Money’s Too Tight: Housing Edition

After a long delay of posting material on the course site, I wanted to share this article from the Guardian by David Byrne, longtime artist/musician/singer, about the effect that the changing economy and cultural life of New York City. His argument is that the increasingly high cost of living in New York is killing its creative energies and that, ultimately, this will lead to the demise of the city itself. As he writes,

Most of Manhattan and many parts of Brooklyn are virtual walled communities, pleasure domes for the rich (which, full disclosure, includes me), and aside from those of us who managed years ago to find our niche and some means of income, there is no room for fresh creative types. Middle-class people can barely afford to live here anymore, so forget about emerging artists, musicians, actors, dancers, writers, journalists and small business people. Bit by bit, the resources that keep the city vibrant are being eliminated.

While New York is different from Toronto in a lot of ways, and it certainly has played a different role in the history of popular music and contemporary culture, there is a lot of what Byrne writes that holds true for Toronto (and perhaps other Canadian cities.) What does the rapid rise in rents, housing costs, etc. mean for the future of music in Toronto? Yorkville was the centre of music in the late 1960s (see this video for a vision of Toronto in the swinging sixties), and musical culture has slowly moved further west along Queen Street in the 1970s to the present, how much further out of the core can culture be pushed before Hamilton is the centre of music for Toronto musicians.

Has Toronto similarly become a playground for the wealthy? What does this mean for the future of musical performance and creativity in the city?

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