Building Toronto’s Next Great Community with Derek Goring, CEO of Northcrest Developments

Downsview is no longer just a part of Toronto’s past, it’s about to define the city’s future. In this episode, Derek Goring, CEO of Northcrest Developments and Chair of the Business Council of Toronto’s Climate and Energy Transition Council, joins Giles Gherson to reveal how the YZD project will transform 370 acres of land into seven new, complete communities. Hear how Northcrest is creating a connected, climate-smart, and vibrant destination with space for thousands of residents and jobs, and a new vision for sustainable urban living.

Transcript

0:04

From the Toronto Region Board of Trade, this is Toronto Talks. Toronto, let's talk city building. YZD is the old code for the Downsview Airport. It's being developed into what's being called a complete community with commercial and residential spaces. This ambitious project will see us creating seven distinct neighborhoods. A diverse mix of homes for 55,000 people, a vibrant part of Toronto with 23,000 people working here. For decades, the Downsview area in the city's north end has been defined by its past. A military airfield, a hub for aerospace manufacturing, and more recently, a patchwork of underused industrial space. Today, a major piece of that land is being completely reimagined by Northcrest developments. In this episode, Derek Goring, Northcrest CEO and Chair of the Business Council of Toronto's Climate and Energy Transition Council, joins the board's President and CEO, Giles Gerson, to talk about what's in store for the future of this site. Here's that conversation. Derek Goring, CEO of Northcrest Developments, great to have you on Toronto Talks. Let's talk a bit about you, and I see you as kind of a visionary in this sector. where you were at First Gulf, Waterfront Toronto, East Harbor Development, you were heavily involved in, obviously. So tell me a bit about your whole career in this space. So yeah, I mean, one of the interesting things I've found is a lot of people I talked to in real estate development didn't set out to go into real estate development. There's a lot of people that end up there somewhat accidentally or by roundabout routes, and that's my story as well. So Route 6, you didn't say to your mother, I want to be a real estate developer. No, and in fact, when I was going to school, there weren't actual formal educational programs about real estate development, which there are now. So it wasn't a career that most people even knew existed. I accidentally ended up in the industry because I was supposed to take a consulting job coming out of undergrad. The economy had turned. This was in 2001 when the tech bubble burst. And so I scrambled after graduation to try to find a job. any job. And the first opportunity I found was a summer contract working for Minto as a financial analyst. Now, there's an Ottawa-based company. Were you in Ottawa? No, they have a Toronto office. It is Ottawa-based, but they had a pretty substantial Toronto presence. And so I started running financial models for real estate development projects because it was the first opportunity that came to me, but I immediately really loved it. The idea of being able to translate a excel file into something real in the city that you can actually touch and feel was pretty cool and uh i got to work on some pretty cool projects and the sort of famous one at the time and it's funny given the surroundings down here yeah down here on the water there's so many big buildings but at the time these two towers at young and eglinton were these this very high profile it was like the first time a 50-story condo building was built in the city of Toronto and it caused a huge surge. And so that was one of the projects I was running the financial models on. And the offices that we were in were just a couple of doors down. So to go to work every day and then walk down the street and see the hole in the ground and then see the building come up, it was really that translation from theoretical and intellectual to the reality. And so, but I worked on everything that's down here now. So East Bayfront, West Dolan, the Pan Am Village. He's in my infrastructure development, right? I mean, the floodplain, all of that. Yeah. And so everything that's under construction now, I was involved in the early days of conceptualizing and then bringing those opportunities to the market to find private sector partners and sort of learned a lot and built some relationships with people. I always knew I wanted to go back to the private sector. I never thought I would be in public sector. And that's kind of quasi in a way though, because you're, it was three different governments at Waterfront Toronto, right? The federal government, the province, and handling those three levels of government and getting a plan out of them. Yeah. Not so easy. I was on the board of it for a while. Yeah. And so I remember that well, but, uh, but great, great, as you say, learning experience. Yeah. And one of the things that when, when people ask about going into public sector, cause there's some stigma associated with that in the industry, or at least there used to be, What I found is working in public sector, you get exposure to more sooner in your career and more opportunities to take more responsibility if you show some ambition and willingness to work hard. And so I think I was actually able to feed up my career by spending some years working on really amazing projects and getting exposure to things like what was happening on the waterfront was really exciting. And, you know, we could tell what was happening because we knew what was happening. But for the average Torontonian, they just saw parking lots. Yeah, industrial building. So I actually left in 2011 when things had just started construction. So, you know, lots of people and John Campbell, our old CEO, used to joke about this is most people think real estate projects start when the crane goes up. But for the people in the development world, that's when actually most of the work is done. Beginning of the end. Yeah. Not the beginning of the beginning. So anyway, it was a great experience. And then I went to work at Infrastructure Ontario and opportunity came up. I had intended on going back to private sector, but I ended up staying in public sector for this opportunity. Got to work on sites like the one we're standing on right now. And then the opportunity came up to work on East Harbour. And so, you know, again, going back to that idea of leapfrogging, the experience I had working government with government, understanding how government works and the infrastructure side of real estate development set me up really well to work on the East Harbor project. And I had built up a relationship with the CEO of First Golf from a project when I was at Waterfront. And so that was a natural transition and an amazing opportunity. I mean, I loved that project. I wanted to see it built. We went through the entitlements process and then ended up selling the project to Cadillac Fairview. And that's when the opportunity came up to work on Downsview. And so I was hired as employee number five of Northcrest, what is now Northcrest. And I saw this opportunity and there's a lot of similarities actually between East Harbor and Downsview. The scale is, they're both massive in different ways. But they're also like frontiers as well, right? I mean, I always think of down here at the waterfront as Toronto's last frontier, but actually Downsview is, if not the second last frontier, maybe the last is a great developable site. You don't have many of those in a city of this size. Yeah. And I think the thing that's been most interesting and exciting to me, and I feel very privileged to have had these opportunities, is to get involved in projects when they're literally just empty and there's not even a vision for what it could be, to get involved at that early stage and help working through the process of figuring out from all of those potential opportunities, what's the right thing to do. Clean place, right? Which you rarely get that chance. Yeah. And then East Harbor and Downsview in particular, they were places that the city had grown up around and they were kind of forgotten in a lot of ways. And the idea in both cases, we used the term, they were the holes in the donut. And we were trying to flip that idea on its head and turn them from a place that was a void in the center of lots of activity and actually turn them into the center. And so we're trying to do that at Downsview. almost. Yeah. Yeah. It's the center as opposed to the hole. And that's, that's the approach we're taking at YZD as well. Well, so talk a bit about that. I guess if you had an elevator pitch for what you're, what you want to see happen or what, and what you're planning to have happen at, at YZD, what is, what would that elevator pitch be? You know, in a couple of lines, what is it, What makes this an exciting venture, a different venture? So YZD is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to build a piece of city in an established city like Toronto. 370 acres is a huge site, and you have the opportunity to work at the neighbourhood scale to create complete communities. It's not just about building homes or about places to work. It's about entire communities, park space, parks. Because that little park will be there. The algae park's already there. We're adding new parks and we're creating communities at scale. There are things you can do at that scale that you can't do in normal real estate development. So we're really trying to take advantage of that opportunity to deliver communities that have all the amenities and services that people would want. and do it in an intentional way rather than, you know, organic or incremental or accidental the way most parts of the city are. So will they be like a main street, like a shopping street? Or will it be more like a mall type of shopping and retail and, you know, restaurants and so on? What will we see? So the site is actually too big to be one thing. Yeah. And so we've broken the 370 acres into seven neighborhoods. And really what we're trying to do is create each neighborhood have its own character. So each neighborhood would have its own center. In some cases, it would look a lot like a main street. In other cases, it'd be more like a square kind of situation. But we're not building a mall. We are building walkable, urban, vibrant neighborhoods. And so lots of ground floor oriented retail. But again, because of the scale of it, we have the opportunity to curate the uses in a way that's similar to a mall. Whereas, you know, in a downtown environment like this, every project, every building is competing for the same handful of tenants who paid the most rent. And they look a lot the same. And they look a lot the same. And we have the opportunity to think about it as a whole. And we actually think about retail as amenities and services that deliver an overall great experience for the people living and working there. Because the reality is, for us, those things are what drive the value of whatever's built above. And so for us, it's not about optimizing the rent of the retail. It's about optimizing the mix that creates the overall best experience. Because if you can add a little bit of value to every square foot of residential and commercial space, that's worth way more than a couple of dollars in rent on the retail. So it's not that we don't want rent in the retail. We want the best combination of uses as opposed to every square foot trying to maximize the rent. And so when you talk about other places around the world, we think about best practices for, and this is a rare thing, as you've said, to be able to have every 70 acres to really start with a clean slate and build seven different communities. Was there a place in particular around the world that helped inspire the vision or guide the vision? So looking at precedence is an important part of the process when you're taking on a project like this, but it's also important to remember that what worked in one place isn't necessarily going to work in another place. So context is super important when you're just trying to figure out what the right solution is for a real estate development project like this, but it doesn't mean you can't learn from other places. So rather than saying, Hey, we really liked that project. We're going to try to do that here. It's like, you know, there's a thousand decisions that get made in projects like this. What are the five or six things we can learn from there? What are the five or six things we can learn from there. And in some cases, what are the five or six things they did that we really don't want to do because that did not work? So it's trying to pull the threads from a whole different number of precedent projects. So there's a couple, though, that we really like. So one is King's Cross in London, England. A lot of adaptive reuse and creating a combination of buildings, old and new with public space and institutional uses that really created this vibrant, uh, new place. And part of the other thing that was, uh, interesting about King's Cross is that the developers were able to turn it from a place that I didn't go there at the time, but apparently before they started, it was, it had a reputation as a place, like it's not safe to go. Don't go. Yeah. And now it's one of the most best highlighted and attractive places in all of London. And so flipping a neighborhood on its head in terms of the reputation and attractiveness, perceived attractiveness of it is something that we really liked. Boston Seaport Redevelopment, former industrial port area that they've turned into a series of mixed use communities. Big focus on public ground, a lot of focus on interim activation prior to development, which is something we learned from. The Wharf is a project in Washington, D.C. that, again, it was waterfront, so you'd think prime, but it was an undesirable area. Southeast, I guess, in Washington. I don't know Washington enough. I think so. That sounds right. Sounds right, yeah. And one of the things that we learned from there is the importance of critical mass. So again, in a place that doesn't exist in the consciousness of the city, they built 2 million square feet of development, which included apartments, condos, retail, office, entertainment, and opened it and delivered it all in one phase so that the moment you arrived, it felt like a real place. And some projects have fallen where it's too incremental. There's no retail, but lots of residents. Yeah, and it just feels incomplete for a really long time. So again, these are all lessons that we have tried to learn from other places. Well, when you're talking about the seven neighborhoods, are you going sequentially? So you'll have first neighborhood fully built, second neighborhood then fully built. So the sequence won't be, here's all the housing and all the seven, then here's all the retail and all the seven, then here's something else and all the seven, or maybe offices or what have you. Is that how you're going? We are trying to go neighborhood by neighborhood. but there'll be overlap. And so again, in our first phase, which is the hangar district, we want to deliver a critical mass in the first phase, and then we'll finish that neighborhood in phases after that. We intend to start the second neighborhood, which is the Wilson district down by the Wilson subway station. And we're about three years behind. So essentially, we're going to stagger them. And then when we finish the first one, we'll move to the third one. The intention is to always have two going at the same time. Some overlap, but enough critical mass in a neighborhood before we start the next one. And each neighborhood will have residential, retail, and commercial, and office as well, or manufacturing, or other things like that? Or will those be consigned to specific neighborhoods? How do you do that? Because I know you're trying to do all of this. Yeah. Complete communities is an important element of it, which means there has to be places to work and things to do in each neighborhood. But the mix will be different from one neighborhood to another. The hangar district is where all the existing hangar buildings are. So there's existing... Over from the airfield. Exactly. The manufacturing... Bombardier site. Bombardier. So the hangars are amazing buildings, which we're going to repurpose. So the first district has way more employment than any of the other. And that sounds more like King's Cross or something. You've got older buildings. So you're mixing with newer buildings. Exactly. Well, maybe even the seaport. Yeah. Whereas the Wilson district down by Wilson subway station, there's literally not a single structure on that part of the site. And so it's going to be more residential focused, more high rise focused because it's right beside the subway. Hangar district is much more employment oriented, mid rise, more of that full mixed use live work play kind of environment. But Wilson will certainly have retail and other commercial uses. Office in particular, I mean, we have existing office in Hangar District, which we'll repurpose. But building new office buildings in this market, not really realistic. But who knows? I mean, over the course of the full build out of YZT, which we expect to take 30 years, the market could change again. If you think back five years ago when we were initially conceiving of East Harbour, office was the hot all staying out there. Think of Toronto, 2% vacancy rate. Downtown Toronto, commercial real estate before COVID, now 20% vacancy. So a huge flip. Yeah. So I think one of the really important things to remember when thinking about a project like YZD is nobody really knows what the future is going to hold. So we've developed a plan that is flexible and adaptable. And we'll have some room for future changes. Yeah. And so you want to get the main infrastructure right. You want to get the overall plan right, but leave yourself enough room to maneuver that as the market changes, you can adapt to whatever the conditions are at the time. So right now, residential is where the focus is going to be. But even within residential, you know, two, three years ago, everyone was building condos. Now everyone's building Murphy family. And how will you gear with that? Because I was going to ask you that question. You know, the market has changed. Clearly, there's a big demand for families. I mean, we're worried ourselves about the Manhattanization of Toronto where families are moving out because, you know, they need to find some space. They need two bedrooms or three bedrooms, not small, you know, condo spaces. Yeah, for sure. And the market is changing. So we were always going to have a balance of rental and ownership housing. I'd say if you ask me today, we're going to be shifting more towards rental than we were before. But the exact mix is still to be determined and it'll flux over time. we have committed that in the first phase of development at least 40 percent of the units will be two bedroom or more because we recognize that family units is an important part of that I actually do think that to a certain extent rental is easier to deliver bigger units multifamily kind of or family type units because the for whatever reason the condo investor was just wanting to buy one-bedroom units. So developers were selling what people were buying. Whereas with rental, you have a long-term interest in that building. You want to see it be full. You want to deliver what the users of the space are delivering as opposed to what investors think they want. So we are shifting a little bit in that direction. But affordability is a big problem. And the bigger the unit, the more expensive it is to build, which means you need more rent to pay for it. And so affordability is going to remain a challenge. What sort of, remind us again of the population you're seeing. What kind of population are we expecting to see of residents in this space, in this river of 70 acres? Yeah, just our project alone will be over 50,000 people living there that don't live there today. The broader area, because the closing of the airfield is going to completely transform that part of the city beyond just what we're doing on the airfield. itself, the height restrictions because of the flight path. And so in the secondary plan that the city just approved last year, the future population is over 115,000 people. Wow. That's a major change. It's a big... And then as an employment zone, presumably, again, I don't know where it's going to figure. I mean, we think of, you know, the downtown, it's Canada's largest employment zone. The area around Pearson Airport, I think, is Canada's second largest employment zone is around 500,000 people or workers, uh, employees, is this going to be like, is this going to be a significant employment zone itself, do you think? Or more? Not relative to those scales. We're, we're projecting 40 to 50,000 jobs in, uh, Downsview. So it's not, not nothing, but, um, not compared to Pearson or Downtown. No. Um, and you know, we see a bit of a niche in Downsview. So if you think about Downtown being where your traditional office worker is going to be, and, You know, it doesn't seem like Downsview is going to compete for traditional office space because why would you go to Downsview when you could be downtown? And also, we're not the place where you're going to build a gigafactory or a battery plant or, you know. Yeah, you need a lot of space for that. You need really big space for that. So we see our niche as scale-up, medium-size businesses that need space that is not traditional office space but not massive scale. But you could do manufacturing with 3D printing and that kind of thing. Absolutely. Robotics, automation, life sciences is a sector we're really interested in. Film and media is another sector we're really interested in. And then one I'm particularly focused on and passionate about is actually making Downsview a center of excellence for modern methods of construction. So automation, modular, panelization. Well, we're getting into that in the board, actually. I guess the question always arises with manufactured housing is, does it all look kind of, does it not look, people don't like the look of it sometimes. I think they may be thinking of older type of manufactured housing. I think today it's very different. But to give a riff a little bit on that, because I think you could be a, you know, it could be a bit of a game changer if you move in that direction. But it's going to be a bit of a, I mean, maybe risky. I don't know. It's not a trivial thing to do, for sure. No. It actually requires a pretty completely different business model than the way developers traditionally have operated. Because you have to make a decision about something like that pretty early on in the design process. So the typical process is you fully design a building and then you go to tenor and find someone to build it for you. If you take that approach, modular is never going to work. You know what it's going to be. But if you're making a decision about which modular provider or which company you want to work with before you've even started to design a building, How do you get any kind of leverage with them on the pricing? It's a challenge. But we do have scale and we have these existing hangar buildings where they used to make airplanes. So like we have things that other developers don't have and we want to leverage that opportunity. We for sure don't want every building to look the same. And so that is a challenge we have to overcome. But I've done a fair amount of research. First of all, there's a number of different companies that are doing this. And there's lots of opportunities to change the articulation of the building, the facade, the look and feel. Especially with AI, I mean, the sophistication of technology now means you can make changes, right? And all the analytics that would go along with the change can be done almost like that. So it's not like it would suddenly throw you off kilter if you did a different approach to the facade or what have you to make it look different. Yeah, so I'm really excited about that opportunity. And like I said, leveraging the scale of the site is one of the themes that we keep coming back to is, you know, there's a big responsibility with taking on a project like WISEADD, but there's also unique opportunities that come with that. And we don't want to miss those opportunities. No, and they're exciting. Just quickly, I mean, one of the reasons, obviously, at the Business Council of Toronto, you chair the Climate and Energy Transition Council, which is a pretty exciting group of CEOs focused on how do we advance climate and energy transition for competitive advantage in the Toronto region. Yeah. And I know this is something that at Northcrest, you spent some time on, and you're chairing this committee. So maybe tell us a little bit about your vision for how this exciting development can include a real contribution to energy conservation and climate. Yeah, so maybe I'd start with the fact that Northcrest is owned by a pension fund, and so inherently there's a long-term perspective. And so from the earliest days of conceiving YZD, we wanted to make sure that we were focused on climate adaptation and making sure that we were creating and building a place that was going to be resilient and respond to future climate, not just today's climate. And so it was built into the DNA of our organization and of the plan. And so, you know, thinking about being carbon neutral, ready, thinking about embodied carbon back when people weren't really talking about that yet. It's always been at the forefront of our mind to ensure that we were thinking about climate and energy transition from the early days. One of the other advantages we have at WiseID is there's no existing infrastructure. Right. And so we can decide how we want to build this in a 21st century kind of way from scratch. And so, again, from the earliest days, the general idea was to use electrification for all the heating and cooling of Downsview. Which is how you do it today, as opposed to 20 years ago. And so it was something we were already working on. And so when you and I started the conversation about business council and the idea that climate and energy transition would be one of the sub-councils, it was an obvious thing for me to be interested in because it was a way to take what we are already doing and try to bring more voices around the table to collaborate and find ways of pushing even further down that road. And in the context of both Downs U and what the board is trying to achieve in terms of economic development, competitiveness, and productivity, there are a lot of companies that are in this space in Toronto already, but it's very dispersed. And there's, the companies are having a hard time getting traction, finding customers, finding capital. And so one of the ideas that we've been pursuing is to try to make Downsview the cluster for cleantech in the GTA, and then actually deploy the technology in that cluster in the development of Downsview. And so it's been really great to collaborate with the people that you guys have brought around the table. There's some real excitement and that we're building. So things like smart grid is one of the things that we're really trying to lean into and to do it differently from the design stage as opposed to trying to retrofit or... Which is generally the way it gets done. Yeah. Yeah. And so that's super exciting. So we're looking at district energy. We're looking at geo exchange for heating and cooling as the primary source, onsite renewable, onsite storage. And so the smart grid is a way to tie those various things together. No, that's great. So we're talking a little bit kind of futuristically almost, but the other thing I think is important about the way you're approaching this is responsible development. I know you're heavily engaged with Indigenous communities in terms of how this development should proceed. So maybe talk a little bit about that because that's an important feature. Yeah, so our parent company, PSP, has a term they refer to as responsible investing. And so we kind of riffed on that and created a concept called Responsible Development. And that was really recognizing a few things. One, again, going back to the long-term nature, we want to be there for the long term. We want to be good neighbors. You know, we want to be part of the Downsview community, not viewed as someone coming in from the outside. So we worked really closely in developing relationships with the local community and nonprofit groups, understanding what's there now, what people like, what they don't like, what they're scared about, what they see as opportunities. And that was from the very earliest days of the organization. And so we heard back from our stakeholder engagement, a lot of things about, you know, worries about gentrification, wanting to see this project be something that helps the people that are already there, not just the people that are going to be there in the future. And so we built a lot of that into our plan in terms of social procurement, looking for opportunities for small businesses to participate in what was going to be happening there. And then separately, but related, right from the very beginning, we started engaging First Nations to be around the table and talk to them about what the opportunities they saw, how they wanted to participate in these groups. So we've now got a longstanding relationship with the Mississaugas of the Credit, and we're working with them to identify opportunities for them to be part of certain design processes, get their feedback and input into how some of the projects that we're doing are going to advance, looking for economic opportunities for them to participate in all the economic activity that's going to be happening at Downsview and it's been a great collaboration so far. We're on the ground floor for that too. Yeah and it's you know like with most things it's about developing really good relationships, building trust over time, being really respectful about what each party is looking for and how you can work together where you know one plus one equals three kind of situation. So it's been really rewarding and we've enjoyed getting to know our First Nations partners and we see lots of opportunity for them to be part of this. That's great. Last thing, Roger Stadium. So there's something that, I mean, I think if you talk to people about, you know, the whole what's going on up at, you know, the Downsview airport site, people have heard obviously about the Roger Stadium. I know it's not a long-term thing, but it sounds pretty exciting as a, It was a short-term venture, at least, to bring concerts here. Tell me a bit about that. Well, it's really part of a broader strategy. Again, given that 370 acres is a lot of land, and it's going to take decades to build the site out. So from the early days, we identified the opportunity to make use of future development land that's currently vacant to have something interesting happening. And it's been really rewarding. Not only is it an opportunity to try things out and then see what works and then what works we can incorporate into the permanent development. It's an amazing thing that we've seen as the local community and people from all over the GTA actually are looking for fun things to do. And there's not enough of them, especially in the north end of the city. So as soon as we started doing things like the skating rink or play on the runway, we got all kinds of people coming out. We had an outdoor movie theater. And so it's just immediate traction. But a lot of that programming was free programming for the local community and people in the area. So then we also said, well, there should be certain things we can do that generate revenue that we can use to cross subsidize the free community programming. And so we started with movie productions, actually. Oh, really? And so a lot of movie shoots that happened on the site, which has been really great. What kinds of, like, is there a particular motif because of the landscape? There are certain things. Well, one of the more famous ones that happened was Mr. Beast shot Beast Games on the runway. So the sort of village that they set up was actually up on the runway. But most of it is actually happening inside the hangar. So effectively the airplane hangars are like movie studios. They're big span, spanless spaces that they can do what they want in. So you create their own little worlds in there. So we've had Amazon, Sony, a bunch of HBO, lots of big name studios producing shows and movies in the space. So that's been great too. And we also identified recreation, arts and entertainment as other sectors that needed space. It's hard to find locations in Toronto. And so we're working on a sports field situation up there now. And then we had been in discussion. You're going to need probably anyway for the- Permanent, for sure. But we want to at least bring stuff in as soon as possible so that people see the benefit in the early days. So we'd actually been talking to Live Nation about some various opportunities, more actually in the permanent situation. But then they came to us last year, and it's crazy how fast it all happened. They came to us last year with an opportunity to do what is now Roger Stadium, because Toronto doesn't have an outdoor venue to track the largest bands in the world. Roger Center is occupied mostly by the Blue Jays. And, you know, I'm not in this business, but what we learned is if you think about a show, you think, well, it's just a one day show. But those huge shows, they need a few days to set up. Then they do usually a couple of nights and then they need some take down time. So trying to find a week or 10 days in the summer when the Blue Jays aren't going to be at Roger Center, there's very few windows of opportunity. So there's a huge demand for that. We originally said, well, maybe we can get seven or eight shows. This is with Live Nation. And they've already done 14 booked for 2025, which is really great. I was just up at the site this morning. The stadium is there. They're stalling the flames. That's fast. They're ahead of schedule, apparently. And the first shows are at the end of June. So we're really excited. That was amazing. That. And, you know, obviously it's an opportunity to generate revenue. But probably more importantly, it's an opportunity to raise the profile of YZD. 700,000 people. Well, it's a magnet, right? I mean, it's interesting because, again, we haven't talked about this, but probably the last that we should talk about is the accessibility of the space, of the area, of the zone to the rest of the city because you are actually pretty well served by rapid transit, which I think would surprise people maybe. They haven't thought about it, but you've actually maybe talked a little bit about that because my sense is that this is one of the big features of the development is you've got this access. We've just done this big thing on congestion in the city of Toronto. Yeah. As you might imagine, people saying, my God, why would I ever go up there given congestion? But the answer is you're much better served than maybe other parts of the city. Yeah. It's interesting. When I first heard about the Downsview Opportunity, I was a little bit skeptical. You know, it seemed really far away. And you've driven up to, yeah, I was going up there. But the more I learned and the more I did my research, I had this aha moment when I realized that Yorkdale shopping center is the most successful mall in Canada. And it's just to the south of our site. Right. And when you look at the GTA, Downsview is right at the geographic center of the entire region. Most people wouldn't guess that. Most people wouldn't guess that. I wouldn't have guessed that either. But that's one of the reasons why Yorkdale is so successful. So in addition to the fact that we do have the 401 just to the east of us, the Allen Expressway just, sorry, 401 is to the south, Allen Expressway is to the east. We have the Line 1 subway. We have three subway stations that are already on the site on our doorstep. We have Downsview Park Go Train Station, which can take you to Union Station in 20 minutes. That's the key. Which is now getting two-way all-day service of electrified Go expansion. And so we are as well-connected as anywhere else in the region. But because we're at the geographic center, it's actually way more accessible for most people than... I don't think. Yeah, that's right. If you're in the 905, you don't want to come all the way to downtown Toronto for an event. You'd rather go to Downsview. So I think we're used to thinking about people downtown and will they go up, but the reality is of the six plus million people that live here, most of them would rather go to Downsview than to come downtown. There's a secret. There's a secret. And so we're really excited about what's already there. And that's a big deal for going back to the precedent question. Most of these really large scale projects, including East Harbor, which I had to work on, had almost no existing infrastructure. Right. And a lot of work has to go in, a lot of work and money has to go into creating the infrastructure to enable the project. The infrastructure investments have already been made. And now it's about leveraging. So harvesting what you've done. Exactly. Yeah. The three subway stations that are along our site are three of the most underutilized stations on the network. So we're now bringing the population that will actually validate the decision. Well, you get a flavor of that presumably with Rogers Stadium, right? You're going to see people come from all over the city, all over the region to these concerts. And the proof of that, that'll prove out the point. It's a good point where we are really trying to push people to use public transit to get to those concerts because the traffic will otherwise be bad. And the entrance to Rogers Stadium is going to be 200 meters from Downsview Park Subway Station. So that will by far be easy to go there. Excellent. Well, I think we probably used it part-time, but great conversation. I'm so delighted we could have this opportunity to chat about this whole exciting development at Downsview. Well, we don't call it Downsview now. Why is that due? No, listen, I could talk about this all day long, as you might be able to tell. I'm pretty passionate and excited about what we do and look forward to starting to bring it to reality in the next couple of years. Congratulations. It's very exciting. Thanks, Giles. That's all for this episode. Thanks for listening to Toronto Talks. Make sure you subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. And don't forget to keep talking Toronto. Our voice drives meaningful change.