Strathcona

Strathcona is Vancouver's oldest residential neighbourhood, established in the 1880s around Hastings Mill and originally known as the East End. With a population of roughly 12,600, it is one of the city's smallest neighbourhoods — and one of its poorest. The median household income was $21,964 in the 2016 Census, roughly a third of the city-wide median, and nearly half of residents lived in low-income households. Over 80 percent of dwellings are renter-occupied, the highest rate in Vancouver, and more than 60 percent of rental households receive some form of subsidized housing. The housing stock is dominated by apartments and social housing, with single-family detached homes comprising just 5.5 percent of dwellings. Indigenous residents make up roughly 10 percent of the population — the highest rate of any Vancouver neighbourhood — while Chinese-Canadians remain the largest visible minority group. The neighbourhood's heritage character comes from a small stock of surviving Victorian and Edwardian houses dating to the 1890s, many restored with support from the Vancouver Heritage Foundation.

Strathcona is one of Vancouver's most reliably left-of-centre neighbourhoods, with a deep tradition of community activism dating to the 1960s, when SPOTA — the Strathcona Property Owners and Tenants Association — successfully halted the city's urban renewal demolition program and blocked a proposed freeway through Chinatown. Provincially, it falls within what is now the Vancouver-Strathcona riding, where the NDP has held the seat continuously since 1972. In 2022, Strathcona was one of only four neighbourhoods where Kennedy Stewart defeated Ken Sim, alongside Mount Pleasant, Grandview-Woodland, and Fairview. But Stewart's margin was narrow — just 91 votes, or 43.3 percent to 38.8 percent — and Sim actually won the advance vote at RayCam Co-operative Centre. Green councillor Pete Fry, who chaired the Strathcona Residents Association, led the council vote at election-day stations.

Municipal Issues

The opioid crisis and street disorder were not abstract policy questions in Strathcona — they were daily realities. The City of Vancouver defines the Downtown Eastside for planning purposes to include Strathcona, and the neighbourhood's northern edge along East Hastings is fully within the DTES in any practical sense. Over 500 Vancouverites died of drug overdoses in the year preceding the election. The Strathcona Park tent encampment, which swelled to roughly 400 tents and 500 people in 2020-2021 before being cleared, remained a raw memory. A new encampment sprang up along East Hastings in July 2022, just three months before the election, and Mayor Stewart's refusal to have police clear it by force became a defining wedge issue. Strathcona voters tended to favour harm reduction and decriminalization over the policing-first approach that ABC proposed — but the city-wide electorate decisively disagreed.

The Hogan's Alley redevelopment was a significant local milestone. In September 2022, the Hogan's Alley Society signed a memorandum of understanding with the city to negotiate a long-term lease for the Hogan's Alley Block, which would include rental housing, a cultural centre, childcare spaces, and small-business space to honour the Black community displaced by the construction of the Georgia and Dunsmuir viaducts, completed in 1972. At its peak in the 1940s, Hogan's Alley was home to roughly 800 Black residents.

Gentrification was rapidly reshaping a neighbourhood that had historically been one of Vancouver's least expensive. Average dwelling values rose 237 percent in real terms between 2006 and 2016, and new condo developments like the 350-unit Strathcona Village at 900 East Hastings — comprising 280 market condos and 70 social housing units — were bringing market-rate housing into an area long dominated by social housing and SROs. The Georgia and Dunsmuir viaducts, which connect Strathcona to downtown, were slated for demolition under the Northeast False Creek Plan, though by 2022 funding challenges had pushed the timeline well into the future. Heritage Vancouver placed Downtown Eastside SRO hotels — roughly 100 privately owned buildings housing about 4,000 residents, one-third of them Indigenous — at the top of its 2022 watch list.