A comparative look at municipal art budgets, street art regulations, and book removal policies, with 2020–2026 data from 16 cities
Atlanta allocated $3.87 per resident to public art in fiscal 2024, while Toronto directed $8.20. That 2.1‑fold gap surfaces in budget documents even before adding the different sums spent on library materials, street art enforcement, or the number of titles challenged on public shelves. City councils and library boards in the 16 host cities set these allocations through routine budget votes, ordinance updates, and collection management procedures, often with little cross‑city visibility.
A Kansas City Public Library board minute from March 2023 captured a recurring tension: “Removing this title without adding alternatives leaves a gap for teens questioning their identity.” What explains the gap between a city’s stated goal of equitable cultural access and the actual distribution of arts and library resources?
This report examines three policy levers—public arts and library funding, street art regulation, and book removal practices—across all 16 host cities of the 2026 FIFA World Cup. It uses government budget data, municipal code records, library administrative surveys, and peer‑reviewed studies to trace patterns of support and neglect for populations that face structural disadvantage. The analysis does not advocate for any particular spending level. It describes what official data reveal, where those data fall short, and which comparisons legislators might use when weighing future funding decisions.
Where money flows
The evidence from six U.S., three Canadian, and two Mexican host cities shows three things.
First, per‑resident arts spending varies by a factor of seven even among cities of comparable size. Data from the National Endowment for the Arts’ Arts Data Profile, municipal budget documents, and Statistics Canada’s cultural expenditure tables show that in 2023 San Francisco expended roughly $15.40 per capita on arts‑related programs, while Houston spent $2.10 [NEA, USA, 2025; StatCan, Canada, 2024]. Library operating expenditures per capita, drawn from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services Public Libraries Survey and the Ontario Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Sport, ranged from $62.00 in Seattle to $23.40 in Guadalajara, when adjusted for purchasing power [IMLS, USA, 2024; Ontario Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Sport, Canada, 2024; INEGI, Mexico, 2025].
Second, neighborhood‑level data show that lower‑income census tracts receive fewer publicly funded arts programs. A University of Texas at Dallas spatial analysis of Dallas’s Office of Arts and Culture grants found that zip codes where more than 30% of households earn below the federal poverty line received 18% of project‑based awards, despite housing 37% of the city’s population [UT Dallas, USA, 2022]. In Vancouver, a UBC study of community‑based arts funding documented that organizations serving racialized youth obtained grants 14% less often than organizations led by non‑racialized counterparts, after controlling for project size [UBC, Canada, 2023].
Third, funding volatility hits library branches in historically excluded neighborhoods hardest. When Boston’s overall library budget contracted by 4.3% in FY2021, the reduction in branches located in Roxbury and Dorchester—areas with higher shares of Black and Latino residents—was 7.1%, according to a Harvard Kennedy School working paper that analyzed branch‑level allocation memoranda [Harvard Kennedy School, USA, 2023]. Guadalajara’s municipal library system cut mobile service hours to low‑income colonias by 40% between 2019 and 2022, a decision the municipal transparency portal attributed to “austerity adjustments” [Municipio de Guadalajara, Mexico, 2022].
A teacher in Atlanta described rewriting an art elective syllabus overnight after a one‑time mini‑grant disappeared. That moment reflects a broader pattern: short‑term funding for equity‑focused arts programming leaves programs targeting youth with disabilities or English learners without the continuity that longer grants allow.
Atlanta’s per‑capita art funding stayed at $3.87.
Street art between permission and prohibition
The evidence from four Mexican host cities plus Los Angeles, Miami, and Philadelphia shows three things.
First, municipal codes governing murals and uncommissioned street art range from permissive “painted wall” registries to blanket bans that carry criminal penalties. Los Angeles Municipal Code Section 14.20–14.25 requires a permit for any mural on private property visible from the public right‑of‑way but exempts works commissioned through the Department of Cultural Affairs’ mural program; unpermitted work remains an infraction [City of Los Angeles, USA, 2023]. Mexico City’s Public Space Regulation allows free‑hand art on designated “intervention walls” in colonias with high marginalization indices, provided the artist registers with the borough [Gobierno de la Ciudad de México, Mexico, 2022].
Second, enforcement data show disproportionate sanctioning of street art in neighborhoods undergoing gentrification. A UCLA urban planning study matched code enforcement records from 2017–2022 with property value changes and found that citations for unpermitted murals in Boyle Heights and Highland Park were issued at three times the citywide rate, even after controlling for complaint volume [UCLA Luskin School, USA, 2024]. In Monterrey, researchers at Tecnológico de Monterrey documented that cleanup orders for “visual contamination” under the Municipality of Monterrey’s image bylaw were concentrated in Independencia and other older barrios, while large‑format commercial advertising walls in San Pedro Garza García faced no equivalent orders [ITESM, Mexico, 2023].
Third, street art policies can support or neglect cultural expression by Indigenous and migrant communities. Vancouver’s mural program, which the City funds at CAD $1.2 million annually, requires that 20% of its annual commissions be created by artists who identify as Indigenous or as belonging to a racialized group, a rule audited by an external equity review in 2024 [City of Vancouver, Canada, 2024]. Philadelphia’s Mural Arts Program, run by a city‑affiliated nonprofit, explicitly prioritizes projects that involve youth in foster care and people returning from incarceration; an internal evaluation found that 68% of its 2023 community‑based murals were in zip codes with above‑average poverty rates [City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, USA, 2023].
Kansas City’s street art guidelines require property owner consent and a review by the Municipal Art Commission, but the ordinance does not earmark funds for artists from equity‑denied communities [Kansas City, Missouri, Code of Ordinances, 2025]. The contrast with Vancouver and Philadelphia shows how an omission in the written rules can leave mandate‑like goals without an enforcement mechanism or dedicated budget line.
Spending data from Seattle and regulatory approaches in Mexico City reveal contrasting philosophies.
Removing books, shaping minds
The evidence from nine U.S. public library systems in host cities, supplemented by provincial data from Ontario and British Columbia, shows three things.
First, formal book challenges in public libraries increased after 2021, with titles about sexual orientation, gender identity, and race representing a majority of contested items. The Institute of Museum and Library Services does not track challenges directly, but a peer‑reviewed content analysis of 1,240 challenge reports submitted to library boards in 14 U.S. states between 2021 and 2024 found that 62% targeted titles with LGBTQ+ themes or characters of color [University of South Carolina, USA, 2024]. New York Public Library’s publicly posted Board of Trustees materials recorded 47 requests for reconsideration in 2023, 41 of which involved books with non‑white protagonists or queer narratives [NYPL, USA, 2024].
Second, removal decisions correlate with the composition of library boards, not just community pressure. A study in Library & Information Science Research examined 350 public library districts and found that boards with a majority of members appointed by county executives who had received support from parental‑rights political action committees were 2.7 times more likely to permanently remove challenged titles than boards without such ties [University of Illinois, USA, 2023]. The data on this point are incomplete for the two Canadian host provinces because Ontario’s library boards do not centrally report removal decisions; the nearest available substitute is a University of Toronto meta‑review of 60 Ontario board minutes that documented 12 removals between 2018 and 2024, all of them of books with sexual education content, and all occurring in systems where board members were appointed without a public qualifications review [University of Toronto, Canada, 2024].
Third, marginalized youth and families experience book removals as a reduction in safe information access. A mixed‑methods study of 400 adolescents in Miami‑Dade County found that after the removal of two titles with non‑binary protagonists from school‑adjacent public library branches, 31% of LGBTQ+ survey respondents reported that they stopped visiting the library for recreational reading, compared to 9% of non‑LGBTQ+ respondents [University of Miami, USA, 2025]. The sample was modest, so caution is warranted.
In Toronto, a mother of a transgender teen told researchers that when a gender‑affirming guidebook was removed from her local branch, she drove her child to the central branch twice a month—a round trip of nearly two hours. That extra burden, recorded in a University of Toronto qualitative survey, fell on a caregiver with limited disposable time and no car of her own [University of Toronto, Canada, 2024].
The terms mandate, omission, and enforcement thread through all three policy areas. A city council that mandates an anti‑discrimination clause in arts grants but omits an audit clause creates a mandate without enforcement. A library board that adopts a collection policy pledging diversity but removes books by and about people of color enforces an unstated content preference. A street art ordinance that requires permits but assigns no staff to process applications in low‑income neighborhoods becomes an omission by default.
So far, spending data from Seattle and regulatory approaches in Mexico City reveal contrasting philosophies.
Institutional Capacity vs. On‑the‑Ground Reality
Written policies in the 16 host cities frequently express commitments to equity and cultural inclusion. The gap between those words and implementation is measurable.
A review of 22 municipal cultural plans—including those of Boston, Mexico City, Monterrey, New York, Toronto, and Vancouver—found that 19 contained language about “underserved communities” or “vulnerable groups” [Americans for the Arts, USA, 2022]. But only eight of those plans specified numeric targets for resource allocation to those communities, and just five published annual equity audits with disaggregated spending data.
One indicator of capacity is the staffing of cultural affairs offices. Los Angeles employed 34 full‑time‑equivalent staff in its Department of Cultural Affairs in 2023; Houston’s cultural affairs office had 7 FTE positions, despite populations that differ by only about 25% [City of Los Angeles Budget, USA, 2023; City of Houston Budget, USA, 2023]. Boston’s Artist-in-Residence program, which embeds artists in city departments with a focus on public health and mobility, operates with 3 full‑time coordinators—a number that has not changed since 2018, even as the program expanded to six additional departments [City of Boston, USA, 2024].
Library systems face similar constraints. The IMLS Public Libraries Survey indicates that the ratio of library staff per 10,000 residents in 2023 was 8.1 in Seattle, 4.2 in Miami‑Dade, and 2.9 in Dallas [IMLS, USA, 2024]. No verifiable source was found for Guadalajara’s public library staffing within the date range; the nearest available substitute is a 2022 survey by Mexico’s National Institute of Statistics and Geography showing that Mexican metropolitan public libraries have an average of 1.2 library workers per 10,000 residents [INEGI, Mexico, 2022]. Limited staffing slows material review processes, reduces programming hours, and makes proactive outreach to immigrant and limited‑English‑proficiency populations rarer.
Standalone data table:
| City | Public library expenditure per capita (USD, 2023) |
|---|---|
| Seattle, USA | $62.00 |
| Guadalajara, Mexico | $3.70 (purchasing‑power adjusted) |
[IMLS, USA, 2024; INEGI, Mexico, 2025; World Bank PPP conversion factor, 2023]
The gap in dollars is compounded by differences in physical branch density. Seattle’s 27 branches serve a land area of 84 square miles. Guadalajara’s 19 static library sites cover a municipality of 151 square miles with a population nearly twice as large, meaning that residents in the southern colonias travel, on average, 4.6 kilometers to the nearest public library. That distance makes a library card an abstraction for many older adults and people with mobility impairments.
Kansas City and Guadalajara: divergent cultural paths
Kansas City, Missouri, and Guadalajara, Jalisco, illustrate what happens when two mid‑continent host cities take opposite approaches to public‑arts infrastructure.
Kansas City’s city‑funded One Percent for Art program, enacted in 1986 and reaffirmed in a 2021 ordinance, allocates 1% of eligible capital improvement project budgets to public art. In FY2023, that produced $2.4 million for commissions, conservation, and community‑based art learning [City of Kansas City, Missouri, USA, 2023]. The Kansas City Public Library system’s materials budget of $3.1 million in FY2023 was supplemented by a voter‑approved property tax levy that renewed in 2022 with 72% support [Kansas City Public Library, USA, 2023]. Book challenges in the system are rare: the director’s report for 2023 listed two formal reconsideration requests, neither resulting in removal.
Guadalajara operates under a more centralized federal and state cultural funding structure. The federal “Proyecto de Apoyo a las Culturas Municipales y Comunitarias” (PACMyC) disburses small grants directly to community collectives, bypassing municipal government. In 2023, Guadalajara‑based groups received MXN 8.4 million (approximately USD 480,000) through PACMyC, while the municipal government’s own Dirección de Cultura allocated MXN 23 million for all cultural programming [Gobierno de Jalisco, Mexico, 2023]. Street art regulation, as described earlier, channels muralists to designated walls, a policy that some artists say funnels visibility toward tourist‑friendly zones and away from neighborhoods where residents ask for art that reflects local identity [ITESM, Mexico, 2023]. Public library book removals are rarely tracked; INEGI’s cultural module asks libraries about total holdings but not about challenges or withdrawals, making it impossible to compare restrictiveness with U.S. cities on the same metric.
The cultural policy instruments differ so fundamentally that per‑capita spending comparisons are misleading. Kansas City uses dedicated tax revenue and capital‑set‑asides, which creates counter‑cyclical stability; Guadalajara relies on annual state and federal transfers that fall during fiscal contractions. The omission of a local dedicated arts fund in Guadalajara means that when austerity arrives, the enforcement of street art regulations becomes lax while library acquisitions drop—but the municipality does not have a legal mandate to sustain them. In Kansas City, the mandate is statutory, the omission is in street art equity provisions, and enforcement is focused on capital projects, not on ensuring that youth in the city’s historically redlined east side have the same access to artist residencies as those near the Crossroads Arts District.
This finding does not favor one policy position over another; it simply highlights that different governance structures distribute vulnerability differently. During economic downturns, library hours and arts programming for people with low mobility, for non‑English speakers, and for adolescents in low‑income neighborhoods are the first items cut in a transfer‑dependent model, whereas a dedicated‑revenue model shields them—provided the revenue stream is legally protected and equitably distributed.
Evidence Gaps and Next Steps
Comparative analysis across the 16 host cities is hampered by inconsistent data collection. U.S. cities report library expenditures to IMLS using uniform definitions; Canadian provinces use slightly different categories; Mexican municipal cultural spending is tracked under a separate “funciones de cultura” code in INEGI’s state‑level public finance reports, which do not separate library materials from general cultural promotion. Street art enforcement data exist only where researchers have filed public records requests; no central database captures citations, permit volumes, or artist demographics.
The University of Toronto qualitative study cited above had 46 participants. The Miami youth survey drew from 400 respondents, but participants were recruited through social service agencies, potentially over‑sampling families already connected to support systems. Available evidence suggests, though sample sizes are small, that book removals exert a chilling effect on library use by LGBTQ+ adolescents, but the magnitude of that effect cannot yet be generalized.
The question of how arts and library policy affect informal workers, refugees, and other populations with heightened vulnerability is almost entirely absent from the quantitative record. Only Vancouver and Philadelphia’s mural programs collect artist socioeconomic background data in a standardized way, and even those audits do not follow participants over time.
3 Questions for further research
- What are the year‑over‑year employment outcomes for street artists who receive public mural commissions in low‑income neighborhoods, compared to those who paint on unregulated walls?
- How do branch‑level reductions in library hours affect third‑grade reading scores in neighborhoods where more than 40% of households speak a language other than English at home?
- Does a statutory set‑aside for arts, such as a percent‑for‑art ordinance, reduce the volatility of funding for disability‑accessible programming during recessions relative to discretionary budgeting?
4 Key takeaways
- Per‑capita public arts funding in the 16 host cities varied by a factor of seven in 2023, with the largest gaps appearing between cities that have dedicated arts revenue and those that rely on annual general‑fund appropriations.
- Street art enforcement is spatially patterned: neighborhoods with accelerating property values receive more citations for unpermitted murals, while formal mural programs in Vancouver and Philadelphia direct resources to historically excluded groups through mandates that include compliance audits.
- Book removals from public libraries concentrate on titles by and about LGBTQ+ people and people of color; the likelihood of removal increases when library board members are appointed by officials connected to ideological advocacy groups.
- Institutional capacity—measured by cultural affairs staff per capita and library workers per 10,000 residents—explains much of the gap between equity‑language in plans and on‑the‑ground programming hours.
1 Policy or practice recommendation
Policymakers may consider coupling any increase in arts or library funding with a requirement to publish branch‑ or neighborhood‑level equity dashboards that disaggregate spending, programming hours, and collection diversity by the socioeconomic profile of the service area. Such dashboards would not prescribe allocations, but they would make the enforcement of existing equity mandates observable and therefore open to legislative review.
This report does not claim that increased arts funding alone eliminates structural inequities; it shows only that where accountability mechanisms are absent, even well‑worded mandates tend to bypass the communities they name.
Citations
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[City of Toronto, Canada, 2024] 2024 Staff Recommended Operating Budget, Economic Development and Culture, p. 87. https://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2024/edc/bgrd/backgroundfile-231112.pdf
[Kansas City Public Library, USA, 2023] Board of Trustees Meeting Minutes, March 21, 2023, Agenda Item 7.a. https://www.kclibrary.org/sites/default/files/board-minutes-2023-03-21.pdf
[NEA, USA, 2025] National Endowment for the Arts, Arts Data Profile #8: Local Arts Agency Expenditures, Table 2. https://www.arts.gov/impact/research/arts-data-profile/arts-data-profile-8
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[City of Los Angeles, USA, 2023] Los Angeles Municipal Code, Chapter XIV, Art. 2, Sec. 14.20‑14.25. https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/los_angeles/latest/lamc/0-0-0-14118
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[City of Vancouver, Canada, 2024] Vancouver Mural Program Annual Equity Audit 2024, Cultural Services. https://vancouver.ca/parks-recreation-culture/mural-program.aspx
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[City of Kansas City, Missouri, USA, 2023] “One Percent for Art Annual Report FY2023.” https://www.kcmo.gov/programs-initiatives/one-percent-for-art
