Best Places to Live Now
Whether you’re moving to the city, relocating across town or looking to put down roots, we’ve crunched the numbers for you to determine Vancouver’s most livable ’hoods right now.
How We Did It We have our fair share of lively debates here at VanMag HQ—whether macarons are still athing, whether the Sylvia Hotel is haunted, et cetera, et cetera—but “What’s the best neighbourhood in Vancouver?” was the question that really brought the heat. Suddenly, it was east-siders versus west-siders, trendiness versus longevity, and hours of production time lost as we argued over the specic boundaries of whatever “the Fraserhood” is.
But subjectivity can take one only so far when it comes to nding an answer. After duking it out and doing our research (we are professionals, after all), we nally put our opinions aside and boiled “livability” down to its bare bones. Beyond lifestyle preferences and the intangible—and deeply personal— cool factor, we could all agree on a few things (see our full wish list to the left): a great urban neighbourhood will always be walkable, have reliable neighbours and feel safe and connected.
Our qualiers established, we then turned to the expert, award-winning data journalist Chad Skelton, to mine stats and gures for analytic gold. Skelton worked with us to dene quantiable measurements for everything on our
list, from trustworthy data sources like Stats Can and the City of Vancouver. To determine ethnic diversity, for example, he measured the chance that any two people, chosen at random, will be of a dierent race; for biking, walking or transit, he collected data on all the commuters who get to work without acar.
A few editorial decisions were made once the numbers were in hand. UBC ranked highly in all of our qualifying categories, but we agreed that recommending the campus to nonstudents was unrealistic. We cut a few lowerpro le residential ’hoods from the comparison altogether (no oense, Arbutus Ridge!) to focus on the more diversely developed areas of the city. Ultimately, though, it was the cold, hard data that decided our 2018 Best Neighbourhood—the West End. (Just acoincidence that this is where our editorial director, Anicka Quin, happens to live…though that hasn’t stopped her from gloating.)
Of course, everyone (not just our opinionated editors) needs something dierent from acommunity—access to running trails, a great ramen bar, a safe place for your kids to play, a lively singles scene. Though each of the neighbourhoods on this list may be great, they’re also just a starting point—so we’ve put Skelton’s amazing interactive neighbourhood nder tool at vanmag.com/ FindYourHood for you to tweak for yourself. Play around with categories that mean the most to you, nd your personal best neighbourhood and then let us know where you landed. Because even after putting this issue to bed, we know this is one debate that may never reach an end.