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Originally Posted by J.OT13
Thanks for the info. I guess I mostly think of the compactness of the Vancouver CBD, along with the insane density around it, but yeah, I guess the actual CBD doesn't have much residential.
Are the streets of the CBD empty after 6pm? Does everything close after office hours?
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It's certainly not a dead zone like many cities. Most of the city's hotel rooms are in the CBD, or on its edge, most of the Downtown transit runs through the CBD, and there's a fair amount of retail as almost all the buildings have some sort of retail or restaurant on the main floor, and they don't all close down at 6pm. During covid things were different as tourism disappeared, conventions stopped, transit use slumped and work-from-home reduced the number of people in the area. There are also four Downtown higher education campuses, and a lot of language schools, and they almost all closed for a while, so there were far fewer people associated with them too - and they're all now back to normal.
Quite a bit of smaller scale retail closed down, but almost everything has reopened or been replaced with new retailers. (The exception is the recently closed Nordstrom store, but that had nothing to do with viability in Vancouver, it was apparently very profitable, but not worth retaining because most of the rest of Canada stores were performing poorly).
And there were still over 60,000 people living Downtown, and 50,000 more in the West End in the rest of the peninsula. There are twelve supermarkets Downtown, (and a City Market about to open) and another five in the West End, a Costco, four Dollaramas and sixteen Drug Stores on the peninsula that also sell food, so there are always people around going shopping.