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 Seattle, Before and After

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. 

This is what success looks like.