Drive east on SE 164th Avenue through Fisher's Landing and you pass it without registering it. A stretch of manicured berms, low corporate buildings set well back from the road, landscaping that looks tended by someone with a maintenance contract rather than a homeowner. It reads as private property because it has always functioned as private property. That's the Vancouver Innovation Center, a 52-acre business campus threaded into Fisher's Landing East, and until recently there was no reason for anyone who doesn't badge into one of its offices to think about it at all.
That's changing, and the change is coming from the neighborhood association, not a developer's press release. The Fishers Landing East Neighborhood Association has confirmed that the City of Vancouver will run a new park in the campus's northeast corner, paired with a public trail loop wrapping the outside rim of the property. For a piece of land residents have driven past for years without a reason to stop, that's not a small update. It means a family with a stroller or a retiree with a dog can use the park in one corner and the trail around the campus, without making the whole 52 acres public.
What FLENA is actually describing
The neighborhood association's own language on this is still catching up to the plans, which tells you something about how early this is. Their site notes they'll add detail as they learn more, but the shape of it is clear: a city-run park carved into the campus's unused corner, and a trail that runs the full perimeter rather than cutting through the middle of anyone's parking lot. That's a meaningfully different proposition than a pocket park. A loop trail around 52 acres gives Fisher's Landing something it hasn't had: a walking route long enough to matter, sitting on land that used to be off-limits by default.
FLENA describes its own turf simply: "Where the Columbia River meets the shadow of Mount Hood, this is our home." The group's 2026 calendar already treats the VIC as neighborhood ground rather than corporate ground. FLENA held an ice cream social with lawn games at the campus on September 19, and a fall cleanup is on the books for October 17. Residents are gathering there before the trail is even finished, which is usually a good sign that a public space announcement will stick rather than stall out in committee.
The retail news is louder, but it's not the story
If you've paid attention to Fisher's Landing over the past two years, the headlines have been about Fisher's Landing Marketplace, the shopping center anchored by New Seasons Market at SE 164th Avenue. Shake Shack opened its doors there on April 16, 2025, its first location anywhere in Clark County, sharing a building with a Starbucks and drawing enough local interest that Reddit's r/VancouverWA thread lit up over the pairing. Daiso landed at the same center a few months earlier, on October 12, 2024, bringing 9,280 square feet of Japanese variety retail next door to the grocery store.
Both are genuinely good additions. Neither one adds an inch of new ground to the neighborhood. They fill existing commercial space with different tenants, which is what shopping centers do. The VIC story is a different category of change entirely: it's a park and trail loop opening up land that was never available to the public. A new burger counter changes what you can eat for lunch. A new trail loop changes what you can do with a Tuesday evening that didn't exist as an option before.
The slower version of the same idea, a mile away
Fisher's Landing already has one large piece of underused, mostly-fenced-off land near the neighborhood's core, and it's not the VIC. It's the Fisher's Landing Transit Center, the C-TRAN park-and-ride at SE 164th Avenue that has functioned almost entirely as a place to leave your car since it opened. C-TRAN has spent years studying what to do with the site's unused corners, and the design firm Ankrom Moisan has published a master plan for turning the property into a genuine mixed-use hub, with a "Brew Hub" and "Community Hub" as anchor uses, an urban park, a wetland preserve, and a trail network woven through the whole site.
That plan is real, but it's also further out than the VIC park. C-TRAN's own update page describes the work as ongoing, without a construction timeline attached, which is standard for a transit agency moving through zoning and phasing questions before it can commit to a shovel date. The useful way to read the two projects together isn't "both are happening now." It's that Fisher's Landing has two of its largest single-use properties, a corporate campus and a park-and-ride, both being pushed in the same direction: from car-oriented and closed off, toward walkable and open. The VIC's version of that shift is close enough to see. The transit center's version is the one to watch over the next several years.
The neighborhood wasn't short on places to go
None of this happens in a vacuum of nothing else to do. Fisher's Landing has had its own gathering spots for a while, and they're worth naming because they're the reason a new trail loop lands as an addition rather than a rescue:
- Big Al's, the entertainment complex with 42 bowling lanes and a sports bar built around a projection screen, sits near the Marketplace and has been a rainy-day standby for years.
- Jerusalem Cafe, opened by the Farran family after their downtown Vancouver location took off, serves lamb shawarma and homemade baklava off 164th Avenue.
- Stardust Diner keeps a 1950s theme going with pancakes and a hobo skillet that regulars order without looking at the menu.
- LeRoy Haagen Memorial Community Park anchors the area near the old ferry landing site, with the Journey Theater Arts Group staging performances nearby.
That's a neighborhood with enough texture already that a new park doesn't have to carry the whole burden of making the place feel lived in. It just adds one more reason to be outside that wasn't there before, on land that used to be someone else's parking lot view.
What this means if you already live here
If you're in Fisher's Landing East or the Village at Fisher's Landing, the practical takeaway is simple: keep an eye on FLENA's calendar rather than waiting for a ribbon cutting. The association is the group closest to the actual timeline, and events like September's ice cream social at the campus are as good an early signal as you'll get that the trail and park are moving from plan to reality. The transit center redevelopment is worth tracking too, but on a longer horizon. Check in with C-TRAN's own updates rather than assuming a groundbreaking is imminent.
Fisher's Landing has spent years being defined by what's easy to see from the road: the Marketplace, the transit center, the corporate campus you drive past without a second thought. The most interesting thing happening in the neighborhood right now is the part that's been invisible until this year, a piece of private-feeling land turning into public ground one announcement at a time.
If you're weighing East Vancouver against other parts of Clark County and want a read on how a neighborhood like this actually functions day to day, not just what a listing sheet says, Oxford Street Partners has spent plenty of time in Fisher's Landing with buyers making exactly that comparison. Book a consultation when you're ready to talk through what fits.
