Incentive package for music venues, arts spaces headed for May public hearing

The city is working to make incentives for creative spaces available to individual sites and properties as well as larger cultural districts that have been proposed in city planning documents in recent years.

Monday’s Arts Commission meeting included a presentation from Donald Jackson, a business process consultant in the Economic Development Department, on progress on the push to create standardized incentives that would encourage developers to create art galleries, music venues or other creative spaces in new projects. The incentives would work in some ways similarly to affordable housing bonuses that would allow greater building height and floor area ratio in exchange for providing discounted creative space for at least 10 years.

Jackson said EDD staff is working on the creation of a “paper district” with all the necessary conditions and incentives that could be applied to any site if a developer wished to incorporate a creative use into a given project. Jackson said the paper district would offer flexibility without the city deciding which districts or specific geographic areas would be best suited for the incentives.

“What it does is create a process that property owners and community groups and arts groups can basically go through to get this mapped into a specific area,” he said. “We wanted to make sure there was sort of a ground-up process that people could follow and not just try and dictate from above, like where every sort of creative district should be.”

Jackson said the incentive package is being presented to boards and commissions over the next month, with a Planning Commission hearing scheduled for April 23 and a City Council hearing expected for May 30.

Projects that enroll in the incentive plan would have to provide at least 30 percent of ground-floor building frontage to the eligible creative space, which would receive a lease at 50 percent of market rate with a yearly rate increase cap of 5 percent. Of the additional space allowed under the agreement, 25 percent would have to be dedicated to the affordable creative use.

The package would also include a fee-in-lieu option that would allow developers the applicable increased density without providing the eligible space – if they paid a predetermined fee that would pay for the creation or preservation of creative spaces elsewhere.

For the preservation or relocation of creative spaces affected by the redevelopment of an incentivized property, a comparable space would need to be created and the operator of the affected space would need to receive the option to lease the new space.

“We do these through land-use agreements or restrictive covenants similar to how density bonus programs work now for affordable housing – we’re just gonna use that,” Jackson said. “The city would use a similar mechanism and have that in place for affordable creative space.”

The incentive package would be another tool long sought by the creative community to help music venues, theaters and other cultural spaces continue to exist as land prices and operating costs across the city continue to increase. Last year, the city approved a change to the building code scaling back the regulatory process to open music venues and creative spaces across the city. That change made hundreds of parcels eligible for those uses that had been barred because of the previous land-use designation that treated those uses similar to bars and nightclubs.

Jackson said work is also underway to create separate but related overlay for the Red River Cultural District geared specifically toward preserving the cluster of music venues and entertainment businesses located between Sixth and 10th streets.

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