Downtown communities

Only 3 of the 22 local areas sit on or beside the downtown peninsula, and between them they hold most of the city's rental housing. A 1956 rezoning turned the West End into Canada's dense-living prototype: more than 220 high-rise apartment buildings were up by 1972, about 47,000 people now live in its 1.98 square kilometres, and roughly four in five households rent. Downtown proper added the Yaletown and Coal Harbour towers through the 1990s and 2000s, on old CPR rail yards and the ground Expo 86 left behind, and holds about 62,000 people across 3.7 square kilometres served by six SkyTrain stations on two lines. Strathcona, across the viaducts, is the oldest surviving residential neighbourhood in the city, built out as the East End between 1886 and 1920 and 80.8 per cent rented at the 2016 census against a city figure of 53 per cent.

Not owning a car is the default here rather than a statement, and the trade is paperwork: strata insurance, leasehold parcels and airspace parcels turn up on this side of the city more than anywhere else, so a downtown purchase deserves more scrutiny than a house does, not less. The other thing to weigh is that the local-area boundary takes in the Downtown Eastside. The blocks around Main and Hastings, where the supervised injection site has run since 2003, are a ten-minute walk from the heritage lamp posts of Gastown and sit inside the same statistics.