North Victoria

3 neighbourhoods north of Bay Street, and the least mythologised part of the city. Burnside Gorge carries Victoria's light industry, its Rock Bay remediation sites and the third lowest median assessment of the twelve at $577,000, alongside the highest share of tenant households spending more than 30 per cent of income on shelter, at 40 per cent. Hillside-Quadra runs up Quadra Street past the Hillside mall to Summit Park's Garry oak meadow, has a median age of 36, the youngest in the city, and holds only 150 dwellings in buildings of five storeys or more. Oaklands is a straightforward grid of family houses: 990 detached homes, not one dwelling above four storeys, and a median household income of $78,000, the fourth highest of the twelve.

The trade here is space for prestige. A house in Oaklands or Hillside-Quadra costs meaningfully less than an equivalent one in Fairfield or Gonzales, the lots are often bigger, and the commute downtown is fifteen minutes by bicycle along a route that is mostly flat. What you give up is the water. None of these three touches it. What you may gain is room to change: British Columbia's 2024 small-scale multi-unit legislation allows up to four units on most single-family lots in the city, and nowhere in Victoria has more such lots to work with than Oaklands.