A look at the origins, costs and clashing views on city government’s $300,000 program to remove graffiti and tagging throughout Asheville
Above: Before and after shots of graffiti painted over on a building in the River Arts District. Photo by Zen Sutherland.
123 Graffiti Free is its name. Launched July 1, the program aims to clamp down on graffiti in Asheville. City government is putting up $300,000 from its reserves, boosted by $30,000 from an anonymous private donor, to clean up graffiti at little or no cost to property owners.
The program, which ends on Sept. 30, is about halfway through. According to a website tracking its progress, since its launch the city has cleaned up graffiti in 73 sites, and is working on 46 more. The biggest cluster of locations are downtown, with some scattered throughout the River Arts District and West Asheville.
The move follows considerable controversy about city’s new graffiti rules, passed in April. The debate saw the Council of Independent Business Owners calling for harsher penalties against taggers and angry that proposed city rules might require them to shell out to clean up graffiti on their property.
A move to make graffiti a felony under state law failed to advance in the state legislature, but the city moved forward with its clean-up program and new rules. Asheville City Council approved it 6-1 in April. Council member Cecil Bothwell, citing concerns about using city cash to clean up private property, cast the sole dissenting vote. The program allows property owners to contact the city, who will cover — at $100 an hour — up to $500 of the cost of graffiti cleanup on a given site.
Some local artists have also criticized the program, saying it represents an archaic approach to dealing with graffiti and that the large amount of funds set aside for the purpose could be far better used to support public art.
The city also hasn’t seen the rush of property owners asking for cleanup it anticipated. So far, it’s spent just $17,550 of the allocated funds.
A month and a half after it started, questions remain about the city’s approach to graffiti and if the program will accomplish its intended results.
‘Rapid removal’
Assistant City Manager Cathy Ball is staff’s point person on the issue, and she and other staff played a role over the last six months in crafting. Sitting down at a table in her office overlooking downtown, she tells the Blade that the current effort began with the Downtown Association approaching city government and elected officials.
“There have been discussions about the problem of graffiti, and the costs to property owners, probably for at least the past five to six years,” she says. “They [the association] asked what we can do to make it better, because it’s just getting out of control.”
From the city’s view and the organizations — notably the Downtown Association and the Chamber of Commerce — they worked with to push an end to graffiti. So the city looked at other cities in North Carolina, finding that some required owners to clean-up graffiti and others footed the bill themselves.
“We tried to look at how we could commit to get it removed without having a cost ot city taxpayers on an ongoing basis,” Ball says. The ordinance the city passed, with increased fines for those caught doing graffiti, a requirement (after Sept. 30) that property owners clean it up and the $300,000 to cover the clean-up bills for property owners, represents a combination of those approaches.
Normally, when a property is vandalized — if a rock’s thrown through a window, for example — repair is left as a matter for the property owner to handle. But Ball says that the city’s intervention depends on how pervasive a social issue the kind of vandalism becomes. In this case, she says, staff and the Council members who approved the measure believe that it’s become a big enough issue to justify taking money from the city’s savings to tackle it.
“There are a lot of similarities between this and someone throwing a rock and breaking a window,” Ball says. “When the problem becomes larger than just one window, that’s when there are policies made by our leadership to see if this problem is big enough to require intervention on the part of government to deal with it.
“The issue facing Asheville is that this is causing problems with people not feeling safe, with hurting businesses,” she says.
As for the $100 an hour, she says it’s based on the city’s costs with removing graffiti from its own property.
“From everything we’ve read, rapid removal is the key,” she adds.
As for how the areas the program ensures that the areas it cleans up won’t simply get tagged again, Ball asserts that the city’s working with the Asheville Police Department to make sure that doesn’t happen through creating a graffiti database.
“We’re capturing data every time we remove a tag and the police are monitoring that on a daily basis,” she says. “If they see a tag that’s repeated, they’re able to target certain areas.”
But she admits “the research has shown that if you clean it off, it’s likely it will be re-tagged. It’s almost as if you’re creating a new piece of paper. That has happened since we started the program, a few times.
“But with the data and us taking pictures, it allows the police to do better enforcement.”
The main concern the city has, she says, is that demand for the graffiti clean-up has been lower than expected. Ball attributes some of it to business owners believing that the clean-up will exceed $500 and thus cost them money.
“We’ve not gotten as many as we would’ve liked to have gotten,” she says. “We need to evaluate that.”
“One of the hindrances is that people think the graffiti on their property may take more than the $500,” she notes. “We’d still encourage them to call. The estimates are free, so we may find that it’s less than that and can be removed at no cost to them.”
Wall wars
Not everyone agrees. Local artist Gus Cutty, for example, told the Citizen-Times in April that “the vandalism debated today in Asheville is a sign of a thriving youth culture in a city notorious for it’s lack of safe, encouraging alternatives for young people.”
Jen Gordon, a local artist, arts administrator and former member of the city’s Public Art and Cultural Commission, says the approach to graffiti is behind smart urban policy by, “like 30 years.” She’s criticized the city’s program in a column for this site.
“I understand the issue, the perceived view of tagging and graffiti [from the city and business] is that they come from kind of a degenerate people, people who don’t really care about property,” Gordon says.
But “there’s a huge distinction between tagging and graffiti and street art, things that have been accepted in the arts world for a long time.” She notes that artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Banksy played a major role in shaping cities’ arts and culture.
“The best approach involve activating your creative community,” she continues. “You have a bunch of people who have the technique, the skill-set, the ability to take the funds and turn them into something that’s meaningful and intentional. That will be more effective in the long term for eradicating tagging.”
The $300,000 the city put towards removal could “go a heck of a long way to create public art.”
As an example, she highlights the Chess Players mural on the I-240 overpass leading into the Lexington Avenue area, painted by local artist Ian Wilkinson for the Asheville Mural Project.
“It has not been tagged,” Gordon observes, and even when the columns below are, the technique Wilkinson used means the offending paint can be easily scrubbed off without a costly removal process.
Instead, she asserts, the city’s removal approach is an irresponsible use of tax dollars that won’t solve the problem.
“It’s like whack-a-mole: you’re covering it up, you’re creating another blank slate and in the minds of taggers ‘who cares?’” Gordon says. “If you have an artists’ work on the side of a building or a retaining wall, and you have a process for that, it’s far more effective amelioration than creating a blank canvas for someone to tag again.”
If the city were to donate the same funds its using for graffiti clean-up to business owners to commission a piece of art on the same wall “I can almost guarantee it will stay up longer.”
Gordon says the city’s approach shows a deeper problem with the way it engages the arts versus other sectors of the economy, citing initiatives like Philadelphia’s Mural Arts Program as the example Asheville should follow instead.
“There are working models and best practices that are identified throughout this country that we just aren’t looking at as a city; it’s kind of appalling.”
She attributes this to the city being under-staffed following the downturn’s budget crunches, which eliminated the only staff position dedicated to arts and culture. She contrasts its approach to the arts with the treatment the city gives other industries.
“I’ve heard [Council member] Gordon Smith say a number of times that the arts community is doing fine on their own, that it doesn’t need city support,” Gordon says. “That’s a completely inaccurate assessment of the situation. Every economic and cultural sector of a city needs municipal support. Look at breweries and restaurants and the support and incentives they get.”
As she sees it, the city needs to better put its money towards lasting art and cooperate with county government and other organizations to create a plan to support Asheville’s culture of creativity.
Asked about the possibility of backing public art instead of its current removal program, Ball says “there are private property owners that have said they’re interested in providing a wall for artists who want to be creative, who want an opportunity to express themselves.
“That has worked in some communities for a certain segment,” Ball says. “The solution to removing graffiti is a community effort, our thoughts were that some private sector folks may come in and help with that.”
“But the city’s role in that is just to facilitate the conversation.”
So far, on Sept. 30, owners will be required to bear the costs of cleaning up graffiti, with the city acting as a go-between to arrange with one of 10 companies to do the job.
But by that time, Ball says, staff will probably ask Council to “reevaluate the program” given its current experiences, and will make some new recommendations. Staff are currently working on what changes it will advise
As for whether the program will ultimately be successful, Ball adds, “we’ve never done anything like this before.”
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