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No one is better at making something out of nothing than arts groups in pricey Vancouver. We have heard the grim news recently about our theatre, dance, film and visual arts groups getting the heave-ho from their residences and studios in downtown, Gastown and the Downtown Eastside. Our cultural class is scrambling for space and making-do — as our creators always do — but a downtown without the studios and residences of artists is a dismal prospect, Calgary without the old world charm.

The reason for this is that Vancouver's great condo transformation continues unabated, and no corner of our downtown peninsula (or anywhere nearby) is safe from the prevailing urban ideology of hausen uber alles.

What a strange new city we are making: chock full of boomers preparing retirement nests; hub to global investors transforming their dollars/euros/pesos/yuan/rupiah into condo walls. But as a direct result, we are also shrinking core-area offices and studios, the very spaces where culture is created and where new businesses are grown.

Vancouverites may regret for a long time the way former planning head Larry Beasley's "Living First" downtown housing policy guidelines were allowed to morph into a "condos only" downtown development reality. To bring the irony of this situation into focus, just ask the art galleries and artists who were cleared off their Homer Street locale so that Amacon Developments could build a condo complex launched into pre-sales last week, bearing the name "The Beasley."

The choice of this condo's name seems to me yet more evidence of "Vancouver: the postmodern edition." Find me another city, anywhere, where a developer happily names an apartment tower after the city planner who approved its construction.

Larry Beasley, to his credit, had Amacon endow a scholarship in his name for UBC planning students, in lieu of residual naming payments for the 200-unit, 33-storey condo.

The Contemporary Art Gallery, the Vancouver International Film Centre and other arts groups have benefited from our condo boom, with developers of adjacent properties being granted extra floors for building in exchange for providing arts facilities, which are managed by the City of Vancouver's Politburo-sounding Office of Cultural Affairs.

This particular private-public partnership is fruitful, but these arrangements do not create low-cost housing or work spaces for individual artists — studios with good light for painters, soundproof rehearsal space for musicians and actors, shops for designers and crafts people.

A new condo project at Main and Prior streets is preserving a historic building, but the proposed development is forcing the exit of the artists and designers who now call it home. Faint hope comes from the current review of Vancouver's cultural space needs, from individual studios right up to the advisability, or inadvisability, of a quarter-billion-dollar new home for the Vancouver Art Gallery. This study is being wrapped up by Toronto consultants Artspace for the Office of Cultural Affairs under Sue Harvey.

As Ms. Harvey observed at last fall's national Creative Cities conference, few doubt that every month Vancouver sees a growing shortage of affordable studios and housing for its artists. It is a shame that such affordability is not achieved the way some U.S. cities do, by requiring developers to set aside a fixed proportion of any new project's housing units as permanently earmarked for affordable rentals. Affordable and integrated rentals — not funds poured into general revenues; not the high-profile museums and theatres that politicians love to open; not little ghettos of social housing concentrated in one neighbourhood, but spaces for artists (and seniors and students) integrated into every residential floor.

I have been to apartment towers like this in Manhattan. As I rode up the elevator with the developer, neither he nor I had any idea whether the people riding with us were paying the market rate of $5,000 a month, or the permanently deeded, -affordable rate of $1,000 a month.

Under Vancouver's former planning directors Ray Spaxman and Mr. Beasley, the city pursued a policy of setting aside 20 per cent of the land in large development sites for social housing. But because senior governments have largely moved out of the affordable housing business, many of the resulting sites remain empty and forlorn.

One thing is certain: Vancouver's theatre and visual artists have made virtues out of their studio-less necessities. Our city is renowned continent-wide for its site-specific theatre and dance productions, the fine arts pushed into the street because of an all-conquering housing boom.

Vancouver's recent PuSh Theatre Festival featured several standout creative uses of downtown public spaces because, according to artistic director Norman Armour, "we are really short on performance spaces." A four-person theatre troupe from Sydney, Australia, brought us one of them, Small Metal Objects, in which actors wearing radio mikes milled around speaking their lines amid the comings and goings of Vancouver Central Library patrons. With audiences sitting on temporary risers, half the fun was gazing into the faces of the hundreds of people in Library Square's atrium, trying to figure out who were the actors and who were just acting out the dramas of daily life. None of us will ever look at Moshe Safdie's grand atrium the same way.

I am no fan of Safdie's architecture, but his urban design is always thoughtful. Here the social logic of his bridge-like entrance walkway made sense to me for the first time. By limiting the space, by pushing people together inside the city's largest single room, the architect makes Vancouverites interact. It's a little like the Aussie play itself, literal theatre of the street.