Victoria Needs to Build Artist Housing
When I moved to Victoria in the 1990’s, one of the tropes about the city was that you couldn’t swing a cat without hitting an artist. Some of that was hyperbole, but there was also some truth to it. Back then there was a thriving young artists scene in Victoria and while there are some young artists still in the city, it is not at the scale that we saw back then. Or perhaps the concentration has changed as the city has grown. To be clear, there are still a lot of great artists that call Victoria home, but a larger and larger portion of them are either established artists or retired amateur artists. So what has changed? Well the main thing is cost of living. Not too long ago, one of the things that truly differentiated Victoria from Vancouver was the cost of living, there was a significant rent benefit in living in Victoria. For those that wanted to focus on creating art, this was a huge bonus as it meant that they could spend a smaller portion of their time working a side job and more time creating new art. That rent benefit has largely disappeared as cost of living in Victoria has increased to almost match the Vancouver area. With that benefit gone, young artists are going to be looking for other places to live or perhaps more depressingly, give up on their art and focus on work that will cover their rent. As we consider the creation of more and more affordable housing space in the city, we need to ensure that we at least consider creating some housing focused on the arts community.
There are many significant issues with the cost of living in Victoria right now and I understand for many people, creating housing focused on just those that are creating art may seem like a privilege that we don’t have. I also recognise that there is merit to the argument that by creating affordable housing en masse, it will benefit everyone including those that are creating art. I also believe that one of the great things about living in a city, is being able to see, hear and experience art. That’s why I think there is merit in going further and creating housing specifically targeted at young artists. The City at least in part, seems to agree. In the recent three part series I wrote on Reviving Downtown Victoria, the third article (which you can read here) discussed some of the aspects of the Create Victoria plan which does include some mention of creating artist housing. To date, beyond directing staff to update other plans to ensure that consideration is given to artist housing, nothing has actually happened.
I believe that a focused approach on creating homes for artists that are designed for artists is something that should be at the forefront of planning policies. When I attended the recent Rock Bay Industry, Arts and Innovation District Ideas Jam, I was happy to see that other people are also thinking along these lines and there were quite a few discussion tables that raised artist housing as a need. While much of the housing that will be going in that area will be new built, we do also have an opportunity to consider artist housing as a part of any office building conversions. One of the key challenges with turning office buildings into housing, is that the floor plate of the buildings are often not conducive to creating regular apartments. I talk about the issue in this recent article if you would like more information. One option for the conversion of office buildings that could work is artist studios. Having extremely large spaces that stretch away from the windows, while also having all of the living space contained in one room works well for artists who need space to work on their pieces especially larger ones and also to store some of the completed works. We can all picture the amazing artist studio spaces that made SoHo famous in New York (of course almost no young artists are living there anymore either). Those are the kind of spaces that could be created out of a converted office building.
Creating artist housing in a city is not just some random idea though. There has been a lot happening across North America along this line. Vancouver has recently opened a 30 unit building in Mt. Pleasant. Florida surprisingly has quite a few projects in Miami and even Tampa Bay. Olympia Washington, which is already somewhat of a destination for artists trying to escape the high rents of Seattle, is trying to go further and add artist focused affordable housing as well.
A second type of housing that I would like to see are residences for art students. Currently Victoria doesn’t have a true art focused post-secondary institution like Emily Carr in Vancouver, but we do have the Vancouver Island School of Art and the fine arts faculty at UVic. I could see a partnership between the two institutions we do have to create a residence building for their students that could include significant studio space. Of course, that would likely require VISA to expand their current programming, but I think that would be great considering it is right downtown.
Beyond housing for artists, I do want to say that Victoria does have some glimmers of light when it comes to the arts community. We already have amazing artist focused galleries like the Fifty Fifty Arts Collective and the Rockslide Gallery. We will be seeing a new performance space that will be opened up to the arts community at the former site of the downtown Tomley’s Grocery Store that closed last year. It has now been bought by Other Guise Theatre Company and will provide office space and performance space soon. It would be great if there was an office conversion somewhere near Douglas and Johnson that could be used for artists as it is close to both this theatre and the VISA campus. There is also the great community art hub run by the Alter Arts Society in Quadra Village which definitely provides opportunities for those that are wanting to create but may not have the means to do it. If we could add housing on top of these great community resources, we could start rebuilding our arts community into the real powerhouse for creativity that it was in the 1990’s.
I would love to hear your thoughts on creating artist housing in Victoria. If you are aware of any examples that I should have been aware of, or you know of some new great art spaces I should know about, please leave a comment below.