While the city has
a large number of non-profit arts service organizations
that offer general business development to artists and
arts organizations, these entities are rarely connected
to the vast array of services available to entrepreneurs
and small businesses provided by the city and other
economic development organizations; their assets
remain under-utilized.
IMPROVE ACCESS TO HEALTH INSURANCE AND
OTHER WORK SUPPORTS FOR CREATIVE WORKERS
AND ENTERPRISES.
As this report has detailed, there is a great need for
strategies that address the woeful lack of health insurance
facing creative workers and the businesses that
employ them. Non-profits, unions and industry associations
should look to expand efforts to pool freelancers
into larger groups that could purchase insurance at
more affordable rates.
BEGIN TO ADDRESS THE CREATIVE CORE’S WORKFORCE
DEVELOPMENT NEEDS.
City leaders and industry stakeholders share a strong
interest in developing talented and skilled workers and
should look to better align workforce organizations,
industry leaders, trade associations and unions to coordinate
the skills development needed for creative
industries. These entities should also collaborate with
the city’s network of workforce training providers and
educational institutions to develop programs to meet
these multiple needs. ❖
29 TECHNICAL APPENDIX
NOTES ON METHODOLOGY
Unlike most previous studies of New York City’s creative industries, we have attempted to view the sector
through an economic development lens, counting enterprises and workers and focusing on the scope of the creative
industries. The approach looks solely at the direct employment associated within the city’s creative activity, rather
than attempting to capture all of the indirect economic activity connected to it, as is the practice when trying to measure
the economic impact of a specific event or investment.
Both this conceptual approach and many of the specific methodological decisions detailed below were based on
the pioneering research of Mt. Auburn Associates, who conducted similar assessments of creative sector economic
activity in New England in June 2000 and in Louisiana in August 2005. Their approach to analyzing the creative
sector conforms to the methods used to analyze other economic sectors such as life sciences, manufacturing or
natural-resource-based industries.
One important way that this study differs from traditional arts-related economic impact studies is its inclusion
of both non-profit and for-profit enterprises within the creative sector. Our contention is that these enterprises,
despite their tax status, have the same underlying goal: to generate content, as both goods and services, that transmits
symbolic and cultural meaning to a marketplace, whether an audience in a theater or a group of high school
boys waiting for the next video game. Another major distinction is the inclusion of sole proprietorships, which are
particularly important in the creative sector. Studies which do not include the number of individuals who earn all,
or a substantial portion, of their income through self-employment would seriously underestimate the relative economic
importance of the creative sector.
Our first task was defining what and who should be included in New York’s creative core.The second, more difficult
assignment was to measure it.
One of the key components of the Mt.Auburn approach is that every region has a distinct creative economy and
that a definition used in New England would not necessarily be relevant to New York City.The Center for an Urban
Future, Mt.Auburn Associates and an advisory board of creative sector leaders helped us come up with a definition
of the “creative core” that comprises nine industries:
• Advertising
• Film and Video
• Broadcasting
• Publishing
• Architecture
• Design
• Music
• Visual Arts
• Performing Arts
The first step in measuring the creative core was to identify the number of enterprises involved in these creative
core industries and the number of individuals who make all or part of their living through employment in a nonprofit
or for-profit enterprise, or through self employment.
The U.S. Census’ County Business Patterns includes information on employment for enterprises with wage
employees. The 2002 version, the most recent available, indicates 198,627 workers in the city employed by firms within
the nine “creative core” industries. A separate data set tracking “non-employers” indicated an additional 79,761
freelancers and sole proprietors within the core, for a total of 278,388. (See Table 3, page 9 for the breakdown by
creative industry.)
30
This count is extremely conservative for three major reasons:
1) We focused primarily on those enterprises involved in the creation or production of creative content. While
we included some activities involved in the distribution of creative content, we only included these activities
if the distribution-related activity also involved production or was a core activity in terms of the market in
New York. For example, media (a distribution channel), art galleries and museums were included in the definition
of the core. Movie theaters, CD stores and book stores were not.
2) Our count does not include many of the suppliers to the creative core. For example, art supply stores, legal
firms specializing in entertainment and other similar firms are clearly part of the broader “creative economy”
in New York City. However, they were not considered part of the creative core, under the definition set forth
in this report.
3) There is a significant amount of “embedded” activity within the creative sector which is very difficult to quantify.
The best examples of embedded activities would be public libraries (which are important distribution
channels for creative content, as well as important venues for creative work) and are considered part of local
government employment. Similarly, jobs in museums and performance venues owned and operated by government
or colleges and universities are classified under the economic code of their parent organization.
Finally, many “crafts”-related businesses are included in manufacturing under the current economic codes.
Thus, an artisan furniture maker would be included under the economic code for furniture manufacturer. It
was impossible to disaggregate within manufacturing those enterprises that were more design-intensive.
While it was not possible to capture all of the embedded activities, the methodology tried to make some estimate
of creative workers employed in industries outside of the “creative core.” Perhaps the best example is fashion. We
did not want to count all 30,000 apparel jobs in New York City within the creative workforce, but it’s clear that there
is a “creative” element to some number of these positions. Fashion designers working in manufacturing all merit
inclusion within the creative workforce; the question was how to come up with an estimate of their numbers in New
York City.
We used national estimates of the percentage within each creative occupation that were neither self-employed
nor working within the creative sector.Then we applied those percentages to the number of individuals in that creative
occupation in NYC. For example, in the fashion industry, we found that there were 4,080 fashion designers
working in the city in 2000. Of these, 22 percent were working in apparel manufacturing, 30 percent in apparel
wholesaling and about 6 percent in apparel retail. Some additional 6 percent work in other miscellaneous industries
like government or education.We took this percentage (64 percent) and applied it to the 4,080 fashion designers to
come up with another 2,600 creative jobs.
Applying this process to the numerous creative workers employed in non-creative industries as indicated in
Table 4 (see page 15), we identified an additional 30,754 creative workers in the city. As Table 1 shows (see page 6),
adding these three figures yields the 309,142 total for New York’s creative workforce.
The U.S. Census’ County Business Patterns (2002) has information on employment for enterprises with wage
employees.This is the most recent data set that has detailed information on employment at the level of enterprises.
The U.S. Census’ data on “Non-employers” supplements the enterprise employment data. This data included
individuals who file returns to the IRS that indicate that they earn income from a sole proprietorship, an enterprise
whose only employee is the owner.
A third set of data, the 2000 Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) Special Tabulation of the 2000 U.S. Census
was used to complete the measure of the creative workforce by comparing the other two data sets against the number
of individuals living in New York City who reported working in “creative” occupations.
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Cultural District in Lower Manhattan.”
Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and the Alliance for the Arts (1993). “The Arts as an Industry: Their
Economic Importance to the New York—New Jersey Metropolitan Region.”
Price Waterhouse Coopers (2001). “2001 New York New Media Industry Survey: Climate Study.”
Scanlon, Rosemary (February 2003). “The Importance of Arts to New York City’s Economy.”
Seley, John E. and Wolpert, Julian (May 2002). “New York City’s Nonprofit Sector.”The New York City Nonprofits
Project, Community Studies of New York and the Nonprofit Coordinating Committee of New York.
Slaff, Jonathan and Veaudor, Delphine (2004). “The Continuing Impact of 9/11 Upon Individual Artists of all
Disciplines in NYC: 2004 Artist Write In.”
U.S. Census Bureau (2002). County Business Patterns.
U.S. Census Bureau (2002). Non-employer Statistics.
U.S. Census Bureau (2000). Equal Employment Opportunity.
ADDITIONAL SOURCES AND RESOURCES
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the Center for an Urban Future can be viewed
at www.nycfuture.org. Please subscribe to our
monthly e-mail bulletin by contacting us at
cuf@nycfuture.org or (212) 479-3341.
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From Arts Organizations to Ad Agencies

www.nycfuture.org DECEMBER 2005
From arts organizations to ad agencies,
New York’s vast creative sector is one of the
city’s most important, and least understood,
economic assets.
T A B O U T T H I S R E P O R T
I N S I D E
The Center for an Urban Future produced this report in partnership with Mt. Auburn Associates. The report builds
upon the Center’s 2002 report about the role of arts and culture in New York’s economy, titled “The Creative Engine,”
as well as Mt. Auburn’s considerable analysis of the creative economy.
The Center for an Urban Future is a New York City-based think tank dedicated to independent, fact-based research
about critical issues affecting New York’s future including economic development, workforce development, higher
education and the arts. For more information or to sign up for our monthly e-mail bulletin, visit www.nycfuture.org.
Mt.Auburn Associates is a Massachusetts-based consulting firm that focuses on economic development analysis and
strategy. For more information, visit www.mtauburnassociates.com.
The report was written by Robin Keegan and Neil Kleiman of the Center for an Urban Future with Beth Siegel and
Michael Kane of Mt. Auburn Associates. It was edited by Andrea Coller McAuliff, David Jason Fischer and Jonathan
Bowles and designed by Julia Reich with cover design by JEROME.Additional research assistance was provided by Tara
Colton, Doreen Jakob, Suman Saran,Alexis Frasz, Sascha Brinkoff and Dan Dray.We also acknowledge the helpful contributions
we received from the members of an advisory committee of creative sector leaders and many others.
The report was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, Deutsche Bank, the New York Community Trust, the
Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation and the Independence Community Foundation.
Special research support was provided by the British Consulate-General. Additional program support was provided
by the Bernard F. and Alva B. Gimbel Foundation and the Taconic Foundation.
The Center for an Urban Future is a project of City Futures, Inc. City Futures Board of Directors: Andrew Reicher
(Chair), Ken Emerson, Mark Winston Griffith, Marc Jahr, David Lebenstein, Ira Rubenstein, John Siegal, Karen Trella
and Peter Williams.
Key Findings p. 5
Inside New York’s Creative Economy p. 8
The creative city runs on talent, clusters, audience
and the interaction of non-profit and for-profit work.
Spotlight on City Hall p. 14
What has the Bloomberg administration
done to support the city’s creative ecosystem?
Show Stoppers? p. 17
Challenges to the city’s pre-eminence in the
creative sector include high costs, economic
insecurity and a lack of business skills.
Learning from London p. 25
London has done far more than New York
to harness its creative assets.
Recommendations p. 27
Creative activity may
be the closest thing to
a natural resource in
New York, but it is
also a little-understood
and long-overlooked
asset, and one that
can no longer be
taken for granted.
3
FFROM THE SOUTH BRONX TO MADISON AVENUE,
New York has long been an incubator for cutting-edge
artistic expression, a showcase for important art forms
and a home for dynamic creative companies. But
despite New York’s longstanding status as a global center
for creative activity, the alchemy that allows the city’s
creative economy to thrive is still largely a mystery.
Several scholars in the United States and abroad
have recently examined the role of the creative economy
as an engine of growth, with some studies exploring
the intricacies of various parts of the picture here in
New York. But none have gotten to the heart of what
makes this vital part of the economy work or provided
a blueprint for maintaining New York’s creative preeminence
in the face of intense competition.
Until now.
This study, for the first time, provides a full picture
of New York City’s “creative core”—encompassing both
non-profit arts and cultural organizations and forprofit
creative companies, such as advertising agencies,
film producers and publishers. The study also details
what is needed to ensure that this critical part of the
city’s economy continues to flourish, an important discussion
at a time when a growing number of cities and
states are building economic development strategies
around attracting the kind of creative people that have
long congregated in New York.
This report is the culmination of more than two
years of research into New York’s creative economy. The
Center for an Urban Future conducted this research in
full partnership with Mt.Auburn Associates, a nationally-
renowned consulting firm that previously produced
the first major sector analysis of the creative economy,
titled “The Creative Economy Initiative:The Role of Arts
and Culture in New England’s Competitiveness.” This
report also draws upon a handful of studies about the
impact of arts and culture on New York’s economy, from
the Center’s own 2002 report “The Creative Engine” to
the seminal study by the Port Authority and the Alliance
for the Arts in 1983 (updated in 1993).
While the combined strength of the city’s creative
sector may not trump the impact of the financial services
sector, it isn’t far off. The city’s “creative core” (see
page 6) consists of 11,671 businesses and non-profits
(5.7 percent of all employers in the five boroughs) and
provides employment to 309,142 people (8.1 percent of
all city workers). In recent years, creative industries
have added jobs at a considerably faster rate than the
overall city economy: between 1998 and 2002, employment
in New York’s creative core grew by 13.1 percent
(adding 32,000 jobs) while the city’s overall job totals
increased by 6.5 percent during this period.
Among the city’s nearly unparalleled concentration of
creative core enterprises, New York has more than 2,000
arts and cultural non-profits and over 500 art galleries,
roughly 2,300 design services businesses, more than 1,100
advertising-related firms, nearly 700 book and magazine
publishers and 145 film production studios and stages.
No other place in the U.S. even comes close to
matching the city’s creative assets. In fact, 8.3 percent
of all creative sector workers in the U.S. are based in
New York. The city is home to over a third of all the
country’s actors and roughly 27 percent of the nation’s
fashion designers, 12 percent of film editors, 10 percent
of set designers, 9 percent of graphic designers, 8 percent
of architects and 7 percent of fine artists.
The entities that comprise the creative core range
from mega-corporations such as Time Warner and
vaunted institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art
to small organizations and individual entrepreneurs
throughout the five boroughs. It includes non-profits and
for-profits, full-time workers and freelancers. Indeed, 28
percent of all those in the city’s creative workforce—
roughly 79,000 people—are self-employed.
People working in the creative core range from the
lighting designer who illuminates the Great White Way
to graffiti muralists from the South Bronx who are
commissioned not only to create murals and memorials
locally, but to provide their talent to ad campaigns for
major corporations. Their goals are variously artistic,
social, political and economic. And they draw upon an
unmatched set of strengths that has fueled New York
City’s cultural greatness—starting with abundant talent
in the creative fields.
“The best thing is the talent pool,” says Mara
Manus, executive director of the Public Theater. “It’s
incredible—from every kind of artist to crew member.”
The presence of so many creative people, in so many
different fields, has a significant ripple effect on the
city’s economy. For instance, Department of Cultural
CREATIVE NEW YORK
FROM ARTS ORGANIZATIONS TO AD AGENCIES, NEW YORK’S VAST CREATIVE SECTOR
IS ONE OF THE CITY’S MOST IMPORTANT, AND LEAST UNDERSTOOD, ECONOMIC ASSETS.
4
Affairs Commissioner Kate Levin says that New York is
home to numerous businesses that are here primarily so
they can easily service those in the city’s creative sector,
from the many curtain manufacturers that sell to local
theaters to firms like Freed of London, the United
Kingdom-based maker of ballet shoes that probably
wouldn’t have a location in Long Island City if not for the
large number of ballet dancers here. “There are a number
of industries that simply must be in New York City
and decide to locate here because of the arts,” says Levin.
But while creative activity may be the closest thing to
a natural resource in New York City, it is also a little-understood
and long-overlooked economic asset—and one that
can no longer be taken for granted. In recent years, consumers
have become ever more interested in content that
offers value beyond the merely functional. The creative
industries have attempted to respond by generating products—
from films and plays to books and computer
games—that speak to this growing consumer demand. But
this trend, combined with the technological changes that
are revolutionizing a number of creative fields (see page
24), also means that they don’t need to do it here.
The opportunity for growth within these industries—
and for the cities in which they are located—is
great. But as changes in communications and distribution
practices open these markets to entrants from all
corners of the globe, it is critical that New York first
begin to understand these industries and their workforce
collectively as a key contributor to the city’s
economy. Secondly, city leaders must begin to develop
programs and policies that address some of the real
obstacles facing the creative core—and potentially
undermining New York’s position as the national
leader of creative content production.
Some concerns, such as the high cost and limited
availability of appropriate work space, are perennial.
“When we work elsewhere in the country, even in D.C.,
people faint when they see the budget line for rent,” says
Muffie Meyer, co-founder and president of Middlemarch
Films, a documentary film production company. “And we
are paying below market. In many cases it affects how
we compete with other companies pitching for jobs.”
The worsening economic insecurity of creative sector
workers is another major challenge. “Health insurance is
definitely an issue,” says graphic designer Ari Moore. “I
can’t afford any of the options out there—there’s a freelancers
union, but it’s still very expensive to get health
insurance through that. I’ve had to not get care, and then,
since I waited so long, I had to get more expensive care.”
Other issues demand the attention of city policymakers
as well. While New York’s prominence in the
creative industries seems secure enough for the
moment, it is in no way guaranteed. In the film industry,
for example, many production companies have
passed over New York in favor of lower-cost locations
from Toronto and Vancouver to Louisiana. There is an
unfortunate precedent for this trend; during the 1960s,
the music industry saw a significant shift to Los
Angeles for the same reasons—lower costs for production
and other supports not available in New York.
This trend goes beyond one or two industries: from
architecture to dance, cities across the country and
throughout the world are eating into New York’s market
share and aggressively pursuing our creative talent.
As public policy expert Richard Florida and others
advance the argument that culture is an economic
development asset, cities and states in the U.S. and
abroad are developing policies designed to attract the
creative workers that many policymakers now believe
are key to sustained growth.
The importance of this shift goes far beyond the creation
of “arts districts” in Pittsburgh or artist live/work
space in Minneapolis. Twenty years ago, New York was
home to half of all advertising agency headquarters in
the world.Now it claims less than one third, according to
AdWeek’s “2004 Trends in Advertising” report.
Perhaps the biggest concern is that, as Time Out
New York senior editor Howard Halle puts it, “New York
is becoming more of a market for art, than an incubator.
It’s still a place people want to come and make it,
but more people say: ‘I’ll pass, and stay here in Berlin
and make art and if what I do catches on, then maybe
I’ll eventually come to New York.’”
New York isn’t the only creative capital facing
these challenges, but global competitors like London
and Toronto are ahead of the Big Apple in developing
public and private sector strategies to maintain and
grow their creative industries.
In this rapidly-changing landscape, without a forward-
thinking strategy to support creative endeavors,
the city that never sleeps may one day wake up to find
it has lost its edge. The good news is that the city and
major stakeholders throughout the creative economy
are eager to address these issues. But until now there
has been no roadmap. This report—more than two
years in the making, informed by over 200 interviews
with leaders in the creative industries, creative workers,
economists, officials, patrons and other stakeholders,
and conducted in partnership with the groundbreaking
research team at Mt. Auburn Associates (see
Technical Appendix, page 29)—should help guide policymakers
toward a holistic strategy to meet those challenges.
We present it with confidence that its findings
and recommendations can help preserve and expand
the city’s creative pre-eminence, the special creative
mix that makes New York New York. ❖
5 3
■ As of 2002, New York City’s creative workforce comprised
309,142 people, accounting for more than 8.1 percent of all
those employed in the five boroughs. The total includes
278,388 employed in the creative industries, as well as
another 30,754 involved in creative occupations, such as a
fashion designer working for an apparel manufacturer,
which our methodology does not consider part of the creative
industries (see Technical Appendix, page 29).
■ There are 11,671 businesses and non-profits—5.7 percent
of all city employers—in New York’s creative core. In addition
to this figure, the city’s creative core includes 79,761 sole
proprietorships, meaning that roughly 29 percent of the
309,142 in the creative workforce are self-employed.
■ In recent years New York has lost some of its market share in
certain industries, but it is still the unrivaled center of the creative
economy in the U.S., accounting for 8.3 percent of all
creative sector workers nationwide. Internationally, only
London, which counts its creative workforce near 525,000,
boasts a larger creative workforce than New York.
■ In recent years, the creative core has been one of the more
dependable growth areas for the city’s economy. Between
1998 and 2002, employment in New York’s creative core
grew by 13.1 percent (adding 32,000 jobs) while the city’s
overall job totals increased by 6.5 percent during this period.
■ Much of the recent growth in creative industries has been
among the self-employed. During 1998 and 2002, selfemployed
individuals accounted for nearly half (48 percent)
of all employment growth in the creative core.
■ Across the sector, the number one reason creative businesses
choose to operate in New York is access to the city’s tremendous
pool of talented and skilled workers.
■ New York’s creative core is bolstered by an unmatched support
infrastructure. This includes internationally-acclaimed
educational institutions—from The Juilliard School and NYU’s
Tisch School of the Arts to the Pratt Institute and the School of
American Ballet—as well as a large community of arts-friendly
philanthropic foundations and patrons, prominent trade
organizations and a local government that provides a significant
level of attention and support. The city also boasts more
than 15 unions and 50 locals that serve creative workers.
■ New York’s singular mix of both non-profit and for-profit
creative activity contributes enormously to the city’s success
as a creative center. This blend creates an environment in
which individuals can sustain a creative lifestyle, providing
both opportunities to make money and reach a broad audience
as well as opportunities to experiment, innovate—and
even fail.
■ New York faces a number of significant challenges to its creative
sector, including the high cost of appropriate work
space; a general lack of business skills among individual creative
entrepreneurs; pressures to conform to a traditional forprofit
business model; creative workers’ widespread lack of
benefits such as health insurance; barriers to reaching appropriate
markets; and the impact of changing technology.
■ Contrary to common wisdom, creative businesses and workers
in New York cannot simply “colonize” another cheap
space when they are priced out of an area. The continual loss
of work space is time consuming and costly, and significantly
impacts the production of creative products. If they are to
succeed, creative businesses require proximity to one another,
access to their markets and audiences, and most of all,
space that is appropriate to their work. These needs present
real restrictions on where creative businesses and their
employees can work.
■ Under Mayor Bloomberg, the city has demonstrated an
increased appreciation of the creative sector’s importance to
the New York’s economy and improved the delivery of services
to creative firms through agencies such as the Department
of Cultural Affairs and the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre and
Broadcasting. Yet, the administration has not sufficiently
addressed key affordability issues facing creative workers
and firms, such as the dearth of affordable work and rehearsal
space and the shortage of reasonably-priced housing.
■ Facing many of the same assets and challenges to its creative
sector as New York City, the city of London has created a
centralized body that convenes stakeholders from creative
industries, education and government to think strategically
about how to best promote and support its creative sector
through investments and program initiatives. The “Creative
London” initiative seeks to overcome the traditional fragmentation
of the field and devise common strategies for investment
in the creative sector.
KEY FINDINGS
6
I
THE BIG APPLE’S CREATIVE CORE
The numbers and notions behind New York City’s signature sector.
IN THIS REPORT, THE “CREATIVE CORE” REFERS TO
industries in which the creative element is central to
both the cultural and economic values of what they produce.
These include businesses and individuals
involved in all stages of the creative process—conception,
production and initial presentation of the product.
(See Technical Appendix, page 29 for a fuller discussion
of the methodology and definitions used in this report.)
As we have defined it, New York’s creative core
consists of nine industries—advertising; film and video;
broadcasting; publishing; architecture; design; music;
visual arts; and performing arts—and includes creative
workers ranging from architects to zither players.With
the charts that accompany this section, we have made
the first major attempt to pull together all the industry
and workforce data available in order to present as
accurate a picture as possible of one of the city’s most
complex assets.
Assembling a clear picture of the creative core is no
easy task. First, traditional data sets do not capture all of
the city’s creative activity in a discrete way: federal statistics
don’t treat the fashion industry, for example, as an
industry; instead, it’s subsumed under manufacturing,
wholesaling and retail.Thus, its workers do not get counted
as part of the creative industries, but as part of these
other industries. Federal employment data also doesn’t
count many of those in the creative sector who work on a
part-time or project-by-project basis; for instance, only
about 7,000 actors and 10,000 musicians and singers are
counted as “employed” in the city, though combined membership
in the American Federation of Television and
Radio Artists and the American Federation of Musicians
in New York is close to 30,000. In addition, a significant
percentage of the growth in the creative core over the last
decade has been in the area of sole proprietorships—that
is, one-person enterprises—yet not only are these “firms”
not captured in traditional business data sets, they are
typically omitted from analyses of this sector entirely.
In order to best capture the complexity of the creative
economy, we have used both County Business
Patterns and Non-employer data sets from the U.S.
Census to capture the firms and workers that are
employed in the creative industries. However, using
only these two sources, we were not able to capture the
significant amount of creative employment outside of
the creative industries—graphic artists employed by
Wall Street firms, for example. In order to include these
important workers, we also analyzed occupational statistics
from the 2000 Equal Employment Opportunity
data.This data also provides an important window into
the complex nature of workers in the sector.
Other researchers examining the creative economy
have broadly defined creative jobs to include everything
from scientists to hair salon operators, but we purposely
kept our numbers conservative. We include only those
businesses and workers whose main activity is the origination
and/or production of creative products. In an
effort to focus as sharply as possible on those businesses
and individuals that add creative value to the product,
we included only those “introducers” that do the initial
presentation of creative work, and thus are actually creators
and/or producers as well, such as ad agencies, and
museums or galleries that present curated shows.
Not included in our numbers is the secondary economic
activity related to the creative core. For instance,
we have not counted businesses, such as suppliers and
distributors, that do not add creative value, as described
above, even though they make a crucial contribution to
the creation of a finished good or service purchased by
a consumer. Similarly, our count of the establishments
and workers in New York’s creative core does not
include the vast support infrastructure of service
providers, educational institutions, financing and other
resources critical to meeting the needs of the core. ❖
Table 1:
NYC’S TOTAL CREATIVE WORKFORCE (2002)
The 309,142 workers in New York City’s creative workforce
include employees of creative firms, sole proprietors and those
employed in creative activity within non-creative businesses.
Creative workers employed in creative core businesses
Within firms with employees 198,627
Within firms without employees (sole proprietors) 79,761
Total creative workers employed within
creative core businesses 278,388
Creative workers employed outside
of creative industries 30,754
Total creative workforce in NYC 309,142
SOURCE: County Business Patterns, 2002; Non-employer Statistics, 2002;
Equal Employment Opportunity, 2000, U.S. Census.
7
Table 2: TOTAL CREATIVE EMPLOYERS IN NYC BY INDUSTRY (2002)
There are 11,671 businesses and non-profits in the creative core. Not surprisingly, there is a strong concentration of both news
syndicates as well as musical groups and artists.
NAICS Industry Number
Code of Firms
Publishing 51111 Newspaper publishers 209
51112 Periodical publishers 453
51113 Book publishers 233
51119 Other publishers 101
Film and Video 51211 Motion picture & video production 1,065
51212 Motion picture & video distribution 65
51219 Post-production & other movie & video industries 309
Music Production 51221 Record production 54
51222 Integrated record production, distribution 50
51223 Music publishers 116
51224 Sound recording studios 148
51229 Other sound recording industries 31
Broadcasting 51311 Radio broadcasting 107
51312 Television broadcasting 71
5132 Cable networks & program distribution 163
51411 News syndicates 62
Architecture 54131 Architectural services 1,138
54132 Landscape architectural services 68
Applied Design 54141 Interior design services 675
54142 Industrial design services 89
54143 Graphic design services 1,111
54149 Other specialized design services 340
541921 Photography studios, portrait studios 323
541922 Commercial photography 488
Advertising 54181 Advertising agencies 751
54185 Display advertising 83
54186 Direct mail advertising 124
54189 Other services related to advertising 213
Performing Arts 71111 Theater companies & dinner theaters 445
71112 Dance companies 104
71113 Musical groups & artists 364
71119 Other performing arts companies 51
Visual Arts 45392 Art dealers 535
71211 Museums 157
Other 7115 Independent artists, writers & performers 1,375
Total Creative Employers 11,671
Total New York City Employers 205,350
Source: 2002 County Business Patterns, U.S. Census.
8
INSIDE NEW YORK’S
CREATIVE ECONOMY
The secrets to New York’s creative sector’s success? Talent, proximity to audience and suppliers, a receptive public
and a unique environment in which for-profit and non-profit creative organizations provide mutual support. UUNDERSTANDING THE NUMERICAL DATA ALONE DOES
not give one a true picture of the richness and
complexity of the city’s creative core. The numbers
represent real businesses and real people, and in
order to get a view from the ground as well as one
from the air, we spoke to more than 200 individuals—
top executives at major corporations, heads of
non-profit groups, creative workers of every type, at
every stage in their careers.We asked them what New
York offers in terms of an environment conducive to
creative work.Their answers could be boiled down to:
the abundant talent the city boasts in virtually every
creative endeavor; unmatched concentration that
offers access not only to that talent, but to new ideas
and receptive audiences; and the chance to earn a living
while following their muse.
TALENT
The breadth and quality of New York’s talent pool
are the essential building blocks for the city’s creative
economy. New York’s creative workers are the originators,
producers and presenters of the vast amount of
content that fuels this sector. They are the artists, performers,
sound technicians, designers and many others
whose ideas and unique skills give form to the cultural
life of New York City.
For instance, Michael Pashby, general manager of
the Magazine Publishers Association of America, which
primarily represents consumer magazines, estimates
that 85 percent of the dollar value of the magazine
industry is concentrated in New York—mainly, he says,
because this is “where the talent is.”
The same goes for many other creative industries.
“You have to be here if you want to be in publishing,” says
Denice Oswald, an editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. “A
lot of writers that we in the industry are looking to court
are here because they are working for the literary press,
like the New Yorker or the New York Times.And New York
is just a breeding ground for young writers.They all want
to come here and seek their fortune.”
New York doesn’t simply attract talent, however,
it also creates it. The city’s top-notch schools and
training programs turn out some of the most highlyskilled
creative workers in the world, and the streets of
New York might offer the greatest laboratory, finishing
school and proving ground of all: a number of the most
important art forms of the last century, including
bebop jazz, abstract expressionism, spoken word poetry,
hip hop and rap, and pop art, to name a few, have
emerged from Gotham’s neighborhoods to achieve
worldwide recognition. Some of the city’s creative
workers are the best in their respective businesses;
some are among a handful with the expertise to do
what they do.
The economic realities of the sector, as well as the
need to match the right worker with the right project,
lead many employers to hire creative workers by the
gig, rather than as full-time employees. In part, this is
because creative workers—even equally talented
ones—are not always easily interchangeable.
Increasingly, creative businesses try to hold down
costs by hiring workers on a freelance or project basis,
even for what once were staff positions. The high rate
of self-employment across the creative core (see Table
5, page 23) reflects this trend.
Creative workers are also frequently called upon to
serve more than one function at a time, or to shift roles
from project to project, and may therefore need to be
proficient in a number of diverse skills. “We look for
what we call three-fers, people who have three professional
level skill sets,” says Kevin Cunningham, artistic
director of the non-profit theater and media company
3-Legged Dog. “We are always changing roles and need
people with multiple skill sets to do this. In one, I act as
a production lighting designer and a producer. In
another, someone else is the producer so I can be the
director. We also swap roles in production. I also
require that everyone put on a business hat and has an
understanding of the fundamentals of budgeting,
fundraising, et cetera.”
Some workers welcome this fluidity as an opportunity
to express their creativity in more than one arena:
Arin LoPrete, a freelance graphic designer, calls his
“day job” as creative director of a technology company,
9
Table 3: TOTAL WORKERS IN NYC’S CREATIVE INDUSTRIES (2002)
278,388 people work in New York’s nine creative industries, including nearly 80,000 sole proprietors. Another 30,754 creative
workers work in other sectors of the city’s economy.
People Working
NAICS People Working Within Within Firms
Code Industry Firms With Employees Without Employees Total
Publishing 5111 Publishing 3,747 3,747
51111 Newspaper publishers 11,845 0 11,845
51112 Periodical publishers 22,036 0 22,036
51113 Book publishers 13,080 0 13,080
51119 Other publishers 1,911 0 1,911
Film and Video 5121 Motion picture & video industries 3,761 3,761
51211 Motion picture & video production 5,825 0 5,825
51212 Motion picture & video distribution 1,958 0 1,958
51219 Post-production & other movie
& video industries 4,204 0 4,204
Music 5122 Sound recording industries 908 908
Production 51221 Record production 270 0 270
51222 Integrated record production, distribution 3,770 0 3,770
51223 Music publishers 904 0 904
51224 Sound recording studios 867 0 867
51229 Other sound recording industries 158 0 158
Broadcasting 51311 Radio broadcasting 4,332 0 4,332
51312 Television broadcasting 14,956 0 14,956
5132 Cable networks & program distribution 16,049 0 16,049
51411 News syndicates 2,255 0 2,255
Architecture 54131 Architectural services 10,505 2,785 13,290
54132 Landscape architectural services 302 140 442
Applied Design 5414 Specialized design services 11,226 9,569 20,795
54192 Photographic services 2,886 4,303 7,189
Advertising 54181 Advertising agencies 26,765 4,745 31,510
54185 Display advertising 1,367 0 1,367
54186 Direct mail advertising 3,458 0 3,458
54189 Other services related to advertising 1,585 0 1,585
Performing Arts 7111 Performing arts companies 1,764 1,764
71111 Theater companies & dinner theaters 10,972 0 10,972
71112 Dance companies 1,938 0 1,938
71113 Musical groups & artists 9,271 0 9,271
71119 Other performing arts companies 666 0 666
Visual Arts 45392 Art dealers 1,876 868 2,744
71211 Museums 8,053 327 8,380
Other 7115 Independent artists, writers
& performers in creative industries 3,337 46,844 50,181
Total Workers in Creative Industries 198,627 79,761 278,388
SOURCE: County Business Patterns, 2002 and Non-employers Statistics, 2002, U.S. Census. (Table includes sole proprietors, or firms in which the proprietor is the
sole worker. In the data source, this number is only tabulated for the top-level industrial code, not broken down as are numbers for firm-level employment.)
(Sole Proprietors)
10
“yet another stop on my endless quest to design as
many things as I possibly can.”
The creative core’s well-known hybrids—think
actor/dancer/singer, writer/director, singer/songwriter—
reflect these workers’ need for versatility of
employability as much as they do the need for artistic
fulfillment.This is especially important in today’s economy,
as a growing number of firms are starting to show
the same kind of label-defining versatility: high-profile
businesses such as Russell Simmons’ hip-hop lifestyle
company Def Jam and Martha Stewart Living
Omnimedia are branching out from traditional categories
like music, fashion and publishing to become
“entertainment” or “media” companies as a way of
reaching a larger market.
CLUSTERS
Because of the unstable and collaborative nature of
creative work, the creative economy is a fundamentally
social economy, in which connections among individuals
and businesses are crucial to success—and even to survival.
Some business owners and individuals we spoke to
belonged to industry associations or other formal organizations,
but all relied upon informal networks of peers,
competitors, suppliers and producers to help them find
fresh ideas, collaborators and employees, business tips,
sources of material and, of course, jobs. The benefits of
agglomeration include both the ready availability of support
infrastructure (see page 12), abundant opportunities
for formal and informal networking, and access to
patrons and financial backers.You simply can’t find this
level of concentration, for both workers and employers in
the creative field, anywhere else.
“We use and need and benefit from each other,”
says Morty Dubin, a producer of commercials and
chairman emeritus of the New York Production
Alliance. “We use Broadway a lot for the talent pool,
and Broadway actors need to be here because we give
them work. Otherwise they couldn’t afford to stay here
and keep at acting; we help them make a living.” And
it’s not just actors, he says; it’s musicians and writers
and designers and others as well.
“A lot of it is word of mouth, friends of friends or
colleagues,” adds photographer Stephanie Diamond. “I
will have a studio exhibit and people will bring friends
and then connect through their friends to curators or
other artists. Pitching cold to a gallery or a museum
doesn’t work. You need a name or a connection. It’s all
about developing a relationship.”
In order to facilitate these relationships, creative
workers and firms gravitate toward places within the city
that have particularly high concentrations of creative
activity. “You want to be within an arts community, a
creative cluster. This connection is why you’re paying
the price to be in New York City,” says Sara Garden
Armstrong, an artist and owner of Art Entrée, a small
company providing art-related entertainment and art
tours in Long Island City.
Clustering offers not only formal and informal networking
benefits, but also helps facilitate business partnerships
critical to getting a creative product developed.
In Greenpoint, Brooklyn, homewares and lighting
designer Babette Holland partnered with one of the few
remaining metal spinners in the city to collaborate on
the development of a new line of lighting that is now
sold to upscale furniture stores throughout the nation,
including Ethan Allen. Nearby in Williamsburg, Frank
Eagan, the former owner of Sounds Easy Studios saw
how it would benefit his business to be part of a creative
cluster. “Being a studio owner, location is very important,
because you want your collaborators close to you,”
he notes. “I remember instances where we would need
a certain musician—a violinist—for a project and we
just went into the subway station because we knew the
violinist playing down there.”
These creative clusters frequently have their own
unique characteristics, and some—like SoHo, Bleecker
Street, Williamsburg or Madison Avenue—have even
developed their own international reputations. Even
these clusters do not operate in isolation, however.
Creative work frequently requires individuals and
firms to connect to those in other creative industries,
and the city’s unique concentration of the entire range
of creative activity is essential to their ability to do so.
Advertising is perhaps the quintessential New York
creative industry for this very reason: For a single advertising
campaign, an ad agency may use film, television
and radio and employ the skills of writers, artists, photographers,
graphic designers, fashion designers, stylists,
directors, camera operators and producers—all of whom
can be found at the agency’s doorstep.
Even far more self-contained creative industries
such as architecture and book publishing rely upon the
connections to other businesses and industries that can
be made in New York. “Publishing is still a really intimate
business when you get down to it. The relationships at
lunch and so on are invaluable,” says Geoff Shandler, editor-
in-chief of publishing house Little, Brown and Co.
“I would prefer to be somewhere else to do this work, but
it would require everyone else to be there too.”
Perhaps the biggest cluster of all,however, is the city’s
non-profit arts community. These non-profits generate
content that serves as a magnet for tourists from all over
the world. They also regularly export New York-made
products to other parts of the country through touring
productions. Yet, perhaps even more importantly, the
11
presence of so many non-profit arts organizations helps
keep top creative talent in the city by allowing workers the
freedom and opportunity to experiment and innovate,and
to do projects they find exciting and rewarding—typically
the reasons they pursue creative work in the first place.
They also provide creative workers opportunities to hone
their craft—whatever it might be—in a potentially receptive
market, thus increasing their eventual salability.
MARKETS
Of course, every performer needs an audience.And
every creator of art, from writers to craftspeople, needs
a market. New York offers access to a large, diverse and
largely supportive audience.
Writers need readers; visual artists need viewers;
musicians need listeners; performing artists need people
in seats. And with its eight million residents, and
visitors from across the world, New York not only has
people to spare, it has the right kinds of people—a large
and eclectic mix of individuals, with varied tastes and
interests, who value creative work. This is one of the
things that make the city a fertile environment for creative
endeavors—which in turn helps attract and retain
the all-important talent.
Whether you’re a harpsichordist or a handbag
maker, an appreciative and discerning public stands
ready to appreciate quality work. “I am envious of
artists in Vienna sitting around smoking cigarettes in
cafés,” says artist Joseph Stashkevetch. “But because
there are no dealers there, they might as well sit in
cafés and smoke cigarettes… This is the best [art] market
in the world.”
MAKING ART WHILE MAKING RENT
Artists, performers, sound technicians, musicians,
architects, designers and ad teams give form to the cultural
and creative life of New York City. Despite the
uniquely important role the workforce plays in propelling
this part of the economy, New York demands a
lot of its creative workers. Even for the most soughtafter
individuals, the city’s full-time talent search rarely
translates into stable employment.
Indeed, an unusually large percentage of workers
who identify themselves as part of the creative core
report that they are not consistently engaged in creative
work. Musicians are one example: according to a
2000 report by the National Endowment for the Arts,
“More Than Once In A Blue Moon: Multiple
Jobholdings By American Artists,” more than 39 percent
of musicians nationally hold a second job in another
profession to make ends meet.The same holds true for
creative workers in general.
Theatrical press agent Bruce Cohen points out that
this has always been the case, noting that the city’s amazing
concentration of creative opportunities allows creative
workers at all levels to support themselves while pursuing
less remunerative passions. “George S. Kauffman used to
write play reviews for the New York Times and also wrote
plays,” says Cohen, who also serves as president of IATSE
Local 18032, the Association of Theatrical Press Agents
and Managers. “Look at Playhouse 90 on Channel 13 from
the 1950s, and you will see stage actors in those plays, and
they also did movies in New York. ”
One of the conclusions of this report is that a vibrant
mix of non-profit and for-profit ventures is fundamental
to both the quality and sustainability of the city’s creative
activity.While in most industries there is a distinct line
between non-profit and for-profit work—you are either
a corporate lawyer or a Legal Aid lawyer, not both—for
workers within the creative economy there is an almost
seamless fluidity between the two sides. “No one comes
to New York to be a non-profit or for-profit dancer; they
come to be a dancer,” says Kate Levin, Commissioner of
the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs.
In fact, many workers choose New York precisely
because they can be both. Says Mara Manus, executive
director of the Public Theater: “You just can’t make
enough in non-profit theater without working in other
disciplines. Most artists have to do voice-overs and
write for soaps or whatever.”
In New York, this relationship isn’t just about
struggling artists trying to make the rent. It is also
about providing those who have achieved commercial
success with opportunities to stretch their creative
legs—or prove their artistic chops. “There are dozens
and dozens of examples of a Willem Dafoe who
makes ‘Spiderman’ by day and works with experimental
theater at the Wooster Group at night,” adds
Cohen. “In the English-speaking world, the only
other place to do this is London, where you can work
on your movie in the morning, then at 4 p.m. get on
the Underground and go act in a theater. And this
dynamic applies not only to actors but playwrights,
set designers and costume designers.”
The other great value-add of New York’s dynamic
non-profit arts sector is that it offers venues for creative
products—such as plays and musicals—to prove their
appeal to audiences in smaller venues. In recent years,
productions like “Proof,” “Urinetown” and “Avenue Q”
have caught the attention of critics and theatergoers in
tiny Off-Broadway houses, then moved on to Broadway
and national acclaim. Dozens of actors, writers and
other creative workers have built careers for themselves
in the process; without the chance to refine their
work in non-commercial surroundings, they might
never have achieved that kind of success. ❖
12
SUPPORTING ACTORS
(AND GRAPHIC DESIGNERS. AND CREATIVE ENTREPRENEURS.)
New York’s universities, philanthropic institutions, unions and trade associations, suppliers and distributors, and city
government agencies all make it a bit easier for creative workers and entrepreneurs to “make it here.”
NNEW YORK’S CREATIVE SECTOR RELIES ON AN
array of support services—from research and advocacy
to training and financing opportunities. Indeed, the
city’s extraordinary support infrastructure for creative
industries is another major factor in fostering a hospitable
environment for creative work. It is both a reason
that creative individuals first locate in New York—to
avail themselves of training opportunities, including
the city’s outstanding higher education institutions—
and a key factor why these individuals are able to
remain in the city despite the high cost of live and work
space. Creative workers—whether employed within
firms or self-employed—rely on skills training and
upgrading, funding, networking opportunities, mentorships,
work and rehearsal space, business skills training,
and work supports like insurance and health benefits
in order to thrive in their career. In fact, the fluid
and unpredictable nature of these industries and workers—
the project-oriented nature of the work, and the
large numbers of freelancers, individual artists, sole
proprietors and small companies that populate the sector—
makes having a strong infrastructure of services
and supports all the more important.
EDUCATIONAL AND TRAINING INSTITUTIONS
The large number of top-flight and often highly specialized
educational and training institutions is one of the
key components of New York’s creative infrastructure.
The Juilliard School offers arguably the best
training in the world for dancers, musicians and
actors.Visual artists can look to NYU’s Tisch School of
the Arts, the School of Visual Arts and Pratt Institute
for instruction. If you’re an aspiring dancer, the
School of American Ballet is as good as it gets. Fashion
designers have the Fashion Institute of Technology
and Parsons School of Design, while architects can
turn to quality schools and institutes such as the
Architecture League, the Municipal Art Society, and
the Center for Architecture.
“We are blessed [in NYC] by a fairly extraordinary
institutional infrastructure for architecture,” says
Michael Sorkin, principal of the Michael Sorkin Studio
and the director of the Graduate Urban Design
Program at City College of New York. “This is important,”
he says. “One of the sources of good architecture
is a good architectural culture. If you believe that lifelong
learning and expanding creativity is important for
new work, then those institutions are important, the
same as viewing paintings in a museum are for artists,
or all of the rock-and-roll clubs are for musicians.”
As can be expected for such a central locale for
the creative industries, the educational and workforce
training scene for the creative sector is vibrant
and complex. New York City is home to dozens of
higher education institutions with arts programs.
Most of these focus on teaching the art form, though
several are increasingly teaching the business of art
alongside or in addition to these programs. These
schools, along with a host of vocational training institutions,
also provide a number of certificate and continuing
education programs to people in the creative
industries. Additionally, every primary and secondary
school within the New York City public system now
includes a newly instituted system-wide arts curriculum—
a great way to create not only tomorrow’s
artists, but their audience. And New York has a rich
array of arts services organizations and trade associations
that provide training to individual artists and
creative workers, arts organizations and firms—on a
myriad of topics.
At the same time, this educational infrastructure is
the training ground for new creative workers and the
testing ground for new art forms and products. The
schools offer ample venues through their galleries, theaters,
lecture halls and visual arts studios for emerging
and established artists across disciplines. Importantly,
higher education programs within the arts and creative
fields are, like the non-profits, akin to an informal R&D
arm for the creative industries as creators of new companies
and entrepreneurs; among their other functions,
the schools allow for new ideas to be tested before they
reach the marketplace. Professionals within the creative
industries serve as educators in many of the programs
and courses, passing on the benefits of their
experience while continuing to hone their crafts and
refine their ideas.
13
PHILANTHROPIC AND FINANCIAL COMMUNITY
New York’s creative enterprises and individuals
derive tremendous value from being located in a
nexus of strong philanthropic, government, corporate
and individual support. New York is home to
global foundations such as the Rockefeller
Foundation and the Ford Foundation as well as corporate
foundations at Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan
Chase, all of whom have a history of funding creative
endeavors both nationally and in New York. Another
critical element is the significant support of the individual
donor community.
The crucially important non-profit sub-sector
has been the greatest beneficiary of this philanthropic
support. According to a 1999 study by the Alliance
for the Arts, a prominent research and advocacy
organization for the cultural sector, of the $1.5 billion
operating income of 575 non-profit cultural organizations
in New York, more than 38 percent of this
income came from private sources and 11 percent
from government grants. (The remaining 51 percent
came from revenues for performances, exhibitions
and merchandise.)
In addition to private and corporate philanthropy,
New York has an unparalleled concentration of
investment banks, venture capital firms and other financiers
that are well-positioned to support the city’s
creative industries.
TRADE ASSOCIATIONS AND UNIONS
Trade associations like the American Institute of
Graphic Arts, the Association of American Advertising
Agencies, the National Visual Artists Guild and the
New York Production Alliance provide support services
to creative businesses and entrepreneurs. These services
range from training in new technologies and business
skills to advocacy for the industry and networking
events. Additionally, New York is home to myriad arts
services organizations, both national and local, that
provide a host of services from training in specific
skills, to developing art and audiences, to accessing
health care and financial support, to meeting the general
needs of a wide spectrum of creative workers and
arts organizations.
Labor unions also play an important role. Though
the creative sector probably isn’t the first field to
come to mind when New Yorkers think about unions,
organized labor has a powerful presence and an
important role within this cluster of industries.A large
portion of New York’s creative workers are represented
by unions, especially in the set of industries commonly
referred to as ‘entertainment’—film, theater,
and television.
More than 15 unions and at least 50 locals representing
creative workers operate in the five boroughs,
including the Actors’ Equity Association, the American
Guild of Musical Artists, the American Guild of Variety
Artists, the American Federation of Television and
Radio Artists, the American Federation of Musicians
Local 802, the Communications Workers of America,
the Directors Guild and the International Alliance of
Theatrical and Stage Employees.
While exact numbers are hard to come by, the
scope is large within certain segments of the creative
sector: virtually 100 percent of the work performed and
undertaken on Broadway alone is done with union
labor. Membership in the American Federation of
Television and Radio Artists and the American
Federation of Musicians in New York is close to 30,000
people, though many of these are members of other
unions and may be working under this union only on a
part-time basis.
These unions and their locals support the creative
workforce by providing skills training, organizing
around intellectual property issues, health insurance
and other social supports. Notably, union contracts
allow the legions of creative workers who are employed
on a project-by-project or freelance basis to enjoy most
of the same benefits that are available to “9 to 5”
employees—including pensions, health insurance and
workman’s compensation.
At the same time, many industry leaders say certain
unions drive up costs of many events and productions
in New York. This places a particular burden
on small venues, organizations and companies trying
to deliver a product while keeping their costs in
check. And in some cases, it has caused business to
flee the city for cheaper locales. For example, it is a big
reason why dozens of film and television production
companies opt to shoot New York scenes in Montreal,
Vancouver and other locales.
SUPPLIERS AND DISTRIBUTORS
Another strength of New York’s creative core is
the depth of the city’s “value chain,” or production
cycle. The presence of suppliers, distributors and
other providers of economic support for the creative
industries are a major reason those industries are so
strong here.
For instance, filmmakers and photographers
depend on the array of film and camera supply companies
that make it possible to get a new lens for a
camera within an hour, allowing companies to save
both time and money. Similarly, New York theater
companies have access to some of the finest costume
making companies in the country. ❖
14
SPOTLIGHT ON CITY HALL
The Bloomberg administration has provided key support and assistance to the non-profit arts and film industries, but
could do more to support the broader creative economy. CCITY GOVERNMENT ITSELF IS ANOTHER KEY PIECE OF THE
infrastructure that supports New York’s creative industries.
Businesses and workers in the city’s creative core
have long enjoyed a much higher level of attention and
support from city government than is the case in most
other American cities. Indeed, the NYC Department of
Cultural Affairs (DCA) has a larger annual budget than
the National Endowment for the Arts.
Under Mayor Bloomberg, the city has demonstrated
an increased appreciation of the creative sector’s
importance to New York’s economy and improved the
delivery of services to creative firms through agencies
such as DCA and the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre
and Broadcasting. But the administration has done little
to address the key affordability issues facing creative
workers and firms—most notably the lack of both
affordable work and rehearsal space and reasonablypriced
housing.
New York City’s budget for arts and culture nonprofits
and individual artists is unrivaled in the country.
In fiscal year 2006, DCA’s expense budget is $131 million,
the bulk of which gets disbursed in the form of
grants to the city’s Cultural Institutions Group, the 34
museums and other institutions across the five
boroughs that are located on city-owned property. A
smaller, but still significant, chunk of the DCA pie provides
program support to more than 600 arts and cultural
groups across the city.
DCA also has an $803 million capital budget to
spend over the next four years, a sum that will support
infrastructure-related projects at 169 cultural
organizations around the city. This is more than double
the number of groups that received capital funds
from the city five years ago. In recent years, DCA capital
funds have helped support the development of a
76,000 square foot facility for the Alvin Ailey
American Dance Theater and the restoration of the
Brooklyn Academy of Music’s landmark building on
Lafayette Avenue.
In recent years, the Bloomberg administration
supplemented city government’s longstanding support
for non-profits with increased support for several
key creative sectors. City agencies like the
Department of Small Business Services (SBS) have
improved their delivery of services to creative businesses,
showing a greater understanding of the role
creative industries play not only in the city’s economy,
but also in developing strong communities throughout
the five boroughs.
There have also been new partnerships between
agencies. For instance, the Department of Cultural
Affairs worked with the city’s Economic Development
Corporation (EDC) to redesign the Industrial
Development Authority Bond program to better allow
non-profit cultural institutions to take advantage of the
program’s benefits. Groups like the Dance Theater
Workshop have already made use of the IDA program
to finance a new facility. EDC also teamed with SBS and
the Mayor’s Office of Film,Theatre and Broadcasting to
spur development of Steiner Studios, the city’s first
built-from-the-ground-up production facility, in the
Brooklyn Navy Yard.
Importantly, as the Center for an Urban Future
recently described in its June 2005 report “Beyond the
Olympics,” the film office also has shortened the wait
time for permits and created new incentives packages
for production companies that film in New York. Many
believe these enhancements have already begun to help
the city’s film industry remain competitive with Canada,
New Zealand and other lower-priced locations.
Silvercup Studios CEO Alan Suna says that his
Long Island City-based studios produced five television
pilots for the Fall 2005 season. “New York [has]
never had five pilots for a season, let alone our company,”
says Suna. “[Only] one of them would have been
done in New York City if it wasn’t for those tax credits.”
Smaller production companies in the city offer
praise as well. Muffie Meyer of Middlemarch Films, a
documentary company, says the city’s film office has
practically rolled out the red carpet. “We were working
on a children’s history series. For a segment on
1870, the point we were making was about how there
was no garbage collection in all of the city.There were
100,000 horses in the city, dumping manure on the
streets. There was no mechanism to get rid of it,” says
Meyer. “The city actually let us take over a street and
helped us to access tons of manure from the police
stables and put it on the streets. And then, because we
were a non-profit, shooting for public television, they
helped us pick it up.We weren’t paying big fees. But
they did it.”
Even as the city has earned praise for this level of
15
responsiveness, some in the field worry that New
York has left itself vulnerable to changing conditions
and new technologies. “Government orientation to
production seems to be all in old media like feature
films and TV shows that are conventional,” says
Richard Winkler, partner and executive producer at
Curious Pictures, a production and animation studio.
“We do a lot of digital, and we’re in a blind spot. The
city and state seem slow to recognize the existence of
what my company does.” Even though small businesses,
artists and sole proprietors have driven much
of the creative core’s growth in recent years, many
among these smaller firms and individual creators
feel that city officials don’t understand their needs as
they do the needs of exhibition-oriented institutions
and larger companies.
On a broad level, Mayor Bloomberg has pushed
for the creation of 65,000 units of new housing across
the city and his administration has supported the creation
of space for cultural organizations as part of new
developments in lower Manhattan and other parts of
the city. In addition, DCA has made it a priority to support
non-profits that are developing studio or
rehearsal work space for artists. Still, many believe
the administration could be doing more to address the
lack of affordable space to live and work.
“What has historically been the incubator for this
talent pool has been cheap space,” says Theodore
Berger of the New York Foundation for the Arts. “Not
that there aren’t pockets left, but they are going fast.
The creative economy always has to replenish itself
with new talent. I am not sure that talent coming out of
schools these days is heading to New York. And mature
artists are more and more likely to leave. If we can’t
keep them here, then we will have real problems keeping
this sector strong.” ❖
SOURCE: 2000 Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) Special Tabulation, U.S. Economic Census;
and New York State Department of Labor (occupation numbers are based on workers residing in NYC.)
17-1011 Architects, except landscape and naval 1,079 12.21%
27-1011 Art directors 610 12.70%
27-1013 Fine artists, including painters, sculptors and illustrators 235 14.42%
27-1014 Multi-media artists and animators 691 18.33%
27-1021 Commercial and industrial designers 398 51.02%
27-1022 Fashion designers 2,596 63.63%
27-1024 Graphic designers 2,991 33.12%
27-1025 Interior designers 568 34.02%
27-1027 Set and exhibit designers 304 26.17%
27-2011 Actors 9,557 33.52%
27-2012 Producers and directors 833 13.35%
27-2031 Dancers 692 54.93%
27-2032 Choreographers 769 78.52%
27-2042 Musicians and singers 4,543 41.08%
27-3041 Editors 3,540 27.55%
27-3043 Writers and authors 866 12.81%
27-4021 Photographers 179 6.06%
27-4032 Film and video editors 303 12.32%
30,754
Table 4: CREATIVE WORKERS EMPLOYED OUTSIDE OF NYC’S CREATIVE INDUSTRIES
In addition to the 198,627 workers employed by firms within the nine “creative core” industries and 79,761 freelancers and sole
proprietors working within those industries, we found that there are 30,754 creative workers who are embedded in other (non-creative)
industries. For instance, fashion designers merit inclusion within the creative workforce, but are normally counted as part of
the apparel manufacturing, wholesaling or retail sector. As the chart below shows, we determined that roughly 64 percent of all
fashion designers and 51 percent of all commercial and industrial designers work in non-creative industries. (For more details,
please see the technical appendix on page 29.)
SOC
Code
Total Creative Workers
in Non-Creative Industries
Who Are Not Self-Employed
Percentage of
Creative Workers in
Non-Creative Industries
16
Chart 2: GROWTH IN NYC’S CREATIVE WORKFORCE (employees within firms and non-employers) (1998-2002)
The creative core added approximately 32,000 workers between 1998 and 2002, a growth rate of 13.1 percent compared to a
rate of 6.5 percent for the city during this period. Notably, self-employed creative workers accounted for nearly half (48 percent) of
the creative core’s growth, with the biggest increase among specialized design services; independent artists, writers and performers;
musical groups and artists; newspaper publishers and specialized design firms.
SOURCE: County Business Patterns and Non-employers Statistics, U.S. Census, 1998 & 2002.
50%
45%
40%
35%
30%
25%
20%
15%
10%
5%
0%
Actors
Fashion designers
Film and video editors
Editors
Set and exhibit designers
Art directors
Graphic designers
Producers and directors
Architects, except landscape and naval
Fine artists, including painters,
sculptors and illustrators
Musicians and singers
Dancers
Choreographers
Multi-media artists and animators
Writers and authors
Photographers
Commercial and industrial designers
Interior designers
Independent artists,
writers & performers
Musical groups & artists
Cable networks & program distribution
Newspaper publishers
Specialized design services
Radio broadcasting
Architectural services
Book publishers
Integrated record production, distribution
Motion picture & video distribution
Post-production & other movie & video
Museums
Art dealers
News syndicates
Advertising agencies
Other publishers
Other performing arts companies
Dance companies
Landscape architectural services
Sound recording studios
% of the U.S. Jobs in Occupations Held by NYC Residents
12,000
10,000
8,000
6,000
4,000
2,000
0
Chart 1: CREATIVE OCCUPATIONS WHERE NYC HAS A LARGE SHARE OF THE NATIONAL MARKET
More than a third of the nation’s actors are based in New York, as are roughly 27 percent of the fashion designers, 12 percent of
film editors, 10 percent of set designers, 9 percent of graphic designers, 8 percent of architects and 7 percent of fine artists.
SOURCE: 2000 Equal Employment Opportunity, U.S. Census.
Growth in Number of Workers
B
17
BOTH THE STATISTICAL AND ANECDOTAL RESEARCH
show that New York’s creative core is a thriving and
complex creative ecosystem. But within even the most
vibrant ecosystem, relatively small changes can have
unexpected and broad-ranging effects, and the creative
economy is facing more than small changes—it is
undergoing a veritable revolution, spurred by factors
including new technology, globalization and business
conglomeration.
The city has begun to feel the consequences of
these changes in its diminishing market share within
creative fields like advertising. Twenty years ago, New
York was home to half of all advertising agency headquarters
in the world. Now it hosts less than one third,
according to AdWeek’s “2004 Trends in Advertising”
report, London, where creative stakeholders have come
together to expand that sector’s economic reach (see
“Learning from London,” page 25), has quietly claimed
much of what NYC has lost. In the field of motion picture
and sound recording, New York faces risk from the
introduction of new technologies and cheaper equipment,
which have allowed both individuals and major
studios to perform these functions themselves.
Certainly each industry and area within the creative
core has its own complex structure and unique
needs. And non-profit arts organizations and for-profit
creative companies undoubtedly contend with different
obstacles. Nonetheless, as we began to look at the
creative economy as a whole, we found that all of these
businesses, non-profits and individuals faced some
common challenges and shared some collective needs
that seemed well-suited to a broad-based, sector-style
economic development approach.
Below we have identified some of the major challenges
that industries and individuals are facing across
the sector.
COST OF APPROPRIATE WORK SPACE
It is hard to run a business if you can’t afford a place
to work. In New York, complaints about high real-estate
costs and too little space are hardly unique to the creative
industries, but these issues are particularly acute for a
sector with such specific space requirements and such a
high percentage of small enterprises and self-employed
workers. The high cost and scarcity of studio time for
musicians and visual artists, and rehearsal space for performing
artists, regularly requires them to make heroic
efforts to pursue their art in the city. In a worrisome
trend, increasing numbers of artists and creative workers
are deciding it’s simply not worth it to stay—especially as
other cities, from London to Paducah, Kentucky, are
bending over backward to get them to relocate.
Doug Culhane is one such creative worker.A sculptor
by trade, Culhane is also a freelance legal copy editor
in his day job. Most years he makes approximately 15
percent of his living off of his artwork, which is shown in
galleries nationally. He has been living in Williamsburg
for the last 12 years, and is now moving out of the city
because he can no longer afford to meet his need for a
live/work space. “When I moved into the neighborhood,
there was one store, some prostitutes and crack dealers
on my block. Twelve artists moved into this building.
Now we are being evicted.” He is not sure exactly where
he will go, but feels confident that it will be better than
New York. “Cities everywhere want artists and are making
room for them. I will probably go to Troy or Hudson,
New York, or maybe Providence or Pawtucket, Rhode
Island. There is a lot of live/work space available there
and there is a really nice-sized artists community.”
Culhane is not the only one from the building planning
to leave the city. Many of his neighbors, who
include an architect, a video artist, a painter and a couple
that own a design company and employ a few workers
in their firm, are considering a relocation from New
York. One particular neighbor, a successful painter from
Beijing who has been in the U.S. for more than 18 years,
is planning to return because he feels that it is better for
artists to be in Beijing than in New York right now.
SHOW STOPPERS?
Despite everything New York’s creative sector has going for it, a number of daunting challenges—most notably the high
cost of work space, the expense and difficulty of “market-making” and the widespread lack of health insurance and other
benefits for creative workers—threaten the city’s pre-eminence.
Twenty years ago, New York was home to half of all advertising agency
headquarters in the world. Now it hosts less than one third.
London has quietly claimed much of what New York has lost.
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Hope Forstenzer, a graphic designer and glass
blower, worked for more than a decade in creative
industries in New York until she left two years ago for
Seattle, where the cost of living—and, importantly for
her, the cost of studio space for glass blowing—is considerably
cheaper. Many of Forstenzer’s graphic design
clients are still based in New York, but in today’s digital
age she is able to live in Seattle—where she can practice
her glass blowing relatively cheaply—and work
remotely. She comes to the city for a few days every
month to meet individually with clients.
Before she left the city, studio space she rented at a
facility in Brooklyn was going for $45 to $50 an hour. In
Seattle, the price is $30 a hour, a rate that goes down if the
space is booked for an entire day.
“I love New York. I had enough work. I was making
a living,” says Forstenzer. “But I couldn’t change my life
in any way to make it more secure. I couldn’t even move
apartments because I couldn’t find one that I could
afford. That is true of a lot of small business and independent
contractors in New York. You can get by okay,
but you can’t get ahead.”
To be sure, a dance company may have different
physical space needs than a woodworker or crafts artisan.
And while affordable space is key, it is often more
important for certain companies—non-profit or for-profit—
to know that they have a long-term lease arrangement.
For many, this stability is worth the price.
Further complicating matters is the fact that much
of the areas where creative types were able to ‘pioneer’
space ten years ago, simply are no longer available.The
rapid escalation of real-estate prices in the late 1990s,
which continues today, caused a well-known migration
of creative and other businesses from their more
expensive Manhattan locales to areas throughout
Brooklyn, Queens and the South Bronx.The city’s decision
to rezone several longtime industrial neighborhoods
around the five boroughs—from downtown
Brooklyn and Port Morris to Long Island City—for residential
development threatens to displace creative individuals
and the businesses whose presence initially
helped transform these areas into creative destinations.
These businesses need to be near their markets,
and their workers have to be in reasonable proximity to
the businesses. Brian Coleman, CEO of the Greenpoint
Manufacturing and Design Center (GMDC), a nonprofit
that developed a facility full of woodworkers and
small furniture-making businesses, says of his tenants:
“They need to be in the marketplace they are serving.
They cannot be on exit 8 in New Jersey.They need to be
in New York City.”
Unfortunately, the reality is that these critical clusters
of creative producers—from the more than 300 visual
and performing artists that occupy more than 24 buildings
in Long Island City to the dense creative fabric of
Williamsburg—are in immediate danger of being lost to
speculative real-estate developers.
Over the last decade, city government has helped to
spur the development of new buildings for the creative
industries throughout the five boroughs, such as the
Brooklyn Academy of Music Local Development
Corporation (BAM LDC) cultural district’s first building,
80 Arts, a shared office space for non-profit arts and cultural
organizations. But the sustained increase in realestate
costs means that many of these projects are likely
no longer replicable without the city playing a key role.
For instance, GMDC developed three other factory buildings
in Brooklyn for light manufacturing companies and
artisans in addition to their flagship facility for woodworkers,
but then the organization could not acquire any
additional factory buildings in Greenpoint or East
Williamsburg, since private developers solely interested
in converting those properties to apartments were always
outbidding them. “Buildings in this area are going for $20
million. We just cannot do these deals and still offer
affordable rates to our tenants,” says Coleman.
“Studio space and shooting space are a huge issue,”
says photographer Eric White. “Because, a darkroom, it’s
a pretty small thing. [But] a studio is a lot of space to do
a shoot. I don’t have a studio. I have a fairly large space in
Brooklyn, where I live. So, I’ll move everything in this
room, which is like the living room/kitchen—I’ll move
everything to one wall and shoot in my apartment.”
Cost is not the only consideration involved, however.
Not all work space is equally appropriate to all creative
pursuits. Common wisdom on the subject is that
artists traditionally “pioneer” areas with few amenities
and large amounts of cheap space, and when they are
priced out of a neighborhood, they simply forge another.
However, in a survey conducted for this report of 71 creative
workers and business owners in three of the city’s
creative hotspots—Williamsburg, Long Island City and
the South Bronx—we found that the reasons creative
activity clusters in certain areas are more complex.
The high cost of work space and housing in New York has prompted increasing numbers
of artists and creative workers to decide it’s simply not worth it to stay here—especially as
other cities offer enticements to relocate.
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When asked how they chose their particular location,
availability of appropriate space—not necessarily
cheap space—was the number one factor among all
those surveyed in each neighborhood. Among the
three areas, however, rent was considered least important
in Long Island City, which is dominated by visual
artists, designers and architects. These workers and
businesses frequently put a premium on space that
can accommodate industrial production methods, such
as glass blowing and metalsmithing.
Take Michael Davis, a former dancer who owns a
stained glass studio, and who needs to run his glass oven
24 hours a day, seven days a week. For him, finding Long
Island City, with its industrial zoning, was a tremendous
relief after a long period of rejection. Before he found his
current space, he says, he had looked for space in
Harlem, but landlords refused to rent to him as soon as
he mentioned what type of business he wanted to set up.
While there have been some successful attempts to
address this problem—such as GMDC and the Alliance
of Resident Theatres/New York and BAM LDC’s shared
office spaces for arts non-profits—as space in the city
becomes scarcer and more expensive, and more and
more industrial space close to Manhattan is rezoned for
residential use, the creative economy is increasingly
feeling the squeeze.
ACCESS TO MARKETS
Answering the question of how to ensure that a creative
product will reach the right market or audience
goes way beyond the simple formula of physically “being
there”—in Manhattan, or in the city at all.When we started
our research, we expected to hear that workers “had”
to be in New York to have any chance of capturing the
attention of the city’s critics and tastemakers, and to
improve their chances of advancing in the city’s market.
What we learned, however, was much more complex.
Apparently,New York’s tremendous talent pool and artistic
community can be a double-edged sword: though the
city boasts a large number of exhibition spaces, bars, galleries,
retail outlets, restaurants and media that provide
access to new markets, the reality is that the costs of running
these outlets mean that they are often too expensive
for emerging talent to enter. Further complicating matters
is that interviewees across every creative discipline
observed that this unmatched density also creates an
environment of unparalleled competition for opportunities
to reach those markets. Admittedly, this competition
is simply a part of doing business in New York City, but it
translates into a lot of very marketable and potentially
lucrative arts businesses never gaining the attention or
spotlight they need to turn a profit.
“When I was in Minneapolis/St. Paul, I was one of
four artists doing my type of work,” says Elaine Giffney,
a textile artist, designer and high-end bag maker. “Here
I am one of 500.”
This level of competition for access to consumers
undoubtedly helps preserve the high quality of the city’s
creative offerings. But it also drives down wages, making
it extremely difficult, even for those with great talent but
no trust fund, to sustain themselves long enough to find
their audience. As if the competition within a crowded
market weren’t enough, creative workers in field after
field now fret that the traditional “entry points”—opportunities
for them to reach an audience—are closing up.
“You don’t have as many places to go as you used to,”
says Sam Pollard, documentary filmmaker and CEO of
Two Dollars and a Dream production company. “There
are plenty of subdivisions of major companies so there
are actually many more channels, but they all report to
the same set of CEOs. Before there were something like
eight places to pitch; now there are five. For example,
A&E is now under the same umbrella as the History
Channel, so now I can only pitch once to them.”
Jonah Zuckerman, owner of City Joinery, a furniture
design firm in Brooklyn, says that there is “a lack
of a place to show products,” but also cites a need for
businesses to do their own collective marketing. “It is
often too expensive to do a shared showroom or enter
another retail outlet,” he explains. He wants to see
something for furniture designers similar to the collectives
of fashion and accessories designers that have
been popping up in NoLita and the Lower East Side.
These collectives—including Emerge NYC,TrunKt and
the Market—share space and do collective marketing.
The city’s craft and artisan community echoes this
need for market access. In a 2004 survey by NY Creates
of more than 619 crafts and folk artists and artisans, 61
percent of respondents said that access to sales and marketing
outlets was their biggest need. In response to this
feedback, NY Creates, a collaborative research effort of
the New York Foundation on the Arts, the New York City
Arts Coalition, the Municipal Art Society and the
Consortium for Worker Education, has begun to establish
a number of fairs that showcase the wares of crafts and
folk artisans—most recently at Atlas Park in Queens—
Despite an increased focus on the economic potential of creative content,
the city’s creative workers frequently lack even basic business skills,
as well as information about how to develop them.
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Brooklyn Designs, a project of the Brooklyn Chamber of
Commerce, has emerged as a successful model for showcasing
new designers along the same lines as the Creative Industries
Development Service (CIDS) in the United Kingdom (See
“Learning from London,” page 25), even though CIDS is aimed
at supporting all of London’s creative industries, while Brooklyn
Designs is singularly focused on the design industry.
Part of the challenge for emerging and even established
creative entrepreneurs is tapping into the marketplace and
accessing new audiences for their products. The Brooklyn
Chamber had been doing this for years with Brooklyn Goes
Global and Brooklyn Eats, programs that market the borough’s
food businesses. When the Chamber identified a growing sector
of furniture and homewares designers, it created Brooklyn
Designs as a way of showcasing these businesses.
Started three years ago, Brooklyn Designs is already a
must-attend show for Brooklyn’s designers. The show provides
access to a growing audience of more than 4,000 buyers,
architects and consumers. Participation in Brooklyn Designs
also gives designers access to editors from top design magazines
like Interior Design and Metropolitan Home, who serve
on the jury to select entries into the show and provide a critical
audience for designers aspiring to launch a product from
Brooklyn to international prominence.
Brooklyn Designs offers the opportunity to get a product to
market with minimal investment. Other trade shows like the
International Contemporary Furniture Fair costs $7,200 for a
200 square foot booth. Brooklyn Designs’ fee is $1,000 for the
same square footage.
In addition to participation in the show, participating designers
who are also members of the Chamber have access to services
including help finding space, employment assistance, business
advice and evaluations on business development. Karen
Auster, coordinator of Brooklyn Designs, often assists designers in
helping them to evaluate how to balance the business end of their
design work. According to Auster, she finds that, “as a creative
person they often need help to gauge how much of their time they
need for business tasks, how much for the creative part.”
BROOKLYN DESIGNS A MARKET
and is exploring the possibility of a more permanent
storefront for these artists.
As the recent rent roil over the future of the iconic
rock venue CBGBs shows, there is a shrinking number
of music venues in New York that provide a testing
ground for new musicians. Ed Greer, a musician and
former senior vice president of club operations with
the Knitting Factory and now an independent festival
producer, explains how the economics of his industry
have changed: “Venues are not making money on ticket
sales. This all goes to pay the band, if you’re lucky.
Venues make money off the bar and increasingly on
spin off products like recordings. They can’t take a
chance on the unknowns as freely.”
As with many of the challenges facing creative
enterprises in New York, the problem of marketing
crosses virtually all industry lines. The many trade
shows and festivals held in the city each year offer such
collective marketing opportunities, but these forums
are often prohibitively expensive, especially for individual
designers. The Architectural Design show, for
example, costs upwards of $3,500 to enter. And the
International Contemporary Furniture Fair, the standard
fair at which to launch a furniture design business,
is not only too pricey for most emerging designers
and other creative producers, but it is also not geared
towards marketing products to the public.
Some creative workers and businesses are coming
up with innovative solutions to the problem, such as
independent music producers distributing niche music in
local bodegas. But the bottleneck at the market-entry
level not only drives down compensation—any band that
won’t accept $100 for a three-hour gig is sure to see a
half-dozen other groups that will—it also makes it
unnecessarily difficult for niche products and businesses,
which are not backed by large corporate distribution
networks, to reach appropriate consumer bases.
MARKET FORCES
As the economic value of creative content and products
has become more evident, New York’s creative community
has become increasingly entrepreneurial, looking
for business opportunities.This greater focus on the
commercial potential of creative enterprises is important,
but efforts to apply a rigid traditional business paradigm
also pose a real threat to the vitality and viability
of the sector. Successful creative products cannot simply
be “cranked out” on a fixed schedule, and even the
largest firms in the city’s creative economy struggle to
generate quality products while meeting investors’ or
shareholders’ expectations about profitability. Creative
workers often see the world, and their work, differently.
Investors commonly struggle with this reality.
“In New York City, most big creative businesses
here are very established, have a lot at stake and are
really focused on minimizing risk,” says Bill Mesce,
manager of corporate affairs at HBO. “We will take a
risk on material, but need [established] talent behind
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camera or in front of the camera.We don’t hire someone
who came straight from really small ‘black-box’
theaters when we’re bankrolling a $30 million series.”
“If you’re casting [an actor], you know who is good,
who is a known quantity and who will make studios
happy,” he says, “Why take a risk on the invisible?”
Pressure to produce a product or a profit in short
order is exactly the opposite of what creative endeavors
need to succeed, say those we interviewed.What these
ventures need most, they say, is the one thing the business
world won’t give them—a chance to fail. The logic
of “research and development” that drives experimentation
in fields like pharmaceutical research and the hard
sciences rarely seems to exist in the world of the arts.
“There are many,many failed scientific experiments,
and they say it’s a waste of money if it’s artistic,” says
press agent Bruce Cohen.“Well, when I was at LaMaMa
[theater club] we had a guy named Harvey Fierstein, and
he had three failed plays before he reworked them and
made them into ‘Torch Song Trilogy.’ Somehow the
stuffed shirts can’t understand that you have to fail nine
out of ten times in the arts. Art is supposed to be perfect
all of the time while medical and industrial development
can afford and is allowed to fail.”
Karen Brooks Hopkins, president of the Brooklyn
Academy of Music, believes there is a general impatience
with the pace of the creative process, which
makes it difficult to give new ideas a fighting chance to
succeed. “The problem in America is if you or your venture
is not brilliant in the first 15 minutes, everyone
wants to throw it out.” To really try something new, she
says, you need three years: “The first year to figure out
what’s wrong, the second year to start to figure out how
to really do it, and the third year to really get it going,
really have a well-oiled machine.” Decision-makers with
non-profit creative groups noted that this time frame is
similar for their ventures as it is for small businesses.
Adding to the challenge is the fact that there often
seems to be an unintended disconnect between the
financial community and the creative community on
how to overcome this risk. Mary Howard, executive
director of NY Designs, a business center for designers
established in 2003 by the CUNY Economic
Development Corporation and LaGuardia Community
College, says “New York has an ineffective capital market
for design. Here is this $5 billion industry concentrated
here. Some of the most talented designers are
here, but no one has any money to run their businesses.
People are winning all of these awards for design and
there is no money.”
Part of the problem is that there is a lack of
financing models to help minimize the risk. Banks frequently
fail to understand that the typical financing
mechanism in fashion is for a designer to factor products—
or pay for the cost of a sample run—up front.
This requires a different type of lending tool for the
designers to keep them from defaulting on their loan.
Corporate pressures of conglomeration in certain
creative industries also mean that a more modest shortterm
payoff often takes precedent over long-term risk.
“Consolidation in the book business is not new, but it is
different now,” says Geoff Shandler, editor-in-chief at
Little Brown. His company was owned by Time, Inc. in
the 1950s, while RCA owned rival Random House. The
difference now, he argues, is that as these subsidiaries
have broadened to include other media businesses, “the
expectations of what is considered profitable have
changed.” According to Shandler, these short-term pressures
have meant “you do not take chances on authors
who may take time to be successful. Some very successful
literary authors, if they started now as opposed to
1963, would not make it.There is just not the time to let
the author grow.There is not time to take the risk.”
In addition to changing funders’ and investors’
expectations about the time frame for success, industry
leaders like Mara Manus of the Public Theater suggest
that what the sector needs is not venture capital but
something more like “adventure capital”: a cross
between investment and philanthropy, somewhat like
charity raffle tickets.
The lack of investment readiness on the part of the
designers and other creative entrepreneurs themselves,
discussed further below, is also part of the problem.
This is certainly not to say that creative ventures
cannot become profitable businesses. But as we
described above, opportunities for innovation are also
essential to the city’s creative ecology, and too much
pressure to succeed on business’ terms could threaten
that delicate balance.
LACK OF BUSINESS SKILLS AND INFORMATION
Given the highly competitive market for creative
products and services, small businesses and aspiring
entrepreneurs need honed business skills to succeed. But
The fierce competition to be seen, heard and appreciated helps preserve the
high quality of the city’s creative offerings—but it also drives down wages and
makes it extremely difficult, even for those with great talent but no
trust fund, to stay afloat long enough to find an audience.
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despite an increased focus on the economic potential of
creative content, the city’s creative workers frequently
lack even basic business skills, as well as information
about how to develop them. These individuals typically
go about learning to run a business the same way they
conduct their other activities: by trying to “figure it out”
using information gained through word of mouth, the
Internet, and whatever other resources they can scrape
up. Many spend a tremendous amount of time and energy
on this kind of trial-and-error approach—and frequently
all they end up doing is reinventing the wheel.
Rachele Dorsinville, founder and executive director
of BAD (Bright Aspiring Designers) Association, Inc.,
says she started her organization to help fill the tremendous
need for business skills and information she saw
when she worked as an attorney for creative workers. “I
was representing independent contractors and realized
most desperately needed the basics—employer ID,
financials. I saw a lot of designers were opening themselves
up to liability because they had no insurance.
Many of them were not even able to use the [technology]
that they needed to design. They thought that just
being a fabulous talent was supposed to be enough.“
Indeed, part of the problem is that many creative
workers are uncomfortable with or resistant to even
thinking or talking about their work as a business.
“With rare exceptions, artists can’t go out and raise
money for themselves,” says Meg Fagan, an oboist and
former development director for The Kitchen, a group
that supports the creative efforts of performing artists.
“This is an intimate process and plays to insecurities to
describe who you even are, and what you can contribute.
I ran a workshop on fundraising for individual
artists and said ‘tell me about yourself’ and only one in
20 could do it.”
Even those who overcome the psychological barriers
typically waste a tremendous amount of energy
casting about for basic information. And despite a vast
assortment of trade associations, educational institutions
and arts service organizations that exist to provide
exactly this training, our research turned up
numerous accounts of budding creative entrepreneurs
spending late nights searching for answers on business
sites on the Internet, talking to friends in the business—
and making a lot of mistakes.
It also means the potential of losing viable businesses
because the producers do not know how to take
their businesses to the next level. According to Mary
Howard of NY Designs, the lack of investment readiness
on the part of many creative entrepreneurs is a
serious barrier: “People show up here [NY Designs]
and they are ‘burnt out’ physically and mentally.A lot of
them come here and want to declare bankruptcy. And
these are successful businesses. Some of them have
grown 40 percent in a year. But they can’t manage it.
They do not know how to get the investment they need
to grow and they want to quit entirely.”
The irony is that New York has a multitude of organizations
that provide technical assistance to entrepreneurs
and small businesses. But evidently, many of these
business entities are not connecting to those attempting
to start firms in creative fields. Meanwhile, non-profits
that provide services to those in artistic fields are not
doing enough to partner with these business assistance
organizations or create their own programs.
Indeed, many creative businesses and individual
workers don’t know what resources are available. “We
have been around for twenty years and I still run into
people who should be working with us but don’t know
anything about us,” says Steve Gross, co-director of The
Field, an arts service organization founded in 1985 to
assist artists in both creating new artwork and managing
the business of being an artist. “Another problem is that
there is no central source to tap all of the various
resources available, and even if there was, many artists
and individual producers would want assurance that this
source could communicate how useful or appropriate a
given service might be for their needs.”
Also missing is a service that connects the business
needs of creative workers across both non-profit and
for-profit sides of the creative industries. Theodore
Berger of NYFA admits that NYFA Source, an online and
print service that provides one of the most comprehensive
resource listings for artists and arts organizations in
the nation, does not provide information for people in all
creative industries. “We have an extensive information
service, but it is primarily non-profit resources.What we
don’t have enough of is information about resources for
the for-profit side of these industries,” he says.
Hugo Barreca, board member of the cutting-edge
string quartet Ethel and former executive at Time, Inc.,
suggests that city government help centralize information
about what kind of business services are available
for people in various creative industries. Some kind of
central knowledge bank, he says, would “make the
process much less of an ad-hoc, every-time-is-thefirst-
time, experience.” This and other policies that
supported the fundamental structure of the lives of
What creative ventures need most, according to those who conceive and support them, is
the one thing the business world won’t give them: a chance to fail.
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artists would pay big dividends, he believes, helping to
draw talent to the city, stabilize the creative economy
and the lives of artists and even relieve pressure on the
health care system.
Another solution would be for arts organizations to
create partnerships and other connections with business
assistance organizations, educational institutions and the
business world. Some of the city’s educational institutions
are beginning to respond to this need: the Fashion
Institute of Technology recently added a new component
to its course offerings which will train top fashion
designers in new technologies, financing and other skills
to keep their businesses thriving in an increasingly competitive
market. But much more can be done.
WORK SUPPORTS AND ECONOMIC INSECURITY
In contrast with other fields that follow a more traditional
employment and business model, work in the
creative industries is heavily project-oriented and in
some sense, almost always “temporary.” Freelance
workers and the self-employed are far more prevalent
as a result, and much of the work is done by small companies
and non-profits that rarely offer benefits—like
health insurance, retirement accounts or pension
plans—that similarly skilled workers in other professions
would take for granted. Other needs more specific
to the sector, such as access to ongoing professional
or technical training and intellectual property protections,
are almost as likely to go unmet.While the unions
and other organizations such as the Freelancers Union
provide some of these supports for workers and help
arts organizations and small firms access better services
and benefits for their employees, the lack of health
insurance in particular has many creative workers living
in fear that one sustained illness or fluke injury will
lead to financial ruin.
Creative workers who lack health insurance are living in fear that one sustained
illness or fluke injury might lead to financial ruin.
Authors 67.9% 57.9% 10.0%
Artists & related workers 53.8% 47.6% 6.3%
Photographers 52.5% 41.4% 11.1%
Musicians & singers 38.6% 26.4% 12.2%
Announcers 34.4% 23.2% 11.2%
Producers & directors 32.8% 28.5% 4.3%
Designers 31.8% 25.0% 6.8%
Agents 27.0% 22.9% 4.1%
Film and video editors
& operators 23.0% 15.0% 8.1%
Architects 21.8% 17.5% 4.3%
Dancers
& choreographers 18.1% 18.1% 0.0%
Actors 17.4% 15.5% 1.9%
Editors 12.9% 9.4% 3.5%
Broadcasting
technicians 9.3% 6.3% 2.9%
Reporters 6.3% 3.7% 2.6%
SOURCE: Occupational Employment Statistics, Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2002. (Note: Rows that do not add up are a result of rounding.)
Table 5: SELF-EMPLOYMENT LEVELS FOR CREATIVE WORKERS IN THE U.S.
Nationally, nearly 68 percent of authors and more than 50 percent of both artists and photographers are self-employed.
Self-employed workers,
all jobs
Self-employed workers,
primary job
Self-employed workers,
Occupations secondary job
24
Says photographer Eric White, who is not insured: “I
think about all the time. I think a lot of people think about
it all the time. Especially, living in New York, one false step,
you step in front of a cab and you have huge problems.”
Because many uninsured creative workers earn
relatively low wages or have unstable incomes, they
frequently cannot afford private health care, and rely
on public clinics. Many more simply forgo care until
they need to go to a hospital emergency room.
According to a 2004 survey of over 4,000 independent
workers in New York City conducted by Working
Today, a national non-profit organization that advocates
on behalf of freelance workers, 84 percent of
freelancers cannot afford health care. Roughly 13 percent
of those surveyed worked in arts and culture. Of
those, more than eight in ten said they could not
afford health insurance.
Small business owners and non-profit leaders
alike feel these pressures as well, in some cases even
changing their business model as a result. Press
agent Bruce Cohen says: “I used to employ a staff,
and now I use only freelancers instead of employees
because of the health care bureaucracy. I used to
spend a third of my day dealing with personnel matters.
Now I farm out editing and marketing and even
phone work, and let everyone else deal with health
care.” As head of IATSE Local 18032, the Association
of Theatrical Press Agents and Managers, Cohen saw
half the organization’s time go toward dealing with
issues of health care costs.
CHANGES IN TECHNOLOGY
Fast-moving technological changes that have
brought great benefit to consumers, like the introduction
of the iPod and desktop movie editing, are rapidly
transforming a number of creative industries. While
these technological innovations have created opportunities
for small firms to compete with larger entities,
they also present unique challenges for many of New
York’s creative companies.
In fact, advances in digital technology have
already significantly altered the way in which film is
produced. The new film technology is relatively
small, inexpensive, easy to operate and requires
fewer camera technicians and support crew. This is
good news for independent filmmakers trying to
make art with limited time and resources, but this
revolution is beginning to have a major impact on
filmmaking and the extensive and skilled workforce
infrastructure that supported it.
Similarly, the music recording industry is currently
facing changes akin to the desktop publishing revolution
of past years. “‘Desktop audio’ has really hurt commercial
studios as it has evolved to offer higher audio
resolution, track count and additional features once
found only in the professional studio,” says Christopher
Walsh, a writer for Billboard magazine. “Commercial
studios use this workstation equipment…but so do producers
and engineers in their homes and, increasingly,
purpose-built home studios. That has taken so much
money out of the commercial studio market.The entire
overdub process of an album’s production can be done
outside a professional studio. And it largely is.”
Seeking to adapt, many studios have diversified
their services. Some have even become recording
schools, teaching desktop audio production. Many have
started production companies to entice unsigned
artists, hoping for back-end profits if the artist’s
recordings lead to a record contract or otherwise produce
revenue. And many studios have dramatically
reduced their rates, especially in traditional downtime
periods, allowing artists on limited budgets an opportunity
once out of their reach.
“Some studio owners reason that an occupied
room generating some revenue is better than an empty
one generating none; others feel that once you start
cutting rates, you may as well close, because there’s no
bottom,” says Walsh.
An additional wrinkle is that the advance of new
technologies has generated a fight for the ownership
of intellectual property.This has put tremendous pressure
on both large multi-media enterprises, which are
consolidating rapidly in order to own the means of distributing
these new technological forms, and on small
creative businesses and the independent creators
responsible for generating this new content.
Currently, there is a lack of visible, accessible,
affordable training opportunities geared toward helping
those in the creative fields adapt their products and
skills to changes in the marketplace. The development
of such opportunities—whether by non-profits in the
creative fields or by local government—could help
ensure that New York keeps its edge in the global creative
economy. ❖
A 2004 survey of independent workers in New York City by the non-profit advocacy
group Working Today found that 84 percent of freelancers, including more than eight in
ten arts and culture workers, could not afford health insurance.
A
25
LEARNING FROM LONDON
As New York takes on the challenges facing its creative sector, industry leaders here can look to London and other UK
cities for some useful models.
AS THIS REPORT HAS DETAILED, CREATIVE STAKEHOLDERS
in New York City face a fairly daunting set of challenges
to maintain Gotham’s current dominant position in the
creative sector. But these challenges are not unique to
New York.
Consider London, the one city in the world where
more people work in creative industries than New York.
The similarities are unmistakable: as in New York, space in
London is limited, costs are high and competition is fierce.
And like New York, London has a dense network of governmental,
educational and private organizations focused
on serving the creative industries, but this network has
traditionally been rather fragmented and duplicative.
But where London, and the United Kingdom as a
whole, is arguably ahead of their American cousins, is
that government is actively crafting tools to support and
grow these industries. Since 1997, the UK has made its
creative sectors a major focus of economic planning,
with particular emphasis on supporting its workforce
and entrepreneurs to spur future economic growth.
The Center recently visited London and several
other cities across the UK to see what is being done
there to encourage the growth of creative industries and
better support the creative workforce. By the time we
returned to the five boroughs, it was clear that New York
could learn a great deal from its rival across the pond.
COORDINATION
Creative London
Aligning and rationalizing the resources available to
support creative work is no easy task. But in London, for
the first time, all of the highest-level creative stakeholders
in the city—arts, business, higher education and government—
have begun to collaborate around a common
mission to support creative industries. The field is being
assessed and assisted as a whole, not in distinct parts.
The coordinated effort began in 2003, when
London Mayor Ken Livingstone set up a commission to
undertake a major assessment of the creative industries
in London. Spearheaded by the London
Development Agency (LDA), the equivalent of New
York City’s Economic Development Corporation, the
commission brought together business executives from
creative industries, government officials and leaders of
arts and cultural organizations to identify the economic
potential of the city’s creative sector, as well as the
major barriers that might impede its future growth.
“As an economic development agency, we are saying
this is a sector we are fully backing,” Graham Hitchen,
head of the LDA’s Creative London initiative. “In our
review, we found it has a huge and major growth potential.
For example, one in five new jobs created each year
in London are in the creative industries. So in 2003, we
started a commission to see what we should do about
supporting the creative industries at the LDA.We did a
lot of investigation: site visits, open forums, research.We
focused on the barriers to growth.”
LDA’s research yielded two major findings. First,
the same entrepreneurial spirit that makes the creative
sector so dynamic would have to inform the collaboration.
And secondly, the coordination and buy-in among
other government agencies would be critical to the success
of these programs.
The most important result of the commission’s work
to date was the creation, in 2004, of Creative London, a
strategic group administered by LDA, and run as a publicprivate
partnership that is advised by executives of major
creative companies, leaders of arts organizations and government
officials to promote, support and grow London’s
vast creative sector. The goal of Creative London is to
tackle the multiplicity of barriers facing the creative sector,
from investment and financing to real-estate and talent
development. Since its inception, Creative London has
developed a series of concrete programs including financing
and investment, talent development, real estate and
promotion—perennial needs of the creative sector. Most
notably, the LDA is supporting the development of ten
“creative hubs”—locally-based partnerships that lead the
creative industries agenda by pulling together community
and cultural groups with government, education and
real-estate partners, and driving forward a long-term program
of investment and growth.
The London initiative is already showing promise,
and some in that city’s creative sector say it is because
the LDA understands and appreciates how employment
is different within the sector, compared to most industries.
“What the LDA and Creative London finally got
their head around was the definition of a job,” says Harry
26
Leckstein, managing director of Freeport Records and
chairman of the London Urban Collective, an organization
that trains youth in the multiple skills required for
entry into the music industry. “They accepted that work
happens differently in the creative arts. In music, television,
film, media, these are all short-term jobs. It used to
be that they defined a job as a permanent position with
a company. The acknowledgement of these projectbased
jobs where you move from one project to another,
maybe in the same company, maybe not, has led to a
whole new way of the government being able to provide
training, infrastructure and funding for projects.”
MARKET-MAKING
Creative Industries Development
Services, Manchester
As noted earlier in this report, accessing markets is
one of the most critical and difficult challenges facing any
creative business. In the UK, the Creative Industries
Development Service (CIDS), a new organization based in
the old industrial city of Manchester, has taken on this
challenge by finding ways to expose artists and arts-based
businesses to new markets, both locally and abroad.
Formed by Manchester’s City Council in 1999,
CIDS was developed to meet the needs of the creative
industries. CIDS provides general business assistance
as well, but their core focus is to bring art to new and
expanded markets.
CIDS provides trade development resources such
as research and strategic planning that target sectors
and key markets, building capacity through information
and training and helping companies to access trade
events. Perhaps most importantly, CIDS has developed a
series of trade shows and travel opportunities to market
creative companies both within the UK and abroad.
In many cases, businesses in the creative industries
do not have resources to explore international opportunities
and might not know about the sources of funding
available. CIDS actively works to open up new markets
for firms in creative industries. “We actively go out and
try and form trade association-like entities,” explains
CIDS executive director Lyn Barbour. “This looks different
in each area because we are driven by the sub-sector
and what their needs are. Often there are projects
like joint marketing or trade shows to New York City.”
The Transatlantic Express, a trade mission to NYC,
is one of two recent trade tours coordinated by CIDS. In
the fall of 2003, CIDS organized a trade mission of a
group of Manchester-based fashion designers, musicians
and other artists to New York to connect them
with New York-based venues and producers in order to
foster new market opportunities for their creative
enterprises. CIDS worked with the Manchester Music
Company, a firm that advocates for the creative sector, to
produce a CD of Manchester’s emerging musicians.
CIDS then arranged for these musicians to perform at
two top music festivals in the U.S., CMJ Music Marathon
in New York and South by Southwest in Austin,Texas.
CIDS stands out for its broad focus: unlike most
groups of this kind, they are not limited to one creative
industry.They are motivated to work with any viable sector
in Manchester and tailor the exact business assistance
needed to elevate the work to a larger, global market.
WORK SPACE
The Round Foundry Media Centre, Leeds
London and other major UK cities rival even New
York for off-the-charts real-estate prices. Addressing
the space issue has become one of the top priorities for
government and creative developers.
One solution to the space issue can be to place similar
companies under the same roof and support their
growth through a mix of services and shared resources.
In Leeds, the Round Foundry Media Centre, developed
and run by the Media Centre Network, a non-profit
management company, is home to an array of small
creative companies including IT, computer animation,
new media trade association and television. The
Centre, established with government support as a flagship
project of Yorkshire Forward, the local Regional
Development Agency, with support from the City
Council, provides shared office space and administrative
functions, flexible lease terms, as well as a host of
business training for the area’s creative entrepreneurs.
“A lot of what attracts the businesses is being all in
the same place. They feed off of that,” says operations
manager Cherry Salt.“Some people have false perception
that they will be competitive, but, quite the contrary, they
are here to be near one another.The Media Centre facilitates
the networking—for example, they set up a four-digit
number for them to call one another so that calling another
company in the building is like an internal call.”
The combination of services is meant to help these
companies thrive and grow stable enough to move out
into the wider marketplace; the expectation is that tenants
won’t stay forever. “We want these companies to
grow and move out. This is everything that we’re
about,” says Salt.“We provide all of this but we are very
careful not to push it. It’s available and if people don’t
want it, that’s fine. We are not here to nanny anyone
and that is the last thing these companies want.”
Proving that there is pent-up demand for the Media
Centre’s cluster model, companies from other sectors,
including a debt collection agency and a law firm, are
constantly trying to parlay their work into a creative
enterprise in order to be housed at the Round Foundry.❖
27
RECOMMENDATIONS
This report details the tremendous importance and daunting complexity of New York City’s creative sector. Just as the
field boasts unmatched assets, it also faces formidable challenges that threaten the city’s current pre-eminence. To meet
these challenges will require a much greater commitment to organization and collaboration between different actors
than has ever previously been the case, and as in London, it will likely fall to the public sector to take a lead role. But
while government, with its resources and influence, is best positioned to play that part, and can provide the initial
impetus to convene the sector’s constituencies, the public sector cannot sustain any effort to which the other actors—
including creative businesses, workers and support institutions—are less than fully committed. Without this sustained
commitment from all involved parties, any progress on the thorny issues we discuss below, from the cost of work space
to ensuring health care for creative workers, will remain piecemeal and precarious at best.
TREAT NEW YORK’S CREATIVE CORE AS A SECTOR.
New York’s creative economy spans a number of different
industries and includes everyone from freelancers
and sole proprietors to small non-profits and multinational
corporations. Traditionally, the sector has broken
down along lines of size, specialty and purpose (for-profit
vs. non-profit); different creative groups have been
more likely to compete—for funding, audience and
favorable treatment from government—than to cooperate.
Undoubtedly, the needs of a non-profit dance group
aren’t always the same as a large publishing firm, and
the primary obstacles facing an up-and-coming fashion
designer are often very different from the hurdles
encountered by a film production company.Yet, the individuals,
firms and non-profits working in the city’s creative
industries—from film editors and music producers
to graphic artists and publishing companies—share
many common traits, challenges and opportunities. To
exploit the opportunities and address the challenges,
non-profit arts organizations, creative businesses, trade
associations and local government officials should begin
to recognize the commonalities within the for-profit and
non-profit creative industries and design strategies
around supporting this remarkable creative core.
CREATE A CENTRALIZED COORDINATING BODY
MODELED AFTER CREATIVE LONDON.
Leaders in New York’s non-profit and for-profit creative
communities should take the lead in creating a centralizing
entity that would bring together the disparate
stakeholders within New York’s creative economy and
advocate on behalf of the sector’s shared needs. Such an
entity should be modeled on Creative London and would
include high-level leaders from creative industries and
representatives from trade associations, unions and arts
service organizations that provide services to the creative
core; government, philanthropic, educational and
financial communities; and leaders from the real estate,
economic and workforce development fields.
This coordinating body would act as a sector association
to strategize around supporting and growing
the city’s vast creative sector, similar to other city-based
industry associations in fields like finance and information
technology. Initial activities could include creating
a unified voice for the creative core and developing
policies that begin to address the issues and recommendations
addressed in this report as well as other
needs identified by the sector. The council would also
be responsible for developing a research program to
further track the trends and opportunities stemming
from the creative sector.
ESTABLISH AN INDUSTRY DESK FOR CREATIVE INDUSTRIES
AT THE NYC ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION.
City government currently supports the creative core
primarily through the Department of Cultural Affairs—
which largely works with non-profit cultural institutions
and arts organizations—and the Mayor’s Office of
Film, Theatre and Broadcasting. While these agencies
have done good work, they were never charged with
supporting large pockets of the creative core; partially
as a result of this oversight, these fields aren’t currently
a meaningful part of the city’s economic development
strategy. The city’s Economic Development
Though the needs of a non-profit dance group aren’t always the same as a
large publishing firm, the individuals, firms and non-profits working in the city’s
creative industries share many common traits, challenges and opportunities.
28
Corporation (EDC) ought to play a larger role in supporting
this sizable and growing part of the economy. It
could start by developing an industry desk that supports
the city’s creative core. (EDC already has industry
desks designed to support a number of key sectors,
including life sciences; financial services; professional
services; media, technology and telecommunications;
airlines; and consumer products.)
BEGIN TO ADDRESS AFFORDABILITY ISSUES FACING
INDIVIDUAL ARTISTS AND CREATIVE ENTERPRISES.
As this report has detailed, the lack of affordable space
to live and work is the single largest challenge facing
New York’s creative core.With so many other residents
and businesses struggling to afford the cost of real estate
in New York, it’s neither practical nor politically feasible
to create real-estate incentives that single out artists and
creative businesses.Yet there are things city officials can
begin to do in partnership with philanthropic foundations,
businesses and real-estate developers. One idea is
for policymakers to push for new cluster buildings for
arts groups and creative businesses, possibly modeled
after public/private initiatives by the Alliance of
Resident Theatres/New York and the Greenpoint
Manufacturing Design Center. Another suggestion is
for the city to encourage real-estate developers, universities
and large cultural institutions to include space
for artists or creative firms in their new developments.
MORE FLEXIBLE SUPPORT FROM THE PHILANTHROPIC
COMMUNITY.
Philanthropic foundations and private donors already
provide invaluable support to New York’s arts organizations
and cultural institutions.Yet, some of these philanthropists
could further leverage their giving by
being more flexible in how they support creative
organizations. Specifically, instead of providing funds
that are highly restricted to specific projects, the philanthropic
community should allow for more general
operating support and planning grants. Doing so would
go a long way toward stabilizing many non-profit
groups, thereby allowing them to focus on their core
mission of creating art, cultural ideas and content. In
addition, funders should consider making longer-term
commitments that recognize a truth too rarely
acknowledged in the creative world: the time it takes to
develop a new product is often longer than a typical
one-year funding cycle.
EXPAND MARKET ACCESS FOR LOCALLY-MADE
CREATIVE PRODUCTS.
While New York has no shortage of locally-based creative
talent, many creative individuals and enterprises
need help with marketing and getting access to a larger
audience. Non-profit arts organizations and trade
associations should work with city officials to enhance
promotion and marketing of creative businesses, which
all too often don’t have the resources to meet the costs
of getting their product to a wider marketplace. Specific
activities could include:
• Expansion of the “Made in New York” trademark
beyond films that are shot in the city to other
locally-developed and produced creative goods.
• Continued support, from foundations and city officials,
for “market-making” initiatives like NY
Creates, a project that serves the marketing needs
of the city’s vast crafts and folk artisan community.
HELP CREATIVE INDIVIDUALS AND ENTERPRISES GET
ACCESS TO BUSINESS ASSISTANCE SERVICES.
Arts service organizations should take the lead in creating
better linkages between the many entities—
including government, small business assistance
organizations, higher education, unions and trade associations—
that provide entrepreneurial assistance to
creative businesses and individuals.While the city has
a large number of non-profit arts service organizations
that offer general business development to artists and
arts organizations, these entities are rarely connected
to the vast array of services available to entrepreneurs
and small businesses provided by the city and other
economic development organizations; their assets
remain under-utilized.
IMPROVE ACCESS TO HEALTH INSURANCE AND
OTHER WORK SUPPORTS FOR CREATIVE WORKERS
AND ENTERPRISES.
As this report has detailed, there is a great need for
strategies that address the woeful lack of health insurance
facing creative workers and the businesses that
employ them. Non-profits, unions and industry associations
should look to expand efforts to pool freelancers
into larger groups that could purchase insurance at
more affordable rates.
BEGIN TO ADDRESS THE CREATIVE CORE’S WORKFORCE
DEVELOPMENT NEEDS.
City leaders and industry stakeholders share a strong
interest in developing talented and skilled workers and
should look to better align workforce organizations,
industry leaders, trade associations and unions to coordinate
the skills development needed for creative
industries. These entities should also collaborate with
the city’s network of workforce training providers and
educational institutions to develop programs to meet
these multiple needs. ❖
29 TECHNICAL APPENDIX
NOTES ON METHODOLOGY
Unlike most previous studies of New York City’s creative industries, we have attempted to view the sector
through an economic development lens, counting enterprises and workers and focusing on the scope of the creative
industries. The approach looks solely at the direct employment associated within the city’s creative activity, rather
than attempting to capture all of the indirect economic activity connected to it, as is the practice when trying to measure
the economic impact of a specific event or investment.
Both this conceptual approach and many of the specific methodological decisions detailed below were based on
the pioneering research of Mt. Auburn Associates, who conducted similar assessments of creative sector economic
activity in New England in June 2000 and in Louisiana in August 2005. Their approach to analyzing the creative
sector conforms to the methods used to analyze other economic sectors such as life sciences, manufacturing or
natural-resource-based industries.
One important way that this study differs from traditional arts-related economic impact studies is its inclusion
of both non-profit and for-profit enterprises within the creative sector. Our contention is that these enterprises,
despite their tax status, have the same underlying goal: to generate content, as both goods and services, that transmits
symbolic and cultural meaning to a marketplace, whether an audience in a theater or a group of high school
boys waiting for the next video game. Another major distinction is the inclusion of sole proprietorships, which are
particularly important in the creative sector. Studies which do not include the number of individuals who earn all,
or a substantial portion, of their income through self-employment would seriously underestimate the relative economic
importance of the creative sector.
Our first task was defining what and who should be included in New York’s creative core.The second, more difficult
assignment was to measure it.
One of the key components of the Mt.Auburn approach is that every region has a distinct creative economy and
that a definition used in New England would not necessarily be relevant to New York City.The Center for an Urban
Future, Mt.Auburn Associates and an advisory board of creative sector leaders helped us come up with a definition
of the “creative core” that comprises nine industries:
• Advertising
• Film and Video
• Broadcasting
• Publishing
• Architecture
• Design
• Music
• Visual Arts
• Performing Arts
The first step in measuring the creative core was to identify the number of enterprises involved in these creative
core industries and the number of individuals who make all or part of their living through employment in a nonprofit
or for-profit enterprise, or through self employment.
The U.S. Census’ County Business Patterns includes information on employment for enterprises with wage
employees. The 2002 version, the most recent available, indicates 198,627 workers in the city employed by firms within
the nine “creative core” industries. A separate data set tracking “non-employers” indicated an additional 79,761
freelancers and sole proprietors within the core, for a total of 278,388. (See Table 3, page 9 for the breakdown by
creative industry.)
30
This count is extremely conservative for three major reasons:
1) We focused primarily on those enterprises involved in the creation or production of creative content. While
we included some activities involved in the distribution of creative content, we only included these activities
if the distribution-related activity also involved production or was a core activity in terms of the market in
New York. For example, media (a distribution channel), art galleries and museums were included in the definition
of the core. Movie theaters, CD stores and book stores were not.
2) Our count does not include many of the suppliers to the creative core. For example, art supply stores, legal
firms specializing in entertainment and other similar firms are clearly part of the broader “creative economy”
in New York City. However, they were not considered part of the creative core, under the definition set forth
in this report.
3) There is a significant amount of “embedded” activity within the creative sector which is very difficult to quantify.
The best examples of embedded activities would be public libraries (which are important distribution
channels for creative content, as well as important venues for creative work) and are considered part of local
government employment. Similarly, jobs in museums and performance venues owned and operated by government
or colleges and universities are classified under the economic code of their parent organization.
Finally, many “crafts”-related businesses are included in manufacturing under the current economic codes.
Thus, an artisan furniture maker would be included under the economic code for furniture manufacturer. It
was impossible to disaggregate within manufacturing those enterprises that were more design-intensive.
While it was not possible to capture all of the embedded activities, the methodology tried to make some estimate
of creative workers employed in industries outside of the “creative core.” Perhaps the best example is fashion. We
did not want to count all 30,000 apparel jobs in New York City within the creative workforce, but it’s clear that there
is a “creative” element to some number of these positions. Fashion designers working in manufacturing all merit
inclusion within the creative workforce; the question was how to come up with an estimate of their numbers in New
York City.
We used national estimates of the percentage within each creative occupation that were neither self-employed
nor working within the creative sector.Then we applied those percentages to the number of individuals in that creative
occupation in NYC. For example, in the fashion industry, we found that there were 4,080 fashion designers
working in the city in 2000. Of these, 22 percent were working in apparel manufacturing, 30 percent in apparel
wholesaling and about 6 percent in apparel retail. Some additional 6 percent work in other miscellaneous industries
like government or education.We took this percentage (64 percent) and applied it to the 4,080 fashion designers to
come up with another 2,600 creative jobs.
Applying this process to the numerous creative workers employed in non-creative industries as indicated in
Table 4 (see page 15), we identified an additional 30,754 creative workers in the city. As Table 1 shows (see page 6),
adding these three figures yields the 309,142 total for New York’s creative workforce.
The U.S. Census’ County Business Patterns (2002) has information on employment for enterprises with wage
employees.This is the most recent data set that has detailed information on employment at the level of enterprises.
The U.S. Census’ data on “Non-employers” supplements the enterprise employment data. This data included
individuals who file returns to the IRS that indicate that they earn income from a sole proprietorship, an enterprise
whose only employee is the owner.
A third set of data, the 2000 Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) Special Tabulation of the 2000 U.S. Census
was used to complete the measure of the creative workforce by comparing the other two data sets against the number
of individuals living in New York City who reported working in “creative” occupations.
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Mt. Auburn Associates (June 2001). “The Creative Economy Initiative: A Blueprint for Investment in New England’s
Creative Community.”The New England Council.
Municipal Art Society (April 1999). “Design Central, New York:The Crossroads to Design, Production &
Innovation.”
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Nichols, Bonnie (2003). “Artist Employment 2000-2002.” National Endowment for the Arts.
O’Connor, Justin, PhD (1999). “Definition of Cultural Industries.” Manchester Institute for Popular Culture,
Manchester Metropolitan University.
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Economic Importance to the New York—New Jersey Metropolitan Region.”
Price Waterhouse Coopers (2001). “2001 New York New Media Industry Survey: Climate Study.”
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ADDITIONAL SOURCES AND RESOURCES
This report and all other publications issued by
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at www.nycfuture.org. Please subscribe to our
monthly e-mail bulletin by contacting us at
cuf@nycfuture.org or (212) 479-3341.
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A Samuel R. Delany checklist.(Bibliography)

Cooper, Rebecca
Fiction

The Jewels of Aptor. New York: Ace Books, 1962. The Ballad of Beta-2. New York: Ace Books, 1965. Empire Star. New York: Ace Books, 1966. Babel-17. New York: Ace Books, 1966. The Einstein Intersection. New York: Ace Books, 1967. Nova. New York: Bantam, 1968. Driftglass: Ten Tales of Speculative Fiction. New York: New American Library, 1971. Tides of Lust. New York: Lancer, 1973; rpt. as Equinox. New York: Rhinoceros, 1994. Dhalgren. New York: Bantam, 1975; Middletown: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1996. Triton. New York: Bantam, 1976; rpt. as Trouble on Triton. Middletown: …

Making his fortune again and again – Sheldon G. Adelson

When he was a child in the slums of Boston, Sheldon G. Adelson dreamt of owning the strip of stores on his street when he grew up. That way he could go from shop to shop, choosing whatever items he wanted and never having to pay for them–candy, pastry, pickles and even a haircut or bicycle.

When he did grow up, he studied corporate finance at City College in New York and began a career that took him into corporate financial consulting and real estate. He did so well that by the mid-1960s, he was a venture capitalist with investments in 75 companies. Their variety–from pet stores to nuclear energy–was reminiscent of the stores of his childhood.

“Unquestionably, I had fulfilled the fantasy,” he says. But when the stock market slid in 1969, he lost his first fortune.

So what did he do? “I turned around, went right to work and started again.”

He returned to real estate brokerage–”a field I found very easy”–and that led him, in the early ’70s, to doing condominium conversions for a firm with thousands of apartments. It was his sole client. “I put all my eggs in that basket,” he says. But as interest rates climbed and cash dried up, his client went under, and Adelson could not recover his investment. Expect for one building that he bought to convert one his own, he had lost a second fortune.

Now he is a millionaire again, the founder and president of the Interface Group, Inc., a Needham, Mass., firm that produces nearly 40 conferences and expositions a year for the computer industry. One annual event, Comdex/Fall, brings in $20 million and is billed as the world’s largest computer show. The 1984 exposition next month in Las Vegas is expected to lure more than 90,000 attendees and 1,400 exhibitors.

The Interface Group also owns GWV Travel Company, a tour operating firm with offices in Washington, Boston and New York. Adelson, 51, expects the two endeavors to gross $150 million to $175 million this fiscal year.

Adelson’s newest success began in 1971 when, during his second wave of prosperity, he bought controlling interest in a small trade-magazine publishing company. With his interest in condominiums heating up, he journeyed to Anaheim, Calif., the following year for a real estate exposition. There he learned that the magazine in which he had read about the show also owned it.

“I saw that there was a synergism between the magazine and the show,” he says, with advertisers buying exhibition space and readers an important part of the audience for a show. Adelson calculated that the real estate show brought in $1 million “for three days’ work.” He knew he could do the same thing, and the following March, his firm’s magazine, Data Communications User, launched the first Interface show, aimed at users of sophisticated systems, in Dallas.

A falling out with his colleagues in 1975 led Adelson to sell his interest in the magazine, retaining the exposition. He sold his condominium building, using proceeds from the sale to found Interface. Now he has 340 employes and a string of shows ranging from regional Computer Showcase Expos, for users of small computers, to Comdex (for Computer Dealers Expo), initiated in 1979 to meet needs of the growing number of independent sellers of small computers. The series now includes three domestic shows (fall, winter and spring) and Comdex/Europe. Comdex in Japan will be introduced next spring.

Just as he found that a conference complements a magazine, Adelson envisions a synergistic approach to GWV Travel, which he bought in 1981. He plans an airline charter service to go with it, hoping to have two airplanes operating by December.

Though he believes the race is more exciting than the finish, Adelson admits he has really begun to enjoy his success. “I’m a millionaire the third time and forever,” he declares.

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