648 Kingsway is closing its doors due to a 40% rent increase.The beloved music venue is the latest victim of a merciless housing crisis.
Sean Finan (any pronouns) // Crew Writer
Cameron Skorulski (he/him) // Illustrator
For the past two years, 648 Kingsway countered the conceptions of what it means to be a DIY venue. They were a safe haven for the underrepresented in the Vancouver music scene, and a home for young musicians in search for their start. In fact, if you play in a local band, chances are you’ve had a chance to take the stage, or know someone who has. It was crowded, it was beloved—it was forced to shut down.
The co-creators, Clara and Sho, broke the news on the @648kingsway Instagram account: their rent, starting September 2024, was going to increase steeply by 40%. The post explained that their “small but growing team,” who had been working strictly on a volunteering basis, simply could not sustain it. The venue closed its doors officially on August 25th after their four-day-long “People’s Pride Parade,” which had performances from Hoodie Browns, Arrow in the Quiver, Punching Knives, Lilex and many other familiar faces.
Kirc/Jerome and Zak/Willow, members of infamous local “No-Punk” Band “M01E,” have frequently played at 648, and performed on the 3rd day of the People’s Pride Festival. Zak’s first time playing music on a stage was at 648 Kingsway, and he only had positive things to say “All the love to Sho and Clara for giving us an opportunity to play music with our friends. It’s a beautiful thing, I love these people very much.” Kirk agreed,“Clara, Sho, Alyssa, Ava, Maya, Sam, Annie—I owe it to the folks at 648 for allowing me back into just being who I want to be again. Despite us not having the space anymore—the people that made everything happen are still here and that’s what counts.”
The fact 648 Kingsway made a great impact on the community in such a short time speaks to its value. The uplifting of the city’s underrepresented artists has been the drive for the venue’s existence from its conception; Clara and Sho made it their priority to welcome “whichever weirdos wanted to be a part of the space […] because there’s a crisis in spaces in Vancouver. There’s nowhere for people to go and shit’s expensive.”
Shit is expensive, and the struggle to pay rent is not a new occurrence. According to an interview with Clara and Sho on Discorder Magazine in June 2023, the space was never designed to last forever—Vancouver’s extreme prices make it simply impossible. Clara talked about enjoying the fleeting nature of the project, “What I like about the space is that it has an end date, as all Vancouver spaces do.” They said, “ I don’t think we will be around for more than five years.” Two years is an extreme kind of impermanence, however common it may be around these parts.
Venues close left and right. Just in the past few years the “Black Lab” and “Bullet Farm” shut down. Even the popular not-for-profit venue Wise Hall is “fighting to stay open” according to an article published earlier this year by CTV News. In a DailyHive interview with Ana Rose Carrico, executive director and co-founder of Red Gate Arts Society, Carrico called it “DIY venue whack-a-mole: one gets shut down, another pops up, then it gets shut down, and so on.” It’s a vicious cycle: grassroot spaces in Vancouver are doomed at birth. Kirc/Jerome of M01E noticed it too, and urged: “Let’s keep the scene alive.”