Vancouver Coffee Shops vs Dentists: 9,610 Storefronts Mapped by Neighbourhood

Vancouver's 2026 storefront count has 224 dental offices and 222 coffee shops. In 2020 it was 147 dentists to 221 coffee shops. The city's teeth are getting more attention than its caffeine habit.

Every spring the City of Vancouver takes an inventory of the city's storefronts, recording the business name, what kind of business it is, and whether the unit is empty. It publishes the results as open data, 7 years so far (2020 to 2026), 9,610 storefronts in the latest count. The City sorts them into broad groups like "Food & Beverage" and "Service Commercial". That's useful, but it won't tell you where the sushi is.

So I sorted them myself, by name: anything called "Sushi" is sushi, anything with "Pizza" is pizza, Starbucks and JJ Bean are coffee, and so on (the full rules are at the bottom). Then I mapped it across the City's 22 local areas, worked out each neighbourhood's signature storefront, and checked which shopping streets still have a lot of papered-over windows.

The map: what each neighbourhood sells

Start with coffee, because this is Vancouver. Downtown has 78 coffee shops, more than a third of the city's 222, and it's also the densest: 4.4 for every 100 open storefronts against 2.6 city-wide. Switch layers to see pho light up the east side, ramen cluster in the West End and Downtown, and dentists turn up in every single neighbourhood, which is exactly where you'd want them.

Source: City of Vancouver Open Data, Storefronts Inventory (2026 inventory, surveyed in spring; pulled Oct 21, 2026). Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Vancouver. Storefront types assigned from business names by EstateBlock. Signature = the type (with at least 4 shops) that is most over-represented in the area compared with its share city-wide. Not named for areas with fewer than 100 open storefronts. Nicknames are ours and meant as a joke. Links go to the closest EstateBlock neighbourhood page; the boundaries don't match the City's local areas exactly.

Every neighbourhood has a signature shop

A neighbourhood's "signature" here is the storefront type it has the most of relative to its size. It's not the most common thing on the street (that's hair salons almost everywhere: the city has 420 of them by name). It's the thing that makes the area different. A few that jumped out:

• Hastings-Sunrise: Pho Real. 5 pho shops among 293 open storefronts, 3.5 times the city rate. Four of the five are on East Hastings, in the Hastings North shopping district. It's a soup corridor and the numbers agree.
• West End: Ramen Row. 4 of the city's 22 ramen shops, three on Robson Street and one on Denman. Add Downtown's 7 and the two areas hold 11 of 22.
• Downtown: Latte Land. 78 coffee shops. Office towers run on espresso.
• Kerrisdale: The Bubble Tea Belt. 5 tea and bubble tea shops in a village of 159 open storefronts, 4.0 times the city rate. Renfrew-Collingwood (7) shares the title.
• Dunbar-Southlands, Grandview-Woodland, Sunset: Slice Country. Commercial Drive and the Fraser and Main strips of Sunset love a slice: 12 pizza places in Grandview-Woodland, 11 in Sunset.
• Kitsilano: Fresh Manicure Mile. 17 nail salons, the most of any area outside Downtown. West 4th and West Broadway take their cuticles seriously.

The rest: Arbutus Ridge, hair & barber; Fairview, sushi; Kensington-Cedar Cottage, dental offices; Killarney, dental offices; Marpole, real estate & presale; Mount Pleasant, sushi; Riley Park, real estate & presale; Strathcona, hair & barber; Victoria-Fraserview, hair & barber; West Point Grey, sushi. Oakridge, Shaughnessy, South Cambie don't have enough storefronts to call it. Marpole's real estate title comes partly from presale presentation centres, which the inventory counts as storefronts. There are 16 storefronts in the city named simply "Presentation Centre", more than there are Blenz locations (13).

Pizza versus sushi, the eternal question: pizza outnumbers sushi city-wide, 154 to 126, and wins in 12 of the 22 neighbourhoods. Sushi wins in 6 and 4 are tied. Team sushi: Kensington-Cedar Cottage, Kerrisdale, Oakridge, Riley Park, West End, West Point Grey. The West End wins it by the widest margin (-6).

What changed since 2020: more dentists, fewer Starbucks

The inventory itself grew: the City counted 9,610 storefronts in 2026 against 8,205 in 2020, up 17%. Some of that is new shops and some may be how the survey is done; the City doesn't split it out. So anything growing faster than 17% gained ground, and anything slower lost it.

Dental offices went from 147 to 224, up 52%, three times as fast as storefronts overall. They went from 2.0% of open storefronts to 2.6%. Pizza grew 28% and sushi 19%. Coffee shops barely moved (221 to 222) and tea and bubble tea shops slipped (75 to 67), so both lost share.

My read on the dentists: it's not that Vancouver suddenly has worse teeth. A dental clinic is a steady, long-lease tenant that can pay ground-floor rent, and landlords like that. Coffee and tea counts, meanwhile, went nowhere.

Source: City of Vancouver Open Data, Storefronts Inventory (2026 inventory, surveyed in spring; pulled Oct 21, 2026). Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Vancouver. Storefront types assigned from business names by EstateBlock. Exact business names as recorded (case-insensitive), so "Tim Hortons & Popeyes" isn't in the Tim Hortons count. Empty storefronts excluded.

Starbucks was Vancouver's most common storefront name in 2020, with 50. By 2026 it was down to 36, and Subway (45) had taken the top spot. Starbucks closed a round of cafés after a 2025 operations review, including three in Vancouver (Global News), and announced another round in September 2026, after this spring's count was taken (Global News). Banks hold five of the top twelve names. The independent coffee scene is still there: JJ Bean has 11, Pallet 9, Caffè Artigiano 9.

Empty storefronts: which shopping streets are filling up

1,009 of the 9,610 storefronts in the 2026 inventory were empty, 10.5%. That's the lowest share in the 7 years of data; the peak was 13.2% in 2021. (I count the City's "Vacant" category plus a small "Vacant UC" category, which from the entries looks like spaces under construction or renovation.)

Source: City of Vancouver Open Data, Storefronts Inventory (2026 inventory, surveyed in spring; pulled Oct 21, 2026). Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Vancouver. Storefront types assigned from business names by EstateBlock. BIAs with at least 100 storefronts in 2026. Storefronts outside any BIA (3,214 in 2026) not shown.

The biggest turnarounds are Robson Street (19.7% empty in 2020, 9.0% in 2026), the Strathcona BIA (30.9% to 20.1%) and West Broadway (11.2% to 3.6%, now the fullest BIA in the city). The emptiest are the older districts on the east edge of downtown: Hastings Crossing BIA (20.6%), Strathcona BIA (20.1%) and Chinatown BIA (19.4%). By neighbourhood, Strathcona has the highest share of empty storefronts (21.8%) and Riley Park the lowest (4.4%).

What this has to do with buying a home

For the numbers that move prices, see my Greater Vancouver market update and the Vancouver condo market report. For another way to read a neighbourhood's personality, my 3-1-1 complaints map shows what each one reports to the City. To look at homes near these shops, there are 2,319 Vancouver condos for sale on EstateBlock and 1,321 houses right now (as of Oct 21, 2026), or browse the West End, Kitsilano and Grandview Woodland.

How I did this

All storefront data is the City of Vancouver's Storefronts Inventory, downloaded on October 21, 2026 for every inventory year from 2020 to 2026. The City surveys storefronts each spring and records the business name, a broad category, the local area and the business improvement area. I grouped storefronts by name, using these rules (first match wins, case and accents ignored):

• Pho: the word "pho". Sushi: "sushi". Ramen: "ramen". Pizza: "pizz", plus Panago, Domino's, Freshslice and Little Caesars.
• Coffee shops: "coffee", "espresso", "roasters", "caffè", plus Starbucks, Tim Hortons, Blenz, JJ Bean, Bean Around the World, 49th Parallel, Prado, Breka, Pallet, Trees, Waves, Elysian, Revolver, Nemesis, Timbertrain, Caffè Artigiano and a few others.
• Tea & bubble tea: the word "tea", "boba", "bubble tea", "matcha", plus the big bubble tea chains (Chatime, Gong Cha, Sharetea, CoCo, The Alley, Chicha San Chen and others).
• These food types only count storefronts the City files under Food & Beverage or Convenience Goods.
• Nail salons: "nail", "manicure", "pedicure". Hair & barber: "hair", "barber", "salon". Dental: "dental", "dentist", "denture", "orthodont". Real estate & presale: "realty", "real estate", "realtor", the big brokerage brands and "presentation centre".

Name rules miss some shops and catch a few strays, so the counts are close, not exact. The biggest judgement call: I didn't count every "Cafe" as a coffee shop. In Vancouver that word covers Hong Kong-style cafés, bubble waffle shops and plenty of full restaurants, and 190 storefronts have it in their name without matching any rule above. Count all of them as coffee and coffee easily beats the dentists. Every name I matched, and the exact rules, are saved with the data for this post.

Rates are per 100 open storefronts (all storefronts minus empty ones), so a neighbourhood with lots of empty units isn't penalized. What I left out on purpose: cannabis and liquor stores, pawn shops and anything that could turn into a joke about people rather than shops, and the reasons behind high vacancy on particular blocks, which the data doesn't explain.