Vacant commercial space can drag down a street, but Evan Snow sees something else: a chance to make room for local artists, small businesses, and community life. As co-founder of Zero Empty Spaces, Snow helps transform empty properties into affordable artist studios and cultural hubs. He explains why closed doors do not help property owners, downtowns, or neighborhoods, and why a temporary use can still give artists a lasting foothold outside the home studio. The model works because it keeps the first step small, giving artists affordable space while helping property owners show what a vacant storefront could become.
Hi everybody, welcome to another episode of The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast. I'm your host, Tiffany Owens Reed.
It's summer here in Texas. If you don't know, I live in Waco, and I have weirdly been enjoying this very odd hobby of taking walks around my city. I take these walks in 20- to 30-minute increments when I have alone time without my kids, and I really enjoy doing it because it gives me a chance to notice the city at a more human pace and see details that I can't see when I'm driving.
The other day, this past weekend, I decided one of my walks would be along a pretty busy street not far from a grocery store. I'd always noticed this, but this was the first chance that I got to see it up close. There are about five vacant buildings on this walk. On one side, there's a McDonald's, a Domino's, a Dollar Tree. I don't really understand the dynamic. One side is developed, and one side is full of vacant or underutilized properties.
It was interesting to see them up close, and I found myself looking at these properties, taking pictures, and wondering: What is the story here? What is going on? How do we look at this part of the street? Do we see this as a failure of stewardship? Do we see this as an opportunity?
I think many people might struggle with this if you're in the real estate space or if you enjoy thinking about Strong Towns, particularly as it pertains to how we use our buildings, especially our underutilized buildings. It's a really important question.
Vacant real estate, blighted real estate, abandoned real estate can be a source of frustration. It can weigh a community down, but it can also be an opportunity. That's what our guest is going to be talking to us about today.
I'm joined by Evan Snow. He's the co-founder of Zero Empty Spaces, a business initiative that transforms vacant commercial properties into affordable artist studios and cultural hubs. He synthesizes business development, tenant engagement, municipal engagement, and program expansion to deliver sustainable value for property owners, public sector partners, and creative entrepreneurs.
We're going to jump into all of that on this episode, and I'm really looking forward to learning from Evan and sharing his story and its insights with you. Evan, welcome to The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast. I'm really excited about this conversation.
Thank you very much for having me.
All right. To start off, I would love to learn a little bit more about you and give you a chance to tell our audience a little bit about your background. Tell us where you're from, and maybe you can tell your story about how you discovered the arts and how you found yourself functioning in this community-building, placemaking way in your community.
Certainly. I introduce myself as an arts advocate, community builder, and placemaker, but before all those things, I was born and raised in Coral Springs, Florida, which is located in Broward County, where Fort Lauderdale and Hollywood are.
Long story short, I found myself discovering this place in an industrial warehouse district of Midtown Miami called Wynwood, which is arguably the street art capital of the world, where there are murals everywhere, on the floors and on the walls. I was not traditionally into fine art, but these murals as contemporary art were really speaking to me. I got enthralled by this Wynwood place. I wouldn't pass up an opportunity to go there for events or talks.
I would come back to my native Broward County and say, 'Why don't we have more things like this?' Eventually that curiosity led me to starting a social movement called Choose 954 to cultivate culture and community in my native Broward County, in an effort to keep people informed about the great things going on and to try to make it a better place to live, not just a better place to vacation.
Fortunately, shortly after I started that, through my love of TED Talks, I was invited to a TEDx simulcast event where I sat next to a gentleman who would become my future business partner. He overheard what I was discussing about the creation of Choose 954, invited me to meet him for coffee, and then we identified greater things that were missing in our community, not just murals. We didn't have an art fair, and this Art Basel behemoth takes place 45 minutes down the road from us the first week of December and generates a billion-dollar economic impact for one week of art.
Ultimately, I was in the right place at the right time, connected with my soon-to-be future business partner, and the rest is history.
Okay, so how did you personally come to appreciate the arts? Were you into arts in high school? Is this the trajectory you saw yourself on when you were younger, or can you tell me more about how you came to appreciate arts?
I was exposed to arts. In Broward County, they would take us to the museum and the performing arts center, but traditional fine art did not resonate with me. It was truly this street art movement back in 2014 and 2015. Fortunately, Wynwood had some of the best artists in the world, as well as local artists in Miami and South Florida, literally painting everything everywhere: the sidewalks, the inside of the buildings, the exterior of the buildings.
At that moment in time, contemporary street art really spoke to me and my generation and demographic, as I was 30 years old at that time. I just couldn't get enough of this street art thing. Then I found out street art and arts were part of arts and culture, and in the broader arts and culture there were also things like cool restaurants and food experiences.
I was a very curious person. From having been a Johnny 9-to-5 recruiter who would sit at a desk and listen to TED Talks and start getting a little bit of inspiration, I just followed that inspiration and followed that curiosity to see how far those rabbit holes go. They go pretty deep.
It was through those experiences, and then traveling, networking, making relationships with artists, making relationships with event producers, and ultimately making relationships with my future business partner, that I realized I could do these events too. I could help the arts as well, even though it was not part of my trajectory, path, background, or education.
It seems like from the very beginning you saw a connection between art and community building. I feel like some people see art and culture as very experiential, as what they can do in their free time: 'I just want to go enjoy this.' But it seems like you immediately saw it as something that can enliven a community, bring people together, and give a particular place a sense of identity. Can you talk about that? How did you see that, and what were you hoping you could do by bringing that to your particular place?
Sure. Aside from Art Basel in Miami and aside from Wynwood, where the murals are up for anybody to discover any day of the week, they would have a second Saturday art walk, which at one point was drawing 30,000 to 40,000 people to go out on one night of the month. I was enamored and enthralled.
I had never been into community building. I was a regular guy. I would go to the sports bar and watch the Miami Heat and Miami Hurricanes games. But I started receiving so much enrichment in my own life, personally and then ultimately professionally, that I really wanted to be part of the movement. I didn't necessarily want to be part of Wynwood. I didn't live there. It wasn't my community. I just liked to go and visit as a patron.
Fortunately, when I did connect with Andrew, he was an early-stage Wynwood artist back in the day, way before this. He was also an early-stage artist in the arts district in Fort Lauderdale, which was just burgeoning at that time, and he had been part of some art movements. Art had a profound impact on his life as well.
When we started putting our brains together, we realized we needed to do something big for Broward County and Fort Lauderdale. We really wanted to put it on the map as a destination to view and interact with arts, because throughout this experience I was beginning to make relationships with artists, go on studio visits, have really interesting conversations, and realize these people who might not live in Miami, New York, LA, or Chicago deserve to be highlighted, showcased, and supported as well.
Unfortunately, Andrew wasn't able to join us for this podcast. He's one of the greatest intellectual geniuses of our time, and he would look at opportunities and look at ways to do things that people had never done before.
Instead of doing what everybody else had done, doing an art fair in a tent, convention center, or hotel to put Fort Lauderdale on the map, we had to come up with something revolutionary. We thought about the unique elements of our community: the fact that we have an Intracoastal Waterway system that spans thousands of miles up the New River and throughout the coastline, beautiful homes that are on the water that often sit vacant for long periods of time when they're for sale, and a water taxi system, which is very unique. There are not many places, aside from Venice, Italy, that have a water taxi.
Initially, we came up with an idea called Art Fort Lauderdale, the art fair on the water, to host a revolutionary art fair inside vacant mansions that were for sale, make it only accessible by boat, put art throughout these homes, and also make it primarily for independent artists not represented by a gallery, versus traditional art fairs that are heavily gallery-driven.
Throughout that experience, we started getting a lot of interest, press coverage, support from artists, stakeholders, and the community. Ultimately, through that experience, we partnered with the local real estate board, which had brokers, developers, and property managers attend the event and say, 'Can you do art in our commercial space?' That ultimately paved the way for Zero Empty Spaces.
That sounds like such a fun event. I love it. It just sounds so fun.
Okay, so let's talk Zero Empty Spaces. How do you explain what Zero Empty Spaces is? I gave a hint of what you all are doing in the intro, but I'm curious to know more about what it was like for you when this real estate piece came in, this idea of using these vacant spaces.
Initially, were you all thinking of them as exhibit spaces? How did that evolve? What light bulbs were going off in your head as you saw these pieces come together?
Certainly. Maybe just one last piece on Wynwood: where Andrew was an early-stage artist, those were industrial warehouses that were vacant and dilapidated. The artists would go to create inside the warehouse with no air conditioning, and generally no lighting or electric. They would make it work. That was one of the greatest examples of repurposing or activating vacant commercial real estate to make art spaces, and that ultimately led to the current state of Wynwood, which we won't get into right now.
Fortunately, after that period of time for Andrew, he became a marketing and regional director for Westfield, one of the largest mall and shopping center owners and developers, where he had developed some vacancy management strategies and solutions for malls and shopping centers that he was responsible for. It was a way to attract and retain shoppers, keep feet in the street longer, create positive buzz, press, and social media content, and increase dwell time, which is a big thing for malls: to get people to stay there longer so they spend more money.
Throughout that experience, he created one of the first commission-free art galleries in an underutilized portion of a food court as a true arts advocate, and really wrote the guidebook on alternative ways to activate vacant spaces for malls that he would use for his malls with Westfield and then consult with others on.
Fortunately, I caught him as he was looking to transition out of corporate. Since he had been part of the early stage of Wynwood, part of the early stage of this burgeoning arts district in the Flagler Village area in Fort Lauderdale called FATVillage, helped contribute to their art walk formation, and, as a creative graphic designer and marketing agency owner, had designed the logo and branding for our main street in downtown Fort Lauderdale many years ago, called Las Olas Boulevard, he had enough experience, credibility, and relationships that when we came up with this idea, we presented it to the mayor of our city, Dean Trantalis of Fort Lauderdale, who's a supporter of ours and supporter of the arts.
We said, 'Dean, we want to see about taking some empty spaces and making art studios for artists to create and collaborate affordably outside their home, so they can get discovered, supported, and shown while the spaces are not doing anything or serving any positive use.' Fortunately, Dean suggested we connect with the primary property owner of our downtown, of our main street, the Las Olas Company, a gentleman by the name of Mike Weymouth. We always heard he was a tough cookie. It took him three minutes. He gave us a space that was a former art gallery and had been vacant for three years.
We put a bunch of local artists in there who all had their own respective followings and friends. One of them was the artist for the Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show, which at the time was the largest in the world. One of them was the artist for the Miami Dolphins, F1, and the Super Bowl.
Through that experience, we attracted a lot of positive press coverage from local NPR and beyond. We had one of the widest-attended grand openings of anything in our city's history, with over 1,000 people spilling out into the streets based on the novelty of the event. Then, through hosting more events like our artist potluck series and our Creative Zen monthly breakfast lecture series, a mini TED Talk, we were just getting so much engagement and positive feedback that we realized we were onto something.
This was June or July 2019, before COVID. Fortunately or unfortunately, when COVID happened, we actually started expanding more because more empty spaces were becoming available and there were artists looking to get out of the house. If you didn't know about Florida during the pandemic, it was pretty open at that time, so that really served as a catalyst for us. Now it has led us to 34 spaces over the last seven years, across five states, with over 900 artists having come through the program, which has truly changed hundreds of artists' lives thousands of times over with success stories.
I want to go back to the scene of that event you're telling me about with the space that the guy gave you. What was it like for a normal person from that community? How do you think that event was affecting the sense of community in that place?
I know these arts events can be meaningful to people in the art community. They're meaningful to the artists. There are these two layers: people who are into the arts or part of the professional art world, and then the press and what it means to the city and the property owner. But for a normal person living in this town, when these art events start going, how do you think it affects a sense of community, a sense of place, or a sense of identity when you're able to ignite the arts in that way?
Great question. The energy was palpable. Mind you, this is a high-price-per-square-foot corridor, which extends from our downtown to the beach. That's a unique thing about Fort Lauderdale.
There were art galleries on the boulevard. None of them were blue-chip or game-changing art galleries, and they weren't really hosting openings at that time. There was a little bit of a yearning and a desire for the community to have something cool, something like this Wynwood thing that was really blowing up at this time in 2019.
You would never think that you would ever see a local artist on Las Olas, on the main street. At $86 a square foot at the time for rent, it was just not possible or in the realm of possibility. Based on the fact that they all had their own respective followers, they all must have had probably 50 to 100 people themselves come out to the event. It was packed wall to wall.
Just that energy for the arts, and once again, these are local artist studios. This is a space where they're creating and collaborating. You're getting to meet them, have a conversation with them, and pick their brain. There were also people crossing paths from different backgrounds and walks of life.
One of the artists, our first artist, Rosanna Kalis, was a former head of investment banking for one of the largest publicly traded companies in Broward County. She had retired and stepped away from her corporate life to pursue her art, so she had her respective followers, friends, and supporters coming to the space who would more than likely never cross paths and intersect with the street artist Serge, who is the artist for the Miami Dolphins. They probably wouldn't have intersected or had their family and friends have this meeting place, third space, and opportunity for those conversations and dialogues, which has honestly been one of the most interesting social experiments to come out of this whole thing.
It was just a really cool moment in time to open this third space in a place like Broward County, where we didn't really have third places aside from coffee shops.
I would like to unpack a little bit more about the solutions you all are bringing through Zero Empty Spaces. You all tackle what sounds to me like three main challenges. You bring a creative solution to the challenge of blighted real estate. You're bringing a creative solution to the challenge of providing affordable space for artists. You're bringing a solution to the challenge of keeping downtowns activated, or activating them in the first place, and keeping them as places that people want to visit.
I know we don't have a ton of time, but I'd love to talk through these. Let's start with the challenge of blighted real estate, or just empty real estate. It doesn't necessarily even have to be blighted. I know it's pretty obvious, the solution you all are bringing to that, but can you tell me more about your approach? Are cities coming to you with properties they'd like to see activated? Are you all identifying potential opportunities in different places to bring some properties online in this more creative way? Maybe you could share a little bit about the value of finding creative ways to put empty real estate to productive use.
Sure. Closed doors don't generate positive press. Closed doors don't generate anything positive.
Yes, it's commercial real estate. Somebody, a company or a developer, spends a lot of money to build it or acquire it, and understandably the nature of their business is to rent it. But when it's not being rented, they still have to cover the maintenance, the utilities, the insurance, and support their existing tenants that they don't want to lose.
Aside from waiting for that magical, mythical next tenant to arrive and maybe putting up a colorful sign that says 'for lease' or 'call us,' there really aren't that many tools in the commercial real estate property management listing toolkit.
We wanted to develop this to be a win-win-win solution. We can only do it with people and commercial real estate partners that get it and want to say yes. Thankfully, we do work with the largest in the world now, Simon, Brookfield, Centennial, JLL, Lincoln, and small ones as well. It works for some. It doesn't work for all, but we wanted to make it easy and compelling.
You have this vacant space. It's costing you money, and it's not helping you lease the space. Some people aren't able to visualize what their future space would be when it's vacant versus when it's active. When they see activity, that helps them see what will eventually be there.
We only work with property owners and cities that reach out to us. We don't call for-lease signs. It's just not a good use of our time. Fortunately, because we've had extensive press coverage, we go to conferences, and people speak about us at conferences, we've been fielding probably over 1,000 inquiries over the last 18 months from cities, business improvement districts, downtowns, main streets, community redevelopment agencies, economic development offices, and commercial real estate partners as well.
Basically, we go through the program, our resources and solutions, what we have traditionally done by activating them to make affordable artist studios, and our future uses, which are going to include co-retailing spaces that will serve as true retail incubators for communities of any size, as well as other things we're developing in the food and beverage space, with ghost kitchens in former restaurant spaces and mixology academies in former bar spaces. There will actually be a workforce development, job training, and job placement component during the daytime, and at nighttime, we'll be selling drinks.
We let those interested parties know who we are, what we do, how the program runs, what we cover, what we need the property to cover, and what we need, at this stage, the city to cover. We're getting asked to go to every corner of the country every day, so we do now need some municipal funding to help us offset the upfront cost to mobilize and make these happen.
So what is going on? This is a positive thing for you guys. Cities are realizing they have all these spaces that need some type of productive, attractive use. But from where you sit, I guess the flip side to that is properties are getting emptied out. Can you give a little context? What have you picked up on as to what's going on behind that oversupply of property that cities are trying to figure out what to do with? Is it e-commerce? Are people shopping less in person? Is it trends in different parts of town and where people want to spend time? What have you noticed?
All of the above. To oversimplify things on the commercial real estate side, people are playing games of Monopoly that we're not privy to. There are people doing things like assemblages, where you're assembling multiple properties on a block, on a corridor, whatever, so you can eventually do a redevelopment, which is very prevalent where we live in South Florida.
There are a lot of things behind the scenes, but yes, there are changes in the economy. Obviously, a lot of major retailers have closed. A lot of small businesses, unfortunately, can't make it. We live in one of the least affordable places for housing in the country, where they keep building a supply of new ground-floor retail spaces, but we don't have the demand. This is also true across the country. There are not enough coffee shops, boutiques, or pop-ups that are looking to pay market rent.
What we're in the mindset of now is that we're democratizing the opportunity. We're the conduit. To answer your previous question, the property owners feel more comfortable with Zero Empty Spaces as an established brand, with the signage, press coverage, insurance, recommendations, and endorsements, so they don't feel like they're just giving the space to a bunch of artists to run wild with, which is understandably one of their concerns. We help mitigate that.
We can't be everything to everyone. But instead of just leaving it vacant and hoping for the best, hoping that eventually maybe the economic development division for the city will do some campaign to attract small businesses or national businesses, this is a way that you can put local members of your community in the space and give them the opportunity to test the market as a springboard and launching pad before they go sign their own five- or 10-year permanent lease.
We have had that happen successfully. Artists have taken their own space after starting with us, and artists have even met, formed collectives and companies, and now have multiple spaces after they started with Zero Empty Spaces.
I think it's interesting that cities are oriented more toward trying to attract the established national business than they are toward starting their development flywheel with the local. I think that's part of the problem here. In a way, you guys are inviting them to take a couple steps back and saying, instead of necessarily aiming first for the tenant who can afford the $86-per-square-foot rent, maybe first you should focus on attracting your local business owners and grow from there.
I'll leave that if you have thoughts on it, because I see this all the time: the big fancy development just sits there waiting for someone who can afford it. Why not start with what people in your community can afford in the first place and then let it get the flywheel going?
Our key differentiator is we use a modular divider wall system that's movable like furniture and connects together like IKEA. It fits all the permitting requirements and alleviates architectural drawings and all the extensive things. We can set up a 3,000-square-foot space in one to two days and break it down quickly as well.
Those modular divider walls, as you can see in our videos and on our social media, allow us to give artist A space one for 100 square feet and artist B space two for 150 square feet. We keep these all bite-sized and affordable. Generally, artists on average pay $300 to $400 a month, inclusive of the utilities. That democratizes the opportunity so that they can test the market, get into these spaces, and make the magic happen.
We encourage more and more cities, downtowns, and BIDs. It's great that you want to do a retail incubator, but instead of putting one creative small business in one space for three, six, maybe 12 months and hoping for the best, by the time they're setting up, it's almost time for them to break down. The burden of running the space and marketing the space falls on the shoulders of one small business that might never have had a brick and mortar before. That's not setting it up for success. We have found that when you have 10, 20, 30, or sometimes 40 artists in the space, it is setting it up for success.
That really speaks to what I wanted to talk about, which was how you all are providing solutions for local artists by providing them that space, not putting the burden of one space on one artist, and then obviously creating opportunities for collaboration and that organic, spontaneous idea sharing and brainstorming.
Can you talk about downtowns a little bit? When you are working in a community, are you mainly working in downtowns?
We're receiving most of the inquiries from downtowns. Our latest space in downtown Minneapolis and our next space in downtown Berkeley are in downtowns, but they're in malls, office buildings, shopping centers, and new mixed-use development projects, wherever the property owner feels that there's a need and reaches out and aligns with us.
But yes, downtowns are the hub of most major and suburban cities. Unfortunately, due to COVID, work from home, and changes in the economy, downtowns understandably have been hollowing out a little bit. Also, people moved out to the suburbs. Not everybody wants to live downtown if you're starting a family. If you don't work downtown, which has changed with work, then you really might not need to go there.
By making a draw for local people to go visit and patronize, and even for people who do go downtown for the hair salon or whatever business it is, the coffee shop they patronize, they can see this art space and art pieces transforming in the window as they walk by. It's been a really cool experience to provide that.
Can you walk us through your process at Zero Empty Spaces? You've mentioned a couple pieces of it with the modular furniture and the ability to subdivide it very easily, but can you walk our listeners through, not super in depth, but what it's like when a city approaches you and you think this is a good fit? What's that process like to get that property subdivided, the space properly allocated, and then find those artists and start assigning those spaces?
It's a series of conversations. The good thing is that it's not a heavy lift for the cities. We really do all the work ourselves. We need, at a minimum, there to be initial interest and a line of communication to a property owner who is interested and amenable to the use, activation, and terms, which generally is a $0 lease with a six-month minimum guaranteed runway before we go month to month with the 30-day notice to vacate. On average, we're running 36 months. Some spaces are running five and six years. We can talk about that another time.
We do need there to be some buy-in from the stakeholder group that's bringing us in, because it's generally the city, the downtown, or the BID bringing us in to support their community and give them the benefits. We do need some municipal funding to help us get that off the ground.
Once we go through all that, we identify the site. We measure the site. We do our due diligence and feasibility. We'll then schedule a site visit and stakeholder engagement meetings. We'll go measure it further, make sure everything pencils out, and then if it all does, we'll sign the lease and schedule our trip to come back for a build-out.
We commence the build-out with an open house preview and an information session that we market, run ads on, and do press releases for, to invite the general public, primarily the artists, to come see the space as it's numbered, listed, and priced out, and hear our presentation geared toward them. Generally, we do that on a Saturday afternoon.
Artists start moving in the next week. We can build out these 3,000-square-foot spaces in one to two days, so we can do this in weeks or months, now that we have a little bit of a backlog and we're traveling a little bit. It's not a long, drawn-out process. Maybe getting the approval from the city internally, budgets, or RFP might be a little bit long and drawn out, but ours is not long and drawn out. I'm glad to share that with anybody who's interested.
What is it like when you get to a new community and you're trying to get a feel for what the art scene is? You've got the property, you're building those partnerships with the downtown, the BIDs, and the city, then you're working on the property, and then you're reaching out to the community to attract the artists.
I think that's interesting, because I think some people would want to have clarity around what the art scene here is even like. What is our community here like? Do you have a process for getting a feel for that part of it, or do you just trust that this is a city, there are people here, and there are some artists? How do you approach that?
A mix of both. We're trying to make better-informed decisions now because we do have to go places where there are artists, because the artists do pay rent that subsidizes and makes it a sustainable win-win-win as it relates to our operating expenses, utilities, upfront costs, and so on.
We do now ask the stakeholders to connect us with the arts department, the arts council, the arts division, and local groups like that. Once again, the big thing is to make this a win-win-win. We understand we're coming from another community, from the outside, so we do take the time to build relationships and let people know who we are and what we're doing. We're not coming to take from the grant pool. We're coming to provide literally life-changing resources that have helped artists go full time and changed people's careers.
Once we have those conversations, then generally we're a little bit more well received. People start sharing it organically through social media, Nextdoor, and things like that. We are mindful of the fact that we are outsiders and do take the time to have those conversations and form those relationships to try to set the program up for success.
You all have now worked, tell me if I have my numbers correct here, with 34 properties, and 27 of them have found a permanent tenant. That meant the property owner actually found someone who wanted the whole property, so the pop-up art spaces moved. If I understand correctly from our earlier conversation, someone might hear that at first and be confused: 'What happened to all the artists?' But you see this as a good thing. You see this as a success.
Can you explain that model and why you consider it a success when you've moved into a space, run it as an artist space for, let's say, two years, and now the property owner has found a tenant who wants the whole thing, and the artist spaces are moving out or moving somewhere else? Tell us why that's a good thing and why you see that as a success.
Sure. Nothing in life is permanent, and if we were to do a permanent space, it wouldn't be as affordable because now you have a whole other slew of costs and charges and things. To have an opportunity in a space for three years, five years, or six years in a storefront is significant. In reality, 99% of artists are not going to rent a storefront in a downtown or main street to have their studio gallery, unless they're very successful or in a financial situation to do so.
The relationships that are formed, the conversations, and being able to take your art out of your house, which is the number one thing for all artists, is a life-changing and inspiring opportunity within itself. So yes, they are a meanwhile use. They are temporary in nature. But the benefits are a lot.
The majority of our artists report to us on their surveys and feedback that their career is now validated. They were able to call themselves an artist. They might have been painting at home for 30, 40, or 50 years, just as talented as the kid with the master's in fine art degree, but were making their family, working a job, and never stepped outside their house with their art. There is certainly a life-changing validation process, which has been very rewarding and fulfilling for us.
We can't be everything to everyone. We'd love these spaces to be permanent. We did establish a 501(c)(3) called Spaces of Possibility, ideally to get properties donated to us so they could be permanent art spaces and eventually affordable live-work housing spaces for artists that we're just starting to roll out right now.
But this is how we've drafted the program. It is month to month until the property gets a permanent tenant. It's also month to month for the artist, so if their situation changes, there's no penalty to discontinue, and they're not burdened with a long-term lease.
Also, thinking about the alternative, the alternative would be the property would just sit there empty that whole time. You really are providing a flexible, agile, creative middle use. We know that this is not going to be the long-term use for this property, but while you're working on that long term, why don't we do something good with it in the meantime that's also affordable and flexible for the artists?
At first, it might sound unfortunate, like you're just displacing the artist now. But if their option is to stay at home with their garage studio or wait until they can afford market rate, this is great for them. It's really giving them that incremental step to get exposure, validation, and test their idea and see if this is something they can sustain.
I know that I have more questions than I have time, so I'm looking at my list here. What advice, Evan, would you give to someone who's in their town and maybe can't pull off a Zero Empty Spaces project at the same scale, but is seeing real estate or potential in their town to use the arts to bring the community together and ignite a more localized economic flywheel? What advice would you give to them in terms of where to start, or the kinds of conversations they should be having or thinking about?
Sure. There are people that care generally in every community. Some of them are paid, and some of them are volunteers. If you go connect to your economic development office, your downtown, your business improvement district, your mayor, city commissioner, or somebody like that, they more likely know the constituents in their community to connect you to.
If you have a placemaker or a placemaking movement in your community, which more and more communities have, I certainly encourage you to connect with them, or even some of the larger networks like PlacemakingUS, which can connect dots throughout the country. It is possible. It might not be on a Google search. You might have to show up to events and city commission meetings and introduce yourself and network, but there are people out there who do want this, whether you know it or not.
What would you say to any community that maybe has anxiety or hesitation about the idea of art, or is thinking, 'We're not really an artsy city. Maybe we have enough to sustain a farmers market art scale, but I don't know that we have enough to actually fill up a whole building.' How do you speak to that?
It's not a one-size-fits-all approach. The farmers market concept is what we're proposing now with the co-retailing retail incubator solution: same thing, taking a large space and subdividing it into smaller spaces, but for emerging brands, makers, and people who traditionally sell on Etsy, at art markets, or farmers markets, giving them that opportunity beyond the farmers market.
In Florida, you have to take all of your products and merchandise, your tent, your racks, go set it up, pay a fee, hope it doesn't rain, hope people show up, and then that's four or five hours, maybe once a week or once a month. So now, aside from the artist studios, for communities where they do want more retail spaces or more of the 'experiential economy,' we're giving them that opportunity in addition to or aside from the art spaces.
All right, Evan. In closing, I'm going to invite you to tell us a little bit about your town, your neighborhood, or wherever you call home right now. What do you love about it? I always ask my guests to tell us about a couple of small local businesses they like to recommend people check out if they come through on a visit.
Sure. When people think about Broward County, they generally think about the water taxi and the Everglades, the airboat rides or the alligator wrestling. That's cool, and it serves its purpose as well. But we actually have some other really great nature elements and parks.
One of them is the Atlantic Trailhead at the Sawgrass Expressway, which is literally on the edge of the Everglades, where I grew up in Coral Springs. You can see for miles, and it has one of the best sunset views anywhere in the world. You can find that on my social media. We have great parks, and we have a whole bunch of pickleball courts now.
We have a really noteworthy, huge farmers market called Yellow Green in Hollywood. We're one of the most culturally diverse and culinary diverse communities in the country. Yes, we have a lot of Mexican and Colombian restaurants, but we also have places like Krakatoa Indonesian in Hollywood, which has been on Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives.
I believe the city of Lauderhill in Broward County, aside from Brooklyn, has the most diverse culinary options per capita. There's a lot to explore. There are a lot of gems, and there are a lot of really cool small businesses and shops. If you ever have any questions, don't hesitate to reach out. I'm an open book.
All right, Evan, thank you so much for taking time to join me on the show. It's been a lot of fun hearing about Zero Empty Spaces, and I definitely am feeling more inspired as I look around my community and think about what could be possible if we took a more creative and incremental approach to some of these spaces. Thank you for taking time to share with us.
Thank you, and Strong Towns, you guys keep up the good work. We're a big fan.
All right. To our audience, thanks so much for joining me for another conversation. I'll be back soon with another episode. If there's someone you think I should have on the show, please let us know using the suggested guest form, which we always include in the show notes. I'll be back, hopefully next week, with another conversation. In the meantime, keep doing what you can to build a strong town.
This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a nonprofit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong Towns member at strongtowns.org/membership.