West End

The West End is one of Canada's most densely populated neighbourhoods, with roughly 47,000 people packed into just over two square kilometres of the downtown peninsula between Stanley Park and Burrard Street. The housing stock is overwhelmingly rental: over 80 percent of households rent, the highest rate in the city alongside the Downtown Eastside, and the predominant building type is the concrete high-rise apartment tower built during the neighbourhood's rapid densification in the 1960s and 1970s. The median household income of roughly $65,000 is near but below the city average, reflecting a population that skews young, single, and renter. The West End is home to Davie Village, Vancouver's LGBTQ+ commercial district, and the community has long been one of the city's most socially liberal. English is the dominant language at about 62 percent, with Japanese, Korean, and Tagalog the next-largest mother tongues, reflecting the neighbourhood's role as a landing point for international students and young professionals.

Despite its socially liberal character, the West End delivered a narrow win for Ken Sim in 2022 — 39.4 percent to Kennedy Stewart's 37.6 percent, a margin of fewer than 200 votes. The result masks a sharp split between election-day and advance voting. Stewart won four of five election-day polling stations, including Lord Roberts Elementary (46.8 percent to 30.5 percent) and King George Secondary (40.8 percent to 35.0 percent). But the West End Community Centre advance poll, which cast over 4,200 ballots — more than 40 percent of the neighbourhood total — went decisively for Sim at 44.2 percent to Stewart's 33.3 percent, flipping the aggregate result. Provincially, the West End is within Vancouver-West End, held by NDP MLA Spencer Chandra Herbert since 2008, while federally it falls within Vancouver Centre.

Municipal Issues

Public safety dominated the campaign in the West End, where the neighbourhood's proximity to the downtown core made street disorder a daily concern rather than an abstract policy debate. The intersection of Davie and Granville streets, one of the neighbourhood's commercial hubs, experienced persistent issues with open drug use, aggressive panhandling, and petty crime. The VPD reported that the downtown peninsula — encompassing the West End, the Downtown Eastside, and the central business district — accounted for a disproportionate share of the city's violent and property crime. ABC's pledge of 100 additional police officers and 100 mental health nurses appealed to residents who felt that the Stewart administration's approach to street disorder had left them exposed. The documentary Vancouver Is Dying, released ten days before the election, crystallized anxieties that were already acute in a neighbourhood where the effects of the overdose crisis were visible on a daily basis.

The West End Community Plan, adopted in 2013, had already permitted significant densification along the Davie and Robson street corridors, and by 2022 several major tower projects were either under construction or in the approval pipeline. Hardwick's TEAM drew a modest 9.9 percent in the West End — below her city-wide average — suggesting that anti-densification sentiment had less traction in a neighbourhood that was already one of the densest in North America and where residents had long accepted high-rise living. The more salient housing issue was rental affordability: with the vacancy rate below one percent and average rents among the highest in the city, tenants in the West End's older rental towers faced renoviction threats as landlords sought to redevelop aging buildings at higher densities under the new community plan.

The West End's character as a walkable, transit-rich, amenity-dense urban neighbourhood — anchored by Stanley Park, English Bay Beach, and the Seawall — made it a model for the kind of urbanism that Vancouver's planning framework aspired to create elsewhere. But that very success created its own pressures: tourist overcrowding at English Bay in summer, limited green space relative to population density, and a commercial tax base that struggled to support the neighbourhood services demanded by roughly 47,000 residents. The Jim Deva Plaza at Davie and Bute, opened in 2016, remained the West End's only significant new public space in a decade.