Cleveland Heights is top city for artists

Community Partnership for Arts and Culture (CPAC) mined the databases of large arts organizations, such the Ohio Arts Council, to provide a snapshot of where Cleveland-area artists are living. CPAC's “Putting Artists on the Map” study looks at the top artist districts by categories (musician, visual arts, literary), their educational attainment, and even alternative modes of transportation—how many artists bike or walk to work.

Not surprisingly, cities likes Cleveland Heights--which have neighborhoods that promote walking and biking, have public spaces that encourage social interaction, have diverse populations, and inexpensive and larger housing (with room for studios)--tend to be Greater Cleveland’s creative havens. It’s also interesting that artists tend to walk and bike to work in higher percentages than the average Clevelander.

Coventry Village and Cedar-Lee ranked one and two in the region for the highest concentrations of artists per thousand residents (30.2 and 23.8 respectively).

Cleveland Heights has three neighborhoods that rank in Greater Cleveland's top ten artist clusters. The ten are:

• Lakewood (292 artists)
• Cedar-Fairmount/Shaker Square/Larchmere (240)
• Coventry Village (217)
• Tremont (155)
• University Circle/Little Italy (130)
• Severance neighborhood in Cleveland Heights (122)
• Onaway/Lomond in Shaker Heights (121)
• Downtown Cleveland’s Superior Warehouse District (110)
• Chagrin Valley (92)
• Detroit-Shoreway (84 and rising)

Overall, 19.4 percent of the region’s artists choose to live in the Heights neighborhoods of Coventry, Severance, Forest Hills, Cedar-Lee and Cedar-Fairmount/Shaker Square.

Cedar-Lee ranked high in artist home ownership (84%). Taken as a whole, Eastside neighborhoods ranked high in diversity and in artists with advanced degrees (18.2%), but also had high concentrations of people “not in the labor force.” 

The top three categories in the region’s artist districts are:

• Music – 65.5%
• Theater – 64.9%
• Literary – 62.5%

In this passage from the report, CPAC hints at what it hopes to gain from mapping artists:

“Artist-based community development is more than opening an art gallery or having an artist move into a neighborhood. This type of development involves the creation of a more organic relationship between artists and their neighbors. This can mean a neighborhood takes steps to identify its hidden arts and culture assets by finding its gathering places and influential figures. Artists can be engaged by making beautiful and interesting public spaces and help unite residents in the process.”

In other words, the aforementioned cities, which account for a large percentage of the region’s artists, could benefit by building on their current artist base. They might make their economic development arts-driven; they could engage the community in a discussion and find out if it's appropriate to create policies or provide incentives to start a home-based businesses or to direct CDBG funds to reconfigure single-family homes with studio spaces. At the very least, engaging influential figures from the arts community in economic development discussions could begin to shape the communities to become even more inviting for artists to live and work.

These efforts matter because self-identified artists are a stabilizing force in the urban core and inner-ring suburbs. They are an important part of the social fabric, drawing the public to galleries, which serve as a third leg in the civic common. Galleries and artist spaces can be flexible. They are not necessarily centered on a simple transaction, nor are the spaces devoted exclusively to one age or one type of person.

The next three installments of CPAC’s study include a survey of artists' preferences regarding buildings and neighborhoods, a regression analysis that predicts where artists will be living next in Cuyahoga County, and an analysis of the type of building stock artists are currently living in.

A version of this article originally appeared on the GreenCityBlueLake website, www.gcbl.org.