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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  • Incomes caught up with inflation. So why does everyone feel broke?

    Early on in my career, I used to run development pro formas where I would assume that our costs would increase at some rate in and around inflation. Combined with a conservative contingency allowance, I used to think I was being prudent. How cute.

    The pandemic made this approach seem silly. Our pro formas did not contemplate 40-50% cost increases for certain line items. But even without these outliers, the pandemic did cause things to become more expensive than one would have expected from pre-pandemic trends. Here’s a recent chart via the Bank of Canada:

    But the cost of things is only one side of the equation. For things to be “more expensive,” we also need to look at their relationship to income, and that’s what Yaz Terajima has done here. Interestingly enough, household disposable income seems to have kept pace with the additional cost of things, at least on average.

    Between 2020-25, the average household spent about $6,500 more per year relative to pre-pandemic trends, but disposable income increased by about $7,400, creating a positive income-expense gap of about $900.

    So why, then, does it feel like things are more expensive? Well, for one thing, there is a meaningful difference across age groups and income levels. Yaz also found that younger and lower-income households did not, in fact, see their incomes rise sufficiently to cover these higher costs.

    On top of this, this study does not factor increases in overall wealth due to assets appreciating, which tend to be more concentrated among wealthier households. So the full-picture reality is almost certainly a bigger socioeconomic divide across age groups and income levels.

  • How built form drives Toronto’s modal splits

    If you’re a cyclist in Toronto, you probably know that Shaw Street is a damn good street for biking. The city first redesigned the one-way street in 2013, adding a bike lane in each direction (one of which is a contra-flow bike lane). Then in 2020, they made it so that the one-way direction for cars alternated every few blocks. This stopped drivers from using it as a high-speed shortcut. The result was an immediate increase in cycling.

    Here’s some data from Observing the City for the intersection of Bloor and Shaw:

    As of June 2025, the modal split at this intersection during peak hours was 34% bikes, 21% pedestrians, 1% trucks, and 44% cars. At times, there has been a 310% increase in cycling trips since the redesign. It goes to show you that the right street design (or the wrong one) will induce demand. If you look at the intersection counts for the entire city, you’ll see just how profoundly built form impacts behaviour. Cycling is broadly an Old Toronto thing.

  • Density by necessity

    A blog reader sent me this article by Adam Clermont arguing that “Hong Kong was a 15-minute city before the rest of the world knew what to call it.” It’s great. He was right. I did find it interesting, so much so that I subscribed without really looking at what I was subscribing to.

    Here’s an excerpt:

    There are things Hong Kong does not do well. The apartments are small. Mine is small. I have made peace with this in the way that a man makes peace with anything, which is to say, incompletely and with occasional resentment. The rents are obscene. The air quality on bad days could strip paint off a Renault. Nobody is moving here for the spaciousness. But the fifteen-minute city crowd keeps talking about access, about proximity, about the ability to live a full urban life without depending on a car. And on that score, Hong Kong is not a case study. Hong Kong is the answer key that the rest of the world keeps trying to peek at while pretending they came up with it themselves.

    His overarching argument compares Hong Kong to Paris. While Paris was busy talking and planning to be a 15-minute city — by redesigning its streets and removing space for cars — Hong Kong was already busy doing it, by accident and out of necessity.

    While it is certainly true that Paris has undergone a deliberately planned urban transformation over the last decade or two, it’s worth pointing out that we’re talking about two of the most dense cities in the developed world.

    Hong Kong is, of course, on another level of hyper density, but Paris, as we like to talk about on this blog, is also sneakily dense, despite its mid-rise heights.

    The fact that both cities might be described as so-called 15-minute cities places them in a rarified universe, regardless of how deliberately or accidentally they may have ultimately gotten there. Not all cities have the benefit of density, and Paris already had lots of 15-minuteness before it became a buzzword and it started planning for it.

    Adam has a line that “density is not a problem to be solved but a feature to be exploited,” and I would agree with this. However, the broader problem to be solved is how do you create this feature in the first place, if you don’t already have it?

    Modern cities are typically not as dense. It is almost universally true that high urban densities are the result of necessity — physical constraints and/or economic gravity. Hong Kong is an island with no place to go but up. The same is true of Manhattan.

    Paris is not an island, but it hemmed itself into practical equivalents over the centuries through fortified walls. Even today, the boundary of Paris proper is the Boulevard Périphérique, which sits where the city’s last defensive walls were built in the 19th century.

    Dhaka, to throw out another example, is hemmed in by major waterways that flood every year like clockwork. Naturally, the city focused development on higher, safer ground, though there are informal settlements that have found ingenious ways to navigate its precarious waters.

    Density may be a feature to be exploited, but it tends to happen best when there’s no other choice. That’s why Hong Kong is so good at it. The real problem to be solved is getting there when it’s not the only option.

    Photo by Antonio Sokic on Unsplash

  • Inside the post-pandemic AI investment boom reshaping San Francisco

    San Francisco’s Q2 2026 economic report is perhaps an idealized summary of how the post-pandemic, AI investment boom is transforming our cities.

    Housing Supply Crisis: Residential apartment rents grew 14% from March to July, and single-family house prices are now growing at double-digit annual rates. And yet, the city continues to see a structural decline in housing permits, below pre-pandemic levels.

    Segmented Commercial Market: The city’s office vacancy rate declined 3.7% over the past year, but the overall vacancy rate is still greater than 30%. Weekly office attendance also remains below 50% of pre-pandemic levels.

    Urban Rebound: Average highway speeds are dropping, suggesting more user demand. MUNI Metro (local) ridership is also increasing rapidly, reaching over 70% of pre-pandemic levels. But downtown BART station exits (regional rail) are below 50% of 2019 levels, reinforcing the fact that though the city is active, but people simply aren’t commuting in nearly the same way.

    Ultimately, the surge in housing prices proves that the “urban doom loop” narrative was fundamentally wrong (remember that?). San Francisco remains an intensely desirable place to live and work. But they’ve got to get moving on building more housing.

  • The gravity of bond yields

    Customarily, the “risk-free rate” is considered to be the yield generated by a stable government’s debt. This matters to real estate investors because if you’re going to make an investment and take on additional risk, then you need to be compensated for that risk — earn a spread — above the risk-free rate.

    Bond yields are also similarly the foundational benchmark for lots of financial instruments, meaning that when yields go up, so does the cost of other things, like mortgages and real estate debt.

    As of August 17, the yield on the 30-year US treasury bond closed at over 5.3%. This was a 19-year high. Howard Marks of Oaktree Capital wrote a great memo on the topic that, as always, is worth a read. Among the factors contributing to higher bond yields, he calls out inflation being “stubbornly higher than is desirable” and the US’s “total lack of fiscal discipline.”

    The point of his memo is to once again argue that we cannot repeal the laws of economics without there being consequences. He quotes investor Stanley Druckenmiller who said, “Every basis point of artificial yield suppression is a subsidy to procrastination. Governments defending prices against fundamentals always lose. The only variable is how much they spend before conceding.”

    Marks ultimately concludes: “I don’t think the U.S. can perpetually spend more than it takes in and not expect its creditworthiness to be questioned and its IOUs – its currency and Treasury securities – to be disrespected.”

    All of this suggests that real estate investors might want to be prepared for “higher for longer” financing costs. That means don’t count on cap rate compression.

  • How tax policy shapes the immigration equation

    Immigration is an exciting topic (to put it one way). Over the last few years, public sentiment around it has shifted significantly in Canada from viewing it as a positive thing to thinking there’s too much of it.

    But as John Burn-Murdoch points out in this recent FT article about the real fiscal costs of immigration, it’s important to be precise about what’s going on. Our decisions and policies guide assimilation and affect whether an immigrant becomes a net cost or net contributor.

    Here, for example, is an interesting chart showing what pay percentile a primary earner needs to reach in order to become a net contributor to the country:

    In the UK, the average couple arriving at age 30 needs the primary earner to have a salary at the 55th percentile, compared to only the 28th percentile in Germany. This is because of the relatively low tax rates for low-income workers in the UK, and flatter tax regimes in the other countries in the chart.

    This is just one example demonstrating that “immigration,” to use the words of Burn-Murdoch, is “not a fixed thing across time and place.” Who are we attracting? And what policies do we have in place to ensure people economically assimilate and become net contributors?

  • How built form (not more lanes) solves traffic congestion

    I snapped this photo while we were in Paris a few weeks ago. We were walking down the street in the 7th and I noticed this mother (I’m presuming) picking up her daughter from the library. The daughter (I’m also presuming) got on the back of the bike and then they took off down the street. She also happened to be wearing a beret, which only added to the whole experience.

    When I posted this photo on Twitter, I got some of the comments I would expect. Some people called the mother (we’re all presuming) irresponsible for not wearing a helmet and for not forcing her passenger to wear one as well. Okay, maybe the child is of the age where one is technically required. But another way to look at it might be that it’s a testament to how safe they feel on the roads of Paris.

    My implied point was that this could have been a minivan ride. The solution to traffic congestion is not optimizing around the car; it is getting people out of them. Paris proper has about 2 million people compared to Toronto’s 3 million. But the footprint of the former is about one-sixth the land area, making it, on average, about 4 times more dense. And yet, Paris feels counterintuitively less congested, and easier to get around.

    The answer, and solution for all cities looking to get people moving, lies in its built form, its rail network, and what you see pictured above.

  • Squatters, not planners, created Bologna’s beloved porticoes

    Bologna, I’m told, is a city famous for its colonnades or porticoes. I’ve never been, but it’s a city that’s on my list. Bologna has 62 km of covered walkways, 40 km of which are in the city centre, and they are designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. They provide shade in the summer, and protection from rain during the winter. But how did this happen? What’s the legal structure underpinning them?

    Bologna’s porticoes go back roughly a thousand years and, interestingly enough, they are a result not of some grand, top-down master plan, but of a ground-up, market response. Bologna was a dense, walled city, with a growing population. Space was at a premium and so unscrupulous developers and landlords started encroaching into the public right-of-way and cantilevering their buildings outward. Few people were apparently fussed.

    The earliest evidence of a portico in Bologna seems to date back to the year 1041 — an example of private use of public land. But over time, the utility of these colonnades started to be more broadly appreciated. Not only did they protect pedestrians from the elements, but they allowed craftsmen to work outside of their workshops with natural light and with similar shelter.

    Gradually, porticoes became obligatory (at least in some areas and on some sites). This then transferred the porticoes from private use of public land to public use of private land. Developers were forced to build them.

    My understanding is that the vast majority of the porticoes exist today with this legal structure. The land is private, but the public enjoys an access easement in perpetuity. This means that private owners must pay to maintain these colonnades. It’s an example of what we often call here in Toronto a POPS space — a privately-owned, publicly accessible space.

    These spaces took many centuries to become codified, but what I find most interesting is that they are a product of ground-up innovation. A more contemporary example of this is Tokyo, which is often considered to be an example of bottom-up planning. Here’s a book on the topic called Emergent Tokyo — Designing the Spontaneous City.

    Turns out, Bologna’s beloved colonnades weren’t the product of visionary planning, but of Medieval squatters.

    Photo by Ryan Ladd on Unsplash

  • The final release at One Delisle

    We’ve just launched a new One Delisle Instagram account (@one_delisle) and, as part of it, a new video series. Here’s our most recent video, featuring Jeanne Gang of Studio Gang. We also filmed a new video this week that I think is going to be spectacular. Hint: It involves a drone, house music, and a beautiful summer-in-September sunset. So if you aren’t yet following One Delisle, you may want to do that now.

    This week, we also introduced The Reserve Residences, which is our final release for the project. This is a collection of only ten homes on the highest floors of the building. All of these suites feature generous 2–3 bedroom floor plans of up to 3,600 square feet. This is the final opportunity to own before occupancies begin in spring 2027. For more info or to book a site tour, email sales@onedelisle.com.

  • Housing on the Line

    One of the fundamental truths about cities is that transportation and land-use planning are integral to one another. The most successful cities understand this and build density on top of transit, and build transit where density can and will go. See, once again, the Tokyo model. It’s for this reason that I think the Superkül-led conceptual project called Housing on the Line is an important one for Toronto. While the projects are speculative, they remind us that many of our transit stations are severely undeveloped, including ones we’ve only recently built. Why?

    Description:

    Housing on the Line, a conceptual project and architectural exhibition conceived and initiated by Superkül, will open to the public next Thursday, September 24th in Liberty Village. Developed in collaboration with six other firms – COMN Architects, Dubbeldam Architecture + Design, Gabriel Fain Architects, StudioAC, Studio VAARO, and Suulin – the project proposes speculative designs that integrate multi-unit residential buildings with smaller existing subway station sites along TTC Line 2 Bloor-Danforth. Each firm’s proposal treats a different subway station along Line 2 as a creative canvas for imagining innovative typologies and context-appropriate design that delivers human-scale character, enhanced amenities, and community connectivity.

    Details:

    Housing on the Line | Opening Reception
    Date: Thursday, September 24, 2026
    Time: 6:00–9:30 pm
    Location: The Bakery, 2 Fraser Ave, Toronto
    RSVP: adele@superkul.ca

    If you can’t make the opening reception next Thursday, you can also visit between September 25-27, during the hours of 10am-5pm.

    Project credits (in order): Superkül, Studio VAARO, Gabriel Fain Architects, Dubbeldam Architecture + Design

    Image credits: All renderings by Aron Lorincz Ateliers