Jason Prince, an urban planner, has two decades of experience in local economic development, non-profit housing development, and pedestrian-oriented planning.

As a student at McGill University, Prince worked to establish Montreal’s first multi-university student housing cooperative, the Pink Triangle Student Housing Cooperative. Prince acted as executive support to the Fonds foncier communautaire Benny Farm, a community effort to buy and renovate over 300 apartments in inner-city Montreal and create Montreal’s first community land trust. Later, Prince helped structure a community-owned geo-thermal energy non-profit corporation, Green Energy Benny Farm, serving three community housing projects (Energie verte Benny Farm).

Between 2008 and 2013, Prince headed up a research-action project out of McGill University’s School of Urban Planning. On the one had, we explored how to assure mega-projects, involving $billions in public funding, also improve the local communities in which the moneys are spent.   

One focus was on a new mega-hospital for the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC). The McGill based research-action project, a collaboration of four Montreal universities and more than a dozen community groups, helped negotiate Montreal’s first “community benefits agreement” with the MUHC, signed in 2012. 

A second focus was on the new highway intersection just a few hundred feet from the hospital. Some research-action, working at local and regional levels, aimed to change how Montrealers move in their city, pushing for quieter, safer neighbourhoods and actively fighting provincial government plans for a larger inner-city highway intersection (the Turcot Interchange). 

Prince co-edited a book on the Turcot struggle, published just 3 days before public hearings began on this controversial project, in 2009: Montréal at the Crossroads (Black Rose Books, 2009).

In 2018, Prince co-edited a second book with Berlin activist and author Judith Dellheim: Free Public Transportation, And Why We Don't Pay to Ride Elevators (Black Rose Books, 2018).

Prince currently teaches the social economy and public policy, part-time, at Concordia University’s School of Community and Public Affairs, while also coaching non-profit businesses as a social economy agent with PME MTL Centre Ville.