Farmland conversion and landfill sites

[danbrotherston]

Now if only we still had some industrial land within the existing municipal boundaries.  I'm looking at you NCR and Kraus (Waterloo) and Budd (Kitchener).  Do other countries protect their industrial land banks, or are they being lost everywhere to condominiums, convention centres and stadiums?

We haven't built any new convention centres or stadiums in the region, but all those, and especially condominiums are much more intensive of a land use than factories, so I think it's a win.

The bigger problem is that old industrial lands are unlikely to be used by industry anyway...for many of the same reasons why building sprawl is easier than condominiums. It is cheaper to build a big new sprawling complex on undeveloped land than it is to reuse existing land. New complexes are less space efficient than old ones. Transportation costs are put off on the city and province.

FWIW...I would agree with you on development, if we had processes and policies in place to direct (read: force) developments to be more efficient with space and resources. But we don't...which is why it's rather hard to support this kind of thing.

That being said, I don't know the details of this development, so I cannot speak to the value of this one specifically (although six farms isn't something to sneeze at, especially as the number 6 suggests that they are some of our dwindling supply of small farms, rather than larger agribusiness conglomerates).