Oakridge

Oakridge is a small, quiet south Vancouver neighbourhood of roughly 13,000 people, centred on the intersection of Cambie Street and 41st Avenue and the Oakridge-41st Avenue Canada Line SkyTrain station. Roughly 50 percent of residents speak a Chinese language as their mother tongue, making it one of the most heavily Chinese-Canadian neighbourhoods in the city. The population skews older — about 22 percent are aged 65 and over, the second-highest senior concentration in Vancouver — and more than half of residents are outside the labour force. About 62 percent of households are owner-occupied, and the lowest mortgage rate in the city suggests a community of long-established homeowners who purchased decades ago. The housing stock is a mix of single-family detached homes (38 percent), low-rise apartments, and duplexes, though this is changing rapidly as the Cambie Corridor Plan drives intensification.

Oakridge delivered one of Ken Sim's strongest results: 70.6 percent — 1,679 of 2,378 valid ballots — with just three polling stations (Trinity Baptist Church, Van Horne Elementary School, and the Jewish Community Centre). Stewart managed only about 15 percent. Sim exceeded 66 percent at all three locations, reaching 76 percent at Trinity Baptist Church. Despite the overwhelming margins, Oakridge's small and aging population produced a modest absolute vote count — one of the smallest neighbourhood electorates in the city. Provincially, Oakridge falls within Vancouver-Langara, a BC Liberal stronghold held by Michael Lee from 2017 until BC United suspended its campaign in 2024, after which the NDP's Sunita Dhir narrowly won the seat by just 419 votes over the Conservatives. Federally, it was within Vancouver South, held by Liberal Harjit Sajjan from 2015 until his retirement.

Municipal Issues

The Oakridge Centre redevelopment — one of the largest mixed-use projects in Canadian history — dominated neighbourhood life. Vancouver's first shopping mall, built in 1959, was demolished and replaced by a five-million-square-foot complex of residential towers, a nine-acre rooftop public park, a new community centre, a public library branch, and roughly 850,000 square feet of leasable retail. The development includes over 3,000 residential units across multiple towers, housing more than 6,000 residents, with the tallest reaching 52 storeys after a 2022 rezoning amendment. In 2022, the site was a massive construction zone that had disrupted the 41st and Cambie intersection — the neighbourhood's commercial heart — for years. The project's scale was transformative: the Cambie Corridor Plan designates Oakridge as a Municipal Town Centre, the highest-order growth node, with plans to more than double the corridor's population.

The adjacent Oakridge Transit Centre redevelopment added to the transformation. The 14-acre TransLink bus depot site at 949 West 41st Avenue was rezoned in 2020 for 17 buildings of up to 26 storeys plus a two-acre public park, further intensifying development pressure on a neighbourhood that had been largely single-family for decades. The Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver, a major neighbourhood institution at the corner of Oak Street and 41st Avenue that served as one of Oakridge's three polling stations, was also planning its own redevelopment — a new eight-storey facility with two residential towers of 37 and 39 storeys.

For Oakridge's established, predominantly Chinese-Canadian homeowner population, the convergence of massive redevelopment projects, public safety concerns amplified by anti-Asian hate crimes and the Vancouver Is Dying documentary, and Sim's identity as the first Chinese-Canadian elected mayor produced near-total alignment with ABC's message. The neighbourhood's demographic profile — older, homeowning, low labour-force participation, high Chinese-language use — made it one of the most receptive electorates in the city for a platform built on public safety, competent governance, and resistance to the pace of change imposed by the outgoing council.