The arts are facing a real-estate crisis. Here are four ways artists are trying to fix it | Canada Voices

When newcomers arrive at Montreal’s Bain Mathieu for concerts, circus performances, plays, dance parties and even Muay Thai matches, they’re often startled. The former bathhouse lives up to its name not just in spirit, but in form. Unfolding before visitors’ eyes is a long-ago-drained pool filled with people and, often, a stage. “You can play with the perspective so much,” Noëmie Lachapelle, the venue’s director, said this past fall.

Enveloping the stage that evening was an inflatable bandshell. These kinds of bespoke blow-up structures are the signature of Bain Mathieu’s owner, the Société de promotion des arts gigantesques (SPAG), and during recent events, the half-dome served as a screen for 360-degree projections to augment the performances around it.

Its staff are constantly seeking ways such as this to enhance both visitors’ experiences and artists’ opportunities. The long-time artistic haven of Montreal is now catching up with Toronto and Vancouver’s real estate crises, pushing up rent prices and edging out alternative spaces. Bain Mathieu, which offers its space to artists for free, is increasingly a counterweight to these trends.

“We always say that it’s a dream factory,” Lachapelle said from the floor of the pool, as comedians and comedy fans passed by, carrying chairs to set up for an improv show. “You can arrive with the crazy idea here, and we’re going to help you figure it out.”

Already often at the lower end of Canada’s income spectrum, and facing the same rising real estate costs as all Canadians, artists and arts organizations across Canada are struggling to hold on to performance, rehearsal and studio spaces. While organizations that provide figures to the Canadian Arts Data system reported a slight decrease in real estate costs in real terms between the 2019-20 and 2022-23 fiscal years, their total costs have surged – at a rate of nearly 38 per cent, well beyond the rate of inflation.

It’s a tight squeeze to afford space to create. And it might get tighter, especially as the older, often industrial buildings that once served as oases are falling to redevelopment, while new-build spaces come with new-build markups.

At the same time, this creativity is generating creative solutions. The front lines of the arts’ real estate crisis are filled with artists themselves finding ways to find, create and sustain space – from holding performances in pools to finding alternative financial products. Here are four ways the Canadian arts sector is trying to save its spaces.

Alternative spaces

Built in the 1930s as a bathhouse for Montrealers at the east end of the Ville-Marie borough, Bain Mathieu was shuttered in 1990 and lay vacant for years. SPAG struck a deal with the city to take possession in 1998 to use it as a workshop for its inflatable artworks – but soon came to realize it could also play home to raves on the artists’ off-days.

“The more people who realized we existed, the more people were asking to come,” says SPAG’s founder, René Jacques. A few years later, his team decided to make Bain Mathieu a full-time event venue.

These kind of spaces are necessary as traditional venues become harder to access and more expensive. In today’s real estate crunch, “people are less shy to ask for it,” Lachapelle says.

The venue-less Imago Theatre company was already familiar with Montreal’s high venue demand when it started seeking space for the world premiere of Gabrielle Chapdelaine’s The Retreat in 2023. So it sought to stage the play, about a purgatory-like place for people who want to leave this world, somewhere that felt like a “non-space,” says artistic and executive director Krista Jackson. Bain Mathieu turned out to be a perfect fit.

Working with such an alternative space, she says, can add new layers to the art: “It can widen the experience and help people be in conversation with the city, not just the play.”

Some organizations, such as Akin Collective in Toronto, have long sought to find short-term studios in “meanwhile” spaces, where there’s a gap between leases or time before a building gets redeveloped. The immersive theatre company Outside the March has spent years putting on shows in unconventional spaces in that city.

Even as its own costs have risen over the years – including renting equipment and space for each production – Outside the March has spent years building relationships with landlords and developers who are game to make fun, immersive performances financially viable. This month, the company also revealed a $500,000 gift from the Hilary and Galen Weston Foundation as it announced a fundraiser to buy its own production equipment and seating.

The company has held a rave-themed production in a former Bombardier office in postindustrial north Toronto and an escape-room-based show in a shuttered video store. “It’s harder for so many reasons to produce theatre now,” says creative producer Griffin McInnes. Working in these spaces “can be more of a logistical lift, but it’s a creative no-brainer.”

Land trusts

In 2017, the board of 221A, a non-profit that operates 140,000 square feet of cultural spaces around Vancouver, decided to study land trusts as a way to bring its tenants more long-term security than traditional 10-to-15-year leases.

Vancouver has long faced affordability challenges, but late last decade was a time of great concern for artists in the city: The Eastside Culture Crawl Society found in 2019 that about 83 per cent of the artists with studios in its neighbourhood faced “imminent” threats of displacement because of property development.

By that year, 221A was already developing recommendations for how a land trust might be a solution. Its staff and consultants studied other cities’ models such as London’s Creative Land Trust and the San Francisco Bay Area’s Community Arts Stabilization Trust, which were using grants and donations to buy up property or secure extremely long-term leases to provide spaces for artists at affordable rents – assuring that the creative community didn’t need to worry about being displaced.

When 221A executive director Brian McBay and his team put out feelers about a land trust around the local arts sector, the idea was met with great enthusiasm. They’ve since set up a non-profit society called Cultural Land Trust and begun seeking $15-million in seed funding from governments – hoping to own six properties by 2027 and 30 by 2050.

And that’s if they only focus on Vancouver itself. British Columbia has commissioned 221A to work on a proposal on what sustainable arts infrastructure might look like for the whole province. If government seed money can be secured, McBay and his team hope to court philanthropists to come to their cause.

One trend they identified in their research that might compel governments to pony up is how inefficient grant programs for artists can be in today’s real estate market.

“We realized that rental costs continued to escalate, while grants don’t even meet inflationary change, so you had a bigger share of grant money going to private landlords,” McBay says. “You could recycle those funds back into the arts sector if someone could put up financing to get properties out of the speculative real estate market.”

Community bonds

The Halifax non-profit community arts centre RadStorm moved into its current location on Gottingen Street in 2018 with an explicit plan for the future: The collective of organizations that share the space would eventually buy the building.

Not only that, but the landlords agreed to sell them the building at its 2018 price, $450,000, even well after 2018 – a fortuitous situation, given the gentrification of their North End neighbourhood, which was egged on by real estate values in the city surging during the COVID-19 pandemic’s early years.

It’s not exactly easy for a DIY collective to secure a mortgage, though. The organizations that share RadStorm’s space – among them a screen-printing studio, a zine library and a music collective that offers all-ages concerts and practice space – tried raising money to buy the building by asking for donations at their regular events. But that alone wasn’t enough. “Every year we would still not have enough money,” says Hannah Wood, RadStorm’s outreach and sales lead.

This July, the collective began raising money with a different approach: community bonds. They hope to raise $350,000 through the bonds, which, combined with individual donations and government grants, would give them a total of $500,000 to cover the building’s purchase price, closing costs and taxes.

Paying local bondholders instead of a landlord or a mortgage can help keep RadStorm’s fate in its own hands, while investors can keep money in their community while generating annual returns.

Investors can buy two-, three- or six-year bonds ranging in price from $1,000 to $10,000, with annual interest payments of 2.5 per cent to 3.5 per cent. The collective has raised $163,500 so far.

“It’s an important investment for anyone in Nova Scotia who wants a place like us to exist – especially if your concern is about youth,” Wood says. “If you don’t give kids places to be, it just means they’re getting in trouble where you can’t see them.”

RadStorm is working with Tapestry Community Capital to run the community-bond campaign. Founded in 1998 to support renewable-energy projects in Toronto, it’s since helped non-profits and co-operatives raise more than $100-million. Between 2002 and March, 2024, 16.7 per cent of community bonds across Canada have been issued by the arts and culture sector, Tapestry says.

“These organizations have a big community of artists, performers and, most importantly for this purpose, audience members,” says Jennifer Bryan, Tapestry’s director of campaigns. “Most of them are already supporting the organization, and this is a new, interesting way to do that.”

The Toronto music venue Hugh’s Room Live recently reopened in an east-end church after many years of tumult, and finished raising $1.3-million worth of community bonds with Tapestry in September to replace one of its mortgages. Board chair Brian Iler says that the approach meant taking “a big risk, perhaps, but we had a pretty strong sense that we had enough support from the community.”

‘Meanwhile’ spaces

As Toronto’s Why Not Theatre’s operating budget surged nearly fourfold in the late 2010s, its founder and co-artistic director Ravi Jain kept hearing the same refrain: “You need to buy a building.”

But why, Jain wondered, would he want to spend $5-million or $6-million on a building when he could spread that kind of money around? The one or two rehearsal and performance spaces it might add to the city wouldn’t fix the real estate crisis. Instead, Jain remembers thinking, “What if we look at Toronto as the theatre? And what if we look at all the unused spaces, and somehow find a way to turn those into performance venues or temporary rehearsal halls?”

Why Not launched a pilot project in 2019 that connected performing artists with underused spaces, including a church and community centre, delivering 2,400 hours of facility time to more than 50 artists.

Jain and his team, including producer Mary Anderson, kept developing the idea over several years, interrupted by both a pandemic and pivoting plans. They will formally relaunch the Space Project this month, with plans for Why Not to administer one space in Toronto’s west downtown, while also working with partners across the city and country to bridge the gap between artists and real estate. Many of these partners will use pieces of a $250,000 grant that Why Not received from the Canada Council for the Arts to help artists access new space for their work.

The Common Ground Arts Society in Edmonton, for example, will direct funding through its RISER collaborative-producing program for underserved artists, providing free space to a handful of collectives to develop stage shows.

“With a little bit of funding, much smaller than the cost of opening one new space, we are able to invest in weeks of space at a time that gives these artists the freedom to fully address their needs as people, and do the best work they’re able to do,” says Mac Brock, Common Ground’s managing producer.

In Toronto’s west end, the Terrarium co-operative art studio, which serves queer, trans and BIPOC artists, was able to open its doors last year and supplement its artists’ rents thanks to Space Project funding. “It allowed me to have some time to figure out a model,” says Zanette Singh, one of Terrarium’s founders. “I don’t think one model is going to work for every single type of studio space.”

Though the federal government supports artist spaces through programs such as the Canada Cultural Spaces Fund, the Why Not team hopes to use the data it gathers from the Space Project to make a case to Ottawa that financing artists’ smaller needs, even case by case, could bring significant benefits.

This kind of project, says Alex Glass, the executive director of ArtsBuild Ontario, which will manage spaces in the Kitchener-Waterloo region, “just takes the work off the artist, so they can focus on getting in the space and making their art.”