OTTAWA — As the space crunch for performing artists in Toronto got worse at the end of the last decade, leaders in the Why Not theatre company got a different kind of creative.

The idea they came up with, an online brokerage linking strapped performers with odds and ends of underused real estate, is inching toward reality after a successful pilot project.

“You’d be able to see our inventory of spaces—you’re able to see when it’s all available. You’ll be able to put your security deposit in,” said Tom Arthur Davis, a Why Not producer, speaking to The Logic via Zoom with co-artistic director and founder Ravi Jain. “And hopefully, as much as we can, making things keyless-entry. So it’s trying to make it really easy and user friendly from the real estate side of things.”

What they’re calling the National Space Network has arts groups interested in other cities, which is important, Davis said, because these arrangements would need intermediaries to make everything as painless as possible for property owners and managers.

“You don’t want it to be like with Airbnb, where there’s the owner and the rentee communicating directly,” Davis said. “You want to make it really simple and easy for the real estate company or landowner to play ball.”

In 2018, real estate prices in the city were hovering at what seemed then like crazy levels. Why Not was having tremendous success, but also difficulty keeping up with the costs of space.

“Our operating budget went from being about $600,000 to about $1.5 million to $2 million in that year,” said Jain. “And as we were growing, everyone said, ‘You’re growing. Go get a space now. You should get a building.’ And we said, ‘That’s a terrible idea. The business model of a building, it doesn’t work.’”

Why Not estimated it would have to raise $6 million for a building to suit its needs. And if it could pull that off, the trouble was that afterward, WhyNot would own a building.

“There’s a lot of capital that has to go into one space. And capacity is reached so quickly that it doesn’t actually serve the needs of the community. It just becomes yet another exclusive space that relies on expensive rent, and artists keep getting pushed out,” Jain said.

“We said, ‘What if we imagined Toronto was the theatre? There’s so much empty space that already exists. We could actually be way more flexible and use that underutilized space and turn it into temporary rehearsal halls—and what if that can be free for artists?’”

Vacant storefronts, offices between tenants, buildings not yet fully occupied—there are odds and ends of space in even a booming city. The trick is connecting people who control it with those who might use it, if only briefly.

Why Not got to work with the property developer Crestpoint Real Estate Investments, as well as a church and a Portuguese community centre. They called their effort the Space Project. The idea was to provide rehearsal and preparation space, not performance venues, so as not to compete with those that exist now.

In three spaces over three months, Davis said, about 50 artists shared 2,500 hours of time. The projects included a dance film, performers workshopping productions for festivals, and a group of comedians who got together to try material out on each other.

Before COVID-19, the pilot project was set to expand to six spaces, with funding from the Toronto Arts Council and the federal Canada Council for the Arts.

“In 2020, right before we shut down, we had spaces that we were going to use and one of them was a 15,000-square-foot warehouse,” Davis said. “We had a group that—they could not find rehearsal space that they could afford, because they had 100 performers in their show.”

The experiment taught them that space should be inexpensive but not quite free, so people who book it have motivation to use it, Davis said.

“The cost of it was just under $4 an hour to run it,” he said. “Now, I don’t think it quite scales at that rate, because I was also going in and scrubbing toilets and stuff.… But it still was, like, ‘OK, once we remove the cost of actually having to rent space, suddenly we can make this a much more affordable program.’”

The pandemic stopped the experiment cold. Performing arts have been some of the last public activities to resume.

“The biggest thing the pandemic’s showed is how precarious artists’ lives are,” Jain said.

But also, as so many people have rearranged their lives, it’s created an opportunity.

“People who never would have thought that they could give up their office space or repurpose their office space—people were just more open to that thinking,” he said.

Among the supporters is the Canadian Urban Institute, a Toronto-based think tank aimed at building healthier cities.

“One of the challenges in urban life is you want to have nimbleness and flexibility built into almost everything,” said the institute’s president and CEO Mary Rowe. “A lot of landlords just did not have the bandwidth to try to navigate a four-month contract, a temporary lease…. Our systems aren’t calibrated to enable this kind of swifter, shorter-term transaction.”

Technology offers obvious solutions, Rowe said, perhaps even more so as landlords look for anybody to fill room in pandemic-battered downtowns.

“You look at a system and you say, ‘Where’s the slack in the system?’ The tech sector is so good at disrupting—it looks at where there’s slack in a system, where there is excess capacity. Just like Airbnb and people’s rooms. How do you then create some kind of platform mechanism to be able to move into those spaces in efficient ways and appropriate ways?”

While COVID-19 kept performances on ice, Why Not fine-tuned. Research-oriented contacts with groups in other cities turned into a broader effort; last fall, the National Space Network wrote to the Department of Canadian Heritage seeking funding, with support from Rowe and arts groups from Edmonton to Montreal.

Documents obtained by The Logic through access-to-information legislation show Heritage officials struggled with how to respond. “The current policy and program authorities are designed not to provide assistance to this type of project,” warned a briefing note to deputy minister Isabelle Mondou.

If Why Not and the others can get the National Space Network off the ground, the department might help pay for “portable equipment such as lights and sound systems, or movable seating equipment,” the note said.

Federal programs “tend to privilege those who have space and those who have historic legacy,” Jain said. Big cultural institutions have a form of generational wealth, much like people who bought downtown houses decades ago.

The first artists to suffer when the economics of the arts get worse are those who are already marginalized, he said. “We talk about decolonization. We talk about equity. We’re talking about these systems that keep people out and space is a major one. It’s land, it’s property, and it costs a lot of money.”

The lack of federal financial support isn’t fatal, Jain and Davis both said, but it does point to mechanisms that are behind the curve, in their view. Arts funding models aren’t designed for this kind of flexibility, Jain said.

“We really have to change the models or at least adapt some of them. And that’s where we’re really trying to carve out space [to say], ‘Let’s think about this differently.’”