Closing the Books, 2025
With less than a week left in this challenging year, some American taxpayers are considering how to maximize their deductions with last-minute charitable donations. This is a good thing—everyone, regardless of a modest income, can give up to $300 to a good cause and pay that much less in taxes, and people doing well financially can get much bigger deductions than that. You have a choice: you can fund battleships or a gaudy ballroom with your tax dollars, or you can help a nonprofit do something healing for society.
Every nonprofit has a mission, and ours, ArtHouse, wants to make it possible for artists to live in San Francisco again, with co-op live/work housing and venues. We’re an antidote to the current policy of local landlords that only accepts tenants who can prove they have lucrative jobs. It’s a false security for landlords, these days, because so many people have lost their high-end jobs this year. San Francisco currently has more than 61K empty units, because few people can, or want to, pay tech boom rents, but still artists are denied housing.
Artists’ housing can be seen most simply as a fairness issue. But it is a lot more than that. It’s an experiment that challenges a uniquely American fallacy, and proves, for once and for all, that value is not solely a matter of money. How we plan to do this is a major part of the ArtHouse experiment.
Every civilized country in the world understands that artists are part of the common good. Their presence stimulates imagination, provides food for thought, creates things that give pleasure—music, films, books, things of beauty—and perhaps most of all, speaks truth to power. For that reason, every other civilized country has an Arts Secretary on the Cabinet and offers artists stipends, so they can develop their mature work without starving. In America, however, there’s no Arts Secretary, no stipends, and artists are considered merely producers of marketable commodities. In Charles Dickens’ novel about the US, Martin Chuzzlewit, he wrote, “In America, everything is about money.” Not much has changed in the nearly 200 years since he wrote that.
ArtHouse intends to demonstrate in a locally visible, tangible way, how creators serve the common good. Our tool is the World Happiness Index. When we begin to develop a location, an early part of the process is circulating a version of the World Happiness Index to residents of the surrounding neighborhood. A year after we open, we’ll circulate the same thing again. As countless academic studies have already shown, we will be able to demonstrate that when artists live and work in a place, it makes people around them happier. One study in England, published in 2019, followed thousands of people for longer than a decade and found that the ones who were regularly exposed to art lived longer.
You have a choice, as a taxpayer. You can give your full tax amount to the government for battleships, or you can send a bit to ArtHouse for equity in housing, building happier neighborhoods, creating things that give you pleasure, and helping people live longer. If you decide we offer a better option, here we are:
We wish you a much happier new year!
#taxes, #charitable donations, #deductions, #battleships, #experiment, #World Happiness Index, #artists
Proust Said That 