Woodman

South of Sardis the built-up city narrows into a single long run down toward the Vedder River, and that stretch is the fastest-growing part of Chilliwack. Vedder put on 39 per cent more people between 2011 and 2021, second only to Promontory, and it now holds more residents than any neighborhood except the downtown.

Most of that growth landed at the south end, in Garrison Crossing, built on the grounds of the Canadian Forces base that closed in December 1997, and in the subdivisions that filled in around it. Canada Education Park and the University of the Fraser Valley campus are down there as well, which gives the neighborhood a working daytime population on top of its residents. The base closure reshaped that whole end of Vedder, and everything standing on the site dates from after 1997.

Some context still helps. Rooms along this corridor tend to sit in plazas rather than on a street frontage, so they are easy to miss from a car and much easier to find on a map beforehand. A neighborhood that has added people at this rate also turns over its commercial units at a fair pace, which is reason enough to confirm a place is trading before driving out to it, and awkward when there is no number available to confirm it with. Chains are excluded from this directory, so whatever sits behind the name, it is a local business rather than a franchise.