26. Graffiti

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Economics of Everyday Things – Episode 26: "Graffiti"

Date: March 30, 2026
Host: Zachary Crockett (Freakonomics Network)
Notable Guests:

• Repose (Philadelphia graffiti artist)
• Tommy Conway (Director, Community Life Improvement Program - CLIP, Philadelphia)
• Jane Golden (Executive Director, Mural Arts Philadelphia)

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the economic, cultural, and civic dimensions of urban graffiti, using Philadelphia as a case study. Crockett examines graffiti’s evolution from illegal expression to city-sanctioned street art, the enormous costs cities incur in its removal, how some cities have embraced murals as public benefit, and the continued tensions between artists, government, and communities.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Origins and Artist Perspective

• Repose’s Story (01:25)

  • Began noticing graffiti as a young teen in West Philadelphia, inspired by seeing tags out train windows.
  • Learned techniques from watching older artists paint:

    “I was just soaking it all in ... the way that they would use their body to make certain lines, different techniques...” (Repose, 02:00)

  • Chose the name "Repo" after tagging an abandoned house and feeling like the “repo man” taking things left behind. (02:55)

• Graffiti Styles Unique to Philadelphia

  • Emphasis on “wickets,” a tall, elongated local style originated by Notorious Bick:

    “Once you master the wickets ... people know, oh, this person is definitely from Philadelphia.” (Repose, 03:42)

2. Evolution of Graffiti in Philadelphia

• Historical Context (04:01)

  • Philadelphia claims roots as the birthplace of modern graffiti, notably with Cornbread (Darryl McCrae) in the 1960s.
  • Initial reaction from city officials was punitive—viewing graffiti as linked to gang activity and urban blight.

• Cost and Scale of Graffiti Removal

  • Tommy Conway details the formation and growth of the city's removal efforts:

    “We started with just 12 employees and a half million dollar budget ... We removed graffiti from 3,000 properties and street fixtures in our first year. Now we're at about 185,000.” (05:09–05:34)

  • Philadelphia spends $3M yearly on cleanup; the U.S. spends ~$12B annually. (05:51)
  • Removal is relentless, averaging 500 surfaces a day.

• Policy Justifications

  • Conway’s rationale:

    “When you have graffiti in your community, it's a sign that folks don't care ... So cleaning it up was very good for business.” (06:56)

  • Argues graffiti unchecked can foster decay and decline in neighborhoods.

• Exceptions to Cleanup

  • Some pieces are left up, often community-endorsed or memorials.

    “If it’s in memorial of somebody, we'll work with the police department and give the family time ... There’s a couple locations ... the community didn't care and it was very colorful. So we left it there and it's still there to this day.” (07:46–08:29)

3. The Artist Code and Spaces for Expression

• Artist Ethics (08:37)

  • Repose and peers avoid certain types of property:

    “One of the main rules is you don't write on people's personal property, like cars and churches ... You would want to hit like abandoned places.”

• Graffiti Pier (09:00)

  • A well-known, unofficial space for practice and art, un-policed and covered in layers of tags and pieces.
  • Has become a local landmark for both artists and tourists.

4. Cities Embracing Street Art

• Philadelphia's Mural Arts Program (12:25)

  • Early 1980s: Transition from strict removal to engagement, led by Jane Golden.
  • Golden set out to understand graffiti writers and offered an alternative—city-funded murals:

    "I started talking to graffiti writers ... trying to figure out how we could design a program that would be palatable and not punitive. ... There's a lot of talent out there." (Jane Golden, 12:44)

  • Faced initial resistance from both artists—“desire to live outside the system”—and the formal art world:

    “You all are not doing public art. And I’d be like, well, we’re in public doing art, so what do you think we’re doing?” (Jane Golden, 13:31)

• Program Results

  • Over 4,000 murals; Philly now seen as top U.S. city for street art (USA Today).
  • Research (Yale, 2015) showed murals can have positive mental health effects on both artists and neighbors.

5. Artist Ambivalence Toward Mural Arts

• Complex Feelings Among Artists (14:32)

  • Repose has worked with Mural Arts, but notes controversies:

    “Why do they put certain murals in certain areas? Is it for gentrification reasons? ... Are they really beautifying the city? Or is mural arts using people of color to capitalize off of what they do as an art?” (Repose, 14:32)

  • Financial disparity:

    • Murals can cost $25,000–50,000, but only $3,000–$10,000 is shared among artists.
    • Repose made $1,200 for a mural, far less than what he earns in private commissions (up to $60,000).

    "If I go get a wall on my own, I can make 40,000, 60,000 ... so there's definitely a big difference." (Repose, 15:42)

6. Did the City’s Efforts Solve the Problem?

• Mixed Results

  • Removal and mural programs reduced unauthorized graffiti—until Covid.
  • Graffiti spiked during the pandemic as people, “stuck home,” turned to tagging.

    “The pandemic created a whole new breed of graffiti vandal because people were stuck home. They were bored.” (Tommy Conway, 16:36)

  • City eventually regained control, but artists like Repose say graffiti writers are “winning big time.” (16:55)

• Optimism and the Perpetual Struggle

  • Conway's tongue-in-cheek rallying cry:

    “I like to just tell the guys we have more paint than they do.” (Tommy Conway, 17:09)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Repose (on artist code):

  “You don’t write on people’s personal property, like cars and churches. ... You would want to hit like abandoned places.” (08:37)

• Tommy Conway (on the scale of removal):

  “We removed graffiti from 3,000 properties and street fixtures in our first year. Now we're at about 185,000.” (05:09–05:34)

• Jane Golden (on bridging art worlds):

  “We’re in public doing art, so what do you think we’re doing?” (13:31)

• Repose (on the business of graffiti):

  “If I go get a wall on my own, I can make 40,000, 60,000 … so there’s definitely a big difference.” (15:42)

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Important Timestamps

• 01:25 – Repose tells his graffiti origin story
• 05:05 – Tommy Conway introduces CLIP and graffiti removal logistics
• 06:56 – Discussion of graffiti’s impact on community perceptions
• 07:46 – Exceptions made in graffiti removal (memorials, community-approved art)
• 08:37 – Repose explains graffiti artists’ code of conduct
• 12:44 – Jane Golden recounts efforts to create a mural arts program
• 14:32 – Repose discusses complications of mural art and gentrification
• 15:42 – Comparison of pay between city murals and private commissions
• 16:21 – Covid-19’s effect on graffiti rates
• 17:09 – Conway’s “more paint than they do” morale booster

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Episode Tone and Takeaways

The episode balances skeptical civic perspectives with the vivid, personal experiences of street artists. It treats graffiti both as an urban cost and a form of artistic self-expression, highlighting the grey areas between vandalism and celebrated public art. Both city officials and artists wrestle with graffiti’s persistent allure and its complicated role in shaping the urban experience.

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Transcript

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[Zachary Crockett]

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[Repose (Philadelphia Graffiti Artist)]

When I was younger, I would say like around 13 or 14, I would get on a train and as I would look out the window, I would see a bunch of graffiti, mainly tags. It kind of intrigued me. Later on, like as I got older, I wanted to do it too. I go by repos and I'm a Philadelphia graffiti artist.

[Zachary Crockett]

Repose grew up in West Philadelphia. In high school, he began immersing himself in the city's graffiti culture, learning everything he could. He watched other artists as they painted.

[Repose (Philadelphia Graffiti Artist)]

I was just soaking it all in because they were focused on their piece. I would just watch their arm movements, the way that they would use their body to like make certain lines, different techniques and stuff like that. That's kind of how I picked it up.

[Zachary Crockett]

But as repos would learn, not everybody sees the poetry and graffiti. Where one person sees a liberating form of public art, another sees a nuisance, one that costs cities millions of dollars a year.

[Tommy Conway]

Beauty's in the eye of the beholder. And my thing is that's great, but you can't do it on someone else's property.

[Zachary Crockett]

For the Freakonomics radio network, this is the economics of everyday things. I'm Zachary Crockett. Graffiti Most graffiti artists have an origin story for their name, and Repose is no exception.

[Repose (Philadelphia Graffiti Artist)]

When I was younger, I used to do mischief stuff like going into abandoned buildings. This one place was like an abandoned house and there was some spray paint in the basement. And I started, you know, just Tagging on the walls and stuff. And then we were taking some stuff that was left over or whatever. So I was just writing repo cause I felt like I was the repo man.

[Zachary Crockett]

Repo started out by tagging his name, but soon he began doing what are known as pieces, which are larger and more elaborate creations. He says that every city has its own unique graffiti style. And in Philadelphia, that style is called wickets. It was originated by a guy called Notorious Bick.

[Repose (Philadelphia Graffiti Artist)]

He created this technique where you would have just a regular tag, but you elongated to make it like a tall tag. Right. And once you master the wickets, when you just put it up on the wall just one time, people know, oh, this person is definitely from Philadelphia.

[Zachary Crockett]

Repose comes from a long local tradition. In fact, most experts agree that Philly is where graffiti art originated. With an artist named Darryl McCrae. He started spraying walls in the 1960s under the moniker Cornbread. When the media wrongly reported that he had died in a gang related shooting, he tagged Cornbread on an elephant at the Philadelphia zoo just to prove he was alive and well. Before Cornbread, most graffiti in Philadelphia was gang related. But he inspired a new generation of artists who were in it for individual recognition. City hall did not take kindly to all of this graffiti. In the 1980s, the mayor's office established the anti graffiti network. It later splintered into two different agencies. One of those became the community life improvement program, also known as CLIP.

[Tommy Conway]

We started with just 12 employees and a half million dollar budget, and we created what was called zero tolerance zones.

[Zachary Crockett]

That's Tommy Conway. He's run the program since the very beginning.

[Tommy Conway]

We started on Broad street, which is our major thoroughfare in the city, and at Spring Garden, worked our way north. But every day we would go back and any new re tags of graffiti would be cleaned within 24 hours. After we did Broad street, then we worked on Germantown Avenue. It just snowballed from there. We removed graffiti from 3,000 properties and street fixtures in our first year. Now we're at about 185,000.

[Zachary Crockett]

185,000 surfaces a year.

[Tommy Conway]

Properties and street fixtures. Street fixtures are street furniture, like the poles, the signs, benches. Wow.

[Zachary Crockett]

All right, so we're talking like 500 a day.

[Tommy Conway]

Yeah. Just imagine if we weren't doing it.

[Zachary Crockett]

Conway says the city spends around $3 million a year removing graffiti from buildings, street signs, highway underpasses, and other conspicuous locations. Of course, Philly isn't the only city that deals with graffiti. In Austin, Texas, the annual cleanup bill is around half a million dollars. In San Francisco, it's 20 million. Most estimates suggest that altogether the US spends around $12 billion annually on graffiti cleanup.

[Tommy Conway]

Quick removal is our biggest deterrent. When they put it up there, we try and get it down within a couple days and we've been pretty successful at that.

[Zachary Crockett]

The services that Clip provides are free. You just call the local non emergency complaint line to file a graffiti report. And Conway sends one of his 14 in house crews to clean it up. Other big cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles handle graffiti removal in much the same way. It's become a necessary city service, and Conway says the work has benefited everyone.

[Tommy Conway]

When you have graffiti in your community, it's a sign that folks don't care. And lawlessness and graffiti unchecked breeds other graffiti. So we just continue and then creates trash and litter and the sense of hopelessness. So cleaning it up was very good for business.

[Zachary Crockett]

Some reports have suggested that graffiti leads to reduced retail sales, declines in property value, and lost revenue from less ridership on transit systems. There isn't a lot of hard data to back up those assertions, but Conway takes them to heart. He says that last year clip received around 30,000 calls for graffiti removal and that they take down pretty much everything that gets reported. Only a few exceptions are made.

[Tommy Conway]

Sometimes if there's an issue with the graffiti, for instance, if it's in memorial of somebody, we'll work with the police department and give the family time. We'll leave it up there for a couple weeks until after the burial. Then we would take it down. That's one instance. And the other ones are if it's on the top of the center city building and the graffiti is not the major issue, but someone's getting on your roof, so that's more of a safety concern for them. There's a couple locations. One that pops in my head is like off of 5th street where it was a junkyard, that the entire wall was many different pieces and the community didn't care and it was very colorful. So we left it there and it's still there to this day.

[Zachary Crockett]

Repose says that most graffiti artists follow an informal code of conduct when it comes to choosing a location for their art.

[Repose (Philadelphia Graffiti Artist)]

One of the main rules is you don't write on people's personal property, you know, like cars and churches. You don't go over things of that sort. You would want to hit like abandoned places.

[Zachary Crockett]

In Philadelphia, one of those abandoned places is Graffiti Pier on the banks of the Delaware River. It's on the underside of a vacant railway spur. And what you see is row after row of concrete support columns in Technicolor. A place where street artists can paint without worrying about rules. Tags, cover tags, cover pieces, cover tags.

[Repose (Philadelphia Graffiti Artist)]

It's really something I went to pretty much practice. But I wanted my name to live, so I put my name up high. All over Graffiti Pearl Graffiti Pier has

[Zachary Crockett]

become a popular destination not just for artists, but for Instagrammers and tourists. The city of Philadelphia has taken note of this popularity and it's been working on another approach to graffiti, one that treats it as a benefit rather than a cost. That's coming up. The Economics of Everyday Things is sponsored by crowdstreet. You're the kind of person who reads the fine print, who likes to make your own calls, who's built a life, not to mention a career, by thinking independently. So why shouldn't you invest that way too? Crowdstreet is built for self directed investors who want direct access to private market opportunities like private equity, private credit and real estate. Vetted offerings, transparent data and clear diligence summaries help you make confident, informed choices. Because independence doesn't stop at your desk or your business or your weekend projects, it should extend to your investments too. Invest the way you live independently. Learn [e-mail].

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[Zachary Crockett]

In the early 1980s, Philadelphia's approach to graffiti was mostly punitive and focused on removal. But the city realized that something positive could come out of this public art. So they brought in a young artist named Jane golden to convince taggers to paint city funded murals instead.

[Jane Golden]

I started talking to graffiti writers, trying to understand why they wrote on walls and trying to figure out how we could design a program that would be palatable and not punitive. Because I was really taken by a lot of the graffiti art I saw around the city, and it was sort of reminiscent of abstract expressionism to me. So I felt like, oh, there's a lot of talent out there.

[Zachary Crockett]

At first, she met resistance from graffiti artists.

[Jane Golden]

There were a contingent of young people that just wouldn't sign up for that. I'd meet them wherever they wanted to meet, behind a rec center, like a corner store. And so I had a connection to the broader graffiti world, and I think I understood that rebellion and the desire to live outside the system.

[Zachary Crockett]

And the challenge didn't stop there.

[Jane Golden]

Then the resistance came from the formal part of the art world, because people would say to me, you all are not doing public art. And I'd be like, well, we're in public doing art, so what do you think we're doing?

[Zachary Crockett]

Goldin eventually convinced both sides that street art could add value to the city. Today, she's the executive director of Mural Arts Philadelphia, the largest public art program in the country. By most accounts, Mural arts has been a success. The city now has around 4,000 murals. And earlier this year, USA Today designated Philly the best city in America for street art. In 2015, the Yale School of Medicine published a study showing positive effects on the mental health of both the artists and the neighbors where such projects were installed. But artists like Repose say that while the program has done meaningful work, things are complicated.

[Repose (Philadelphia Graffiti Artist)]

I've done murals with mural art, so I kind of play both sides. I don't mind working with them. I don't feel like it's selling out. My thing is, why do they put certain murals in certain areas? Is it for gentrification reasons? Because it just seems like that for me sometimes and for a lot of graph writers, especially, because it goes into, like, a racial kind of thing. So you do have black people who write and you have white people who write. But what are the murals really for? Are they really beautifying the city? Or is mural arts using people of color to capitalize off of what they do as an art mural.

[Zachary Crockett]

Arts says it budgets anywhere from 25,000 to $50,000 to make a mural. Depending on the size and the scope of the work, around 3,000 to 10,000 of that is shared between the artists. Repos says he took home around $1,200 when he painted a mural at the program. That's much less than the fees he says he's earned on the open market, where some businesses use street art to draw customers.

[Repose (Philadelphia Graffiti Artist)]

If I go get a wall on my own, I can make 40,000, 60,000, depending, you know, so there's definitely a big difference. I've worked with Footlocker. I've worked with regular residential people, but for the most part, I just reach out to people in the community.

[Zachary Crockett]

Now the big question here is whether or not the city's efforts have led to a decrease in Philadelphia's graffiti problem. The answer is sort of the combination of removal crews and the mural program seemed to be working well for a while. And then Covid happened.

[Jane Golden]

Since COVID graffiti in our city has gone up, and our underpass walls in particular are vulnerable to graffiti. And this is a puzzle for me, right? Because for so long, it was not the case.

[Zachary Crockett]

Tommy Conway of Clip has a theory.

[Tommy Conway]

The pandemic created a whole new breed of graffiti vandal because people were stuck home. They were bored. It took us probably a good two years to get it back under control to where it is today.

[Zachary Crockett]

Repose says that these days, he and his fellow graffiti artists are again outmatched.

[Repose (Philadelphia Graffiti Artist)]

They're winning big time.

[Zachary Crockett]

And whenever Tommy Conway's removal crews feel like they're up against an impossible task, he likes to remind them of a simple fact.

[Tommy Conway]

I like to just tell the guys we have more paint than they do.

[Zachary Crockett]

For the economics of everyday things, I'm Zachary Crockett. This episode was produced by Julie Kanfer and Sarah Lilly with help from Lyric Bowdich. It was mixed by Jeremy Johnston.

[Tommy Conway]

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[Zachary Crockett]

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[Tommy Conway]

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