Toronto Doesn't Have an Artist Problem. It Has a Space Problem.

In November 2024, Toronto City Council adopted a ten-year cultural plan that promises to develop one million square feet of new cultural space in the city. It is a real plan with real money attached. It is also, read a different way, an admission of how much room the city has already let go of.

The plan is called Culture Connects, it runs 2025 to 2035, and its headline commitments are specific: a million square feet of new cultural space, a 50 per cent increase in the city's cultural investment over the decade, and two million extra dollars a year into the Toronto Arts Council for five years starting in 2025.

Those are good numbers. The question nobody at the announcement asked out loud is the one every working artist in this city can answer from memory: a million square feet compared to what?

What a collapse actually looks like

Start with Artscape, because it was the biggest single thing holding artists in Toronto buildings, and because its failure was financial rather than cultural.

On 28 August 2023, Artscape announced it would be placed into receivership and wind down its management of cultural spaces. The reporting that followed laid out the arithmetic. The organization owed more than $21 million to TD. Its long-term debt at the end of 2022 was $31.7 million. It ran a $3.7 million operating deficit that year. The trigger came in June 2023, when it could not repay $4 million that had come due on an operating loan, and the final blow was its inability to sell Artscape Daniels Launchpad at 130 Queens Quay East fast enough to cover what it owed.

A receivership order on 11 January 2024 appointed msi Spergel inc. as receiver over Launchpad, Triangle Lofts, Youngplace and the Lofts at 210 Simcoe. Not every Artscape asset was pulled in, and the city and the bank bought time along the way. But the model did not survive contact with a pandemic that killed its event revenue: a non-profit carrying development-scale debt so that artists could pay below-market rent.

The buildings nobody was legally living in

The other half of the story is smaller, older and much harder to legislate, and 888 Dupont Street is the cleanest example of it.

In October 2021, up to 50 artists and working creatives were evicted from 888 Dupont to clear the site for redevelopment. The four-storey building had been a yarn-spinning factory and later housed the Canadian National Institute for the Blind. By the end it was doing what old industrial brick does best in an expensive city: quietly holding photographers, clothing labels and studio practices at a rent that made them possible.

Here is the part that matters, and it is about zoning. Toronto has a policy that residents of rental buildings demolished for redevelopment must be offered replacement units. It did not protect anyone at 888 Dupont, because the spaces there were zoned commercial. People were living in them. The city's paperwork said nobody was.

Seventeen Paton Road tells the same story from the other end. The building is a 1927 brick-and-beam former women's garment factory, owned by the same family since the early 1970s, converted over the years into live-work artist space. On 10 March 2020 it was ordered evacuated: the residential units failed the Ontario Fire Code, most notably because they lacked a required second exit. By that September roughly 20 residents were out. In August 2026 the building was listed for sale at $4.5 million, described to buyers as a redevelopment opportunity needing substantial renovation before anyone can occupy it.

Nobody in that sequence is a villain. The fire code is not wrong about second exits. The family did not invent the cost of bringing a 1927 factory up to code. But look at what the sequence produces: a building that was informally affordable for fifty years becomes, in one inspection, a building that can only be afforded by whoever can spend millions to make it legal. And nobody spends millions to make something legal so that it can stay cheap.

This is why the artists you know all have three jobs

In early 2024 Hill Strategies Research ran a survey for the Cultural Human Resources Council. Of 1,170 responses, 688 were from artists. The findings are not subtle.

• 51% of responding artists had total personal incomes below $40,000.
• 66% earned under $40,000 from cultural-sector work in 2023, including 21% who earned under $10,000.
• 71% hold more than one job.
• 69% reported financial stress.
• 30% were satisfied with the affordability of their home.
• 91% did something in 2023 specifically to relieve their financial situation.

Read that last line again. Ninety-one per cent took an action in a single year to deal with money pressure. That is a sector running a continuous, unfunded rescue operation on itself.

And the longer baseline is worse than the mood. Hill Strategies' profile from the 2016 census put the median individual income of Canadian artists at $24,300: 44 per cent below the $43,500 median for all Canadian workers.

What a million square feet has to survive

So: a million square feet by 2035. Against a portfolio that held 265 artist homes and 125 artist businesses going into receivership, 50 people out of one Dupont Street building in a single October, 20 out of one Paton Road building over six months, and a working population where two out of three people earn under forty thousand dollars from the thing they are known for.

A million square feet is a serious commitment, and Toronto has not made many of them. The risk is that it gets built the way this city builds everything else: new, compliant, expensive to operate, and rented at whatever the operating cost demands. That is how you end up with a great deal of cultural space and the same artists leaving.

The spaces that actually worked were not designed. They were old buildings between uses, cheap because nobody had decided what they were for yet. You cannot policy that into existence. But you can decide, deliberately, that some of the new million is allowed to be rough: concrete floors, freight elevator, a rent that assumes the tenant makes twenty-four thousand dollars a year, because a lot of them do.

In the meantime, people are improvising

The thing that happens while policy takes eleven years is that people stop waiting for rooms and start borrowing them. Living rooms. Off-nights at venues. A friend's basement with treatment on the walls. Somebody's parents' garage in Scarborough. None of it photographs well, and a meaningful amount of this city's work currently gets made there.

We have run a weekly creative room in Toronto for about a decade under exactly those conditions, so our bias is on the table. It is a worse arrangement than a building. It is a much better arrangement than stopping.