General Road and Highway Discussion

[cherrypark]

It's not ideal, but speaking as someone currently navigating our nationally lowest vacancy rate for industrial space in the Waterloo Region, this is needed just the same as new housing to enable employment to continue coming to the region. I would much rather see industrial development on lands near the city than having all of our residents need to commute to Milton or Etobicoke for the same.

Now Phase 2 ION missing this employment centre of the region is another discussion I suppose.

Now if only we hadn't rushed to convert all of our prime industrial land into condominium towers, and come up with ways to keep industrial lands close to the other existing infrastructure (eg rails, and other services), maybe the vacancy rate wouldn't be such a problem?  How do other countries manage to keep various uses (residential, service, retail and industrial) all close to each other?  Maybe it's also time to have a conversation about how to make existing industrial zones more dense? Surely there are ways to create multi-story factories that weren't in the middle of a big green space? Didn't we do that once around here? (he asks tongue firmly in cheek)

By not building suburbs and low density residential that push the zoning types (that appropriately should be at the city boundaries or in concentrated zones) further outside the core and require major road infra to move everyone there. There are limitations to inter-mixing based on land value, form factor, and nuisance to residential/commercial areas. We could certainly make our industrial zones denser, but I don't see them (just-in-time logistics of today aside, perhaps) as the primary cause of needing to convert agricultural lands. Our city is growing, but new industrial spaces are not where we're growing our land use by the majority.

In the core, I can't honestly think of any major industrial lands that were recently made condos other than perhaps Schneiders? The reality is most former industrial building areas are parking lots now, not condos. For each condo building, I would be confident estimating an equal if not greater land area has been updated into new employment lands in the last decade (Google, et al). There are many examples of brownfield industrial new builds, such as down at Homer Watson and Bleams. 

I think the vacancy rate now is just the reality of a larger city and one re-turning after a hollowing out that meant a lot of industrial lands became fallow or flattened into parking for commercial conversions.