Maple Ridge Is Sitting on Industrial Land That Could Drive a Generation of Local Jobs. Time to Use It.

The industrial land base in Maple Ridge represents an economic opportunity that the region cannot afford to squander on low-employment uses. A deliberate strategy is overdue.

Maple Ridge has something that communities across the Lower Mainland are desperately short of: available industrial land at prices that make manufacturing, logistics, and trades-based businesses viable. The pressure on industrial land in Burnaby, Surrey, and the established industrial centres has pushed employment land costs to levels that exclude the kinds of businesses that drive broad-based economic growth — the fabricators, the tradespeople, the small manufacturers, the logistics operators.

Maple Ridge's industrial land base, centred in the Albion area and along the Lougheed corridor, is an asset of genuine regional significance. It is also one that the municipality has not fully leveraged through an active economic development strategy.

The risk is passive erosion. Industrial land, once lost to residential or commercial development, almost never returns. The pressure to convert employment lands to higher-value uses — measured in per-square-foot revenue rather than per-worker economic contribution — is constant and well-organized. The advocacy for protecting employment land is less organized, less visible, and less politically rewarded.

Maple Ridge needs an industrial land strategy that protects the existing base, actively recruits employment-generating uses, and resists the incremental conversions that have hollowed out employment land in communities that did not pay attention until it was too late.

The jobs this land could support are good jobs — trades-based, skilled-labour positions that pay wages that can support a family in Maple Ridge without requiring a two-hour commute. That is worth protecting.

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