I had to put together a few numbers for a presentation recently and I thought it would make for some nice show-and-tell today.
Storefronts launched as a test-the-waters pilot program in September 2010. In the past 19 months, we have:
- Activated over 25 vacant storefronts
- Presented over 60 arts projects, including installations, artists’ residencies, and pop-up creative enterprises
- Worked with over 150 individual artists
- We have incubated and stabilized three new arts businesses into these neighborhoods, driving creative economic development faster than any program we know of.
- We’ve lost 8 properties from the program to paying commercial tenants, meaning we’ve got a 30% success rate at leasing these chronically empty spaces.
- Using the 2009 Gehl study as a source of raw numbers, we conservatively estimate that over 250,000 people have seen our projects.
- We received a 2011 Best of Seattle award from Seattle Weekly as “Seattle’s Best New Gallery.”
This last is impressive, we think, given that Storefronts isn’t actually a gallery at all, if you use conventional definitions. But as you know, we don’t use conventional definitions. We think that’s why we’re doing so well.
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Storefronts is the new economic stimulus program that actually works! A huge thanks to all parties who work to make this program so successful. 🙂
Congratulations to all that your doing in Seattle my only wish is that the City
of Eugene would see the light –