This year is off to a rough start for Toronto musicians and music fans. Last month, Hugh’s Room, the beloved roots music venue on Dundas St. West, announced it’s folding after 16 years. The same week, two other noted downtown venues, one dedicated to dance music, the other to punk rock, closed their doors, followed closely by the legendary Spadina Ave. jazz and blues club the Silver Dollar Room, which had operated in various forms for nearly 60 years (and which may yet return in another).

These and similar spaces and the people who perform in them have done a great deal to make Toronto an attractive place to live and work. The city’s unique variety of venues and artists is essential to its cultural life, to its character. But as so often happens in the lives of cities, such spaces are being paid back for their contribution by being priced out of their neighbourhoods.

Unless the city intervenes, as growth accelerates and gentrification does its work, more and more dives and the scenes to which they’re central will be squeezed out of the core.

This process, which is hardly new, is not only bad news for aficionados, but also promises to do damage to the city’s financial health. By providing employment, promoting tourism, and spurring other commercial activity, the music sector contributes more than $700 million per year to the city’s economy. Many also argue that a vibrant arts scene is key to attracting the business, investment and creative talent a 21st-century city needs to flourish. Even for those unmoved by music’s spiritual appeal, its monetary appeal is surely hard to ignore.

What’s more, urban theorists and economists have long contended that Toronto’s music market, North America’s third-largest, could be much more lucrative still, if only policy-makers would learn the lessons of Austin, Nashville, London and other cities that have had particular success in nurturing and promoting their music scenes.

To that end, in 2013, council voted to make Toronto a “music city” and convened a committee of more than 30 music-sector professionals to devise a strategy. John Tory has been a particularly enthusiastic supporter of the initiative and, in the face of the recent epidemic of club closures, the mayor rightly vowed to take immediate action to protect the vitality of Toronto’s music scene.

The committee’s report, released last year, contains useful ideas about how to do that, from changing prohibitive noise bylaws to providing affordable city-run rehearsal spaces and creating more public performance venues. The report even recommends following the lead of Nashville and New York City by dedicating affordable housing units to musicians to ensure they can continue to make art in the city.

Council should also keep pressuring the province to change its perversely inflexible property-tax laws. Rather than rewarding property owners for using their buildings for culturally enriching purposes – say, as music venues – the code impels them to build yet more condos or high-rise office buildings. Gentrification needs no help; government should be protecting the small, idiosyncratic things that give a city its character, not encouraging their eviction.

Finally, there’s demand to consider. Cities like Nashville and Austin, whose music markets are smaller than Toronto’s, have been particularly successful at promoting themselves as destinations for music tourism, significantly boosting their respective economies. Toronto has similar ambitions, as it should.

Of course, doing all this will require money. And making an argument for cultural investment at a time when scarce funds can’t cover even programs for the most vulnerable can be daunting. That’s why culture is so often among the first victims of austerity. But the choice is false. The mayor is right to promise to protect live music venues and invest in a larger music strategy. We can have a culturally rich city and be financially richer for it.

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