The economics are rapidly becoming impossible for your favorite street festival

Chicago has dubbed itself a city of neighborhoods, and during the summer, each one seemingly tries to outdo the others with its own street festival. 

The Wicker Park Fest, celebrating its 21st year the weekend of July 25, will be a massive undertaking along Milwaukee Avenue, the main thoroughfare of this gentrified neighborhood near the northwest side. The three-day event, which costs $600,000 or so to produce, will include more than 100 vendors, dozens of local stores, and two stages of musical acts — last year’s lineup included Jamila Woods, Superdrag, and a tent for house DJs. 

It’s also under threat, said Pamela Maass, executive director of the Wicker Park Bucktown Chamber of Commerce, which puts on the annual event. 

Last year, for the first time ever, the festival didn’t make any money. The event saw its voluntary gate donations drop by half. A group of other Chicago organizations, now united under the Save Our Street Fests Coalition, tells similar stories. The loss of those funds, plus rapidly rising costs across the board, have made the economics of these events harder than ever. Even the rate for water barrels used to secure tents has gone up by a third. 

“We’re a nonprofit, so we’re pretty used to running thin budgets,” Maass said. “But negative budgets can’t work.”

The world of neighborhood street festivals, craft fairs, and events is a sprawling, decentralized economy of pop-up tents, fried food, local bands — and, as vendors and organizers will tell you, rising costs. A surge of interest in in-person events after the peak of the pandemic, as well as a desire to get neighborhoods and real estate on the map, have led to a spike in the number of street fairs across the country, including more diverse cultural and culinary events. In Seattle, for instance, the number of special event permits has tripled in recent years, from a low of 43 in 2021 to 118 last year.

“Community festivals are now becoming their own industry,” said Tim Ward, founder of Interact Event Productions, which produces Fourth of July parades, Founders Day celebrations, car shows, and other city events.

But whether it’s a food truck fest or an arts and crafts fair, everything is getting more expensive. Kahl Muscott, administrator of the Auburn Recreation District, located outside of Sacramento, California, and known for its Grateful Dead music fest, said all costs are going up: staff, security, bands, stage rentals, even the price of beer. He’s seeing long-running festivals in the area close or take a pause due to celebration inflation. Maass agrees, saying staffing is a killer; volunteers are few and far between, meaning more positions need to be hired, another hit on the budget.

Part of the problem with the influx of street fests is that organizers overcharge vendors for booth fees, said Julian Garcia, operations manager for Houston’s Esplanade, a downtown thoroughfare that hosts weekly markets and festivals. Add in permitting costs for food vendors and it becomes more challenging to walk away with a profit. 

Rates for power equipment, rentals, and permits have gone up 15% to 40% since 2020, Brandon Treadway, founder of Portland-based Treadway Events, said. The agency produces small street fests and neighborhood events, handling everything from permitting and marketing to operations and cleanup.

“Pre-Covid, we could do a community festival for $20,000, and that included marketing,” Treadway said. “We’d get a few sponsors and it was still profitable for the organization. Now, it’s $75,000 or $80,000, and that’s bare bones.”

The street festival sector has grown for a number of reasons, according to Mark Wilson, a professor of urban and regional planning at Michigan State University. Communities looking to revitalize or grow local businesses saw the value in promoting walkability and urban vitality, and real estate interests saw the benefit in marketing their region. The Covid-era push for more outdoor socialization also showcased new possibilities in creating instant, communal outdoor space. 

A good way to grasp the rising cost of street festivals is tents. In the past, larger events and festivals would pay to put up massive tents to cover the crowds and vendors. Brian Richardson, who founded L&A Tent Rentals in 1986 in a suburb of Princeton, New Jersey, breaks it down like so: think about a series of large tents like the one you’d install for a kid’s birthday party. For a Sunday event, you typically can’t start setting up tents until 8 p.m. or later on Saturday after the street is closed — which means expenses for the municipality or chamber sponsoring the event — and they need to be fully erected hours before the fair starts so vendors have time to set up. (In some larger cities like New York, tents get set up and removed the same day.) Setup means a staff of about 40, who need to bring in tractors, trucks, and heavy weights to hold tents, since you can’t stake them in, and then also take it all down when the event is over. Richardson says a large tent that can hold roughly 40 vendors costs a festival approximately $50,000, which gets passed on to vendors as fees. 

“You can’t be charging someone trying to sell home-sourced honey that much just for space under a tent, right?” Richardson said. 

That high cost is why he’s doing fewer of these events, and why today’s vendors and food providers bring their own cheaper, smaller pop-up tents. But they’ll still need to pay a fee to rent the space, often around $1,200. Wicker Park fest charges $1,428 per spot for an independent merchant. 

That leads to a landscape of similar-sized tents lining city streets all summer long. Then there are costs associated with security, street closures, and pop-up toilets. To cut expenses, some cities have bought their own infrastructure. Richardson says that dynamic explains the proliferation of holiday festivals, as seen in neighborhoods like Bryant Park or Union Square in New York City. Municipalities or local business districts can purchase the Bavarian village-type structures — small, cozy wooden sheds with shingled roofs — which are easier and cheaper to set up, and reuse them year after year. 

Richardson said he’s seen the number of small food vendors decrease by half over the past decade. What used to be a great side hustle is simply hard to sustain, with grueling hours on weekends, waking up early to prepare, and staying till late in the evening to close down. 

At the same time that increased costs have sidelined some small vendors, corporate entities have become an increasing presence at street fairs. With the declining efficacy of online advertising, in-person contacts and interactions, targeted by ZIP code, can make a big difference. For banks, realtors, phone companies, and home repair and service firms, it’s as simple as setting up and staffing a small tent. Richardson says that at a festival he supplies in Morristown, NJ, about 1 in 5 of the tents are realtors or accountants looking to drum up business. 

“The days of the Yellow Pages are obviously over, and SEO is pretty expensive,” he said. The rising rates of online ads, or cost-per-click inflation, jumped 7% last year alone, per Google data. “You get 20,000 people walking through a street festival on a weekend. That’s a pretty good bang for your buck.”

Garcia, who produces events in Houston, said corporations constantly try to find space at his events because they’re drawn to the cheapest form of advertising: a few staffers in a booth handing out cards. Once they see the attendance numbers at big festivals, “they’re all going to try and get in on it.”

“I had a guy selling shingles trying to get space at an artisan food market,” he said. “I had to explain it really wasn’t the right place for it.” 

Interest in sponsorships for events has climbed in the last two years, Treadway said. National brands, especially insurance companies and banks like Capital One and Chase, want to get involved, and beverage brands like Topo Chico will show up to hand out free samples. But recently, overall sponsorship dollars have dwindled; like so many other parts of the economy, uncertainty has caused potential sponsors to tighten their purse strings. 

The festival circuit is also reckoning with more existential challenges. Organizers need to consider the effects of climate change, as higher temperatures have pushed more summer events to late spring and early fall, clogging the calendar in those months. Additionally, the craft industry in particular is grappling with rising material costs because of tariffs, especially with the rescinding of the de minimis exemption. Abby Glassenberg, cofounder and president of the Craft Industry Alliance, said the industry is just starting to see how this hurts the craft circuit, which really kicks off in the summer and during the holidays. It’s a hardship all sectors expect to face in the coming months. 

“Most vendors source component pieces from China,” Glassenberg said. “Whether it’s handmade by us or it’s a kit for others to make something handmade, tariffs will make those prices go up. Many are seeing whopping tariff bills, way above the cost of the items, already.”

There’s also what some might consider danger in big crowds. Kevin Vasquez, who runs Made in the Shade rentals in Sacramento, said he’s seeing some Hispanic-focused events pull back due to fear of immigration crackdowns. Chicago’s popular Little Village Cinco De Mayo event was canceled for this reason.

For better or worse, Richardson said, the festival circuit offers an economic barometer for the nation.

“If people are uncertain about the economy, uncertain about buying those homemade mittens, that’s going to be a challenge,” he said. “Vendors only care about one thing, and that’s the number of people that are coming through the door. If they don’t have faith that they’re going to get enough eyes on their product, they aren’t giving up their weekend.”

Patrick Sisson is a reporter covering cities, technology, and business.