Live in Dunbar-Southlands

In 1908 the Dunbar uplands belonged to the Canadian Pacific Railway and sat inside the Municipality of Point Grey. The developer Charles Trotter Dunbar paid the BC Electric Company $35,000 to run a streetcar north–south between the tram lines on West 41st and West 10th, and the grid filled in behind it — the first major land development in the mid-1920s, three streetcar routes by 1927, and amalgamation into Vancouver in 1929. What made the place permanent was not the tram but the paper: Point Grey's 1922 zoning by-law, the first in Canada, which fixed the primacy of the single-family house.

The boundaries. West 16th Avenue to the north, the North Arm of the Fraser to the south, the University Endowment Lands and Pacific Spirit Regional Park to the west, and Mackenzie, Quesnel and Blenheim Streets to the east. That takes in 21,425 people across 8.56 km² at the 2016 census — a very low density, because 62% of the dwellings are single-detached houses and another 27% are duplexes, with 78% of households owning. The local area also encompasses the Musqueam Indian Reserve, whose community has held the river mouth for some three thousand years and governs its own land.

The main street. There is one: Dunbar Street, a low strip of small storefronts — many of them in place for more than fifty years — with Stong's Market, the branch library, the community centre a block off it and the Dunbar Theatre, an independent cinema running since 1935. The Dunbar Loop at 41st is where the R4 RapidBus, the 7 to downtown and the 49 east all end. There is no SkyTrain in the local area and none is planned for it.

The two edges. West, the blocks stop dead at Pacific Spirit Regional Park: 874 hectares of second-growth forest, more than 55 km of trails and Camosun Bog, a peatland sphagnum has held for 2,000 years and volunteers have been replanting since 1995. South, below Southwest Marine Drive, the land drops to the Southlands flats — hobby farms, stables, McCleery's municipal golf course and the Southlands Riding Club, incorporated in 1943 and still running rings and a half-mile track inside the City of Vancouver.

Worth knowing before you commit

Quiet, green, and priced like it

The trade-off is convenience: you buy space and trees, and you drive for most other things

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• This is detached-house territory — 62% single-detached, 78% owner households — so there is very little rental stock and almost nothing small or cheap to buy
• No SkyTrain, and no station planned inside the local area: transit means the R4 41st Ave RapidBus, the 7 or the 49 out of Dunbar Loop, and downtown is a real 11–16 minute drive before traffic
• The community centre has a fitness centre, squash courts and a pottery room but no pool and no ice rink — swimming means Lord Byng Pool or Kerrisdale
• One commercial strip for the whole area: Dunbar Street is genuinely useful, but for anything beyond groceries and a bakery you are heading to Kerrisdale, Broadway or downtown
• The area has fought density for fifty years — Penta in the 1970s, Polygon in the 1990s — so provincial and city rezoning is now landing on a neighbourhood with no recent practice at absorbing it
• Catchments split between Lord Byng and Point Grey Secondary and they change; confirm the current catchment for a specific address with the VSB school locator before you buy

How Dunbar-Southlands got here

• 1860Samuel and Fitzgerald McCleery, two would-be prospectors from Ireland, take advantage of an 1860 law granting land to settlers who cleared and farmed it, and break ground on the Fraser flats that become Southlands. The Musqueam had held a village at the river mouth for some three thousand years; their reserve is established in 1864.
• 1908The land in the Dunbar area is owned by the Canadian Pacific Railway and sits inside the young Municipality of Point Grey. Developer Charles Trotter Dunbar pays $35,000 to the BC Electric Company to run a north–south streetcar between the established tram lines on West 41st and West 10th Avenue.
• 1922Point Grey enacts Canada's first zoning by-law, which maintains the primacy of single-family residential homes — the rule that still shapes every block up here. The first major land development follows in the mid-1920s, and by 1927 three streetcar routes serve the area.
• 1929The Municipality of Point Grey merges with the City of Vancouver and Dunbar-Southlands becomes part of the city, inheriting a street grid, a commercial strip and a zoning pattern that were all set before amalgamation.
• 1935The Dunbar Theatre opens on Dunbar Street. Nine decades on it is still running as an independent neighbourhood cinema, one of the last of its kind in Vancouver.
• 1943The Southlands Riding Club is incorporated with 40 members. In 1946 seven of them buy sixteen acres of the Blenheim flats and the first gymkhana horse show is held; in 1947 member volunteers build the big oval Cinder Ring and a half-mile track.
• 1989The University Endowment Lands forest is transferred to the regional district and opens as Pacific Spirit Regional Park — 874 hectares and more than 55 km of trails locked in along the entire western boundary. Six years later neighbours formally establish the Camosun Bog Restoration Group to bring the drained peatland back.
• 1990sA Polygon Homes townhouse-and-apartment proposal on Alma Street is rejected, two decades after residents stopped the Penta Co-operative Housing project. Dunbar-Southlands enters the 2020s as one of the city's lowest-density local areas: 62% single-detached houses, 27% duplexes, 78% owner households.

The resident's angle: the forest is the reason people stay and the reason the west blocks cost what they do — but it is also 874 hectares of shade, wet trail and windfall. Storm closures after a big November blow are routine, the flats turn to mud from October, and the horses are working animals on shared lanes, not scenery. Ride, walk or drive down there accordingly.

Small yoga, pilates and personal-training studios come and go along Dunbar Street and the Kerrisdale strip — check that a particular one is still operating and still running the class you want before you plan a routine around it.