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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  • When does the market wake up to underbuilding?

    In 2025, I wrote a post titled “Why 2029 will be the bottom for Toronto housing supply.” This was a fairly easy prediction to make, even four years out, because of how long it takes to build new housing.

    If the pre-sales and housing starts aren’t there (the leading indicators), then we know what supply will look like in the coming years. This remains true even if the market were to quickly rebound tomorrow; new supply simply can’t turn on that fast.

    But as clear as this future may be for those looking at the data, I don’t think the general market is looking toward 2029 and saying, “Damn, I better rent or buy now because in a few years housing is going to be scarcer.” And that’s because we’re still building and absorbing inventory from the end of the last cycle. That’s our current reality.

    If we assume 2029 will mark the supply bottom, the more important question for city builders is, “When will the market recognize this?”

    I have tended to be overly optimistic in my prognostications on this topic. At the beginning of this year, I said that things would feel much better in the second half of 2026 and into 2027. I’m not sure that’s true. Excess inventory is still being absorbed.

    At this point, I think we need at least another year for the market to really recognize that we’re underbuilding, which, by the way, is typically what happens at market bottoms. The hard part is nailing the timing.

  • SimCity 2000 comes to Toronto

    I just discovered this great isometric map of Toronto by John Fewell.

    He started with Google Maps using one fixed isometric view (30° down, aligned with the diagonal of the street grid), and then used Gemini to redraw each frame as an illustration. The overall map is intended to be a nod to SimCity 2000. (I loved that game in the 90s.)

    If you zoom in, you can even see cars driving around.

    At the time of writing this post, he had spent roughly $57 on Gemini and $21 on GPU rentals to produce it. Here’s more on his creative process. Imagine how much time and effort this would have taken before AI.

    Here’s a downtown screenshot:

    Here’s Junction House:

    And here’s me waiting for One Delisle to be rendered:

  • Park City to Moab

    Shot on Fujifilm X-T3 (23mm)

  • Asymmetric utility and digital minimalism

    Vitalik, the guy who co-founded Ethereum, is a devout minimalist. He has lived as a nomad for many years and has written quite extensively about how he travels the world with only a 40-litre backpack. I now need one of these just for diapers and emergency clothes in case of throw-ups. This is what one might call physical minimalism.

    In a recent post, he extended his approach to digital minimalism, talking specifically about how he is (1) eschewing social media algorithms, (2) cutting constant cell connectivity, and (3) doing away with web applications (this one got a little too nerdy for me). Obviously this specific approach isn’t going to work for everyone. Vitalik lives a unique life.

    But as someone who writes a daily blog, maintains multiple social media accounts for various projects, and generally considers themselves to be a technology enthusiast, this is something that I’m increasingly thinking about. Its time has come, especially with AI opening up a new attention rabbit hole.

    I see social media as a necessary evil. It has cognitive costs to us all, but it’s also the way you reach people today if you happen to run a business that aspires to have revenue. The way I have started approaching “digital minimalism” is by trying to be as high-agency as possible.

    In other words, I recognize that these are tools I can operate as needed, but I want to avoid being a passive, low-agency consumer of everything. I want some control. For example, I don’t use WhatsApp (except for necessary group travel chats) or check most DMs. There are too many apps. If you want to get a hold of me, send me an email.

    I also use Buffer to schedule most social media posts these days, meaning less time in the actual apps. Asymmetric utility is the goal. Of course, it’s not like my screen time is going down; there’s a lot more I could and should be doing. Uninterrupted time to think, focus, and create feels like such a luxury in today’s world.

  • 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.