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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  • The spirit of a place

    We often think of cities in terms of their built environment. This city has lots of futuristic tall buildings, this one has lots of ornate mid-rise buildings, and this one is mostly suburban sprawl. But the built environment is only one component.

    Underlying the physical environment (let’s call it the hardware of a place) is a cultural ethos that connects our spaces and influences our behaviors (let’s call it the software of a place). In the architecture community, this is often referred to as the genius loci, or the “spirit of a place.”

    I was reminded of this when reading a recent column by Benedict Evans that starts with him reminiscing about the six years he spent living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area:

    More fundamental than that, though, is the ethos and the sense of possibility. Of course, you’re going to do amazing things. Of course, you’re going to make a company – that’s what everyone does. Of course, this new thing is going to change the world. The world is malleable. You can do things. You can create a giant company from a PowerPoint in a couple of years.

    This, of course, is a well-documented feature of the Bay Area. And its origins can almost certainly be traced all the way back to the Gold Rush of the mid-1800s when risk-taking misfits flocked to the region in search of overnight riches, transforming a sleepy hamlet into a place.

    But even though the lineage may appear clear in the case of San Francisco, the genius loci of a place does not represent immutable code. It changes over time, just as the fortunes and influence of a city also rise and fall over time.

    I often think about this in the case of my city, Toronto. Instead of being founded by maverick gamblers, the city was founded on an opposite set of principles: British imperial loyalty, Protestant morality, and anti-revolutionary order.

    Toronto has changed a great deal since then, through massive waves of immigration and robust post-war expansion, and the city’s built environment has naturally transformed from orderly Victorian row houses to supertall towers.

    But now, with the frenetic condominium boom of the last cycle in the rear-view mirror, there’s an increasing sense of what’s next. What will be Toronto’s genius loci of the future? That’s the exciting opportunity in front of us today and it’s up to us to decide. Indeed, the world is malleable.

  • Canada is uniquely suited to become a global hub for data centres

    Kevin Yin frames the data centre debate eloquently in this recent Globe and Mail article: “The backlash against data centres is understandable. But the answer is not to block construction. It is to design a better bargain.”

    Here are some things we can say about data centres right now:

    • They create relatively few long-term direct jobs (though innovation spillover does exist when they cluster).
    • They are power hungry.
    • They are a core physical engine of the new global economy.
    • They play to Canada’s physical and economic strengths as an energy superpower.

    Meaning, Canada is uniquely suited to become a global hub for data centres and AI infrastructure. Canada has abundant energy, naturally lower cooling costs, geopolitical stability, and deep institutional capital.

    The challenge is that we need to manage the negative externalities. No household, for instance, wants to pay higher energy bills.

    We also need to make sure that there are long-term economic benefits for the country, and that we’re not repeating the old habit of “exporting” our resources to other countries so that they can innovate. That would be a bad deal.

    The world is going to continue to need a lot more data centres, and Canada is in a unique position to lead and have control over its own destiny. Kevin offers a few ideas for what a better bargain might look like, if you’d like to have a read.

  • Why real estate development is an art form

    When I interviewed Michael Cooper, founder of Dream, back in 2016, one of the things he said to me was that real estate development is one of the most creative things you can do. What did he mean by that?

    As a developer, you have to problem-solve within extreme constraints. There are zoning regulations, building codes, investor interests, neighbourhood associations, market conditions, and many other sometimes-competing demands at play.

    The job of the developer is to navigate through this maze, rely on the expertise of others, and come up with the best possible solution. That requires creativity, and it’s what Cooper was getting at.

    The process is also self-reinforcing: constraints are good for creativity. As filmmaker and actor Orson Welles once said, “The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.” In architecture school, we used to always say that the hardest thing is a blank canvas, because design is about solving problems. Constraints present problems.

    Of course, developers can’t solve these problems on their own. They rely on talented multidisciplinary teams and the advice they provide. But it’s important to keep in mind specific professionals tend to view problems through the lens of their discipline.

    A lawyer might feel strongly about a particular legal clause, or a structural engineer might view a particular design as optimal, but ultimately the developer is going to have to take these recommendations and evaluate them against the entire list of constraints they are facing. It becomes a creative trade-off.

    The developer has to have the largest field of view. Seeing the whole board is how you make it out of the maze.

  • Introducing Places

    I must say, I’m really happy to be back blogging on WordPress (now with a self-hosted setup). One of the things I set up over the long weekend was a new “Places” page that links to specific cities and locations that I’ve written about over the last 13 years.

    All I did was ask AI to tell me which places I have written about the most (Toronto was the undisputed number one). Then I created a bunch of corresponding post categories and batch-edited any posts that had these locations either in the title of the post or in a tag.

    Now, if you’re interested in Marrakech but not Montréal, there’s an easy way to filter. Here’s what the Places page looks like:

    This is one of the things I missed the most: the ability to easily search, sort, and go back to old posts. That was surprisingly difficult on Paragraph, and it felt to me like my posts were going into a black hole, never to be found again. Reading old posts and revisiting them with new thoughts is a big part of this writing journey.

    I’m also excited to add to the Places page. Each one of the covers is a photo I took, and if I didn’t have any photos of the place, it didn’t get added to the page. We have some trips planned at the end of this summer and over the winter, including a bucket-list location for our 16th annual ski and snowboard trip, so stay tuned for more photos and places.

  • The Big Mac theory of housing costs

    Forty years ago, The Economist introduced its now-famous Big Mac Index. It was based on the simple idea that a Big Mac is a damn near perfect universal commodity, and so if you methodically compare its price across countries, it should give you an approximation of the purchasing power parity across a basket of currencies.

    For example, a Big Mac currently costs US$6.22 in the US (as of July 2026 and according to The Economist). But in Switzerland, it works out to US$9.04, and in Taiwan, it’s US$2.42. This suggests that the Swiss franc is overvalued and that the Taiwan dollar is undervalued because, in theory, their currencies should adjust over time to correct such a large variation.

    Now, I’m not an economist, but supposedly there is some directional validity to this line of thinking. However, it’s not entirely accurate. If you look at the various inputs that make up the price of a Big Mac, there are over 60 ingredients, including local real estate prices, the cost of labour, and utility costs.

    Some countries may also have tariffs on certain ingredients, which would drive up the price for local consumers (yes, that’s how tariffs work), and some countries may have a higher willingness to pay for American fast food. If there’s a higher perceived value, McDonald’s can simply charge more.

    So, the fact that a Big Mac costs significantly more in Switzerland does say something about the CHF, but it’s also an indicator that retail rents are somewhere around 3x what they are in Taiwan, among many other factors.

    Now let’s consider a product that, unlike the Big Mac, can vary a great deal across countries: housing. A new home requires far more than 60 ingredients, but it similarly reflects local cost structures, including material inputs, labour rates, and any tariffs and taxes that might be levied on the product.

    Every input, from time to development charges, gets factored into its end price, which is why, when a politician claims that something like inclusionary zoning represents a “no-cost affordable housing” solution, I wonder if they’re simply unclear on the economics or if they’re trying to deliberately misrepresent the situation.

    At McDonald’s, the equivalent policy would be to require that every time someone buys a Big Mac, the restaurant must simultaneously offer 20% of a new Big Mac to another customer, below the cost of production. It should be obvious that this practice would require the original customer to pay more for that same Big Mac.

    Images from The Economist

  • I’m going going, back back, to WordPress WordPress

    When I first started writing this blog in 2013, I started on Tumblr. Then about 6 years ago, I decided that Tumblr wasn’t the right platform for a written blog like mine, and so I moved to WordPress (specifically WordPress.com — not a self-hosted setup). About two years ago, I packed up and moved this blog once again, this time to Paragraph. I was trying to shift more of my online activity onchain, and I liked the idea of my posts being permanently stored on a blockchain like Arweave.

    But it turns out that Paragraph wasn’t the best fit for me. I’m still long crypto and I have it set up to syndicate my posts to the old site, but I found the platform more restrictive than my old WordPress setup, and its recent update also pivots the product to much more of an AI-focused media platform (with more credits to buy), and that’s not how I like to write. I just want to open a blank post editor, write my own words (sometimes post photos), and then hit publish.

    So, I’ve decided to return this blog to WordPress, but using a self-hosted setup (with Hostinger) and with my email newsletter being once again sent out by Mailchimp. To be honest, I really questioned this decision. Should I just use Substack like seemingly everyone else? Isn’t WordPress kind of old school? It’s certainly not the easiest to set up (I still have a bunch of housekeeping to do) and Mailchimp is going to again cost me hundreds of dollars per month given the size of my mailing list, but I decided it’s the best decision for me for two main reasons.

    One, I want a site that is as simple and timeless as possible. I’ve been writing basically every day for 13 years and in my mind I’m going to continue writing for at least the next decade. Two, I want to be able to customize my site and my email newsletter as I see fit. This blog is a personal blog, but it is also intended to be the top of the marketing funnel for everything that I’m working on with Globizen. The simple idea is that someone discovers me through my writing, maybe something resonates, and then that leads them to one of our projects or to book a stay at Parkview Mountain House.

    When you write every day, it’s easy to fall into a routine. Most days it’s a real commitment (okay, slog) to find the time to get something out into the world. But whenever I do a big reboot of the blog, I feel reinvigorated. It’s a time when I take the time to think about what I’m doing every day and then adjust as needed.

    Going forward, you can expect to find the same content focused on real estate, cities, and design. But I’d also like to write more personal posts, more travel posts, and get back into sharing my photography. AI muted my desire to take photos, and as much as I think AI is wonderful, I’m feeling a bit of fatigue around it. Part of this return to WordPress is about getting back to basics: a very simple landing page with authentic words, photos, and links.

    The only changes you should notice today are formatting ones, both at brandondonnelly.com and in your inbox. It’ll probably also take me another week or two to fully settle in with the new setup, but regardless, emails will continue to get sent out at 6 AM ET. Onward.

  • What are the actual employment effects of data centres?

    People used to get excited about data centre construction, and communities used to compete for them, frequently with incentives. They represented job creation and an investment in the new economy. But things feel quite different today.

    According to new research from Brookings, more than 100 local communities in the US have enacted moratoriums on data centres, and more than 300 state data centre bills were filed in the first six weeks of 2026 alone. Earlier this year, Sanders and AOC also introduced the AI Data Center Moratorium Act.

    The reasons for this are clear. Brookings reports that the PJM grid region in the US (which serves about 65 million people) saw its power supply costs increase from about $2.2 billion to $14.7 billion in a single year, and data centres are thought to account for nearly two-thirds of the increase.

    So, are the employment and economic gains worth it?

    The new research from Brookings shows that not all data centres are created equal. Hyperscale data centres (like those built by Google and Amazon) can quickly become the largest taxpayers in a county. They also appear to create higher employment benefits compared to colocation facilities (where a landlord builds a data centre and then leases it out to remote tenants).

    The largest employment effects were also seen when data centres cluster. This makes sense, and it’s the foundation of cities. When people and uses cluster together, they produce larger ecosystem effects. Conversely, standalone facilities were found to result in modest gains. A data centre is not a labour-intensive operation in and of itself.

    If you’d like to read the full Brookings brief, click here.

     

     

  • From square to circle at One Delisle

    One Delisle is really starting to make a mark on the Toronto skyline. So on a semi-regular basis, people now send me photos of the building or mention me on the socials. I love when people do that. Here’s a great photo from today from Dion on Twitter.

    One of the comments that I used to get was, “Yeah, I don’t know, Brandon, the floor plate is still looking pretty square.” And I would respond with, “Be patient.” For those of you who aren’t familiar with the design, the entire tower gradually transforms from a square floor plate to a 16-sided circular floor plate.

    Nobody makes this comment anymore.

    I also really like Dion’s photo because it shows the steel for the “crown” at the top of the building coming together. The height of the crown was something we fought for during rezoning. Studio Gang felt it was crucial for the proportions and slenderness ratio of the building. And we agreed.

    I can tell you that it had us measuring the exact height of nearby church windows to see if this crown would shadow them at certain times of the day and year. I’m sure glad we did that.

    Please keep the photos coming!

  • Out-of-office messages are for the unserious — or are they?

    There is a school of thought that out-of-office messages are only for the unserious. If you’re a top-performing executive, owner, or whatever, you need to be available and reachable at all times, and so an OOO message sends completely the wrong signal. It says that you’re just not that committed to what you do. Yeah, I always use an OOO message when I’m away.

    While I appreciate that school of thought and I know firsthand that when you have your own business you’re on 24/7 (because of some unhealthy combination of drive and obsession), I also believe that the following two things are true.

    One, we could all die tomorrow and it’s important to take some time when you can. In fact, I’d say greater freedom is the objective. As Charlie Munger famously stated: “I did not intend to get rich. I wanted to get independent, I just overshot.”

    Two, as connected as we all are today, there’s no way that when I’m crushing back bowls at high elevations I’m going to be able to respond as quickly as I do when I’m sitting at my desk for 15 hours a day. So I think it’s important to let people know, “Hey, if I don’t respond to you in 38 seconds, I have not died; you just need to wait a bit longer.”

    The signal is a recalibration of expectations, not of my level of commitment.

    Cover photo by Luca Bravo

  • Density is a feature of cities

    My sense is that density is a misunderstood characteristic of successful cities. I think most people see it as a bug. They see some of the negative externalities associated with cities, such as traffic congestion, and they assume that the culprit is too many people.

    But they are confusing population density with land-use inefficiencies. This, I can only assume, is why some people arrive at the selfish conclusion that their city is full.

    There are, of course, many counterexamples to this line of thinking. Paris, Seoul, Barcelona, Singapore, Tokyo, and many others have both high population density and are viewed as being highly livable and desirable cities.

    Not all high-density cities are livable, but that’s because other ingredients are missing. I will remind you that Tokyo once again placed first in Monocle’s annual quality-of-life survey this year.

    What I think gets missed are the following three key features of urban density.

    One, dense cities dramatically lower the cost of delivering infrastructure over the long term and reduce per capita energy consumption.

    Two, cities are wealth-generating machines and density drives “agglomeration economies.” Put smart and entrepreneurial people in close proximity to one another, and good things happen.

    Three, the only way to create an enormous, well-functioning city like Tokyo is on the backbone of transit. And the only way to make transit viable and convenient for most people is to build density all around it. Density is the unlock that makes it all possible.

    Ironically, then, density is what can make cities feel less congested and more livable.