Live in Oaklands

Oaklands is the northeast quarter of the city — Hillside Avenue to the south, Saanich north, Oak Bay east, Cook Street west — and it is the neighbourhood where Victoria stops being unusual. A grid of houses on deep lots, laid out in the pre-war boom and filled with narrow-fronted homes from the 1900s and 1910s; 1,340 of today's 3,310 dwellings, 41%, were built in 1960 or earlier. The Garry oaks that give the neighbourhood its name are the surviving edge of a Lekwungen landscape maintained by burning for camas, and they still line Belmont, Cedar Hill Road and the park.

The statistic that defines it. Zero homes in buildings of five storeys or more — the only neighbourhood in Victoria of which that is true. What it has instead is 990 detached houses, the most in the city, plus 345 row houses and 630 duplex apartments. Owners outnumber renters, 1,735 households to 1,565, which is the case in only three of the twelve. Median household income was $78,000 in 2020, third highest after Gonzales and Victoria West, and the share of tenant households spending more than 30% of income on shelter is 35% — the lowest in Victoria.

Where the centre is. There is no high street. The neighbourhood organises itself around two things instead: the corner at Belmont and Ryan, where Oaklands Elementary, the community centre and the park share a site, and Haultain Corner at Haultain and Asquith, a surviving corner store and café that became the standard local example in Victoria's long argument about whether small commercial uses belong in residential blocks. Hillside Shopping Centre handles everything else, from the southern boundary.

What is about to change. British Columbia's 2024 small-scale multi-unit housing legislation permits up to four units on most single-family lots. No neighbourhood in Victoria has more such lots than this one. The grid of 1910s houses on deep lots that makes Oaklands what it is today is also the largest single opportunity for infill in the city, and the next decade will test how much of it survives in its current form.

Worth knowing before you commit

A family grid, an ageing housing stock and a rezoning ahead

The most conventional houses in Victoria, on the lots most likely to be redeveloped

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• Forty-one per cent of the stock predates 1960: expect knob-and-tube wiring, buried oil tanks, original perimeter drains and seismic questions on anything not already renovated
• Provincial small-scale multi-unit rules permit up to four units on most of these lots — good if you want to build, worth checking if you assumed the house next door would stay a house
• Royal Jubilee Hospital is on the southern edge, which is convenient and also means ambulance traffic on Richmond and Fort
• SD61 draws secondary catchments across the Oak Bay municipal line here, so whether an address feeds Victoria High or Oak Bay Secondary depends on the block — confirm before you buy
• There is no supermarket inside the boundary; Hillside Centre on the southern edge does the work, and Haultain Corner does the pint of milk
• Every pool within reach is in another municipality, at non-resident rates — the recurring cost of a Victoria address in a region of thirteen municipalities

How Oaklands got here

• pre-1843The Garry oak meadows that give the neighbourhood its name are Lekwungen ground, actively managed by burning to encourage camas. The oaks along Belmont, Cedar Hill Road and through Oaklands Park are what is left of that landscape.
• 1860s–1890sThe land north of Hillside is farm and estate, subdivided slowly as the city grows. Cedar Hill Road, one of the oldest routes on the peninsula, runs through it toward the Saanich uplands.
• 1900s–1913The pre-war boom lays the grid and fills much of it: Oaklands' streets of narrow-fronted houses on deep lots date largely from this period, and 1,340 of today's dwellings — 41% of the stock — were built in 1960 or earlier.
• 1912Oaklands Elementary opens on Ryan Street. It is still the neighbourhood's catchment school and shares its site with the community centre and the park, which is why this corner functions as the neighbourhood's centre despite there being no high street.
• 1950s–1970sDuplex conversions and low-rise walk-ups fill the gaps along Hillside and Shelbourne, and Hillside Shopping Centre opens on the southern boundary. The neighbourhood keeps its houses; the apartments go on the arterials.
• 2000sHaultain Corner — the corner store at Haultain and Asquith — becomes a minor local cause célèbre as the city works out whether a small commercial use belongs in a residential block. It is now the standard local example in Victoria's arguments about neighbourhood-scale retail.
• 2021The census counts 7,585 residents in 3,310 dwellings, with 1,735 owner households to 1,565 renter ones and a median household income of $78,000 — the most owner-weighted, highest-earning neighbourhood in the north of the city.
• 2024British Columbia's small-scale multi-unit housing legislation makes up to four units permissible on most single-family lots in the city. Nowhere in Victoria does that legislation have more lots to work with than Oaklands, which is the thing most likely to change what this neighbourhood looks like.

The resident's angle: the real amenity here is the streets themselves. The pre-war grid, deep front gardens and mature Garry oaks make Oaklands the best neighbourhood in Victoria to simply walk around, and in March the cherry and plum blossom along Belmont and Asquith is as good as anywhere in the city. What it does not have is water: Willows Beach and Gonzales are both ten minutes away by car, and neither is a walk.

The free option is Cedar Hill's 4 km chip trail, ten minutes north and open to walkers and runners without a green fee, plus the climb up Mount Tolmie. Check current pool schedules before planning around any single facility.