Historically, it was also a more affordable area and traditionally the home for much of Vancouver's working-class populace, in contrast to its wealthier upper and commercially prosperous middle-class "West Side" counterpart.

Hourly tramcar service began operating along a right-of-way parallel to and crossing where the False Creek Trail had existed.

In 1911, a municipal hall was built at the intersection of East 41st Avenue and Fraser Street, while the Hastings Sawmill lands were sold to the local working class.

In the aftermath of the First World War, a building boom occurred in many areas of East Vancouver, resulting in much of the region being occupied by single-family housing by the 1940s.

John Hendry Park was established to contain Trout Lake in 1926 when Mrs. Aldene Hamber purchased and donated the land to the City of Vancouver in order to prevent it from conversion to a municipal landfill.

In 1939, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth visited Vancouver, traveling in a royal procession down Knight Street, and making an unplanned stop in the neighbourhood of Collingwood.

In 1947, many farmers were displaced in South Vancouver to open residential land for returning World War II veterans and their families.

Campbell also advocated demolishing the historic Carnegie Centre and building a luxury hotel at the entrance of Stanley Park.

In 1967, a US-based firm proposed a waterfront freeway, which would have required that 600 Strathcona houses be demolished and a 10-metre-high overpass be built over the centre of Chinatown.

Two communities are part of East Vancouver but often referred to separately because of their unique place in the city's fabric: the Downtown Eastside and Chinatown.

This diverse identity is strengthened by many active ethnic communities, a vibrant artistic presence,[9] a politically engaged youth population, and vocal sexual-orientation and gender-identity groups.

The political identity of the community is reinforced by newspapers such as the Republic of East Vancouver newspaper (the name of which invokes a long-time joking reference to the left-leaning nature of the community and its labour history) and frequent political and social activism – such as the Commercial Drive Car Free Festival and protests.

[10] The artistic identity is reinforced by events at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre, a community poetry anthology ("East of Main"), the Eastside Culture Crawl, and "the Drift", an annual event where local artists present their work centred around Main Street.

[citation needed] Today, evidence of these early settlers from Britain and Ireland is found in places such as the Cambrian Hall (built 1929) for the first Welsh Society in Vancouver (est.

Other visible European communities that have settled in East Vancouver include Polish (e.g. the Polish Veterans Association Meeting Hall on Kingsway, the Polish Hall on Fraser Street), German (Vancouver Alpen Club/Deutsches Haus on Victoria Drive at E. 33rd), Croatian (the Croatian Cultural Centre near Trout Lake, the Croatian Catholic Church on 1st Avenue) and Hungarian (the Hungarian Cultural Society's center on Kingsway at Fraser, and the St. Elizabeth of Hungary Catholic Church on E. 7th at Commercial Drive).

From the 1980s, many Chinese immigrants chose to live outside of Chinatown, including elsewhere in East Vancouver (e.g. Kingsway St. and Victoria Dr. areas) and Richmond.

A wave of immigrants from Southeast Asian countries (e.g. Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Vietnam) have moved to East Vancouver since the 1970s.

Kingsway Street in East Vancouver has many Southeast Asian businesses, such as Vietnamese restaurants, cafes and beauty parlours.

[13] The Vietnamese Seniors Outreach Program on Commercial Drive serve the Southeast Asian community in East Vancouver.

Its length and varied services make it difficult to characterize; common businesses include diverse ethnic restaurants/cafés, specialty grocery stores, and many others.

Key shopping areas along Kingsway in East Vancouver include SoMa (South Main), Kesington-Cedar Cottage (From Fraser to Nanaimo streets) and Renfrew-Collingwood.

Adjoining side-streets are largely small industry and warehouse, though verging quickly on Gastown to the west and Japantown to the east.

Commercial Drive (between Wall to E 17th Avenue) is one of the most vibrant areas of the Greater Vancouver region due to it strong multi-ethnic and activist identities.

Since that time, immigrants from Latin America, Asia, the Caribbean, Middle East and elsewhere mix with a strong aboriginal community to form a dynamic neighbourhood.

Closer to downtown and Chinatown, a thriving street culture includes many low-income, drug addicted and homeless people, but also a close-knit community of social activists.

Further east between Clark and Nanaimo, the street's commercial presence includes marine and transport services, as well as artist studios and the infamous "chicken factories" which sometimes permeate the area with their characteristic odour.

Increased housing prices are causing changes in East Vancouver neighbourhoods, such as fewer new immigrants moving to the area and decreasing affordability for artists, seniors, young families and others.

However, increased housing prices have also caused significant positive changes in East Vancouver, such as greater retention of existing residents (partly due to a lack of affordability in some other areas), increased densification (increasing the number of affordable housing options, e.g. townhouses), more residential investment, neighbourhood-led artistic projects,[20] more community-pride events (e.g. neighbourhood clean-ups, block parties and community gardening), and greater tax base for new amenities(e.g. a new planned library and $2.7 million in street, lighting and sidewalk improvements at Kingsway and Knight Street).

Provincially, East Vancouver includes the constituencies of Vancouver-Kensington, Vancouver-Kingsway, Vancouver-Hastings, Vancouver-Mount Pleasant and Vancouver-Fraserview.

[25] Spartacus Books, founded in 1973 by an alliance of anarchists, Maoists, and social democrats, is entirely volunteer-run and hosts regular events.