Council plans to make it easier for artists to open studios

Last week, city staff recommended allowing “work-only” artist studios in industrial areas, providing some much-needed relief to an industry that has seen the amount of available work and performance spaces shrink dramatically as land prices rise.

The proposal is part of the city's 10-year plan to develop and enhance affordable arts and culture spaces.

Jonelle Aspa, director of the East Vancouver Raw Wood Studio Society, a non-profit art and music studio in Strathcona, supports the proposed changes but thinks the city needs to go further.

“It definitely opens up a lot more potential spaces for artists,” she said. “But the real problem is the expense of it all. The city is opening up this zoning but it's not tackling the actual affordability of it.”

Aspa would like to see the city create spaces and lease them to artists at affordable rates.

“It's a game changer,” she said, to not have to worry “about renting out a space to put on programming.”

Jonelle is the director of Girls Rock Camp, which currently has a residency in the Field House program.

About 2.4 per cent of Vancouverites report working in the arts — the highest concentration of any large Canadian city — and arts and cultural industries contributed $7.9 billion to B.C.'s GDP in 2016, more than agriculture, forestry or fishing and hunting.

Yet Vancouver is facing a critical shortage of art and culture spaces, much of which was lost in the past decade to development and rising rents. East Vancouver alone lost over 400,000 square feet of artists space between 2009-2019, according to a 2019 report from the Vancouver Eastside Culture Crawl.

According to Jonelle there are about 50 artists renting space in the East Vancouver Raw Wood Studio, which has been at the same location for 18 years and is part of the local community. The building is slated for redevelopment next year and Jonelle said it has been difficult finding a new home for the studio.

“The city creates so many spaces for sports all over the city,” Jonelle said. “So why don't artists get the same treatment?”