Metrotown

Metrotown is Burnaby's downtown — a dense, transit-anchored core built around Kingsway, Willingdon Avenue, and Central Boulevard. Covering roughly 3.5 square kilometres, the neighbourhood is defined by its cluster of high-rise residential towers, BC's largest shopping centre, and one of the busiest SkyTrain stations outside downtown Vancouver. It's the most urban part of Burnaby and one of the most concentrated mixed-use districts in Metro Vancouver.

The people who live here lean toward urban professionals, post-secondary students, and multicultural families. The dining and retail mix reflects very large Chinese, Korean, Filipino, and South Asian communities, and that influence is everywhere — from the bakeries and bubble tea shops along Kingsway to the food court at Crystal Mall, which functions as an unofficial community hub for Asian groceries and regional cuisine. Within a few blocks you can find Cantonese seafood, Korean barbecue, Filipino bakeries, and South Indian dosas.

What makes Metrotown distinctive is the convergence of three things rarely found together in Metro Vancouver: a true high-rise downtown feel, immediate access to a 90-hectare urban forest in Central Park, and SkyTrain service that puts downtown Vancouver about 20 minutes away. Many residents live in towers where they can walk to groceries, transit, the library, and a movie theatre without ever crossing a major arterial. The trade-off is density — Kingsway is busy, the sidewalks around the mall are crowded on weekends, and construction cranes are a familiar part of the skyline as the area continues to redevelop under the City of Burnaby's town centre planning framework. For people who want condo living with full urban amenities and don't need to be in Vancouver proper, Metrotown is one of the most complete walkable neighbourhoods in the region.

Metrotown earns a Walk Score of 85 and a Transit Score of 80 (Walk Score), and those numbers translate directly into daily life. Most errands — groceries, pharmacy, banking, restaurants, the library — can be done on foot within a 10-minute radius of the SkyTrain station. The Bike Score of 70 reflects a reasonable network of routes, though Kingsway and Willingdon themselves are busy arterials better suited to confident urban cyclists.

Transit is the neighbourhood's biggest single advantage. Metrotown Station sits on the Expo Line and is one of the busiest transit hubs in Metro Vancouver. From the platform, downtown Vancouver is roughly 20 minutes one way and the King George terminus in Surrey is about 25 minutes the other. Frequent bus service along Kingsway, Willingdon, and Imperial connects to the rest of Burnaby, including the Millennium Line stations at Brentwood Town Centre and Lougheed Town Centre, as well as routes toward SFU and BCIT. For students, the combination of SkyTrain plus bus makes commuting to UBC, SFU, BCIT, and Langara realistic without a car.

Driving is straightforward but rarely fast at peak times. Kingsway is the main east–west spine, and Willingdon Avenue connects north to Highway 1 in about five to ten minutes, putting the North Shore, Coquitlam, and Tri-Cities within reasonable reach. Downtown Vancouver by car is typically 20–30 minutes depending on traffic across the Cambie or Granville bridges. Parking in the towers is standard, but on-street parking around the mall fills up quickly on weekends.

For people who prefer not to own a car, Metrotown is one of the easier neighbourhoods in the region to manage without one. Car-share vehicles are widely available, the mall and supermarkets are walkable, and the SkyTrain handles most longer trips. Cyclists have access to the off-street paths through Central Park, which connect south toward Boundary Road and the broader regional network.

Metrotown families fall within the Burnaby School District (SD41), which operates the public elementary and secondary schools serving the area. There are roughly six schools in or immediately adjacent to the neighbourhood, giving families several catchment options depending on which part of Metrotown they live in.

At the elementary level, Suncrest Elementary, Maywood Community School, and Marlborough Elementary all serve different pockets of the neighbourhood. Maywood in particular operates as a community school, meaning it offers programs and services that extend beyond the regular school day and acts as a gathering point for nearby families — a useful feature in a high-rise neighbourhood where indoor community space is at a premium. For secondary students, Burnaby South Secondary is the main catchment school, with a strong reputation for its academic, arts, and athletics programs, including its provincial sport school streams.

Beyond the public system, Metrotown's density and central location mean families also have practical access to independent schools elsewhere in Burnaby and Vancouver via SkyTrain. Post-secondary access is a notable feature of the neighbourhood: SFU's Burnaby campus is reachable by bus, BCIT is a short transit ride away, and downtown Vancouver's Langara, VCC, and UBC connections are all manageable from Metrotown Station. This is part of why the area attracts so many students.

Family-friendliness in Metrotown looks different from a traditional single-family neighbourhood. Day-to-day, families rely on the parks and recreation infrastructure rather than backyards — Central Park, Bonsor Park, and the playgrounds threaded between towers — and on community programming run through the City of Burnaby at Bonsor Recreation Complex and the Bob Prittie Metrotown Public Library. The library in particular runs regular children's storytimes, after-school programs, and multilingual collections that reflect the neighbourhood's demographics. For parents, the appeal is the combination of school access, transit, and amenities all within walking distance.

Metrotown's commercial life is anchored by Metropolis at Metrotown, the largest shopping centre in British Columbia with more than 400 retailers. It functions as a true mixed-use anchor — anchor department stores, mid-market and luxury fashion, a large food court, a multiplex cinema, a Real Canadian Superstore, T&T Supermarket, and just about every chain service a household needs. For many residents in the surrounding towers, the mall effectively serves as an extension of the living room: it's where you do groceries, get a haircut, pick up a prescription, and meet friends for dinner.

A short walk away, Crystal Mall offers a different experience — an Asian-focused commercial centre with a packed food court, fresh produce vendors, bakeries, and specialty grocers. It draws a steady crowd from across Metro Vancouver and is one of the better places in the region to eat your way through Cantonese, Taiwanese, Vietnamese, and Korean cuisines in a single afternoon. Along Kingsway and the side streets between the two malls, smaller independents fill in the gaps: hot pot restaurants, Korean barbecue, Filipino bakeries, dessert cafés, and late-night noodle shops.

For day-to-day essentials, residents have multiple grocery options across price points — Superstore and T&T inside Metropolis, Crystal Mall's grocers, and various smaller Asian and South Asian supermarkets along Kingsway. Pharmacies, banks, and professional services are concentrated around the SkyTrain station and inside the mall.

Healthcare access is solid. Burnaby Hospital is a short drive or bus ride north on Willingdon, and there are walk-in clinics, medical and dental offices throughout the neighbourhood — many of them with multilingual staff reflecting the local population. The Bob Prittie Metrotown branch of the Burnaby Public Library, housed within Bonsor Recreation Complex, provides one of the busiest library services in the city, with extensive Chinese, Korean, and other multilingual collections.

Despite being one of the densest neighbourhoods in Metro Vancouver, Metrotown is unusually well-served by green space. The big one is Central Park, a 90-hectare expanse on the neighbourhood's western edge that feels far larger than its boundaries suggest. Inside the park you'll find forested trails through mature second-growth Douglas fir, two small lakes, a pitch & putt golf course, lawn bowling greens, tennis courts, a swimming pool at the Central Park Pool, an outdoor stadium that hosts soccer and track, and an extensive off-street walking and cycling path network. It's the kind of urban forest that lets residents disappear from the city without leaving it.

The other major recreation anchor is Bonsor Recreation Complex, a multi-purpose civic facility operated by the City of Burnaby. Bonsor houses an indoor pool with leisure and lane swimming, a fitness centre, gymnasium, dance and program studios, and the Bob Prittie Metrotown Public Library all under one roof. For tower residents without backyards or home gyms, Bonsor functions as a daily extension of their living space.

Smaller neighbourhood parks fill in the gaps between buildings — pocket parks and plazas with playgrounds, basketball courts, and seating areas that serve the immediate residential blocks. The City has progressively added public open space as new towers come online, so the green footprint continues to grow alongside the density.

Culturally, Metropolis at Metrotown's Cineplex multiplex is the main cinema, and the mall regularly hosts seasonal events, lunar new year celebrations, and pop-up markets that draw on the neighbourhood's multicultural population. Live performance and gallery space is more limited within Metrotown itself, but the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts in Deer Lake — a 10-minute drive or short bus ride away — fills that role for much of Burnaby, hosting concerts, theatre, and exhibitions year-round.

Metrotown's social fabric is shaped by two forces working together: density and diversity. The neighbourhood's residents skew toward urban professionals, post-secondary students, and multicultural families, and Burnaby as a whole has very large Chinese, Korean, Filipino, and South Asian communities — a mix that's especially concentrated in and around Metrotown. You hear it on the SkyTrain platform, see it on the storefronts along Kingsway, and taste it in the food courts at Metropolis and Crystal Mall.

Historically, Metrotown was a quieter commercial and residential area along the old Kingsway streetcar route. The shift began in the 1980s when the Expo Line SkyTrain arrived and Metropolis at Metrotown (then called Metrotown Centre) opened, and the area was formally designated as one of Burnaby's town centres. Since then, the City of Burnaby has guided steady high-rise development around the station, and the neighbourhood has evolved into the most urban part of the city. New towers continue to come online, and the streetscape is still actively changing.

Community life looks different here than in a low-rise neighbourhood. Instead of front-yard interactions, the social hubs are the mall food courts, the recreation complex, the library, and the park trails. Bonsor Recreation Complex and the Bob Prittie Metrotown Public Library run a steady calendar of programming — storytimes, language conversation groups, fitness classes, seniors' programs — that reflects the demographics of who actually lives in the surrounding towers. Multilingual library collections and programs in Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, and other languages are part of the regular service.

Events tend to cluster around the malls and Central Park. Lunar new year celebrations, Mid-Autumn Festival activities, summer concerts in Central Park, and seasonal markets all draw substantial crowds. For residents, the appeal is straightforward: this is a neighbourhood where you can live a complete urban life without leaving a few square kilometres, surrounded by a community that genuinely reflects Metro Vancouver's multicultural character.