Government should preserve and create arts spaces like they do affordable housing, and there’s a no-cost statewide bill to get that started, art advocates said at a Monday gathering in Somerville’s Union Square called Making Space for Art.

The bill would allow cities and towns to create cultural trusts, organizations that would manage artists’ spaces in perpetuity, operating identically to the affordable housing trust in cities such as Cambridge and in Somerville, where a cultural trust is already in the works.

There are 57 artists households for every unit of dedicated artists housing in Cambridge, Somerville and Boston, where “market-rate housing is not affordable for most artists,” said Annis Sengupta, director of arts and culture for the Metropolitan Area Planning Council, during the meeting at Warehouse XI that gathered partners in the project: the council, the Art Stays Here coalition and representatives from Cambridge, Somerville and Boston government.

Along with calling on residents to push for passage of the Creative Space Act, now sitting in a Ways and Means Committee on Beacon Hill, advocates talked about increasingly regional efforts to save the arts. That included a digital mapping project that could help identify problems and improve municipal planning.

“When you look at municipal planning, arts and culture are essentially invisible. There is no standard way for municipal planners to have an understanding of what’s happening in the arts and culture sector,” Sengupta said. “There are inconsistent definitions of arts and culture uses – they aren’t even defined in the same way across the same city’s zoning code.”

Meanwhile, creative spaces face overwhelming enforcement scrutiny, “subject to lots and lots of regulations because they typically do lots and lots of things,” Sengupta said. “They are a gathering space. They’re a teaching space. They are a space where people come and eat and drink together. They are a space where sometimes artists want to do a performance that involves fire.”

Displaced again

The council began working toward assembling an inventory and digital planning platform in 2022 amid “a tidal wave” of closing arts and culture spaces, Sengupta said, but the idea came even earlier, when hundreds of artists and musicians were evicted from Cambridge’s EMF building in May 2018. “We had nothing to offer them,” Sengupta said, “and it was honestly devastating.”

That moment was remembered from the other side by Ethan Dussault, a volunteer with Art Stays Here and a panelist at the meeting who runs New Alliance Audio – now near Union Square, its third location.

“There was no toolbox when we got displaced from the Fenway, and there was no toolbox when we got displaced from the EMF building. And when we came to Somerville, I learned, oh, there’s some makings of a toolbox,” Dussault said. He was optimistic about the creation of cultural trusts. “So many problems that I see artists facing would have been solved by this tool.”(He also emphasized that every arts building should form a tenants association.)

Attendees at the meeting were urged to call their elected officials to push for passage of the Creative Space Act – “every single member of the Legislature is saying we don’t have any money,” said Emily Ruddock, executive director of MassCreative, “and we’re not asking for any money this, so we’re making it easy for them to say yes” – and to contribute to the digital mapping project.

The partner communities are being asked to inventory and describe their creative spaces to link to a map and data visualizer “so we have something in place that can make arts and culture visible to municipal planners,” Sengupta said. “Many of those spaces are just addresses, and we don’t have enough information about what’s happening in them to have that dashboard be effective.”

The arts economy

The inventory approach originated in London, where a mapping effort was added to other reporting on the creative economy. Panelist Joseph Henry, from the Boston Mayor’s Office of Arts & Culture, worked at the time for the mayor of London; a cultural survey found that city’s creative economy accounted for one in five jobs. The effort helped “arrest the decline” in arts space and begin adding it back – but “that sort of political imperative [came] only when the mayor realized an economic imperative,” Henry said.

More recently, Henry has surveyed Bostonians and found 18 percent say the creative arts provide their primary income, and another 9 percent cite them as supplementary income – totaling one in every four people. “That’s way more than I think the administration realized,” Henry said.

A look at the arts in Cambridge published in 2017 found they supported the equivalent of 6,129 full-time jobs and $175 million in economic impact in the fiscal year 2015. The report wasn’t mentioned Monday, and Sengupta wasn’t able to assess how the picture had changed over the past decade.

Though the meeting was focused largely on the idea of cultural real estate trusts, Henry argued for “affordable housing for everyone, not just artists.”

“The supply chain of art goes beyond artists. It’s really important for the usher in the theater to also have access to affordable housing. It’s important for the Uber driver who gets us everywhere to have access to affordable housing. You can’t have an art ecosystem without the supply chain,” Henry said.

Next for Cambridge and Somerville

The panel included Claudia Zarazua of Cambridge Arts, who noted that the city was rezoning its Central Square Cultural District and would discuss that March 24 with the Housing Committee and had launched a initiative embedding artists in government to take part in planning. She urged residents 12 and older to vote in the current round of participatory budgeting for the three-year “Support Spaces for Artists” option, which would set aside $120,000 for artists in all media for costs such as studio rental support or makerspace memberships.

Somerville was represented by Greg Jenkins, whose last day as executive director of the Arts Council was Friday, and mayor Jake Wilson, who said he would add a cabinet-level arts leader as well as fill Jenkins’ office.

“Arts space just continues to disappear in Somerville and in the region,” Wilson said upon opening the Monday meeting. “Arts are the heartbeat of this community. It’s not just for the culture they bring. It’s for the impact they have on on on the economy. We need to make sure that as a government, we’re pursuing all the tools at our disposal to protect that heartbeat.”

He looked forward to collaborating with Cambridge, Boston and the organizations because “when we have the data and we can match it with the stories, we can move hearts and minds to make the right choices,” Wilson said.