BC Business
Despite cost overruns, relocation problems and red tape disasters, Vancouver comedy staple Little Mountain Gallery is back with a bang
There are themes so soul crushing and yet so consistently, quintessentially Vancouver that you could almost set your watch to them.
Rent goes up, art space goes down. Lease expires, rehearsal space goes silent. Music venue opens, nearby condo owners protest endlessly.
Look no further than the disappearance of the Media Club, Richard’s on Richards, 901 Main St. and any number of East Vancouver arts spaces for proof of the erosion of the city’s cultural mosaic.
But one Vancouver institution has somehow been able to punch up and keep fighting the good fight.
Little Mountain Gallery celebrated its re-opening on Gastown’s Water Street on April 12 with a 24-hour comedy show featuring Juno-nominated comic Graham Clark and jokes from a rotating cast of his fellow local comedians.
It was something of a full-circle moment, as Clark headed up a similar marathon before the group was demovicted out of its old digs in late 2021.
“It was awesome to see so many people come back and embrace the space,” says LMG executive director Brent Constantine. “It wasn’t so much an exhale—more like an ongoing slow breath through the nose, given what we’ve gone through.”
The previous Little Mountain locale on East 26th Avenue off Main Street was an incubator for local comedic talent, serving as a springboard for Vancouver comedy from 2001 to 2021. Sean Devlin, Andrea Jin, Erica Sigurdson, Ivan Decker and many more comedians cut their teeth in the aging, 1,300-square-foot shack.
But as most people in the Vancouver cultural scene know all too well, grassroots art groups simply can’t have nice things—at least not for long.
That demoviction came in early 2022 to make way for low-rise condos that were in the preliminary stages of construction as of May this year.
The process wasn’t necessarily surprising to Constantine, nor does he hold ill will toward his previous landlord. He had already recognized that the space had outlasted its capacity and functional needs, and was searching for an alternative option as far back as 2019.
The group secured its new Water Street location in 2021 through the help of grants and a team of consultants, but then things went awry: the aftereffects of COVID-19 meant that the city’s permitting process was moving like molasses—to the point where project costs ballooned from roughly $250,000 to $1 million. During the two-year period before the gallery’s grand opening earlier this year, Constantine’s team was on the hook for all operational costs—rent, utilities, insurance—while that permit process dragged on.
“I don’t know why I thought it would be inevitable that we would be able to just continue on… it makes no sense that we [pulled off the new location]. It’s ludicrous,” Constantine says. “If this was someone’s actual full-time job and they really depended on it, their life would be ruined.”
And yet despite all of those headaches, Constantine recognizes that Little Mountain is somewhat of a fortunate outlier in the larger arts picture: the delays allowed him to apply for the necessary grants to subsidize most of the project; the building is owned by BC Housing, so the group was able to secure a favourable lease and a reliable landlord; Constantine himself has a master’s degree in planning; and he’s paying roughly $14 per square foot annually compared to the approximately $70 other commercial tenants in the neighbourhood are paying.
“I feel bad for small business owners,” Constantine says. “Imagine someone who’s trying to open a barber shop and they have it in their mind that in a couple of months they’ll be cutting hair and then it turns into such a process. This is bonkers.”
Bonkers is an apt description when examining Vancouver’s arts landscape dating back to before the 2010 Olympics.
A 2019 report prepared by the Eastside Arts Society estimated that 400,000 square feet of arts space was lost between 2009 and 2019, an amount that translates to two and half times the size of BC Place. That same report noted that, of the 1,612 artists with studios in the study area, 1,332 faced imminent threat of displacement due to rent increases or redevelopment. A City of Vancouver report in 2020 found that two-thirds of the cultural spaces surveyed had leases for less than five years, offering little to no rent stability or security of tenure.
For those in the city’s arts and entertainment scene, it’s just become part of life. There is, however, a land ownership model employed in the U.S. and U.K. that could slow the decline.
At its core, the cultural land trust model is based on the promise of long-term security and viability, such that it shelters art spaces from real estate speculation. By doing so, it locks in sustainable rents and ownerships of those properties.
Under a cultural land trust system, land is acquired—or donated by government—specifically for art spaces and lower-income housing through government subsidies and donations.
Its principal benefits include stable rents, long-term leases and a realistic prospect of land ownership. Similar models are in place as close by as Seattle and San Francisco, or further afield in England and Scotland.
It’s a model that Brian McBay sees a future in. McBay is the executive director of 221A, a nonprofit group established in 2005 that has a long history of sourcing, securing and operating artist spaces and housing across the Downtown Eastside, Chinatown, Mount Pleasant and Downtown Vancouver.
He’s lobbying at the municipal and provincial levels to establish cultural land trusts in B.C., but the pitch doesn’t come cheap: $15 million just to get started, funds that would come by way of government subsidies, grants and philanthropy.
“The alternative is that when you go to city hall and say you want to open an artist studio, they have to open a dictionary, blow the dust off of it and ask themselves, ‘What even is an artist studio?’” McBay says. “Whereas if you say you want to open a hair salon, for example, it’s so much easier.”
Like McBay, Vancouver councillor Pete Fry has been an active participant in the city’s arts scene for decades. From the late 1980s through until the late 1990s, Fry operated warehouse spaces for live gigs across the city, while his background in graphic design has seen Fry work with hundreds of bands over the years.
“I do think Vancouver punches well above its weight as a creative city, as a hub for artists,” says Fry, who sits on the city’s arts and culture advisory committee. “But it also has some of the lowest-paid artists and one of the highest-value housing and real estate markets.”
Fry’s committee is seeing such an alarming pace of displacement that a subcommittee has been struck solely for the purpose of finding and retaining art space.
He too sees value in the cultural land trust model. “I like the idea and I think it’s a viable way to create spaces, but it’s not going to be the silver bullet for all the space needs and it will never be able to address the up-and-coming, independent, do-it-yourself approach,” Fry says. “In a compact city where space is scarce, we’re going to find that cultural and certain DIY artist space use is going to butt up against residential density needs.”
Meanwhile, back on Water Street, Constantine looks out the window at the bustling city and acknowledges the constant friction of a city bound by water on almost every side, and with homes so expensive that only a relative few can afford them.
Now, he finally has time to reflect on the past four years—and to look ahead.
Money is tight, but the comedy calendar is nearly booked through to December. Constantine was run ragged through the regulatory processes, but he doesn’t begrudge the city entirely. He notes that he actually never saw himself as the manager of a comedy club—but if he doesn’t do it, who will?
“When you are an artist, you don’t necessarily want to run a space, you just fall backwards into it because you don’t want to see it disappear,” Constantine says. “And then if you want to develop a space, you have to become a project manager and all of a sudden you’re dealing with architects and engineers and you’ve become so removed from practicing your art. No one wants to do this.”
And so what would make all of this easier?
“Money,” Constantine says instantly. “It always comes back to money.”