Downtown

Downtown is Vancouver's central business district and its most internally diverse local area, encompassing Yaletown, Coal Harbour, Gastown, Chinatown, and the office towers of the financial core. The City of Vancouver's narrower definition of the Downtown local area — distinct from the West End, which is a separate neighbourhood — had a population of roughly 62,000 as of 2016. The housing stock is virtually all multi-family: post-1990s condo towers dominate in Yaletown and Coal Harbour, while the Downtown Eastside contains roughly 100 privately owned single-room-occupancy hotels housing about 4,000 low-income residents. Approximately 80 percent of households rent, and median household income is well below the city-wide average, dragged down by the high proportion of single-person renter households and the extreme poverty of the DTES, where median income was roughly $14,000 in 2016. The DTES also has one of the largest urban Indigenous populations in Canada, at roughly 10 percent of its residents.

Ken Sim won 54.3 percent of Downtown's 11,905 valid ballots — above his city-wide average of 50 percent — but the aggregate concealed the most dramatic intra-neighbourhood political divide in Vancouver. At the Roundhouse Community Centre in Yaletown, Sim took 1,264 votes to Stewart's 497 on election day and 2,797 to 921 at the advance poll — margins rivalling the wealthiest west-side neighbourhoods. At Carnegie Community Centre, the civic heart of the Downtown Eastside at Main and Hastings, Stewart won the election-day poll 295 to 148 — one of the few stations anywhere in the city where Stewart outpolled Sim. Provincially, Downtown spans multiple ridings: Vancouver-West End (NDP stronghold, Spencer Chandra Herbert since 2009), Vancouver-False Creek (flipped NDP in 2020, redrawn as Vancouver-Yaletown for 2024), and portions of Vancouver-Mount Pleasant. Federally, most of Downtown falls within Vancouver Centre, held by Liberal Hedy Fry since 1993.

Municipal Issues

Public safety was the overwhelming issue in a neighbourhood where the opioid crisis, street disorder, and the DTES overlapped with daily life for condo owners, office workers, and business operators. In 2022, BC recorded over 2,200 deaths from illicit drug toxicity — the second-deadliest year on record after 2021 — with fentanyl detected in over 85 percent of deaths. Random stranger assaults made recurring headlines, with several high-profile attacks on elderly residents in Chinatown. The documentary Vancouver Is Dying, released ten days before the election, focused heavily on the Downtown Eastside and attracted over two million YouTube views. The Vancouver Police Union's unprecedented endorsement of Sim, combined with ABC's pledge of 100 additional police officers and 100 mental health nurses, resonated powerfully in the Yaletown and Coal Harbour condo communities while being viewed with deep suspicion in the DTES.

The East Hastings tent encampment that formed in summer 2022 between Carrall and Main Streets became a defining image of the campaign. On July 25, Vancouver's Fire Chief issued an order to clear the structures, citing extreme fire safety hazards. The August 9 clearance by VPD and city crews produced confrontations and multiple arrests. For DTES residents and advocates, the operation symbolized the criminalization of poverty; for business owners and condo residents, the months-long encampment had represented a failure of governance. The polarization was visible in the voting: Carnegie's electorate backed Stewart and his harm-reduction approach, while Yaletown's electorate backed Sim's law-and-order platform by nearly three to one.

Chinatown, which falls within the Downtown local area, faced an acute convergence of challenges. Anti-Asian hate crimes surged over 700 percent between 2019 and 2020, and legacy businesses were closing under pressure from rising rents, declining foot traffic, and the proximity of open drug use and street disorder. Sim pledged to open a city hall satellite office in Chinatown and increase police presence, resonating with the older business community. His election as Vancouver's first Chinese-Canadian mayor carried particular symbolic weight in a neighbourhood that has been the centre of Chinese-Canadian life since the 1880s — though younger Chinatown activists expressed concern that a policing-focused approach would not address the underlying crises.