Toronto Is Building a City Inside an Airport. The Jobs Are the Hard Part.

"Aerospace dominated the site for 100 years." — Christopher Eby, Northcrest Developments

Ninety-five, strictly. But the point survives the arithmetic: for almost a century, one industry held the largest piece of undeveloped land inside Toronto, and nobody had to ask what it was for.

What broke

The military left first. CFB Toronto closed on 1 April 1996, and in 1998 Canada Lands Company incorporated a subsidiary to manage the base lands as a park. What followed was a long argument about what to keep. In March 2010 two maintenance hangars from 1942, buildings 55 and 58, were demolished over organised heritage objection — buildings that had carried heritage recognition and came down anyway. That outcome is worth holding onto, because the heritage conversation at Downsview is still running and the precedent on this ground is not reassuring.

The manufacturer left second, and for a reason it stated plainly. By 2018 Bombardier was using roughly ten per cent of a 370-acre site while carrying the full cost of a 7,000-foot runway. In May of that year it agreed to sell the property to PSP Investments for US$635 million — about C$816 million — with a leaseback that set a clock on departure. Production moved to a new facility at Pearson, and the last aircraft left in March 2024. Northcrest was created to turn what remained into a city.

What the dirt remembers is the part the public record is thinnest on. A century of airframe assembly, fuelling, paint shops and military servicing is not a light environmental history, and the Secondary Plan was adopted alongside a Master Environmental Servicing Plan. But no record of site condition or contaminated-site filing for these lands could be located in open sources for this piece; Ontario's environmental records are largely request-based rather than published. The gap is declared here rather than filled.

The turn

In February 2021 Council adopted a site-specific policy setting the terms for rewriting the 2011 Downsview plan, and that autumn the City launched the Update Downsview study while Canada Lands filed its own official plan amendment. The planning machinery, in other words, moved before the tenants did.

Then came the anchor. On 30 June 2021, PSP Investments and the Los Angeles studio owner Hackman Capital Partners announced a memorandum of understanding for a long-term ground lease and a film and television campus of more than a million square feet, with Hackman investing roughly C$200 million. It was reported as a studio campus designed by BDP Quadrangle, with soundstages from 20,000 to 80,000 square feet. The pitch was not only film: Northcrest framed it as the door to a media, technology and innovation hub.

In September 2024 Northcrest dropped it, and submitted a plan seeking permissions for a broader range of employment uses instead.

"The market changed, and it changed pretty dramatically and pretty fast." — Christopher Eby, to RENX

The precedent that followed is real, and it is not speculative. In July 2025, Toronto City Council unanimously approved the Hangar District — Northcrest with the global developer Hines as joint-venture partner — the first neighbourhood at YZD: just over 100 acres, roughly 5.3 million square feet of development, of which about 2.2 million is residential, for approximately 2,957 homes and a projected 7,400 jobs, with two blocks carrying 19- and 23-storey permissions, about nine acres of open space and a pedestrian bridge over the rail corridor into Downsview Park. On the Canada Lands side of the fence, the Downsview West and Arbo districts together account for roughly 12,500 homes with a minimum of 20 per cent affordable, plus the revitalisation of the historic Depot building. Enabling works at the Hangar District finished in September 2026. First residents are expected in 2031.

What the rules allow

Toronto does not run this site on a ratio. There is no floor space index or floor area ratio governing the plan area as a whole — the controlling metric is gross floor area, the total built floor area measured in square metres, allocated district by district alongside height and block permissions. That matters for reading the headline number correctly: the plan's 1,114,000 square metres of employment space is a floor on what must be provided as the districts build out, not a cap on what can be built. The housing figures work the other way; they are the expected yield of the permissions, not a quota.

At the block scale the arithmetic gets concrete. Within the Hangar District, the North Hangar lands at 123 Garratt Boulevard account for about 40 of the 101 acres and carry roughly 1.2 million square feet of permitted employment gross floor area on top of the 548,000 square feet of existing hangar bays. In September 2026 Northcrest put a 43-acre employment block there on the market through Cushman & Wakefield, targeting what Eby calls future-focused industries: defence, technology, advanced manufacturing, life sciences, post-secondary institutions, and film and digital media. Clean technology and robotics are frequently attached to Downsview in coverage of the project, but they do not appear in the developer's own stated list and are not confirmed here.

So the delta reads like this. What the ground holds is five hangar bays built for one tenant and a decommissioned runway. What the rules allow is a mid-rise city of tens of thousands of people wrapped around 12 million square feet of employment permissions — permissions that exist whether or not a single lease is signed.

Timeline

• 1929 — de Havilland buys 70 acres of farmland and builds an airfield. For the next decade the site is a factory with a field attached, not a public airport.
• 1947 — Ottawa assembles 270 surrounding properties around the plant. The land consolidates under federal ownership and stays that way, in one form or another, to this day.
• 1952 — National Defence acquires de Havilland's land and buildings. Through the Cold War the site runs as a base and a plant simultaneously, expanding for the Twin Otter and later the Dash 8.
• 1992 — Bombardier takes over de Havilland. The base closes four years later; a Crown subsidiary is set up in 1998 to turn the military lands into a park, and the airfield keeps operating beside it.
• 2010 — Two 1942 hangars are demolished over heritage objection. The 2011 Downsview Area Secondary Plan follows, written for a site that still had a working manufacturer on it.
• 2018 — Bombardier sells 370 acres to PSP Investments for US$635 million with a leaseback. Northcrest is created; the clock on the airfield starts running.
• 2021 — The studio MOU is signed in June; the City launches Update Downsview in the autumn. For three years the plan and the anchor tenant advance together.
• March 2024 — The last aircraft departs and the airfield closes. Two months later Council adopts the new Secondary Plan; it comes into force on 9 August 2024, except for lands south of Wilson Avenue.
• September 2024 — The studio is dropped. The site now has a plan, a brand and permissions, and no anchor employer.
• July 2025 — Council unanimously approves the Hangar District. Over the following year the hangar complex is listed on the City's Heritage Register and enabling works begin.
• September 2026 — Enabling works complete; a 43-acre employment block goes to market. Housing starts are years out, and the employment recruitment has just begun.

What it is now

The ground holds an empty airfield and five hangar bays; the rules allow a city of 115,000 people and 12 million square feet of jobs. The whole project lives in that gap, and the honest reading of it is not the usual one. This is not a case of a developer extracting value from a public asset — both owners are public. A federal pension manager owns one side of the fence and a federal Crown corporation owns the other, and the Canada Lands districts carry a minimum 20 per cent affordable requirement that most private masterplans in Toronto would not accept.

The real exposure is structural. The City's strongest instrument here is a floor on permitted employment floor area, and a floor binds the zoning, not the market. For a century the jobs on this land came from one company with a federal relationship and a war to supply. The next ones are being sought through a leasing brochure, from sectors — defence, life sciences, advanced manufacturing — that choose their locations on timelines no secondary plan controls. If they land, Toronto gets the innovation district the plan describes. If they do not, the housing gets built anyway, and the best-serviced vacant land in the city becomes a very large bedroom community with a subway station. That would not be a scandal. It would just not be what Council adopted.

What's still unknown

Four things would sharpen this story, and all four sit in records that are not published. The environmental history is the biggest: no record of site condition for the airport lands could be found in open sources, and Ontario's contaminated-site information is request-based — a direct request to the ministry, or the environmental reports filed with the district plans, would settle what a century of aircraft manufacturing left in the soil. Second, the Secondary Plan came into force in August 2024 for everything except the lands south of Wilson Avenue, and the reason for that carve-out is not confirmed here; an Ontario Land Tribunal file search would resolve it. Third, the title chain behind the 2018 transfer and any subsequent charges sit in Ontario's land registry, which charges per search. Fourth, the heritage question: the hangar complex at 123 Garratt Boulevard was brought onto the City's Heritage Register in 2025, but listing is a weaker instrument than designation under the Ontario Heritage Act, and on this exact site heritage recognition did not save the 1942 hangars in 2010. Which structures are protected, and to what standard, is the thing to watch as each district plan comes forward.