“Toronto can be one of the world’s great cities”: New chief planner Jason Thorne on his grand designs

Jason Thorne loves cities. A self-described urbanist, he’s fond of exploring the less glamorous parts of global hotspots like Paris and Tokyo, taking in everything from gleaming downtowns to gritty industrial areas. A former Torontonian, long-time commuter and veteran of Hamilton’s planning department, he landed the role of chief planner with the city of Toronto last December and is now learning the ropes. But he already has his hands full: with a booming population, a dire housing shortage, and constant debates about how and where to grow, the choices Thorne makes will shape Toronto for decades to come. We caught up with him to talk house-hunting in the city, what makes a great neighbourhood and how Toronto can secure its place on the world stage.

Congratulations on the new gig. It will require you to relocate from Hamilton to Toronto. How’s the house hunt going? We have one! My partner and I found a place in Leslieville, and we’re moving in next month. We were looking for somewhere close to our friends, with good cycling connectivity and a diversity of different kinds of housing, since it means a variety of people in the neighbourhood. Both my partner and I work downtown, and we wanted somewhere that would let us commute easily. We don’t have a car, so that means using transit or walking.

A city planner without a car? That might shock some suburbanites. I haven’t had one in years. But I have in the past, and I’ve been a carshare member for a while. I’m fairly typical of many people in the city. Whether they live downtown or not, most people are multi-modal: walking, driving, cycling and taking transit.

Even with all those options, how will you manage the commute if traffic snarls and the 501 Queen refuses to arrive? Thankfully, there’s a lot of transit investment going on right now, including in Leslieville—I’ll be living not far from the Ontario Line. It’s bringing some growing pains, and we’ll have to manage the impact of all that construction, but it will open up a lot of new ways to get around the city, and not just for me personally.

Related: The bone-rattling reality of Ontario Line construction

You mentioned that you’re a cyclist. Our premier is campaigning on ripping out the Bloor Street bike lanes. Mayor Olivia Chow is opposed. What’s your take? In a city as urbanized as ours, people need lots of different ways to get around. Cycling needs to be one of those. There’s only so much space on our roads, and both transit and cycling lanes are very efficient ways to move people around.

So we’re pro Bloor bike lanes? We need a very robust cycling network in the city, and I’ll leave it at that. Related: How the Bloor Street bike lane has become Toronto’s most contested strip of concrete

When you’re meandering around the city on your bike, where are you most likely to end up? I’m still getting to know all the neighbourhoods after being away for 20 years. One of my favourite things to do on the weekend is to go out and explore. I look for places that make for a nice walk: good places to grab a bite to eat, interesting architecture to see, and cool public spaces or shops to visit.

Where have those sojourns taken you lately? I had a great walk with members of the Kensington Community Land Trust around Kensington Market. I had another in Etobicoke Centre with an old colleague of mine, an architect who lives near the area. And I was up at North York Centre for the Lunar New Year. I lived around there the last time I was a resident of Toronto, 20 years ago, and it was fun to explore the old neighbourhood.

Both of my daughters are in their early twenties now and live abroad. But, when they were young, we loved North York Centre. We could walk to the grocery store, the library, the recreation centre and the swimming pools. I’ve learned that people look for different things in a city during different parts of their lives. I was in Toronto for a number of years back when I was young, single, and wanting to go out to bars and restaurants. Now, with the kids grown and out of the house, I want easy access to work, restaurants and coffee shops.

You’ve said that one of your goals is to make places where people will actually want to spend time. What areas of the city are in need of that kind of makeover? That’s something we have to think about for every neighbourhood. The city talks a lot about making housing supply, which is an important goal, but we need to be even more ambitious. We need to think about creating great parks and public spaces. I like to ask: Do people have access to the things they need in their neighbourhood? That means elderly people having access to seniors’ centres as well as parents having access to schools. It’s about looking beyond just what kind of housing we can build to what kind of neighbourhoods we can create.

Way back in the 1990s, I worked at a community group in the waterfront, and we pushed the city to create new public spaces and parks and to revitalize the Portlands—all of which is now happening. Downsview is another one: we’re planning and developing a new community the size of Peterborough. That’s going to have a huge impact on the city. And then there’s all the transit investment happening. I worked at Metrolinx when it was first created, and we talked about building a 25-year transit network. Now, a number of those projects are getting built. We’ve only just started to see how transformational those will be once they open and get running.

You mentioned the Ontario Line, which keeps having its completion date pushed back. Then there’s the Eglinton Crosstown LRT, which has been a disaster: constantly delayed, wildly over-budget and still no firm opening date. How can we hope to build a better city with this kind of dysfunction? We definitely have some catching up to do around transit investment. For a long time, there wasn’t much of it. But the good news is that we are in fact catching up. The city isn’t just talking about investing in new transit lines—they’re actually under construction, and there are more still to come. We’re finally a city that is taking transit seriously. In terms of the Eglinton Crosstown LRT, it’s my understanding that the project is opening this year, and I think it’s going to be a very well-used line. There’s a lot of development happening along it already, and I think it will turn into a key corridor for the city. Related: Who broke the TTC? Inside Toronto’s transit disaster

Toronto is facing big questions about how to add more housing and where. What’s your philosophy there? For too long, a lot of North American cities only planned for two housing types: people were supposed to live in either a single-family home or a tower, and there wasn’t much in-between. But I think the in-between is the really exciting place. It’s what planners called “the missing middle,” and it’s the kind of housing that’s going to be doing a lot of the heavy lifting in Toronto.

Multiplexes are nice and all, but some housing advocates argue that they won’t solve the housing crisis. What’s your response? No one type of housing will fully solve the crisis. We need fourplexes as well as six-to-eight-storey mid-rises and towers too. That’s why the past two years of planning have been about creating multiple different kinds of housing. A lot of the work I’m keen to deliver on, like creating missing-middle housing, began under my predecessor, Gregg Lintern. His department really pushed to change zoning laws to allow this kind of housing to get built. My goal is to keep that momentum going and make those forms of housing some of the easiest things to build.

Related: “Our previous zoning laws excluded people based on race and income. Multiplexes will help fix that”—A Q&A with chief planner Gregg Lintern

Speaking of the past two years, you’re a tad younger than Lintern. Does your relative youth bring a new perspective to planning? I’m 51, so not that much younger! I will say, I have to think about how people in different stages of their lives and with different means experience the city. In planning, that’s about giving people options. A senior wanting to stay in their home should still be able to walk to a store or a doctor’s office. But they should also have access to a smaller home in the same neighbourhood, if they want one. The same goes for young people: some may want to live in multi-generational households, but others might want to move out and start their own. All of those options need to be available for people, and we need to plan for them.

Council approved a new budget last week. Did anything in there particularly excite you? There was $2 billion in direct investment in new housing, which is great. But just as key were other investments to expand transit and library service hours. I see those as being equally important for housing affordability, because they’re about creating great neighbourhoods that people will want to live in.

That budget also included a 6.9 per cent property tax increase, which has made some homeowners predictably furious. The decision was up to council, not you, of course. But how does the city justify adding to the cost of housing when it’s already so high? That’s a cost, but you have to look at the service it provides. When people get worried about new housing developments, they ask how the new residents will impact parking, school capacity and the waiting lists for recreational programs. This funding will go toward those things.

You lived and worked in Hamilton for 10 years as a city planner. What did the Hammer teach you? It was amazing to do that work in my hometown. There were large parts of Hamilton that hadn’t seen investment in a long time. But, after ten years, I could walk down streets I’d known my whole life and see buildings with new uses and vacant lots turned into housing. It makes me proud to know I had a hand in that transformation. At the same time, I learned that stuff doesn’t happen overnight, and that lots of important work is led by the community, not by planners and bureaucrats. A lot of the transformations I saw in Hamilton were led by the community, and we found ways to help. That’s something I want to continue doing in Toronto. Homeowners tend to be vocally opposed to changes in their neighbourhoods. How will you make those conversations productive? It’s true, and I heard a lot of those conversations in Hamilton. But there are other voices too: people who want to find places to live and parents with older kids living in the basement, hoping they will find a place of their own close by. It’s important to listen to all of those voices and to think of the ones that aren’t in the room: the people who would like to be here but aren’t because the options aren’t available to them.

A motion to allow small retail in residential neighbourhoods recently failed at city council, after some residents feared it would mean bars and pot shops near their homes. Do you want to see corner stores in those areas? Having access to small retail is definitely a key quality-of-life indicator for neighbourhoods. Council asked for more consultation on those provisions, which we’ll do this year, then we’ll come back with ways to address the concerns that were raised.

Isn’t it bizarre that we need to spend months consulting for something as small as more corner stores? I don’t think it says anything weird about Toronto. These are important changes, and they take time to work through. That’s not unique about this city—I certainly had that happen with a number of initiatives in Hamilton that I put forward, and planners across the country face the same thing. Introducing something new takes time.

You’ve described yourself as an urbanist. What does that mean to you? It means someone who loves cities and wants to understand how they work and change. In my case, I like cities of all sizes: when I’m out travelling, I like to go to the New Yorks and Tokyos, but I also check out the smaller places, the industrial areas and the suburbs. As an urbanist, I want to understand all aspects of a city.

Is there a model city for Toronto? Somewhere we should be inspired by? There isn’t just one. When you ride the transit system in Tokyo, it’s impossible to not come away impressed. Copenhagen has a beautiful modern cycling network. Cities like Montreal and Paris have done wonderful things with urban public space. Singapore has found ways to bring green space into dense urban areas. No city is perfect, but I’m inspired by a number of them.

What’s your big project right now? Learn the job, figure out who’s who—and where the bathrooms are at city hall! Besides that, I’m also responsible for urban design and heritage. I want to preserve the city’s existing heritage buildings into new developments, whether that means keeping the façades or giving them new uses. There’s plenty of ways to make the old part of the new, and it’s one way to make Toronto unique.

What’s your big dream for the city? I want Toronto to be seen as one of the great cities of the world. I think we can absolutely get there. It’s already a city that lots of people want to come to—just look at our immigration rates: 270,000 people moved here between July 2023 and July 2024. When people talk about the great urban centres, Toronto should be top of mind.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.