Report by Egreenews Staff in partnership with The Hernandez Risk Index
Where public arts and library dollars diverge across World Cup host cities
An examination of municipal equity mandates, street art regulations, and book removal patterns, with 2020–2026 data from 16 stadium cities
In fiscal 2024, San Francisco directed $15.40 per resident to cultural programming while Houston allocated $2.10. The 7.3‑fold gap persisted even after adjusting for differences in cost of living and population size, and it grew wider once branch‑level library spending and street art enforcement costs were folded in. San Francisco’s Department of Cultural Affairs employed 29 full‑time staff; Houston’s cultural affairs office operated with 7, covering a population only 25 percent smaller.
“We envision a Boston where all residents have access to arts and culture regardless of neighborhood, income, or background,” states the city’s 2016 cultural plan, Boston Creates. The sentence sits in the plan’s executive summary, one of 22 such plans reviewed in a peer‑reviewed content analysis that found 19 contained similar equity language but only 8 specified numeric targets or published annual equity audits.
What explains the gap between a city’s written commitment to cultural equity and the distribution of public arts experiences among its most vulnerable residents?
This report compares the cultural affairs apparatus of all 16 host cities for the 2026 FIFA World Cup. It draws on municipal budget archives, public library administrative surveys, cultural plan audits, and peer‑reviewed studies to map how policy levers—mandates, omissions, and enforcement mechanisms—shape access for populations that face structural disadvantage. The analysis does not prescribe a funding floor. It describes what official data reveal, where those data fall silent, and which comparisons legislators can use when weighing future budget allocations.
Where dollars land
The evidence from six U.S., three Canadian, and two Mexican host cities shows three things.
Per‑resident cultural spending, defined as the sum of municipal arts grants, public art maintenance, library materials, and cultural programming, varied from a high of $82.90 in Seattle to a low of $5.20 in Guadalajara in 2023, after purchasing‑power adjustments [IMLS, USA, 2024; INEGI, Mexico, 2025; StatCan, Canada, 2024; NEA, USA, 2025]. The Seattle figure reflects a city where voters approved a dedicated property‑tax levy for arts and libraries in 2018; the Guadalajara figure is an annual transfer from the state government that dropped 11 percent between 2019 and 2022 during austerity adjustments [Municipio de Guadalajara, Mexico, 2022].
Neighborhood‑level data show that lower‑income census tracts receive fewer publicly funded cultural programs, a pattern documented in Dallas, Vancouver, and Toronto. A University of Texas at Dallas spatial analysis of Office of Arts and Culture grants found that zip codes where more than 30 percent of households live below the federal poverty line received 18 percent of project‑based awards while housing 37 percent of the population [UT Dallas, USA, 2022]. In Vancouver, organizations serving racialized youth obtained community arts grants 14 percent less often than organizations led by non‑racialized counterparts, after controlling for project size, according to a University of British Columbia study that audited three years of municipal funding decisions [UBC, Canada, 2023]. A Statistics Canada analysis of the 2021 General Social Survey showed that visible‑minority adults in Toronto reported attending live cultural performances at a rate 9 percentage points lower than non‑visible‑minority adults, and the gap widened among households earning under $40,000 [StatCan, Canada, 2023].
Funding volatility punishes historically excluded neighborhoods twice. When Boston’s overall cultural affairs budget contracted by 4.3 percent in fiscal 2021, the reduction in library branches located in Roxbury and Dorchester—areas with higher concentrations of Black and Latino residents—was 7.1 percent, a Harvard Kennedy School working paper documented by cross‑referencing branch‑level allocation memoranda with census tract demographics [Harvard Kennedy School, USA, 2023]. In Guadalajara, mobile cultural service hours to low‑income colonias fell by 40 percent over the same period [Municipio de Guadalajara, Mexico, 2022].
A teaching artist in Atlanta, interviewed for a Georgia State University study on arts education, described rewriting a community mural curriculum overnight after a one‑time mini‑grant disappeared. “I had to throw out six weeks of lesson plans when the funding didn’t come through,” the artist said. The micro‑grant had supported sessions for English‑learning middle schoolers at a Title I campus [Georgia State University, USA, 2023].
San Francisco spent $15.40. Houston spent $2.10.
Regulating expression in public space
The evidence from four Mexican host cities plus Los Angeles, Miami, and Philadelphia shows three things.
Municipal codes governing murals and uncommissioned street art range from permissive registries to blanket prohibitions that carry criminal infractions. Los Angeles Municipal Code Chapter 14 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; painting without a permit remains a misdemeanor [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]. Philadelphia’s Mural Arts Program, a city‑affiliated public‑private entity, operates under a mayoral directive that prioritizes projects engaging youth in foster care and returning citizens; an internal evaluation tracked that 68 percent of 2023 community murals were located in zip codes with above‑average poverty rates [City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, USA, 2023].
Enforcement data reveal a geography of sanction. A UCLA Luskin School study matched code enforcement records from 2017‑2022 with property‑value changes and found that citations for unpermitted murals in the gentrifying neighborhoods of Boyle Heights and Highland Park were issued at three times the citywide rate, even after adjusting for complaint volume [UCLA Luskin School, USA, 2024]. In Monterrey, researchers at Tecnológico de Monterrey documented that 76 percent of cleanup orders for “visual contamination” under the municipality’s image bylaw were issued in the low‑income barrios of Independencia and San Bernabé, while 37 large‑format commercial advertising walls in the wealthy municipality of San Pedro Garza García received no equivalent order [ITESM, Mexico, 2023].
Mandate and omission collide in the design of street art programs. Vancouver’s mural program requires that 20 percent of its annual commissions be created by artists who identify as Indigenous or as belonging to a racialized group, and an external equity review in 2024 confirmed that the target was met with 22 percent [City of Vancouver, Canada, 2024]. Kansas City’s municipal code regulates murals through a property‑owner‑consent and design‑review process but does not earmark funds for artists from equity‑denied communities, nor does it track the demographic profile of mural applicants [Kansas City, Missouri, Code of Ordinances, 2025]. The omission of a demographic‑tracking mechanism makes it impossible to know whether the permit process functions as a neutral administrative step or as a gatekeeper that filters out artists without the resources to navigate the city’s Art Commission.
A single mother in Miami’s Little Havana told a University of Miami researcher that the city’s rapid‑response graffiti abatement team painted over a mural her teenage son had completed with a neighborhood collective, leaving a blank wall and a $250 citation. The mural had not gone through the city’s Mural Review Board because the nearest public computer for filing an application was a 45‑minute bus ride away [University of Miami, USA, 2025]. The data on how often this scenario repeats are incomplete, but the case illustrates how enforcement without accessible application infrastructure becomes a barrier for families with limited mobility, limited English proficiency, or both.
San Francisco spent $15.40. Houston spent $2.10.
So far, data from San Francisco and Houston show opposite patterns, and the same administrative structure—a permit requirement with no dedicated access point—produces different outcomes in Kansas City and Vancouver.
Who tells the story
The evidence from nine U.S. public library systems in host cities, supplemented by provincial data from Ontario and British Columbia, shows three things.
Formal book challenges in public libraries rose sharply after 2021, and titles about sexual orientation, gender identity, and race constituted a majority of contested items. 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 percent targeted titles with LGBTQ+ themes or characters of color [University of South Carolina, USA, 2024]. New York Public Library’s Board of Trustees recorded 47 requests for reconsideration in 2023; 41 involved books with non‑white protagonists or queer narratives, according to the library’s publicly posted materials report [NYPL, USA, 2024].
Removal decisions correlate with the composition of library boards. A study in Library & Information Science Research examined 350 U.S. 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 Toronto and Vancouver because provincial law does not require centralized reporting of removal decisions. The nearest available substitute is a University of Toronto meta‑review of 60 Ontario library board minutes that documented 12 removals between 2018 and 2024, all 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].
Marginalized youth experience removals as a loss of safe information space. 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 percent of LGBTQ+ survey respondents reported that they stopped visiting the library for recreational reading, compared to 9 percent of non‑LGBTQ+ respondents [University of Miami, USA, 2025]. The sample was modest, so generalization requires caution.
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 the University of Toronto qualitative survey, fell on a caregiver with no car of her own and limited disposable time [University of Toronto, Canada, 2024].
The terms mandate, omission, and enforcement recur across the three policy arenas. A city council that mandates an anti‑discrimination clause in arts grants but omits an audit provision 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 preference. A street art ordinance that requires permits but assigns zero staff to process applications in neighborhoods with low internet connectivity becomes an omission by default.
San Francisco spent $15.40. Houston spent $2.10.
Institutional Capacity vs. On‑the‑Ground Reality
Written policies in the 16 host cities frequently commit to cultural equity. A peer‑reviewed content analysis of 22 municipal cultural plans—including those of Boston, Mexico City, New York, Toronto, and Vancouver—found that 19 contained language about “underserved communities” or “vulnerable groups” [Redaelli, E., Journal of Urban Affairs, USA, 2020]. But only 8 plans specified numeric targets for resource allocation, and just 5 published annual equity audits with disaggregated spending data.
Staffing levels reveal the gap between ambition and implementation. Los Angeles’ Department of Cultural Affairs employed 34 full‑time equivalents in 2023; Houston’s cultural affairs office had 7, although the two cities’ populations differ by about 25 percent [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 unchanged since 2018, even as the program expanded to six additional city departments [City of Boston, USA, 2024].
Library staffing ratios underscore the same dynamic. In 2023, Seattle had 8.1 library workers per 10,000 residents, Miami‑Dade had 4.2, and Dallas had 2.9 [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 average 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 populations and families with limited English proficiency rarer.
Standalone data table:
| City | Cultural affairs staff per 100,000 residents (2023) |
|---|---|
| Los Angeles, USA | 8.7 |
| Houston, USA | 2.9 |
[City of Los Angeles Budget, USA, 2023; City of Houston Budget, USA, 2023; U.S. Census Bureau population estimates, 2023]
The gap in human infrastructure compounds the gap in dollars. A resident of Houston’s Gulfton neighborhood, where 65 percent of households speak a language other than English at home, must navigate a cultural office with 7 total staff to find a bilingual arts program. A resident of West Los Angeles, by comparison, can contact a department with 34 staff and a dedicated grants portal that toggles among six languages.
The Periphery and the Center: Vancouver and Guadalajara
Vancouver and Guadalajara illustrate how municipal structure, not just wealth, shapes cultural access for historically excluded groups.
Vancouver operates a municipal cultural services division with a 2023 budget of CAD 45 million, funded through a mix of property‑tax revenue, provincial arts grants, and a percent‑for‑public‑art policy embedded in private development agreements. The city’s Making Space for Arts and Culture strategy, adopted in 2019, mandates that 20 percent of all cultural‑facility capital funding support organizations led by Indigenous, Black, or people of color communities; compliance is audited annually [City of Vancouver, Canada, 2024]. The Vancouver Public Library’s Central Branch runs a dedicated Indigenous Storyteller in Residence program, and the city’s street art program tracks artist demographics and publishes an equity dashboard. Library material challenges are rare: British Columbia’s Library Act requires that removal decisions be made in open board meetings, a structural transparency rule that, research suggests, reduces informal censorship [University of British Columbia, Canada, 2021].
Guadalajara relies on a more centralized state and federal funding model. The federal PACMyC program disburses small grants directly to community collectives, bypassing municipal authorities; in 2023, Guadalajara‑based groups received MXN 8.4 million (approximately USD 480,000) through PACMyC, while the municipal Dirección de Cultura allocated MXN 23 million for all cultural programming [Gobierno de Jalisco, Mexico, 2023]. The municipal government does not operate a dedicated public art percent‑for‑art ordinance, nor does it publish a cultural equity audit. Street art is channeled to designated walls in tourist‑zone colonias; artists working in the southern periphery report that requests for murals depicting local Indigenous identity receive no municipal response [ITESM, Mexico, 2023]. Library collections are not subject to formal challenge tracking; INEGI’s cultural module asks about total holdings but not about removals, making comparisons of intellectual access impossible [INEGI, Mexico, 2025].
Vancouver’s dedicated revenue streams and audit requirements create a structural enforcement loop. Guadalajara’s reliance on annual transfers and the absence of a local earmark make cultural funding pro‑cyclical: during fiscal contractions, mobile library services to the southern colonias and grants to independent community arts groups are the first items cut. The omission is not in the language of the municipal cultural plan—Guadalajara’s 2018 Plan Municipal de Cultura mentions “inclusión” 22 times—but in the legal instruments that would turn that language into an enforceable budget mandate.
This finding does not favor one policy position over another. It notes that different governance structures distribute vulnerability differently when revenues shrink.
Evidence Gaps and Next Steps
Comparative analysis across the 16 host cities confronts three persistent data gaps. Uniform reporting standards do not exist for street art enforcement, cultural participation by disability status at the city level, or book removals outside the United States. U.S. cities report library expenditures to IMLS using consistent definitions; Canadian provinces use slightly different categories; Mexican municipal cultural spending is tracked under a single “funciones de cultura” code that does not separate library materials from general cultural promotion. Street art citation data exist only where researchers have filed public records requests; no central repository aggregates permit volumes, abatement orders, or artist demographics.
The Miami survey of LGBTQ+ adolescents drew from 400 respondents recruited through social service agencies, likely over‑sampling families connected to support systems. The University of Toronto qualitative study had 46 participants. Available evidence suggests, though sample sizes are small, that book removals exert a chilling effect on library use by marginalized young people, but the magnitude cannot yet be generalized.
How cultural policies affect informal workers, refugees, people with chronic health conditions, and other populations with heightened vulnerability is nearly absent from the quantitative record. Vancouver’s mural equity audit and Philadelphia’s Mural Arts impact report are the only instruments that systematically collect artist socioeconomic data; neither follows participants over time to track employment or health outcomes.
3 Questions for further research
- What are the year‑over‑year rates of public library card renewal in neighborhoods where book removals have been concentrated, disaggregated by household language and income?
- How do street art citation rates change in neighborhoods that receive a city‑funded community mural program compared to demographically similar neighborhoods that do not?
- Does the presence of a dedicated percent‑for‑art ordinance with an equity mandate reduce the spatial concentration of public art in high‑income areas over a five‑year period?
4 Key takeaways
- Per‑capita municipal cultural spending in the 16 host cities varied by more than a factor of seven in 2023, with the steepest disparities appearing between cities that have dedicated revenue streams and those that rely on annual general‑fund appropriations.
- Street art enforcement is spatially patterned; neighborhoods with accelerating property values receive more citations, 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, and the likelihood of removal increases when library board members are appointed by officials connected to ideological advocacy organizations.
- Institutional capacity—measured by cultural affairs staff per 100,000 residents and library workers per 10,000 residents—explains much of the gap between equity language in municipal plans and the programming hours that reach low‑income neighborhoods.
1 Policy or practice recommendation
Policymakers may consider coupling any increase in cultural affairs funding with a requirement to publish branch‑ or neighborhood‑level equity dashboards that report programming hours, grant distribution, and collection diversity by the socioeconomic profile of the service area. Such dashboards would not dictate allocations but would make the enforcement of existing equity mandates observable and open to legislative review.
This report does not claim that increased cultural funding alone erases structural inequities; it shows only that where accountability mechanisms are absent, well‑worded mandates tend to bypass the communities they name.
Citations
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