A handful of local artists are suddenly out of luck as property owners in downtown Tacoma have announced they will stop participating in a program that provided artists with free studio and gallery space.

You've likely already seen some of the fruits of the program known as Spaceworks Tacoma - an arrangement between downtown property owners and the City of Tacoma that puts would-be career creatives into perpetually vacant retail spaces. As told, artists get help building their business and a space to show their work, and property owners don't have to try to lease storefronts in a ghost town. Best case scenario, participating artists grow into thriving businesses and begin paying for the space. Worst case, the downtown retail environment doesn't look so pathetic all the time.

"We hope that they get foot traffic and build a business," says City of Tacoma Arts Administrator Amy McBride, who helped build the program. "A lot of these artists have home-based businesses, and we like the idea that they could grow into a business that can pay rent. The alternative is empty space."

But as commercial real estate markets start to pick up again, empty space also sends the message that storefronts are available for lease. Commercial broker Dominic Accetturo says his clients decided to cancel their agreement with one artist because of concerns that a prospective paying client might drive by and think the space is already leased because it's full of artists. In this case, the space is in Tacoma's historic Provident Building, owned by LinMar Properties, a San Diego-based investment group.

Times are changing, says Accetturo, and property owners can't risk sending the wrong message to people who are out driving around looking for retail space.

"We had a meeting and we agreed we needed to have one vacant," says Accetturo.

Accetturo says that maybe the program has run its course, and emphasizes that LinMar is only booting one of two Spaceworks beneficiaries.

"LinMar has been very accommodating," he says. "We could kick them both out, but we decided to keep one."

Some observers, however, question the logic and ethics of reneging based on the faint hope of a drive-by leasing.

Katie Lowry, her associates and hundreds of Tacoma youth, for example, were preparing to use one of the Spaceworks Tacoma locations not owned by LinMar to conduct a 10-week series of youth art and education workshops called  "L.I.F.E." or  "Living In Free Expression" - until finding out the owner of the location set to be used had backed out because of similar concerns. The space also would have allowed Pacific Lutheran University-spawned nonprofit Fab-5 to consolidate its operations and offer its multitude of arts-based, youth-oriented community services from a central location, says Lowry.

"Over the last few months, we have had planning meetings to prepare for moving into the space," she says. "We have invested our time as a team to work on class schedule, workshops, drop-in hours and what the space was going to look like. Overall we are disappointed."

Lowry says McBride and her office are working hard to find alternative spaces for Fab-5 and other disappointed people and organizations.

Other people, meanwhile, question whether having artists in the spaces would hurt lease efforts at all.

"People might drive by a house, but people don't drive around looking for that kind of space," says Amy Robitaille, executive vice president of Kirkland-based Commercial Brokers Association, a group that provides listing and other services to more than 900 member offices throughout the Pacific Northwest. "Usually if someone leases a space, it's because they found information (on the Internet or listing service) and contacted a broker, not because they're driving around looking for something."

LINK: Spaceworks Tacoma