Should Sunrise Market Become a City-Owned Grocery Store?

Jan. 15, 2026

With London Drugs closing and Sunrise Market’s future unsure, the Downtown Eastside faces a retail desert.

Mike Tan’s relationship with Sunrise Market in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside dates back to his early childhood visits with his great-aunt.

“She used to live in Chinatown at the Chau Luen tower,” said Tan, a current director with the Chau Luen Kon Sol Society and a Chinatown affordable housing advocate.

“So we’d walk along Gore Avenue, hand in hand, with bags full of fresh, cheap veggies.”

Just like his great-aunt did, Tan knows that most of the 7,000 senior citizens living in the Downtown Eastside and Chinatown rely on the family-owned Sunrise Market to access fresh produce, protein, milk and dried goods at discount prices.

“They will go every few days to stock up, again because it is the place to go for cheap, fresh veggies. It is really a lifeline,” said Tan.

For decades, Sunrise has kept its prices low by scooping up the shipments wholesalers are desperate to unload — the rejected truckload, the surplus order, the cancelled container. It is an approach Leslie Joe pioneered with local warehouses, now carried on by his daughters.

But Sunrise Market’s days as a cheap source of healthy food, in an area of the city with high rates of poverty and food insecurity, could be numbered.

In November 2025 the Joe family, who have owned and operated the store on the corner of Gore and Powell streets since it opened in 1961, put their Sunrise Market business up for sale for $4.5 million.

The land the market sits on is not currently for sale. But David Wu, the real estate agent managing the sale, told the Vancouver Sun that because city council voted last month to change zoning in the Downtown Eastside Oppenheimer District to allow for residential towers of up to 32 storeys — with significantly fewer units required at the income assistance shelter rate than the previous zoning — the value of the Sunrise Market land, assessed at just under $4 million, could significantly increase.

This, Wu told the Sun, would potentially attract buyers more interested in purchasing and developing the land than in buying the market.

When The Tyee requested comment from the Joe family on the market’s potential sale, they declined to comment. So any sale or potential development of Sunrise Market, let alone the land it sits on, remains speculation at this point.

But it’s still concerning to Tan, who recently made two TikTok videos outlining his concerns about the potential loss of Sunrise Market and the impact it would have on low-income seniors in the area.

“It’s potentially very devastating for them,” Tan told The Tyee. He added that no one is upset with the Joe family for wanting to retire, and thanked them for the decades they have spent serving the community.

“What people are really afraid of is that someone is going to come in and acquire not just the business but the property and redevelop that and turn it into market condominiums with Urban Fare or Whole Foods on the bottom.”

Potential mayoral candidate Amanda Burrows is already talking about a solution: the City of Vancouver purchasing the land and the business, which would be operated by a local non-profit organization, creating the first publicly owned grocery store in Canada.

“You protect the land from speculation, and it’s meant to be in the hands of community leading it,” said Burrows, one of two potential mayoral candidates for OneCity Vancouver in the October 2026 municipal election.

The city can afford it, she said, by reprioritizing and reallocating the city’s budget away from council’s “zero means zero” pledge to not raise property taxes in 2026, and cut $120 million in spending, while raising the policing budget by $46.2 million.

“People want the cost of living to go down, and one of the ways the cost of living can go down is with our groceries and our food,” Burrows said.

London Drugs store is closing down

While Sunrise Market’s future is up in the air, the fate of the London Drugs in the Woodward’s building, about a kilometre west of Sunrise, is not.

Earlier this month, the B.C.-founded mini-department store chain announced this location will close at the end of January, citing persistent risks to staff safety from violence, and significant operating losses from both ongoing vandalism and shoplifting.

London Drugs, which houses a pharmacy and a post office, as well as selling packaged food, household appliances, cleaning supplies, electronics and more, has been a flagship store at the Woodward’s development since it reopened in 2009.

On the social media platform X, Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim stated it was “extremely disappointing” to see the business close, blaming street disorder and crime in the Downtown Eastside and a lack of mandatory mental health and addictions beds opening in the city.

The Tyee requested an interview with Mayor Sim, but he was not made available.

Coun. Peter Meiszner, who along with Sim is a member of the ABC Vancouver municipal party, posted a video on X expressing his sadness about the loss of London Drugs in the neighbourhood.

“This is a big loss for the community,” Meiszner told The Tyee, adding another Canada Post branch recently closed in Chinatown, directing customers to the soon-to-close London Drugs postal outlet instead.

“They have quite a large food selection, and I know it’s relied upon by many people in the community because it has quite reasonable prices. It’s going to have quite a negative impact on the people who rely on it, and on the neighbourhood as well.”

The city invested in extra policing for the Woodward’s development’s retail offerings, Meiszner said, including additional officer foot patrols and opening a community policing centre in the building.

Meiszner is one of six ABC councillors who, along with Sim, have held a majority on council since the last civic election in 2022. ABC campaigned on, and delivered, funding for more police officers. ABC’s emphasis on policing to solve social problems in the city has come under fire from critics.

During the fall budgeting process, ABC councillors voted to increase the police budget by 10 per cent, while most other city departments will see a drop in funding or zero increase.

Burrows told The Tyee that London Drugs’ closing shows ABC’s focus on policing as a response to street disorder, homelessness and mental health and addictions issues in the neighbourhood doesn’t work.

“When it comes to community safety, we have these conversations all the time: policing isn’t the only solution,” she said.

“The solution is actually in affordability, so access to affordable food, affordable housing, to voluntary treatment, mental health supports. And we need a lot of access to the creation of low-barrier jobs.”

Meiszner disagrees that the policing response has failed.

“I don’t think the police are going to solve the issues in the neighbourhood. I don’t think anybody thinks that,” Meiszner said, adding he doesn’t think even the Vancouver Police Department believes that.

“But police are important for public safety and there’s clearly a public safety issue in the neighbourhood, and we’ve seen positive results in terms of crime statistics trending downward across the city, but also in the Downtown Eastside.”

He didn’t make a social media post about Sunrise Market, Meiszner said, because he didn’t think the business was at risk of closing. But he knows Sunrise Market’s importance to the community and doesn’t want it to close either.

“I went to Sunrise Market for fresh produce because I was a struggling journalist [in] 2008/09,” Meiszner said, adding he has heard anecdotally from colleagues that the business’s current listing is overvalued and unlikely to sell at that price.

“I don’t think [Sunrise Market’s] closing is a sure thing. London Drugs is closing at the end of this month. It’s certain; there’s no turning back.”

A heritage program for businesses

Like Mayor Sim, who spoke to CTV News about Burrows’ public market proposal, Meiszner thinks the idea is “just ridiculous.”

“It’s not going to work,” he said, adding the city already funds meal and food programs in the neighbourhood, and that the non-profit Quest Outreach Society is already running five non-profit grocery stores in the Lower Mainland, including one in the Downtown Eastside.

“I think obviously in the grocery system in Canada we need more competition to help drive down prices,” Meiszner said.

As well, he said city staff assured council the recent zoning changes they made to the Downtown Eastside Oppenheimer District will not “cause land prices to increase because of the requirements for below-market and social housing in those businesses.”

Tan likes the idea of Sunrise Market becoming a public grocery store, or even a co-op grocery store where in return for a small membership fee, customers would be part owners of the market and have input on business decisions.

But if that isn’t possible, Tan suggests the City of Vancouver create something similar to San Francisco’s Legacy Business program, which supports heritage businesses with importance to their communities to continue to operate in the expensive city.

“Things like grants or property tax abatements and other heritage business supports,” he said, adding the city-convened Chinatown Legacy Stewardship Group he was a member of has recommended this idea for the neighbourhood before.

Asked for his response, Meiszner said he would not comment on a program he knows nothing about.

“I’m not familiar with what’s happening in San Francisco,” he said.

[Top photo: Michael Tan has fond memories of shopping at Sunrise Market with his great-aunt. But the future of the low-cost grocery store is up in the air following its listing for sale. Photo for The Tyee by Katie Hyslop.]