Arnprior development on track to hit projected 2035 figures ten years sooner

Arnprior Mayor Walter Stack can only shake his head as he looks over the landscape of his hometown and points to massive housing developments spread over hundreds of acres of land, the same land that less than ten years ago were vacant fields.

Today, those lands are filled with houses and that is the reason the once sleepy Ottawa Valley town is eastern Ontario’s second fastest growing community.

Mayor Stack, a proud fifth-generation native who was first elected to town council in 2005, remembers his first few months as the reeve of the town of just under 7,000. Even then, he saw the incredible potential of the expansion of the then two-lane Highway 417 to the present four-lane highway from Ottawa to Arnprior.

The town experienced an increase in population by 8.4 per cent from 2011 to 2016, at which time its population was 8,795. He said the completion of the 2021 Census and the statistics relating to Arnprior is a document all of council and staff are anxious to examine not only to determine how many people came to Arnprior over the last five years, but just as important is where they came from and any emerging trends that would assist the town prepare for the continued growth expected.

“We worked on plans for the next decade and we had estimated the population would grow from 10,000 to 15,000 by the year 2035,” he said. “But from the way things have been going we are already looking at the possibility we will hit that amount in 2025 and I honestly do not see things slowing down.”

He said when the Highway 417 Arnprior extension was completed in 2012 it literally opened up the floodgates for developers, commuters and others, it made them to look to Arnprior as an alternative to the congested volume of Ottawa.

“The first few years were steady but nothing like we are seeing today,” he said. “But the last six years the interest of developers and small businesses has been constant and you can see that just by driving on the highway and the roads that border the town to see just how quickly the houses have gone up. It is not just the cheaper cost of living, but there is a great talent pool of skilled labour that the major developers hired and that has the spin-off benefits.”

He said nobody could have predicted a nationwide trend of people leaving the city for a smaller rural community because of the COVID pandemic. He said the combination of COVID and the reduction of the commute time between Arnprior and Ottawa is all a matter of timing and for the town, it has meant major investments within the town itself.

“When we sat down with our planning staff around 2015 we knew we had to invest much more money into the redevelopment of our downtown core and much faster than we originally expected,” he said. “In major projects like this, it is common to phase in the upgrades so it can be financed over a longer term. But we realized just how important the downtown was for us to prosper so we as a council agreed to have a two-year window to get it done, and we did it.”

The modern downtown, which now has 100 retail outlets and only one empty storefront, has become an attraction for out-of-town visitors. However, the growth has not come without growing pains.

“The one thing I hear from our residents is they are getting frustrated with the increase of traffic on the major roads, most notably Daniel Street. It is the link between the East end near the river and to the west end where the ground is ready on White Lake Road for another development going in next year. I joke with people that Daniel Street is our version of Carling Avenue. Investing in our roads and all our infrastructure is something we know we can’t put off.”

Arnprior was built on the lumber trade an other sectors along with a large industrial sector but the lumber industry is nowhere near the dominant force it was and like many towns, many factories have left, but the town has expanded its economy and companies such as Nylene, Pillar5Pharmacy and Boeing manufacture modern products that have added to the change within society itself.

“The thing about change is our natural instinct to sometimes fear or resist what comes with it and some people just don’t like change,” he said. “As a council and a community, we trying to maintain that down home folksy feeling while at the same time we are next door to the Nation’s Capital and that brings some cultural changes that as part of that trend.”

Stack said the demographic of the town has not really changed from a healthy mix of seniors, young families and middle-aged couples downsizing their homes that make up the bulk of the population. But the upcoming census will identify where they are coming from.

“Over the last few years the realtors are telling me that it is not just people from the area, but they have sold houses to people from B.C., the Yukon and all parts of Canada and that has been a big change from 20 years ago,” he said. “Our major developers have about 1,000 housing units currently under construction and I don’t see that slowing down in the next ten years.”