If you’re looking for a place to live in Vancouver, hop on the new Canada Line.

This long-awaited rapid transit service that opened for business this week, linking downtown with the airport and the suburb of Richmond, may open up some new housing options.

With stations at Waterfront and in Yaletown, both the Gastown and Yaletown neighborhoods now have much easier access to transit services.

As the line goes south along Cambie Street, with stops at the new Olympic Village, Broadway, King Edward, Oakridge, Langara College, and Marine Drive, these neighborhoods, too, now have a speedier transit alternative to the No 15 bus. And while the city of Vancouver is still formulating its long-term development plan for the Cambie corridor, lots of residential development already underway in these areas, particularly at the Olympic Village, Broadway, and Oakridge, means more choices of places to live.

In Richmond, even more residential construction around the new Canada Line stations is in the works. According to a recent article in the Richmond Review:

As soon as engineers marked locations for the (station’s) concrete pillars, high-rises began to sprout up in Richmond’s City Centre.

By mid-2005, when work on the line was just beginning, 35 high-rise towers were already on the books for downtown Richmond. That number continued to swell….

The Canada Line…prompted city planners to revamp the area plan for City Centre. It predicts the area’s population to triple in size, from 41,000 residents today to 120,000 over the next century. Most of that growth will be in the next few decades.

So if you’re looking for a place to live in Vancouver, hop on the Canada Line. But what the Canada Line corridor looks like today may be very different in the years to come.

Photo courtesy of CanadaLine.com