Vancouver Real Estate

There’s a reason Vancouver has been called one of the most livable cities on earth and it’s not just the mountains. It’s the way the city was built, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, on land that people have always understood to be genuinely valuable. Long before the first European settlers arrived, the Coast Salish peoples, the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations, had established communities throughout what is now Vancouver, drawn by the abundance of the inlet, the forest, and the land between. When Captain George Vancouver charted these waters in 1792, he was navigating a coastline that had sustained civilization for thousands of years. European settlement arrived slowly at first. The Hudson’s Bay Company established Fort Langley in 1827 and the lumber industry began taking root by the 1860s along Burrard Inlet. But it was the Canadian Pacific Railway that truly transformed the region. When CPR vice-president William Van Horne made the decision in the mid-1880s to extend the railway line west from Port Moody to take advantage of a deeper harbour, he set in motion one of the most consequential real estate stories in Canadian history. The provincial government granted the CPR over 2,500 hectares of land at the new terminus. Vancouver was incorporated as a city on April 6, 1886. It burned nearly to the ground just two months later. Residents rebuilt almost immediately. That resilience has defined the city ever since. By the turn of the century, Vancouver had overtaken Victoria as the commercial capital of British Columbia’s Pacific Coast. The opening of the Panama Canal in 1914 unlocked grain and lumber exports to eastern North America and Europe, cementing Vancouver’s role as a global port. A city that had been a sawmill settlement barely three decades earlier was now doing business with the world. That trajectory has never really stopped.