Major challenges await Toronto's next chief planner, experts say

The City of Toronto's hunt for a new chief planner is about to start, and experts say the next person to take the job inherits a long list of challenges and also an opportunity to define the city's development for decades to come.

Former Toronto chief planner Gregg Lintern retired at the end of 2023 and city staff said the search for someone to fill the crucial civil service role is expected to begin shortly. The city will hire a third-party firm to help recruit a candidate over the next three to four months.

The new planner will take charge in the midst of a housing crisis, which has seen the price of both new homes and rentals skyrocket. A wave of transit development is also underway, which will shift where new communities are built across Toronto.

They'll also assume the position at a time when the mayor has "strong mayor" powers, effectively changing their boss from city managers to Mayor Olivia Chow herself, said Aidan Grove-White, vice president of consultancy firm StrategyCorp's land and infrastructure development practice.

"What the planner is going to walk into is very high expectations," said Grove-White, who's also a planner and former manager with Ontario's Municipal Affairs and Housing.

At the top of the successful candidate's to-do list will be addressing the housing crisis. Toronto has endorsed a provincial goal of building 285,000 new homes in the city by 2030, and Chow's housing plan calls for 65,000 affordable housing units to be built in that same period. 

Grove-White said the housing crisis ratchets up the pressure on whoever takes the job. Planning time frames are usually set between five and 10 years, but the new chief planner will need to demonstrate results more quickly.

"We need housing now," he said. "But there are still things that this new planner could do to speed things up a little bit."

The city is dedicating more resources to address frequent criticism that bureaucracy needlessly slows approvals that would get large housing projects off the ground. It's even taken some of the traditional oversight of the planning approvals process off the plate of the new chief planner by hiring an executive director to take on those duties.

"Realistically, it had to be done because one person really couldn't do both jobs," Mark Richardson, the technical lead of advocacy group HousingNowTO, said. 

"The role of chief planner has only become more and more complex as the City of Toronto has become more and more complex."

The director of Toronto Metropolitan University's Urban Institute, Murtaza Haider, said even with changes to the role, he would go further, splitting the job into four different positions. Each should have a distinct focus: land use, the economy, transportation and housing. 

"For that particular role of leadership, it cannot be left only with the lens of land use planning," he said. "It's a job that requires diverse skills that are hard to accumulate in one person."

However, Richardson said he's hopeful the change in the planner's role will free that person up to bolster communications on new developments and controversial policy changes.