Brandon Donnelly

Daily insights for city builders, delivered every morning at 6 AM ET. I’m Brandon Donnelly — a Toronto-based real estate developer and founder of Globizen. I’ve been writing here since 2013.

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  • Cities grow — or should grow — like forests

    One of the themes that we like to talk about on this blog is that cities are chaotic living organisms. We often like to fool ourselves into thinking that everything can be neatly organized and that we can plan for all of the possible outcomes, but we know this is impossible.

    Cities will always evolve in ways that we couldn’t predict and, in fact, this is exactly what we want, even if it can feel somewhat uncomfortable. We don’t want to suppress potentially positive outcomes unnecessarily; we want the potential of cities, and their residents, to be unencumbered to the greatest extent possible.

    Some of the common names for this are bottom-up planning or organic urbanism. And at its core, it is an acknowledgement that the master planners and builders at the top do not have all the answers, and never will. The only way to arrive at optimal outcomes is to instead allow individuals, small entrepreneurs, and local actors to create, innovate, and scratch their own itches.

    I was reminded of all of this when I came across this tweet by David Miet over the weekend, arguing that cities grow — or should grow — like forests. David is co-founder and CEO of an organic urbanism group out of France called Villes Vivantes.

    They work with individual property owners and local municipalities to unlock gentle, incremental housing supply, whether that be accessory dwellings or the conversion of under-used sites and buildings.

    This is not a scale that big developers generally care about, but I would encourage you to check them out, because it is a scale of housing that is good for cities. Bottom-up planning and intervention is a key ingredient in good city building.

  • The Bank of Canada raised rates, but mortgages are still relatively cheap

    The Bank of Canada raised its policy rate by 25 basis points this week to 2.5%. It was the first increase since July 2023, and it was largely because of high oil prices:

    Given persistently high oil prices, CPI inflation has been around 3% since April and is expected to rise to about 3½% by the end of the year. Excluding gasoline, inflation was 2.2% in September and measures of core inflation remain close to 2%. But cost pressures are building, with high fuel prices raising the costs of production and transportation. Imported industrial and electronics input prices have also increased. While businesses have mostly absorbed higher input costs so far, Bank surveys suggest cost pass-through will increase over the next year. Near-term household and business inflation expectations have risen, while longer-term inflation expectations remain well anchored.

    David Rosenberg of the Globe and Mail called the hike “totally unnecessary and premature” given that this is an energy cost problem and that the bank seems to be wearing rose-coloured glasses when looking at GDP growth estimates.

    Cue the mortgage renewal scare articles:

    But let’s keep in mind that 4.5% is not that high. Historically, this is still relatively low-cost debt. The concern isn’t the absolute level — it’s the delta, and the fact that real estate values are highly sensitive to interest rates and get re-priced when rates change.

    Now, when it comes to Canadian housing, a five-year mortgage is very typical, and then the rate resets to market. That’s why 2026 was predicted to be an alarming year for homeowners. That hasn’t been the case. And the faster the market normalizes, the healthier it will be.

    On the other hand, I often think about the US where 30-year fixed-rate mortgages are possible and there are homeowners sitting on 2-3% rates with a powerful economic incentive never ever to move. This is going to be a massive generational distortion to the housing market.

    When people don’t move, inventory declines, people become over-housed, and urban labour markets become less dynamic. Canada’s 5-year resets might create periodic jump scares, but they force reality into the housing market.

  • The fragility of paper wealth

    I recently came across this list of the world’s richest people between 1987 and 1989:

    The obvious takeaway is Japan, which makes up 60% of this top 10 list. As we know, the late 80s marked a massive asset bubble in the country that seemed to be creating unprecedented wealth and affluence — and the ability for the Japanese to buy trophy real estate around the world — but then collapsed in 1990.

    Another interesting name on this list is Paul Reichmann. Those of you in the real estate industry may know that Paul Reichmann and his brothers, Albert and Ralph, founded a development company in the 1950s in Toronto called Olympia & York. It was the outgrowth of their Olympia Flooring and Tile Company.

    Olympia & York developed First Canadian Place in 1975, the World Financial Center in Battery Park City, New York, in 1985, One Canada Square in London in 1991 (the tallest building in the UK at the time), and became the largest property development company in the world in the 1980s — hence Paul’s spot on the list.

    But now here’s this same top 10 list for 1992:

    The Japanese are far less prominent, and Paul is no longer on the list. Olympia & York filed for bankruptcy in 1992, and by the following year had been broken up. It’s a reminder that when we’re talking about the world’s richest people, we’re generally talking about paper equity tied to market cycles, rather than cash sitting in a high-interest savings account.

    Market dynamics trump individual performance, or to put it another way, it’s a lot harder to be a genius when the market turns against you.

  • Living at 2,100 metres

    Parkview Mountain House is situated at around 2,100 m in elevation in Park City, Utah. To put this into context, Denver is the “Mile-High City” which means it’s only 1,609 m in elevation (or 5,280 feet because, for whatever odd reason, that’s how many feet are in a mile — and, yes, the US should adopt the metric system already).

    There are only so many major cities that sit in or above this bracket. Mexico City is about 2,240 m, Bogotá, Colombia is about 2,620 m, and La Paz, Bolivia is about 3,640 m, which gives it the title of the highest capital city.

    But I digress. The neat thing about where PMH is located in Park City is that you can walk about 10 minutes up the street and you’re at the Parkview Trailhead with easy access to hikes ranging from 45 minutes to a few hours. This is such a novelty to me.

    I’ve never done it, but lots of backcountry skiers and boarders also skin up in the winter to get in powder turns away from the crowds. One day I will try this. There’s barely any parking here, though, so walking from the house is a nice feature.

    Here’s a list of the best trails in the area via AllTrails.

  • The built-in bias of city hall data

    MyHamlet.com is a fascinating public records platform that monitors, transcribes, and indexes municipal and county government meetings across the US. Its primary job is to take unstructured and fragmented public data (such as meeting minutes and video recordings of council meetings) and turn it into searchable data for advocacy groups, real estate developers, and others.

    The site covers over 2,400 cities and counties, and it allows you to easily uncover hard-to-ascertain data like public opinion on data centres:

    Okay, you knew this already. But their other rankings include topics ranging from pickleball courts to missing middle housing (both of which seem to have broad support):

    While it’s a great way to surface data that most people wouldn’t care to read otherwise, it naturally inherits the same structural bias of the public meeting format. In other words, the people who tend to engage and attend these meetings typically have both the time on their hands and a bone to pick. There need to be better ways to capture an accurate cross-section of public opinion.

  • London pedestrianized Oxford Street

    London did it: they pedestrianized Oxford Street. The section between Orchard Street and Great Portland Street is now closed to all traffic, including buses, cars, taxis, bikes, and scooters. And already, it looks like this. (For reference, here’s the post I wrote at the beginning of the year when London first approved the plans.)

    Pedestrianization is a much-debated topic in urbanist circles. Toronto has, for instance, very few pedestrian-only streets and has debated pedestrianizing Kensington Market for as long as I can remember. But with London and Oxford, the street was widely acknowledged to be in decline and that created the political consensus to do something.

    I can’t wait to see the data once it becomes available, but even before then, here is my prediction.

    Pedestrianizing Oxford will prove to be an economic and urban success for the city. Other cities will then look to London and say “See, we can do that too!” But the critics will respond with “Yeah, but we’re not Oxford Street in London. We simply don’t have the infrastructure. Where will people park? The businesses will suffer!”

    And they will be right, though not for the reasons they think: Not every city is willing to be bold.

  • Toronto’s grand bargain gave us nodes instead of neighbourhoods

    Stephen Velasco maintains a wonderful set of models for Toronto showing existing, under-construction, and proposed/approved developments. Here’s his website and here’s an aerial he recently shared showing a large section of the city overlaid with subway and LRT stations.

    What is abundantly clear from this visualization is the “grand bargain” that has guided development in Toronto for over two decades: we won’t touch most of the low-rise residential land in the city, and instead we will create high-rise pockets next to transit.

    This was the path of least political resistance, and while building on top of and next to transit is obviously sound, the extreme density cliff we encouraged created several urban economic and city-building distortions.

    Land became artificially scarce, even though there’s lots of room within the boundaries of Toronto. And high density became our only option, eliminating many other housing typologies for Torontonians. But perhaps most importantly, it created an urban fabric of dense nodes that in many cases aren’t actually urban.

    What this means is that most of the city remains unwalkable, without urban amenities, and clogged with car traffic. The way to better use our existing transit infrastructure, create more amenity-rich communities, and reduce Toronto’s dependency on the car is to flank these isolated tower clusters with more evenly distributed density.

    Towers on top of stations are, of course, good, but there then needs to be a gradient of 4-12 storey buildings across the surrounding avenues, major streets, and interior residential streets.

    The good news is that we’re moving in this direction. It’s just going to take time for us to firmly strike a new grand bargain. But in my view, this city-building approach is going to guide the next two decades of development in Toronto.

    Aerial visualization by Stephen Velasco

  • What Ben’s $270-a-month SoHo loft tells us about cities

    I clicked on this artist’s loft tour by Joshua Charow for two reasons: (1) it’s the kind of big, creative loft space that I would love to have for fun, and (2) $270 per month for a SoHo loft seems kind of reasonable.

    The artist is Ben Schonzeit. He moved into the space in 1972, and this was his all-inclusive gross rent. In today’s dollars, Gemini estimates this to be around $2,175 per month, which no longer sounds so dirt cheap, but remains very reasonable for a massive high-ceilinged loft in SoHo. (As an aside, I don’t think most people calculate in real dollars all that well.)

    There’s a lot that comes to mind with Ben’s story:

    • The creation of architectural cast iron changed the economics around ornate facades like the ones you see in SoHo. But at the time, these would have been seen as cheap replicas of the original stone stuff. Architectural purists would have derided these facades for not following the doctrine of “truth to materials.” Of course, today, many would now view SoHo as an example of “we don’t build things like we used to.”
    • Cities operate in cycles. But the flexible nature of these buildings, with their wide-open spans and large windows, allowed them to be easily repurposed.
    • Ben and his artist contemporaries were gentrifiers of the neighbourhood. And they would have long been displaced by the market had they not been protected by policy. One way to look at this dynamic is that they’re getting paid — through below-market rents — for the cultural cachet they created and the sweat equity they put into gentrifying the area.

    One of Jane Jacobs’s famous city-building mantras was, “Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.”” The reasoning for this is that new construction is expensive, whereas old, out-of-favour buildings offer the low-cost leeway needed for new ideas.

    This was certainly true when Ben was signing his lease in SoHo following deindustrialization. But is it still true today? The new idea du jour is AI, and that seems to require a lot of new buildings. Fifty years from now, will there be new SoHo stories similar to Ben’s?

  • Not every neighbourhood wants to be urban

    Many cities today treat local retail the way medieval towns treated tanneries: as an offensive nuisance that must be segregated from where people live. This has led us to our current debate over whether small-scale retail should be allowed deep inside residential neighbourhoods. It’s allowed, sometimes.

    The detractors like to get people excited by suggesting that this will lead to all-night raves, multinational chains, or streets being overrun with cars. But of course, that is not what we’re talking about.

    There are lots of case studies that we can point to. Japan, for instance, has a national zoning code that permits small-scale shops, home offices, and cafes in even its lowest-density, residential-only zone. From there, all subsequent zones work cumulatively, meaning more intensive zones generally inherit all previous uses. The result is a land-use approach that is default mixed-use.

    Of course, there are also lots of examples that we can point to here in Toronto, and that’s because corner stores used to be a part of our daily life. But these remnant examples are generally found in the oldest, and most urban, parts of the city, and rejected in the inner suburbs.

    It is no surprise that Toronto is once again divided on this issue and across its typical built-form lines. This division runs deep, and it will almost certainly resurface when Torontonians head to the polls this Monday.

    At the end of the day, corner stores and local retail are an inherently urban sensibility. It is about not having to get into a car to grab a coffee or a soft washed-rind French cheese from Haute-Savoie. But we know that not all communities want to be urban.

    One resident’s feature is another’s bug.

  • The penthouse loggias of One Delisle

    In the Penthouse Collection at One Delisle, which spans the top three floors of the building, the homes all have a fully covered loggia as one of their outdoor spaces. I say “one of” because these suites all have multiple outdoor spaces. If you’re buying a penthouse, I would imagine you want to own several different pieces of the sky.

    Here’s a plan (this particular suite also has curved walls because it’s, you know, sexier):

    I was on site this morning as the team was installing the curtain wall and panels for the southwest-facing loggia on the very top floor, and let me tell you that it is wildly impressive in person.

    The idea behind these loggias was to create outdoor rooms, protected from the elements both above and on the sides so that they could be used for as long as possible throughout the year. We also provided the option of a hot tub for year-round use, which some purchasers did opt for.

    The space was certainly showing off today on what was a beautiful fall day.