It’s not every day that you get to develop nearly 400 acres of land in the middle of a major city — and Derek Goring intends to make the most of the opportunity.
In 2018, the Public Sector Pension Investment Board bought the airfield and manufacturing site at Downsview from Bombardier for $816 million, and established Northcrest Developments to build communities on that land soon after, installing Goring as CEO in May of 2023.
The site, now dubbed YZD, is adjacent to an almost equally sized parcel owned by the Canada Lands Company.
“We ended up collaborating with Canada Lands on a Master Plan for our joint lands, which is about 800 acres in total, or about the size of downtown Toronto,” Goring says. “Our portion of the site — from Shepherd to Wilson — is the same distance as Front to Bloor Streets downtown. Even saying it out loud, even though I’ve said it lots of times, it still blows me away.”
This isn’t the first time the Sudbury native has had an opportunity to develop a large piece of Toronto from the ground up.
The mechanical engineering and management studies grad has spent much of his 25-year career criss-crossing between public and private sector real estate projects, most recently with First Gulf on its East Harbour project. Goring joined Northcrest in 2019 after the 38-acre site was sold to Cadillac Fairview.
“It could not have been a better experience and setup for the job I’m in now,” Goring says. “Both Downsview and East Harbour were these holes in the doughnut where a whole bunch of stuff was happening around it, but there’s nothing happening in the middle, and the idea is to flip it around and make it the centre.”
The Downsview Secondary Plan, which was recently approved by City Council, sets Northcrest up on a 30-year, $30-billion project to turn the massive plot into a series of walkable neighbourhoods surrounding a two kilometre public space along the former airstrip. The city-within-a-city plan sets out an ambitious strategy to build a mix of affordable, rental and ownership properties for about 110,000 residents — roughly equal to the population of Pickering.
The Star recently spoke to Goring from Northcrest’s downtown offices about the massive project, the opportunity to address Toronto’s most pressing needs, and the challenges of a project this size.
Did you always want to work in real estate?
I got into real estate by accident.
Coming out of undergrad, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I lined up a job doing tech consulting in the fall of 2000 and the tech bubble burst in the spring of 2001, so by the time I graduated they basically told us they didn’t have any work for us anymore.
I was scrambling around and found a summer contract with Minto as a financial analyst. It was literally the first job offer I got, and it happened to be in real estate development, but I took to it immediately.
Were you hoping to eventually oversee a project like YZD?
It looks like I had a master plan, because all the steps seem logical, but it wasn’t strategic at all.
I spent five years at Minto, and at the time I was following what was going on with Waterfront Toronto. I started to attend public consultations, as a private citizen, because I thought it would be neat to have input on what would happen with the waterfront. When I saw a job open at Waterfront Toronto I applied, and I got it.
Working for a quasi-government organization exposed me to a whole bunch of things you don’t usually learn at a typical private real estate development company, particularly on the infrastructure side of things, and in the way you engage the community.
Then I got this opportunity to start a new development group at Infrastructure Ontario, looking at how to make better use of surplus government real estate. Those two experiences taught me a lot about the inner workings of government and set me up well for my eventual return to the private sector.
How did you end up at Northcrest?
I fully planned on working through the East Harbour project until it was built. When the recruiter first called about Downsview I wasn’t interested. It wasn’t until the process of selling the site gained momentum that I thought about a plan B.
I’ve lived in Toronto for almost 25 years and Downsview wasn’t really on my radar; I hadn’t spent a lot of time up there, and it was more enticing to work on the East side of downtown. But the more I learned about it, the more excited I got.
I realized East Harbour was 40 acres, and YZD is almost 400. If you drop a pin in the middle of the GTA, it lands at Downsview, and with the airport closing and the subway already there, I was excited about its potential.
What was Downsview before?
Over 100 years ago it was farmland, and at one point the De Havilland company built an airstrip to test the planes they were manufacturing. We actually have old images of a runway surrounded by barns.
The reason it was selected for that purpose is it’s the highest natural point in the city, which means the winds are more favourable for flight. It was used in World War II for the war effort, and when the runway and manufacturing facilities eventually transferred back to the private sector, the rest of the area was either used for military purposes or transferred to the Canada Lands Company, which owns and operates The Hangar sports complex and Hoop Dome and Scotiabank Pond.
But the whole area was always subject to building height limits, because of the flight paths, so Bombardier closing the airport is the catalyst for what’s happening now.
What’s the plan for the space?
The “how do you eat an elephant?” analogy is very applicable. You can’t develop it all at once, so you need a vision for what the whole thing will look like in the future and then break it down into its component parts.
We want to create a series of new neighbourhoods offering the best of both urban and suburban in one location: livable and walkable with all the amenities and services of downtown. That includes parks and green spaces, infrastructure that allows them to walk or bike anywhere they need to go, schools and healthcare services, cafes and retail.
Our decisions to partner with Live Nation to bring Rogers Stadium to the North Runway this summer is an example of how we’re looking to bring people to the area. We’re really thinking holistically about optimizing the overall experience for residents. That stuff is being planned at a neighbourhood scale, which is something you normally can’t do.
What makes it unique from other Toronto neighbourhoods?
A centrepiece of the plan is The Runway; a two-kilometre pedestrian green space on the site of the existing runway that connects all the neighbourhoods together with amenities, services and parks. The project will be built in many phases over many years, and we don’t exactly know what it will look like, but that will be the connective tissue and the common feature that no other project can have.
We’re trying to use 21st century technology to deliver heating, cooling and data, which is really about electrification, and geothermal is the primary technology at this point, but electrification and district energy systems will let us plug in new technologies as they emerge.
Storm water management is another area of focus; all our roads, buildings and public spaces are going to be designed to absorb as much storm water as possible to reduce flooding city-wide without requiring new storm ponds.
We’re also exploring the idea of using the production facilities we have on site that used to make airplanes to make building construction more cost and time efficient.
How do you ensure mobility across such a large space?
It needs to feel like it naturally first in place, which is a bit tricky, since the site literally had a barbed wire fence around it for most of modern history. If you look at a map Shepherd Avenue runs straight the whole way, then curves around it; Dufferin runs from the waterfront to Wilson, then stops at the airport, then continues north of Shephard. So, we’re going to extend Dufferin back to Shephard and try to rebuild some of the connections that the airport prevented.
The Barrie GO line runs along the Western edge, which is great because you’ll be able to get downtown in less than 20 minutes, but it’s an above-grade rail corridor, which is a big barrier. So, we’re building an underpass and a pedestrian and cycling overpass to improve east-west connectivity.
What is the timeline for the project?
We hope to start demolition of a handful of structures by the end of this year and infrastructure construction next year. We need all new water, sewer, hydro, roads — it all has to be built from scratch, and building construction will start soon after that. Ultimately it will take about 30 years to build out the whole site.
Do you plan to see it through?
I don’t know if I’m going to be around in 30 years, when I’m 78; what I can say is I have no plan to go anywhere, anytime soon. I’m very invested in the success of this project, and I hope I’m around to experience it when it’s finished.
