Nobody wants an industrial site in their backyard. That is why proposed land changes north of Bridge Street have local residents concerned about what the owner, CRA Lands Limited, will do with the land if it gets industrial zoning.
Many wonder why developers cannot relocate their plans to use existing empty buildings or land near the airport in Breslau.
However, urban planner Larry Masseo, a policy advisor at the Waterloo Region Home Builders Association, says the region actually has a shortage of shovel-ready land. For neighbouring cities like Waterloo, Masseo notes that growth has already reached existing municipal boundaries, leaving nowhere else to expand.
“But it’s different in places like Kitchener, Cambridge, Woolwich, where they have a lot more opportunity to reassess the directions and approaches to growth and put their own stamp on it, so to speak,” Masseo said.
In Woolwich, most of the future growth will take place on what are known as the East Side Lands.
“That’s the lands that are on the east side of the Grand River, generally south and east of the Breslau area, and north of Cambridge, kind of in and around the airport,” said Masseo.
While these lands are appealing and even have some prospects lined up, they are not shovel-ready.
“They’re many years away from actually becoming reality because the nature of the servicing there is that they require hundreds of millions of dollars worth of new infrastructure to be financed and constructed before you even get a single building permit,” explained Masseo.
“They had to re-plumb an existing sewage treatment plant to alter its catchment area so that they could divert some flows to another one to make room, and then there were roads and all kinds of infrastructure needed to accommodate it.”
While this infrastructure has been identified, it has not been fully planned, and environmental assessments are incomplete.
“So a lot of that employment land, although it kind of looks good and exists on paper, it does not exist in reality,” Masseo said.
“If you looked at the actual current situation, if some major employer came knocking at the Region of Waterloo this week, there’s really limited options in terms of providing land for them to grow or to locate here.”
The countryside line is a hot topic of conversation in light of the proposed industrial site just over the Waterloo border on Woolwich Street West. The boundary is meant to protect agricultural land from urban sprawl. However, Masseo argues that the line along Bridge Street was drawn almost at random, and that the Conestogo River would provide a better natural boundary.
“They drew the countryside line along Bridge Street, which was really the northern boundary of the city of Waterloo. And I don’t know why they were so, strict on the line in that location because it didn’t really make a lot of sense when you look at as if you’re running a municipality, you should be looking at the availability of services, the cost to provide services for future growth, and all of those other things.
“And so the situation along Bridge Street in that area is that you have the sewage treatment plant in Waterloo, and you have a lot of existing trunk watermains and sanitary sewers, hydro wires, things like that, that are all capable of and have capacity available to service lands on the other side of Bridge Street, but because of policy, they can’t.”
Critics of the countryside line agree, pointing out that the hard boundary has also made land artificially scarce, raising costs and hurting regional competitiveness.
Conversely, Wayne Caldwell, a professor of rural planning at the University of Guelph, argues the countryside line has not restricted growth, but has instead allowed communities to better prepare for it.
“I think one of the key successes of the countryside line has been this certainty that’s created for folks on one side of the line in terms of that’s where urban development is going to try to intensify, and on the other side of the line, an attempt to try to protect farmland and the rural values and communities connected to that,” said Caldwell.
He added that there will always be interest in lowering the cost of land for development.
“If that line isn’t there, there may be some argument that land prices might be more difficult inside the urban centres, and yet it certainly hasn’t limited growth,” Caldwell said, noting Kitchener and Waterloo have seen growth rates higher than the national average.
By Meg Deak, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
Original Published on Aug 20, 2026 at 13:00
Recent Comments