The City of Pickering, Ont.’s innovation corridor strategy seems to be paying off with the recent announcement that the first three anchor tenants have committed to new projects in the corridor.
On April 13, Kubota Canada Limited, Red Crest Developments and The Behar Group announced they will be building in the corridor along Highway 407 in Durham Region.
Kubota, a heavy equipment manufacturer for the construction, agriculture and other sectors, has purchased 50 acres of land and is expected to break ground on a 500,000-square-foot facility later this year.
Red Crest will be building two adjacent office buildings totalling almost 300,000 combined square feet to be leased out. The Behar Group will be building a four-star hotel with an adjoining 30,000-square-foot convention centre.
“We are quite excited and very optimistic about a very strong beginning,” said Pickering Mayor Dave Ryan.
“We are looking to the high-end market. Kubota is an example of that, and Behar and Red Crest are ancillary and supportive of that type of operation. We have other companies we are currently in discussions with, for example in the aeronautics industry, and I am optimistic that going forward we will be able to make more significant announcements soon.”
The innovation corridor strategy has been in development for about 10 years, Ryan said, as the city looked ahead to the launch of the Seaton residential community with its projected 70,000 residents.
The city does not want Pickering to become even more entrenched as a bedroom community to Toronto than it already is, he said, so the decision was made to establish the innovation corridor on 800 acres of provincially owned lands on Highway 407 between York-Durham Townline Road and Brock Road directly next to Seaton.
The city then took the next step of purchasing 28 acres outright and optioning another 197 acres.
“We took the bull by the horns to ensure we could attract the businesses we wanted and market to them aggressively,” Ryan said. “The thing we are trying to ensure doesn’t happen is a lot of large spaces with minimal employment. I am not looking for a lot of warehouses.”
The city’s marketing strategy to potential innovators includes such assets as Durham Region’s EN3 super-cluster of Energy, Environmental and Engineering companies — energy is a definite strength, Ryan points out, with the Darlington and Pickering nuclear plants — as well as local post-secondary institutions Durham College and the University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT), local partnerships with Queen’s University and the University of Toronto, and the burgeoning electric vehicle sector as Oshawa’s General Motors participates in UOIT’s Automotive Centre of Excellence (ACE) venture.
Innovation thrives when the business community takes advantage of synergies with the education sector, said Ryan, citing the ACE and the way UOIT and Durham College train nuclear industry workers.
The innovation corridor will be served by major roadways and GO buses and in future, Ryan said, more transit infrastructure will be built into Seaton.
There is discussion of a new GO train station in Seaton as well and Ryan said it is expected the federal government will also make an announcement within the next 18 months that it will permit the creation of an airport in the area.
“We think there is huge opportunity here, and we think that other manufacturers seeing that opportunity are going to quite frankly rush to be on the ground and ready to go,” he said.
The timetables for the establishment of the new employers and the new residences of Seaton are synching almost perfectly, Ryan said. The first occupancy permits for some 200 Mattamy homes in Seaton will be issued this month or next, he said, and the Kubota plant is expected to be completed some time next year.
In addition to Kubota’s half-a-million square feet of plant space, there will be an additional 65,000 square feet of head office space built in the first phase.
Kubota has said it is looking to expand its campus to over a million square feet in future phases.
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