Demographics of Metro Vancouver

The Metro Vancouver Regional District comprises 23 member authorities — 21 municipalities, one electoral area, and one treaty First Nation.

There remains a small population, less than 2%, of Aboriginal peoples, who according to archeological and historical records, have inhabited this region for more than 3,000 years.

The largest non British or Irish ethnic groups situated in Vancouver include Chinese, Indians and Germans.

Metro Vancouver contains the second-largest Chinatown in North America (after San Francisco's), and many multicultural neighbourhoods such as the Punjabi Market, Greektown, and Japantown.

In the city of Vancouver and four adjacent municipalities (Surrey, Burnaby, Richmond, and Coquitlam), there is no visible majority.

Hence, the term visible minority is used here in contrast to the overall Canadian population which remains predominantly of European descent.

Indigenous peoples, who make up less than two percent of the city's population, are not considered a visible minority group by Statistics Canada.

Until the 1960s, it was easier to purchase the Times of London and The Guardian in Vancouver than it was to find the Toronto Globe and Mail or Montreal Gazette.

Other large and historically important European ethnic groups consist of Germans, Dutch, French (of both European and Canadian origin), Ukrainians, Scandinavians, Finns, Italians, Croats, Hungarians, Greeks, and lately numerous Romanians, Russians, Portuguese, Serbs and Poles.

Non-visible minorities such as newly arrived Eastern Europeans and the new wave of Latin Americans are also a feature of the city's ethnic landscape.

[129] Rimhak Ree (Yi Yimhak) came to Vancouver to study mathematics at the University of British Columbia in 1953, making him the first known ethnic Korean to live in the city.

Technically, though, the term 'Asian' may refer to either group, and also to the large Persian and other Middle Eastern populations as well as elements from Central Asia.

The 2021 census reported that immigrants (individuals born outside Canada) comprise 1,089,185 persons or 41.8 percent of the total population of Metro Vancouver.

In 1996, a study published by BC Housing revealed that 25% of renter households in Vancouver pay 50% or more of their incomes to rent.

"Moving from the 30% shelter cost-to-income ratio (STIR) used in the core housing need model, to a 50% threshold, typically reduces the number of households identified by more than half.

"[169] In 2001, Statistics Canada published a study using both the 30% and 50% thresholds to identify renters and homeowners facing unaffordable housing costs in Metro Vancouver.

Heather Smith and David Ley found that in Canada's gateway cities, "the appreciable growth of the low-income population during the 1990s was almost entirely attributable to the growing poverty of recent immigrants".

[172] They go on to state, "adult immigrants who had landed in the previous decade endured a poverty rate of...37 percent in Vancouver".

[172] Immigrants, recent and old, therefore constitute a large proportion of households in Metro Vancouver considered to be at-risk of homelessness.

Analysis conducted by Robert Fiedler revealed that, in 2001, "29.1% of persons in households...in Greater Vancouver are below more than one CMHC housing standard, indicating that...some households not only must spend an unsustainably high proportion of their income on shelter costs, but must also live in overcrowded and/or substandard conditions to access housing".

The strategy will be enacted in 2012 and will run until 2021, with the goal of ending street homelessness completely by 2015, as well as increasing affordable housing choices for all Vancouverites.

[171] Furthermore, low vacancy rates in Vancouver's market rental stock, a decreasing new supply of apartments in recent decades, and a widening gap of household incomes and housing prices are just a few challenges that must be overcome.