For decades, the playbook for developing land in Ontario was straightforward: get your planning approvals, sign off on the guarantees, and wait for the municipality to run a massive trunk line out to your site.

That playbook is officially broken.

Walk onto almost any candidate site across the province today, and you’ll find the biggest hurdle standing between approved plans and shovels in the ground isn’t local opposition or planning red tape. It’s water and wastewater. Miles of approved housing sit completely frozen simply because there isn’t enough capacity in the local pipe—or because the pipe doesn’t exist at all.

At a recent ULI Toronto breakfast panel hosted at Crozier Consulting Engineers’ Toronto office, industry experts tackled this exact dilemma. Their consensus was clear: Ontario cannot solve its housing crisis using 20th-century centralized infrastructure thinking. The real way forward lies in localized communal systems, flexible delivery models, and new governance tools.

The real cost

When servicing stalls, it doesn’t just delay construction—it locks up land, burning money for decades.

Richard Aubry, VP of Design, Development & Construction at Redwood Properties, knows this struggle firsthand. He’s been sitting on a 140-acre master-planned site designed for 3,000 units in York Region. For over 10 years, that land has remained a cornfield because it was tied to the proposed Upper York Sewage Solutions project. After years of political delays and $50 million spent on engineering alone, the province scrapped the facility in favor of a long, expensive conveyance pipe down to Lake Ontario.

“The end user is paying for that pipe three times,” Aubry pointed out during the discussion. “They’re paying through their DCs, they’re paying for front-ending it, and they’re paying for its replacement over time with taxes… Nothing is more expensive than the traditional public infrastructure system because it has to be big enough to warrant its initial investment. When you do smaller, surgical infrastructure, it’s way cheaper and very scalable.”

The game-changers: Bills 60 and 98

Ontario’s policy landscape is finally catching up to these on-the-ground realities.

As Katherine Rentsch, Manager of Private Services at Crozier, explained, developing outside standard urban boundaries historically forced a choice between two extremes: low-density individual wells and septic tanks, or multi-million-dollar municipal pipe extensions. Shared communal systems offer the sweet spot—high density without the massive trunk lines—but ownership hurdles have long held them back. Small municipalities rarely wanted the long-term operational risk of taking over private infrastructure if an operator defaulted.

That’s where recent legislation comes in:

Bill 60 (Wastewater Public Corporations Act): Sets up a clear structure for publicly owned entities to run water and wastewater systems, collect utility fees, and recover costs directly.
Bill 98: Amends local governance frameworks to make Municipal Service Corporations (MSCs) a viable path forward.
Faster Approvals: Private or MSC-backed subsurface treatment options bypass the lengthy Municipal Class Environmental Assessment (EA) process required for large surface-discharge plants, getting capacity online much faster.

Finding the missing middle

While urban developers see decentralized systems as a way to bypass municipal gridlock, rural regions view them as a lifeline for survival.

Justin Bromberg, CEO of Frontenac Municipal Services, shared how Frontenac County established Ontario’s first rural Municipal Service Corporation to solve this exact problem. With nearly 98 per cent of the county relying on individual septic beds and wells, standard municipal utility extensions were out of the question financially.

“For us, the MSC with communal services was the missing middle,” Bromberg said. “It allows us to have a professionally operated, municipally owned utility serving a cluster of development at the scale that actually makes sense for our communities—too dense for individual septic systems and too small for conventional infrastructure.”

Unlocking capital and reclaiming resources

For institutional developers like QuadReal Property Group, which manages over 100 land-lease communities nationwide, the shift to MSCs is a welcome relief. Phil Busby, Director of Development at QuadReal, noted that handing long-term system operations over to a dedicated public body lets developers focus on building communities rather than tying up capital in perpetual financial guarantees.

Better yet, localized water treatment changes how we view wastewater entirely. High-tech package plants treat water right where it’s used. Instead of pumping millions of liters away through concrete pipes, communities can reuse that clean water locally for urban agriculture, energy recovery, or landscape features.

A call for local courage

The technology is proven, the economics make sense, and the province is clearing the regulatory runway. The final piece of the puzzle is local political will.

“Ontario is a world leader in wastewater filtration—we export it all over the world, but we’re not utilizing it enough in our own province,” Aubry said. “Municipalities have to have the courage to either take control or relinquish control, and right now, many are willing to do neither.”