Hole In The Wall Gang Wants A Room Of Its Own

Hidden away betwixt a currency exchange and variety store on the south side of Dundas Square — Toronto’s stab at a European-style piazza — is a hole in the wall that’s one of the few signs of a true public square to be seen at the intersection of Dundas and Babylon.

A small chalkboard posts a daily welcome to Café Oro — 150 square feet of fair trade coffee, custom-made sandwiches, daily soup specials, fruit-filled muffins and made-to-order attitude. No seats necessary; take a bench at the square or go eat at your desk at the public health department, Ryerson University or City TV, all a stone’s throw away.

Like all the hot spots in New York or Tokyo, only people who know where to find it can find it. Drop by, because holes in the wall are the Next New Thing in city economies and community karma.

Creatives trying to find a starter home for their off-the-wall idea are the force behind the new economy trend, says downtown councilor Adam Vaughan, champion and theoretician of the Hole in the Wall Gang. His success at gaining the good will of planners over his last term may well be an omen of the post-industrial and post-recession city economy.

Laurie Mercer, the manager of Café Oro since 2007, is a prototype of the “nano-preneurs” who treat found spaces in cities as if they were specimens of found art that only awaited imagination before being  turned into something special.

Like most people in what’s called the “casual” or “informal” economy, Mercer comes to her job long in experience and generic skills, but short on the academic credentials needed to make it in the formal economy. She picked up cooking while helping her mom at home, helping out on a farm, feeding her own kids, watching chefs during gigs as a waiter and wholesale food driver, and eventually a break into professional food prep for the east-end vegan hangout, Pulp Kitchen.

Aside from food-related jobs, Mercer worked for a film company on commercials, which taught her the importance of presentation skills. “I try to hire students in photography or people likely to have a good eye for plating,” she says. “Without that, you’re dead when the food goes on display under glass.”

Making a place like this go, during the rise and fall of customer tides as the rush of breakfast and lunch come and go, also requires staff who are part of the “casual labor market.” Mercer tries to hire students, who get paid $11 an hour, because she wants staff “with something else going on in their lives. People shouldn’t make sandwiches when they’re in a bad mood.”

Sociability compensates for Café Oro’s bush shelter ambience.

“Repeat business is 90 per cent of the trade,” she says. “I know people’s allergies, how much time they have to wait, and can figure what to do when they’re too stressed to choose and ask me to surprise them with something nice, and know when to suggest my tea with ginger to fight a cold. Nothing beats the pride of a business owner who produces something that nurtures.”

What makes these kinds of places a matter for public policy?

I like the fact that Café Oro offers wages and hours that allow approximately three people at a time to work their way through university. That’s a public benefit, over and above what one buyer and one seller get in a business exchange. I also think it adds public health value to have an earn-while-you-learn type of workplace that spreads lifelong life skills in cooking from scratch, something few people learn at home or school. To boot, any place that can create 3.5 fulltime job equivalents out of $500 a day worth of soup, muffins, sandwiches and coffee knows something about low-cost job creation that governments should learn from.

Councillor Vaughan sees small shops as part of a much larger trend which cities need to get behind, as is done in Melbourne, Australia. “New ideas need small places,” he says, where artists, newcomers and do-it-yourselfers can “take a run at it,” without having to pay high rents and, even more burdensome, high property taxes – the deadly combination of which makes it impossible for anyone but high-volume/  fast cashflow operators.

“It turns out that the very thing that characterizes healthy neighbourhoods is independent and unique businesses that thrive in small places,” Vaughan says. A recent fire at the buildings centred around Duke’s cycle shop on Queen West revealed that eight small stores hired 108 workers, he says. There’s a rabbit warren of job creation hidden away places too small for most politicians to look at.

Vaughan worries that developers have a formula for ground-floor shopping spaces designed for major outlets, a one-size-fits-all prescription that squeezes out newcomers and innovators and gives the prime spaces to chains – not exactly a prescription for downtown vitality.

Over his term in office, he’s worked with City planners and community groups to foster 20,000 square feet of small openings for artists, food stores (which he classifies as culinary art) and bike shops in his downtown ward. He’d like to see the practice spread to suburban areas.

Toronto needs to return to its history as a city of shopkeepers, says Vaughan. He supports policies that permit holes in the wall and encourage provision of not-for-profit commercial rentals.  He also favors a progressive taxation policy for small, individual- or family-owned businesses that can’t pay the same property tax in their rent as big corporations any more than they can pay the same income tax as their owners.”This is no different from other postponements of regular taxes and levies to lure major corporations to locate in the city,” he says Why not share the incewntives with small retailers of our own?

Conventional cities of the industrial era rolled out an economy with four wheels. The four wheels made full employment go ’round — a strong for-profit sector of corporate heavyweights, a robust government sector of teachers, healthworkers and civil servants, a vibrant voluntary sector of charities and non-profits (the “social economy”), and a diverse sector of small, mostly service-based, main street shops.

Once private sector jobs were outsourced to the Global South and after the shakedown following the 2008 stockmarket crash, a fifth wheel – basically adapted from poor countries in the Global South or reinvented from earlier stages of industrialism – has been discovered. It’s called the “casual” or “informal” economy. That means artists struggling for a commercial break, part-timers who need to supplement their major gig as students, retirees, parents, caregivers, and artisans who don’t like working for a boss.

There is no reason why this informal sector of the emerging knowledge economy should be poorly-paid or treated. In the early days of industrialism, for example, “journeymen” artisans who travelled and worked by the day were among the best-paid and most respected of workers, and the backbone of the early labor movement. There are many reasons why these self-starters should have a space of their own.

In the treasure hunt for new neighbourhood-based jobs, precious things still come in small packages.