Akin Collective buys artists space, time
Enterprise gives creative community leverage with landlords in a gentrifying city
Sunlight floods the cool, brightwhite studio space on the second floor of1485 Dupont St., filling it with the warm glow of a winter morning.
Here, amid a half-dozen squares of varying sizes carved neatly into the concrete floor, you can catch a glimpse of an endangered urban species in Toronto: the artist.
Last seen in any numbers along Queen St. W., then West Queen West, and then Parkdale, Bloordale and beyond, their numbers have thinned and scattered further afield with each migration.
Some say they’ve found more favourable habitat in Hamilton these days, though sightings are more anecdotal than quantifiable.
As the central portion of Toronto has shifted, block by block, from rough-and-tumble disused warehouse and factory building to shiny glass condo towers and chain-brand Irish pubs, the artist’s natural habitat — big spaces, indifferent landlords, low rent — has been rapidly vanishing. Forced migration has always been the urban artist’s lot, from Yorkville in the ’60s to Queen and Spadina in the ’70s and ’80s, to Parkdale in the ’90s and early oughts, but never quite like this.
To call it a crisis is a simple statement of fact. City council more or less confirmed that this week, when it formally asked the Ontario government to alter its tax code to benefit landlords who use their buildings as cultural incubators, not just fallow development opportunities.
“You just can’t find anything, literally, anything,” Shayna Stevenson, a ceramic artist, said. “It’s just so expensive; there’s just no way.”
Except here, on Dupont St., where Stevenson and her partner, Jen Collins, run Keep Company, their ceramic business, out of a light-filled corner partly bordered by fresh plywood walls, painted white.
It’s their corner, but the expanse of floor space just outside it — about 3,000 square feet, all told — is under the larger umbrella of Akin Collective, a unique and growing enterprise in the disappearing landscape of affordable studio space in the so-called creative city.
Akin, with its 19,000 square feet across four buildings, most in the city’s traditional west-end hot zone of artistic production (a new property added just this week, at Victoria Park and Eglinton Aves. in the east, bucks the trend) counts 160 members and a long list of pent-up demand.
Small-scale artists at all stages of their careers patiently wait for their own corner to come up, which given the expanding Akin empire seems likely to be sooner than later.
What makes Akin different from the typical landlord is that they’re tenants themselves. Started by Oliver Pauk, an artist, and Mike Dellios, a furniture designer, in 2008, Akin began to realize there was strength in numbers. (In 2011, Michael Vickers, another artist, joined Akin as an intern and now runs Akin Projects, which runs free workshops for members and public programs like gallery tours for institutions like the Museum of Contemporary Art.)
“The idea for us was, ‘We can take a big chunk of your leasable space off your hands, and we’re going to treat it well and increase your property value, and activate the building,’ ” said Pauk on a recent walk-through of Akin’s 5,000 square feet at 87 Wade Ave. Its expanse of concrete floor, with towering windows on two sides, is fitted with crisp, white plywood dividers, and ranges from 50 square feet for $235 per month, enough for a small desk, to 250 square feet for $720.
If even that’s too much, Akin offers $60-a-month memberships for access to abundant common spaces. Every level of tenancy includes workshops, seminars and an array of otherwise-aggravating details: insurance, utilities, Internet access.
It’s a surprising professionalization of what has always been an ad hoc, catch-as-catch-can arrangement. Artists have typically accepted precarious tenancy as a way of life, month to month in tumbledown buildings they fix up and retrofit in exchange for cheap rent. But that trade-off often also means spontaneous forced migration when a better deal for the landlord comes along.
Such was the case at 224 Wallace Ave. in October, when dozens of small-scale creative enterprises were evicted with just 30 days notice, putting them on the street with nowhere to go.
Akin’s notion works with that inevitability, not against it. “We’re happy to be migratory,” Pauk says. “It’s the only way this can realistically work. We have to just move as needed. And we’re OK with that.”
If it sounds like sacrilege to the old us-versus-them dynamic of artist and landlord, think again. Akin’s approach shifts the same old story to one they get to write themselves.
When they move, it’s with a critical mass of tenants that swallow thou- sands of square feet in one go.
It gives them something that individual artists in this city have almost never had — leverage. But, says Doug Simpson, managing partner at NetGain Partners, a Toronto consultancy that has worked with several of the city’s major cultural organizations, it also makes them innovative urban thinkers.
“Akin works at that interval where a building is at the end of its useful life, and that five-to-10-year space is plenty of time to make a difference and build a community,” Simpson says. “They slip inside beside the bleeding edge of development and make use of what it leaves behind. They’re pioneering a technique that could be used by any number of social organizations: daycares, social agencies, you name it.”
Akin’s approach has grown from grassroots to the threshold of officialdom. This year, Pauk and Vickers will join an advisory group convened by the city of Toronto to examine ways to keep creative spaces in the city’s core. At the table, they’ll join the sector’s major players: Margie Zeidler, president of UrbanSpace, which owns the 401 Richmond St. arts hub, and Artscape, the not-forprofit developer that has remade multiple derelict properties all over the city for cultural uses.
Akin may not match their scale, but they bring their own innovation to the table. As property owners like UrbanSpace and Artscape battle crippling tax regimes, Akin suggests a different way forward, as tenants.
Right now, Akin and its members pay around $28,000 per month to a handful of landlords with whom they’ve negotiated favourable deals that individual artists rarely can: reasonable square-foot rental rates, for one, but more importantly, longterm stability.
With its critical mass of tenants, Akin brokers deals, typically, of five years, with rental increase caps year to year. It’s a strategy that benefits Akin’s members and the landlord both.
“For us to occupy a buildling for five or 10 years, until the owner wants to do something drastically different, that’s OK with us,” Pauk says. “They know we’re going to fix things up and that we’re good for the rent.” In exchange, Akin gets a fixed departure date, marked on the calendar.
It buys Akin something just as critical as space itself — timeWith a multi-year cushion, the move is always in mind, but panic is never part of the equation. One building, a derelict furniture factory on Dundas St. just north of Bloor, is a target. It’s not for rent, at least not yet, but Akin has in mind an eventual overture, and the pitch they can make is compelling.
In this market, even that much certainty is an extravagance.
In the commercial real estate world, increases are at the whim of the property owner and are usually whatever the market will bear. So it was at 213 Sterling Rd., a hive of creative activity until last January, where tenants saw their rental rates as much as triple in a month.
It’s a dynamic that Pauk has seen firsthand. Akin was born in 2008 in Dellios’ loft at 48 Abell, a legendary building and early flashpoint in the city’s recent history of aggressive gentrification. Just down the street from the Drake Hotel, 48 Abell, a sturdy old agricultural implements factory, was cratered in 2011 to make way for condominium towers after a years-long struggle between developers, local residents and the Ontario Municipal Board.
So when they moved up the street to 444 Dufferin in 2009, it was with the expectation that permanence was a relative term. Sharing about 2,000 square feet between 15 people, Pauk and Dellios had the mass but not yet the know-how. Their lease rate has jumped as much as 20 per cent some years and given them an education along the way.
“We didn’t know that a typical commercial lease is essentially the landlord’s wish list of their ideal situation,” Pauk says. “But you can negotiate every single point.”
It’s all put them on a new frontier of artist tenancy, where they, not the landlord, write the terms: “We have property owners contacting us,” says Pauk. “But we like high ceilings, lots of natural light, so they don’t all necessarily meet our requirements, so we can’t work out a collaboration.”
An artists’ organization with landlords at their mercy and not the other way around? That really is something new.