East Van, Vancouver

East Van is less a specific neighbourhood and more a cultural identity — everything east of Main Street, roughly from Broadway to the North Shore waterfront. It includes Hastings–Sunrise, Renfrew–Collingwood, Kensington–Cedar Cottage, Killarney, and parts of Fraserview. Historically, it's where working-class families settled, where successive immigrant communities (Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Filipino, Ethiopian) built their first Vancouver networks, and where most newcomer families on normal salaries still live today.

The appeal is space and value. You can still find two-bedroom character-house basement suites in the $1,800–2,200 range, and rental buildings are noticeably cheaper than on the West Side. The East End also has some of the best single-block food in the city — Filipino groceries and bakeries, Ethiopian injera, Vietnamese pho, and the long-running Chinese Canadian restaurants south of Kingsway.

Transit is a mixed bag. The Expo and Millennium SkyTrain lines serve the northern half well (Nanaimo, 29th, Joyce–Collingwood stations), but parts of East Van are genuinely car-useful. Newcomers tend to love it here if they want neighbourhood character and value; they tend to be frustrated by it if they expected downtown-level walkability.