On July 5, the Town of Neepawa announced that they had purchased 320 acres on the west side of Highway #5, a swath of land over seven times larger than the parcel of land the town acquired from CN back in 2014. That original land has dozens of homes, the new fire and police stations, several apartments, and an under-construction hotel.

The big need in the community is housing, says Brian Hedley, Mayor of Neepawa, but there is also a need to accommodate more commercial and industrial growth. Now that the purchase is complete, the town is just beginning its planning stage where it will consider the infrastructure needs of the new area and parcel out the land to help plan controlled growth. The town will not be developing the land themselves but offering it to developers, as they did with the CN property.

While the town had been considering purchasing more land for some time, a housing study conducted in 2023 made it clear what was needed. “The housing study and strategy basically pointed us in the right direction to where we need to be,” says Colleen Synchyshyn, CAO of Neepawa. “In 2028, which is only four years away, we needed 460 houses, and that’s based on continued growth in Neepawa.” Hedley adds that they aren’t just looking at future growth but the fact that there is already a backlog of people needing homes who are currently in what they consider temporary accommodations.

Synchyshyn stresses that the funds to purchase the land came from the town’s Building and Land Reserve, which holds monies set aside for the specific purpose of purchasing land to facilitate local growth. While Neepawa, along with many Manitoba communities, is struggling to keep up with road repairs this summer after the mild winter laid waste to the asphalt and opened hundreds of potholes, the money used for the land purchase could not have been used for any other purpose, including transportation infrastructure.