Local and provincial arts organizations are encouraging property owners, both public and private, to embrace “meanwhile spaces” that grant temporary access to empty space to artists.
On Wednesday, Arts Ottawa partnered with Kitchener-based ArtsBuild Ontario to host a conversation on how artists and cultural spaces can help reimagine and revitalize a city’s downtown core.
With an abundance of empty storefronts and office buildings lining many downtown streets, especially post-pandemic, the organizations said short-term agreements with artists can be useful in activating vacant properties while long-term redevelopment proposals are underway.
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“This isn’t a concept we’ve come up with,” said Eva Hellreich, program manager for ArtsBuild Ontario. “This is a space activation model that’s been used across the world. There’s some really successful sites in the States, as well as in the U.K.”
Artists, who often experience high costs and low revenues, have been effectively priced out of the real estate market, whether they’re painters, writers, filmmakers, musicians or animators, Hellreich said.
But with alternative models like meanwhile spaces, arts and culture organizations can work with landlords to rent vacant properties and provide access to those spaces for artists for low rates or for free.
“It’s basically putting together the needs of artists needing space to work and create and developers or municipalities who have buildings sitting empty that they want us to activate.”
It’s the type of initiative that can work anywhere, but is especially useful in downtowns, she said.
Hellreich, who regularly works on meanwhile leases, said developers and property owners have reaped the benefits of the arrangement.
“The developer-landlord of the space that we occupied — it’s been so wonderful for them to have artists in the space that’s been sitting empty,” she said. “It’s expensive to have an empty space for so long, so it’s not actually in their best interest to wait for the perfect time, for the perfect tenant. So these projects make the neighbourhood more desirable, it supports community, and it just helps them fill that gap.”
For property owners, the arrangement is low risk, she added.
Meanwhile leases typically have a short termination clause, allowing both the landlord or tenant to end the lease with short notice, typically 30 days. They are often 30-day rolling leases, which are renewed month-to-month.
It’s an agreement that provides flexibility to all parties, Hellreich said.
“There’s very little risk to developers to have a meanwhile space model with a trusted partner organization,” she said. “It helps them recoup their losses and it makes for a more vibrant community, which is great for your reputation. From a PR perspective, it’s a great move.”
Alex Glass, executive director of ArtsBuild Ontario, added that insurers like the initiative, too.
“It’s good for their insurance, to have occupancy within the space, so it lowers the risk for developers,” she said. “The place we went into, the landlord would have had to have gotten it up to code anyway, so it was an investment both for us to do through the interim, but for the building and the unit itself. It’s getting it ready for a commercial tenant when the time comes.”
Under current economic conditions, Glass said landlords who embrace meanwhile spaces usually have a property that has been vacant for a significant period of time, often because potential long-term tenants are shying away from signing pricey leases.
Hellreich concurred. “People aren’t picking up what developers are putting down the same way right now,” she said. “There’s a lot more hybrid and remote work. But artists still need spaces to create art. In terms of waiting for a for-profit that can maybe pay that premium rent, those folks just aren’t looking the same way they used to. So (meanwhile leases) are an adaptive way to approach things.”
Any vacant space can be transformed into a meanwhile space, said Hellreich, adding that ArtsBuild’s strategy is to choose artists based on the space, rather than tailoring the space to the artists.
But the best spaces, she said, are fully accessible and typically near transit. And the best landlords, she added, are those who embrace the arts.
“It always starts with the conversation, the relationship,” she said. “We want to see what we can offer them and what they’re willing to contribute. More than anything, it’s that value alignment. We work with what we have. We’re not going to demand a stage or paint sink or soundproofing. That’s really the role of artists, to help us reimage what’s possible with what we have.”
Activating 300 Sparks St.
In addition to discussing temporary occupancy models, event participants looked at a former cinema on Sparks Street that has been sitting vacant for years as a case study for transforming downtown Ottawa buildings into cultural centres.
“It’s these beautiful shells of what were cinemas that could become really anything,” said Cassandra Olsthoorn, who is responsible for co-leadership, strategy and community mobilization at Arts Ottawa.
The local non-profit advocates for the city’s arts sector. It is the amalgamation of two leading groups in the space, the Ottawa Arts Council and Arts Network of Ottawa, which officially merged in January.
Imagining what 300 Sparks St. could be is an exercise that fits with the Ottawa Downtown Action Agenda released last spring, which included a call to create an arts corridor in the city.
Olsthoorn said arts groups like hers are looking for ways to overcome barriers to that goal.
“Artists for a long time have said they don’t have access to affordable space, they don’t have access to appropriate space,” she said. “This is an investigation to say, okay, if there is space available, what would we do with it and what kind of funding and business model might we need to make that happen?”
Both publicly owned and privately owned properties have spaces sitting empty in Ottawa’s downtown core and with hybrid work and rising costs, Olsthoorn said it’s increasingly difficult to find tenants to occupy those spaces and to make the neighbourhoods around them lively.
Crown Realty Partners, which purchased the property at 300 Sparks St. with Crestpoint Real Estate Investments in 2021, is looking for alternative solutions, said Olsthoorn.
“They’ve been very generous in showing the space to lots of arts organizations, actively trying to show it to people over the past year,” she said, adding that Arts Ottawa saw the space for the first time in May 2024. The tour was organized by Ottawa Centre MP Yasir Naqvi, who created the task force behind the downtown agenda.
Olsthoorn said she has continued touring the space alongside other arts groups that were enthusiastic about its potential but unsure how to move forward.
“It feels like there are a lot of barriers to how we get there,” she said. “300 Sparks — it’s there, it’s available and Crown Realty seem like lovely people who are keen to make something happen. Where do we find the right value match between what the arts can bring to for-profit property owners and the value we can bring to residents and visitors of downtown?”