On a short visit to Toronto last week, I wandered into my old west-end neighbourhood, where my son noted the shuttering of a vaunted club, Hugh’s Room, a hub for jazz and roots music in the city for 16 years. The city is losing other venues, too.
We in Vancouver have experienced many of the same live-music losses: the Cellar Jazz Club, the Railway Club and other venues had audiences but excessive costs. Music is increasingly expensive to stage, but many of our restaurants and merchants make many of the same claims of escalating taxes and other expenses that have distorted once-viable business models. While not necessarily tied to increased land values, the tax take from the city and the pressure on the businesses have grown significantly.
Business failure is nothing novel, but a challenge for communities is to determine whether the presence of culture contributes such to our well-being as to deserve special consideration. Even amid our affordable housing crisis and our need to remedy inequity, should we be sheltering a music scene? In Toronto, they are saying yes, and their mayor has determined that music is vital to the city’s identity.
This is in keeping with many urban development strategies that view neighbourhood access to culture as an essential ingredient of a livable city.
Noted American urbanist Richard Florida, for instance, asserts that districts with high concentrations of technology workers, artists and musicians – what he terms the “high bohemians” – generate a higher level of economic development. He terms this the “creative class” and believes its presence attracts capital and businesses much more effectively.
Somewhat surprisingly, Florida notes that arts and culture occupations are one of three categories – science/engineering and business/management are the others – that improve regional productivity and wages. They are not a drag on the economy; without them, in fact, places don’t prosper.
Florida argues an emphasis on the creative class is more effective in attracting and retaining talent – a major challenge for Vancouver – than would be the development of sports arenas or shopping malls. He would also subscribe to the development of neighbourhood hubs; Vancouver has tended to force most everything into the downtown in Yaletown and Gastown, and this isn’t the ideal approach.
In Toronto’s case, it conscripted a task force to develop a strategy.
Naturally, there will be arguments that under such fiscal stress and housing shortages, a community like Vancouver can ill afford to coddle the musician.
But the report outlines the false economy of austerity in the arts. It points out that there are distinct economic dividends arising from the investment and identifies spinoff spending in a wide range of other sectors. It argues that the rich social life that a music scene helps furnish can serve as an impetus for executives and entrepreneurs to stay put. To that end it has recommended several measures to foster this environment: more public performance venues (particularly music in the city’s parks), affordable city-run rehearsal spaces, a tweaking of noise bylaws and transit hours to reflect the late-night club scene, a fair-compensation strategy and even dedicated affordable housing units to musicians resembling projects in such places as Nashville, Austin and New York, among other things.
The most important push we would need is to reform the structure of property taxes to encourage and even reward a building’s owners for cultural enrichment, rather than demolish and build in its place housing without an ancillary purpose.
Increasingly it is evident that the city’s strategy to produce affordability is the harbouring of an illusion. Notwithstanding more effort to keep taxes in check and build more housing for those in greatest need, a practical and achievable goal – one that furnishes widespread community benefit – is to pursue measures that produce greater livability in our midst. A music strategy would be one of many ways to take us there.
Kirk LaPointe is Business in Vancouver’s vice-president of audience and business development.
