With five-year population growth of eight per cent, the City of Mission is looking for ways to boost job growth so new residents have more reason to stay and invest in the community.
“There’s a lot of new faces in Mission,” said Stacey Crawford, former economic development director with the city and now CEO of Mission Bridgehead Investment Corp., the city-owned corporation established in 2023 to support investment in the community.
While the city’s population totals just 46,226, making it the smallest city in the Fraser Valley, new residents are arriving at a rate of 80 per month.
“The nature of the community is changing. Fortunately, we still retain the character of that small-town feel, and our social capital is very strong,” Crawford said.
The growth is happening in a few specific neighbourhoods, but it’s the need for jobs space that concerns Crawford.
A strong blue-collar workforce has given Mission a median household income above that of neighbouring Abbotsford, and generating more of that income locally would be good for everyone.
Residential ratepayers bear about 75 per cent of the municipality’s tax burden, Crawford said, higher than in Chilliwack and other Lower Mainland municipalities.
“[Our] employment lands strategy is looking to see higher utilization of existing, historical industrial land, and also trying to identify new areas for industrial presence to do two things,” he said. “One, create new local employment opportunities, and second, to diversify the tax base so that there’s not such a heavy reliance on homeowners.”
Two new industrial parks in Mission bring a total of 44 acres to market. This includes Silver Creek Industrial Park, which has 20 lots on 39.8 acres on Lougheed Highway. Three lots have been developed, with further work in the planning stages.
Cedar Coast’s Cade Barr Business Park will deliver four buildings totalling 400,000 square feet on 18.2 acres on Dewdney Trunk Road. The first phase completes later this year.
“When you think about the difference Silver Creek made to diversifying our tax base, this Cade Barr project … is a pretty big deal for us,” Crawford said.
The optimism has spurred the Braich family to come back to market with an 87-acre slice of Mission’s waterfront originally offered to investors in spring 2022. The property includes eight titles with nearly 76 acres of waterfront land and 11 acres of dredged foreshore in the Fraser River.
Zoning permits “a wide range of light and heavy industrial uses including manufacturing, transportation, warehousing, mini-storage, along with barge loading and outdoor storage,” according to listing materials.
“It’s the perfect site for an industrial user. It doesn’t have to go through rezoning, and the price guidance being given is different now than it was [three] years ago,” said Mark Goodman, principal of Goodman Commercial Inc., which is marketing the site at 7011 Herman S. Braich Blvd.
Three years ago, the region’s industrial market was on a rolling boil, and some observers pegged the potential value of the property at upwards of $195 million. Today, with values off their peak and investors more cautious, Goodman anticipates something closer to $100 million – firmly above that figure, but not crazily so.
The site is covered by Mission’s Waterfront Revitalization Master Plan, adopted in 2022, which envisions a Lonsdale Quay or Granville Island type environment for the area.
Yet the expansion of industry east along Lougheed Highway and Highway 1 as sites closer to the core continue to come under pressure for redevelopment with other uses means the Braich property, adjacent to a CP Rail line below Highway 11 and just 20 minutes from the U.S. border, could deliver much-needed employment space.
Crawford wouldn’t turn it down.
“There’s been some effort to create attention, not just for the waterfront but other industrial areas,” he said. “I’m getting calls from people exploring opportunities.”
