Brentwood

Brentwood is the story of how you can build a new downtown in a decade. Until about 2015, Brentwood Town Centre was a quiet 1960s shopping mall at the intersection of Willingdon and Lougheed, best known for its Safeway. Today it's The Amazing Brentwood — a 28-acre master-planned development with 11 high-rise residential towers, an open-air retail plaza, a plaza-level Millennium Line SkyTrain station, and a Cineplex built into the base of a tower. It's the fastest-growing single neighbourhood in Metro Vancouver outside of Surrey City Centre.

For newcomers, Brentwood is a good fit if you want new construction, transit access, and a residential density that feels urban without being downtown-Vancouver expensive. A one-bedroom in one of the new Amazing Brentwood towers typically lists at $2,400–2,900 depending on the view and the building. Older condo stock in the surrounding blocks (particularly on Halifax Street and Willingdon Avenue) can be found for $1,900–2,300.

Brentwood is 15 minutes on the Millennium Line to downtown Vancouver via a transfer at Commercial–Broadway. It's also well-connected to the rest of Burnaby — Metrotown is a 10-minute bus ride, SFU is 15 minutes up the hill. The trade-off is that Brentwood is almost entirely new construction, which some residents love and others find sterile. There's no heritage character here — the neighbourhood is being designed from the ground up as residents move in.