East Side communities

6 local areas east of Ontario Street, and the widest range of housing in the city: Edwardian houses off Commercial Drive, Vancouver Specials by the thousand in Renfrew-Collingwood and Kensington-Cedar Cottage, and new towers around the Joyce and Nanaimo SkyTrain stations. East Side prices sit meaningfully below West Side prices for equivalent stock, and that gap is the city's oldest real-estate fact. This is also the best-served side of the city for transit. Renfrew-Collingwood alone has five stations across its 8.05 square kilometres, and Grandview-Woodland's Commercial-Broadway carried 6.44 million passengers in 2025, third of the network's 54 stations and the terminus of the 99 B-Line, so a Renfrew-Collingwood address can reach downtown faster than a Dunbar one whatever the map suggests.

The east side also carries most of the history the city has had to reckon with in public. Hastings Park was a detention and processing site for roughly 8,000 Japanese Canadians in 1942, marked since 1993 by the Momiji Garden on East Hastings, and Hastings-Sunrise itself was a provincial reserve from 1863 that only voted to join Vancouver on 21 December 1910, which is why the streets still jog where they cross Nanaimo. Kensington-Cedar Cottage is the second-largest local area here at 49,325 people on the 2021 census, behind Renfrew-Collingwood's 51,530 in 2016 and among the most multilingual in the country: 34.7 per cent gave English as a mother tongue at the 2016 census. Riley Park holds the city's highest ground at Little Mountain, 125 metres, and its only cemetery, opened in 1886.