Ground Rules: Rethinking How Edmonton Protects Industrial Land
Major industrial investors know where conditions are right – but does the City? Amidst a worrying lack of industrial investment into Edmonton, the City’s response has been to guard the stock of older, built-out industrial land. Now, instead of drawing investors in, small businesses and community uses are being shut out.
A strong industrial tax base is paramount to a fiscally healthy city. Few would disagree.
This mandate underpins Edmonton’s Industrial Investment Action Plan (IIAP), which reflects the City’s pressing need to staunch the bleed of industrial investment outside of the City’s borders. With a growing non-residential tax rate that is now 230% of the average rate of surrounding municipalities, the City is searching for ways to make industrial development within city boundaries more appealing to investors and developers.¹ The IIAP has been the main arm for the City’s approach to industrial preservation and expansion. Its nine key actions focus on attracting investment and prioritizing the development of ‘shovel-ready’ industrial land.
How Edmonton Regulates Industrial Land
Most industrial properties in Edmonton are zoned Business Employment, Medium Industrial, or Heavy Industrial. The Business Employment Zone permits light industrial uses alongside a broad range of commercial uses and is often located at the edges of industrial neighbourhoods where it functions as a buffer between industrial activity and adjacent residential or commercial areas. Medium and Heavy Industrial Zones are, by contrast, generally located in the interior of industrial areas and are meant to accommodate a variety of more intensive industrial activities.
The regulatory landscape shifted with Zoning Bylaw 20001, which came into force on January 1, 2024 and replaced Edmonton's previous Zoning Bylaw 12800. Much of what the new Bylaw did was highly effective: it consolidated dozens of narrow, overlapping use definitions into broader categories, simplifying the system. For example, the Indoor Sales and Service use has subsumed many similar uses from the previous Zoning Bylaw, including Markets, Convenience Retail Stores, Warehouse Sales, etc., reducing the need for rezonings. However, the Bylaw also removed or majorly impaired some uses that zones had previously allowed. In the Medium Industrial (IM) and Heavy Industrial (IH) zones, several discretionary uses that were previously contemplated have been cut out entirely, including Indoor Sales and Service uses. Custom Manufacturing, which encompasses many of the creative uses previously contemplated by the Medium Industrial zone – such as Breweries, Wineries, and Distilleries and Creation and Production Establishments – now limits Public Space areas to 150 square meters, severely inhibiting the implementation of these uses. These zones kept their names and boundaries, but the range of what can be done within them has narrowed.
Concurrent with the limitations of the Zoning Bylaw, Edmonton's city-wide District Policy now restricts industrial land on a broader scale. Following the IIAP's directive to preserve the existing stock of Medium and Heavy Industrial land for future industrial development, the District Policy was updated in 2025 to discourage the conversion of Medium and Heavy Industrial sites to lighter non-residential zones, subject to limited exceptions.² The two changes compounded each other: uses were removed from IM and IH at the same time that policy-paths to a lighter zone which would still allow them were closed off.
The intentions of the IIAP are commendable; in theory, preserving the stock of industrial-zoned land should maintain opportunities for industrial investment. Whether this assumption holds in practice, however, is far less clear.
When a Building Outlives its Zoning
Consider an all-too-common scenario: a local, small scale investor owns a two-storey industrial building zoned Medium Industrial. Constructed in the 1970s, it was designed for a mix of office, service, and light industrial uses rather than intensive industrial operations. As the City has narrowed the Medium Industrial Zone to prioritize more intensive activity, a disconnect has emerged between the building's form and the uses the zone now contemplates. The site is already fully developed, and too small to attract the large, flexible footprint modern industrial operators want—but it is constrained from rezoning to a lighter zone because it sits in the interior of an industrial area rather than at its edge. Now, the building falls between zoning categories, sitting underutilized with half its units vacant, and industrial investors looking elsewhere for sites better aligned with their needs.
Across the city, this scenario has been the reality for many prospective light industrial or Business Employment type uses and the businesses who rely on them. The City has taken a hard stance on preserving industrial land, while also broadly encompassing multiple conflicting land uses under Medium and Heavy Industrial Zones. Consider pictures A, B, and C below: A and C accommodate outdoor storage operations and warehouse-type buildings, while the office bays in B employ no apparent industrial activities. And yet, all of these are zoned Medium Industrial.
While the sites in A and C should be preserved for industrial use under the IIAP, buildings like the one in B are only hindered, as medium or heavy industrial uses are not often compatible with their existing built context. Beyond the zone categories themselves, neither the IIAP nor District Policy distinguishes between levels of actual industrial activity on the ground. The narrow focus on ‘preserving’ all industrial land, with little consideration for what is already present on these lands, has had a stifling effect on adaptive reuse projects in industrial areas. Unique, creative projects that are intended to reinject life and business into industrial areas are struggling to find policy support because they take away space for industrial uses on sites like picture B, which are not fit for industrial activities in the first place. The cost of hampering adaptive reuse is not borne by property owners alone – the would-be tenants of these spaces are being heavily impacted as well. Older industrial land works for community services, not-for-profits, small businesses, and recreational facilities precisely because it is more affordable. They depend on tired Class C properties in need of reinvestment, and without them, are left with nowhere comparable to go.
A Case in Point
Nowhere are these issues with industrial regulation and policy made clearer than when an owner tries to resolve the zoning mismatch through the planning system.
This is based on a real, recent situation. We've changed the location and other identifying details to keep the people involved anonymous.
In one of Edmonton's older industrial areas, an owner explored rezoning options to convert a 1970s industrial building tht had been vacant for three years to an indoor recreation use. City Administration heavily discouraged it. Its IIAP "site selector" tool had marked the parcel as highly amenable to several industrial sectors, and on that basis Administration concluded the site did not qualify for conversion as it remained compatible with its industrial surroundings and practical for Medium Industrial uses.
The District Policy's tests for whether a site remains viable for industry are vague, so the City leans on the site selector to anchor what is meant to be a discretionary, site-specific judgment. But the City’s reported result was a rating of how amenable the location is to industrial sectors – a measurement entirely unrelated to the on-the-ground contextual information required to make a decision about the site’s industrial compatibility. A locational rating does not answer the pertinent questions of whether the building already standing on the lot can practically convert to an industrial use, or whether the parcel is the size and shape an investor would want for new development. The owner is left arguing against a site selector score and subsequent City judgment that speaks to where the site sits, not what the site actually is.
Administration recommended the owner look instead at other land nearby, already zoned for the intended use. But that land is not the owner's property, it is not for sale, and land that is properly zoned for indoor recreation uses typically comes at a premium the projects in question cannot carry. The affordability of older industrial space is often the only reason these uses pencil out at all. Adaptive uses like this belong in Edmonton, the City says, just not on the site this person owns and sees real viability in.
It has become evident that the City needs to re-examine how the IIAP is being implemented. The first question it should ask is where industrial investment is actually happening?
The recent sale of the 100-acre Twin Willows Golf Course to Panattoni Development illustrates the kind of investment the IIAP is built to attract.³ The site, planned for future industrial use though not yet rezoned, is slated for up to two million square feet of industrial space, with build-to-suit development and construction beginning as early as 2027. In an interview with the Real Estate News Exchange, Panattoni's vice-president of development, Mark Edwards, points to the site's frontage on two major arterials, its location within about a kilometre and a half of the Anthony Henday, its straight-line connection to the Yellowhead Trail, its bus access, and a large reachable labour pool. As Edwards put it, the site checks all of the boxes occupiers are looking to check.
Twin Willows context map, showing arterial road access.
Twin Willows is not an isolated case. By the City's own account, as of 2023 Edmonton has more than 6,500 hectares of available industrial land and 9.95 million square feet of available industrial space, which the City markets as abundant and development-ready.⁴ The City is also directly involved in bringing industrial land to market, through developments such as Goodridge Corners and Ellerslie Industrial. Whatever the precise makeup of that supply, it is difficult to reconcile a stated abundance of development-ready industrial land with a preservation policy premised on protecting industrial land from being lost.
Twin Willows is the scale of investment the City should be trying to recapture from neighbouring municipalities, and it depends on things many industrial parcels simply cannot offer: the size, the highway access, the room to build something purpose-built for a modern operator. A two-acre lot with a 1970s building on it was never going to land a project like this, whatever its zoning. Protecting it won't change that; it just keeps the site underused while the uses that could fill it are turned away.
New major investment was always going to areas like Twin Willows or Ellerslie Industrial, not a small built-out lot in the interior of an industrial area. A high site selector suitability score can't tell you whether real investment was ever going to land in these small sites, and while they sit protected and waiting for the unlikely chance that investment does happen, their owners stay stuck with very limited options.
None of this is to say the City's caution is misplaced. Each conversion makes the next harder to refuse, and the City is right not to erode the industrial base by default. But that caution carries the most weight on sites that could realistically draw major industrial investment. On the ones that can't, preservation doesn't deliver a future industrial user. It just holds a building empty while the use that would fill it is turned away.
A Better Way to Apply the Policy
The tools to resolve this mismatch already exist in Edmonton’s District Policy exemptions (Section 2.5.3). What is missing is a consistent, transparent basis for applying these exemptions. In practice, that means asking a sharper question than the site selector score does, such as: given the size and access of the building already on the site, and the conditions industrial developers are actually looking for, is major industrial development on this land realistic at all? The suitability score should inform a piece of that judgment, not stand in for it.
There is also a more direct fix for many of these sites. Zoning Bylaw 20001 moved away from discretionary uses to reduce uncertainty, which is a reasonable goal. But the answer to uncertainty is not to remove these uses entirely; it is to permit them where they meet clear, objective criteria. The City could amend industrial zones to allow uses like Religious Assemblies, Indoor Recreation, or Markets as of right on sites that meet criteria defined by conditions which limit the practicality of industrial uses, such as buildings that cover most of their sites, physical constraints (ie. low ceilings or poor truck access), and small or awkwardly shaped parcels. This gives owners a predictable regulatory path without the planning-related hurdles that conversion would otherwise require.
Adaptive reuse of industrial spaces is not a threat to industrial supply. Uses like Markets, Religious Assemblies, and Indoor Sports do not displace new industrial development. They put underused space back to work on sites that are unlikely to support medium or heavy industrial redevelopment in the first place. Treating them as a loss of industrial land, rather than the practical outcome they are, keeps these sites in limbo.
Again, a strong industrial tax base is key to a fiscally healthy city. But in the pursuit of this mandate, the City has forgotten that local property owners trying to make use of what they have are not roadblocks against the City’s goals – they are in themselves vital to a healthy city.
1 IIAP page 6
2 Policy 2.5.3.4, amended by Charter Bylaw 21164
3 John Dujay, "Panattoni buys 2M-sq.-ft. industrial site in Edmonton," Real Estate News Exchange, May 1, 2026. https://renx.ca/panattoni-buys-2m-sq-ft-industrial-site-edmonton
4 City of Edmonton, “Industrial Growth” webpage.
All photos retrieved from Google Earth (2025)