Riley Park

Riley Park-Little Mountain is a middle-class, ethnically diverse neighbourhood of roughly 22,500 people in the geographic centre of Vancouver, bounded by 16th Avenue to the north, 41st Avenue to the south, Cambie Street to the west, and Fraser Street to the east. The neighbourhood has one of the city's most distinctive housing stocks: duplexes account for roughly 41 percent of dwellings, many of them Vancouver Specials with suites above and below, while single-family detached homes make up about 25 percent and apartments 32 percent. About 44 percent of residents are visible minorities, with Chinese-Canadians the largest group at roughly 23 percent. The neighbourhood anchors some of Vancouver's most prominent recreational facilities: Queen Elizabeth Park, the 130-acre hilltop destination park; the Hillcrest Centre, a 2010 Winter Olympics legacy facility; Nat Bailey Stadium, home of the Vancouver Canadians baseball team since 2000; and the Hillcrest Aquatic Centre.

Riley Park was one of Vancouver's more competitive neighbourhoods. Ken Sim won 50.4 percent — 3,064 of 6,084 valid ballots — essentially matching his city-wide average, while Stewart took 33.2 percent, well above his city-wide 29 percent. The neighbourhood's four polls all leaned Sim but with narrow margins: General Brock Elementary was the closest at 442 to 382, and even Sir Charles Tupper Secondary was just 675 to 549. TEAM's Colleen Hardwick reached 10.1 percent at General Brock, above average for a neighbourhood bordering the Cambie Corridor's most intense densification. Provincially, Riley Park was split across several ridings before redistribution created Vancouver-Little Mountain for 2024, won by NDP's Christine Boyle with 62 percent. Federally, it falls within Vancouver Granville, where Liberal Taleeb Noormohamed won by just 431 votes over the NDP's Anjali Appadurai in 2021 — one of the tightest races in Canada.

Municipal Issues

The Little Mountain social housing redevelopment was the neighbourhood's signature issue and a visible symbol of housing dysfunction. In 2008, the BC Liberal provincial government sold the 15-acre Little Mountain site — between Main and Ontario Streets, 33rd and 37th Avenues — to Holborn Properties for $334 million. The 224 social housing units, dating from the 1950s, were demolished in 2009, displacing roughly 700 residents. When the sale terms were revealed in 2021, they showed Holborn had paid only $35 million upfront, with $211 million in interest-free provincial loans. By 2022 — fourteen years after the sale — only 53 of the promised 282 replacement social housing units had been built, and most of the six-hectare site sat as a massive vacant lot in the heart of a residential neighbourhood. The stalled redevelopment was a source of frustration across the political spectrum.

Cambie Corridor densification shaped the neighbourhood's western flank. Riley Park's boundary along Cambie Street placed it directly adjacent to the Cambie Corridor Plan's growth zone, which envisions more than doubling the corridor's population with over 30,000 new homes. The Oakridge-41st Avenue Municipal Town Centre, with towers reaching 52 storeys, was under construction immediately to the south. Phase 3 of the Cambie Corridor Plan proposed pre-zoning residential lots for townhomes and multiplexes — accelerating development without individual rezoning applications — and the Vancouver Plan's broader densification proposals added to concerns about the pace of neighbourhood change. TEAM's above-average performance at General Brock Elementary, closest to the Cambie corridor, reflected the particular salience of densification for residents facing the physical reality of construction and zoning changes.

Queen Elizabeth Park, the neighbourhood's centrepiece, was overdue for renewal. A master plan process initiated in 2020 aimed to address the park's aging infrastructure and plan for increased demand from the 50,000 additional residents projected for the surrounding Cambie Corridor. The process had been delayed by COVID, and by 2022 the park's facilities had not had significant upgrades in decades. Nat Bailey Stadium, built in 1951 and home to the Vancouver Canadians since 2000, was also the subject of a planned seating expansion that had been stalled by a city audit in 2019 — adding to a broader pattern of deferred civic investment in a neighbourhood undergoing rapid change on all sides.