Quote:
Originally Posted by esquire
From what I've been reading in news articles in recent years, it sounds like the city is really hard up for industrial land inventory... so on some level it makes sense to zone that area for some form of light industrial, i.e. maybe not steel mills, but warehouses/service centres and the like.
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This is correct. Only 14% of industrial land in Winnipeg is vacant, and even a smaller proportion of that is serviced. My guess is that the availability of vacant and serviced industrial land is too fragmented to accommodate some existing industrial operations that want to expand or large industrial operations that want to locate to Winnipeg.
Whether we should prevent residential/commercial in this particular area and instead allow industrial is a different matter. At the end of the day, if you don't allow this infill to occur, there's a chance it may occur elsewhere - after all, if the private sector sees an opportunity on this land, why wouldn't they see it in another area?
Alternatively, it might be wise to begin servicing other vacant lands in Winnipeg (e.g. CentrePort) so that this land, closer to downtown, can be used for more efficient purposes.