Home galleries are hiding in plain sight across Canada

The article vaguely alludes to why this trend could appear but unfortunate it couldn't devote at least a paragraph to it. It's such an important issue, but given that this the industry impacted is considered small and niche it's so under discussed.

Decades of political opposition toward any and all redevelopment of existing low density single family dominated residentially zoned areas has meant that practically all creation of new housing in the major cities of Canada has meant greenfield sprawl or for urban areas, creeping into brownfield redevelopment, rezoning old industrial areas into new condo developments.

The problem with this is that the arts and gallery system has long relied on repurposing old and affordable industrial space into arts production space gallery and performance space. So what we've been seeing as the housing crisis has become more severe, is an increasing amount of destruction and rezoning of irreplaceable industrial land, aiding a shortage of industrial space, badly wanted by the Amazon's of the world too.

So artists are being squeezed on both ends. The shortage of affordable housing is especially severe for low income working artists, and the political solution for solving this problem is to destroy the artist spaces which makes things more expensive for artists too.

This could all be better fixed if we simply left industrial as industrial and actually allowed people to more intensively develop residential homes to meet our housing goals, and add more arts uses into residential areas (because let's be clear, everything mentioned in this article is likely on the down low, breaking municipal bylaws and Provincial liquor laws), but people have been incredibly resistant to this, no matter how much they claim to love the arts etc etc.

Great that this is a trend. Its also a long tradition in contemporary art. I had my staircase and hallway as a gallery for a couple if years.

Please donate to https://savethecbc2025.ca/ we need your money Americans to support our amazing Olympics coverage thanks!

Canada has one of the worst housing crises of the whole developed world. Housing crisis isn't just a lack of homes, it's a lack of desirable and affordable homes. Many places in world have an abundance of unused homes while also having a severe lack of homes people both can and want to buy. Most people don't want to live in the middle of nowhere where there are no infra, no services and no one else around.

> The shortage of affordable housing is especially severe for low income working artists

Once again, there is NO SHORTAGE of affordable housing either in the US or in Canada.

None. Nada. Zilch. Ноль. 零

And that's important. A simple "not enough housing" problem is easily solved with "just build more".

Instead, there is a shortage of housing _near_ _large_ _cities_. And it can't be solved. Simply "building more" housing in dense cities makes it _worse_.