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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  • From hours billed to value created

    Large law firms typically operate on a structure known as a pyramid or leverage model. The basic idea is that at the top there is a small group of equity partners who are expected to make it rain and bring in big clients, but who don’t actually do most of the work.

    Beneath them is a middle layer of senior people who manage the day-to-day, and at the very bottom is an army of juniors who do most of the actual grunt work.

    Because the base is wide and the juniors are getting billed at hourly rates that far exceed their fixed salaries, the partners at the top get the benefit of the excess funds flowing upward. It is a model that relies on juniors working long hours, most people burning out and leaving, and a relative few becoming partners.

    But as we know, AI disrupts everything. Interestingly enough, Wall Street firms are reportedly going to their big law firms and saying, “Hey, now that AI is empowering you to work fewer hours and be way more efficient, we’d like you to tell us exactly how many hours you’re saving and reduce your fees accordingly.”

    According to this recent FT article, the broad expectation is that the cost per transaction is going to come down significantly and that legal firms will need to adopt different business models in the short term.

    I don’t think this necessarily means that legal firms will become less profitable, but it certainly encourages people to move away from “this is how many hours I worked” to “this is all the value that I created for you.”

  • À la prochaine, Nice

    Our week in Nice has ended. We took an early morning flight out today, connected in DC, and arrived back in Toronto in the evening.

    I love Nice. It’s urban, but it also has great beaches and rocky swimming coves. It shares some of the exact qualities I love about Rio de Janeiro, albeit on a smaller scale.

    It also has a robust road biking culture. And I aspire to one day be able to keep up with the pros on those mountain climbs. Until then, look for me in the bike lanes of Toronto.

    Regularly scheduled programming resumes tomorrow on the blog.

  • La Promenade des Anglais needs a Canadian flag

    I have a suggestion.

    La promenade des Anglais is Nice’s most globally recognizable street. It’s a 7-kilometre waterfront promenade that curves along the Baie des Anges. It’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site and it’s home to many of the city’s events, such as the Ironman competition that took place this week.

    (Congratulations once again to my brother from another mother Austin for showing us how it’s done today!)

    In addition to a beautiful promenade, beach, and shimmering blue waters, you’ll also find lots of flags. Naturally, there’s the French flag. There’s the Union Jack. The promenade was originally funded and built by the British aristocracy who used to winter in Nice.

    You’ll find the flag of Monaco given its proximity (~20 km). The Italian flag also features. Nice belonged to the Kingdom of Sardinia until 1860, and the border is ~30 km away.

    You’ll find the American flag, which presumably reflects the city’s long military and cultural connection with the US. More recently, you might also find Ukrainian flags, reflecting French solidarity with and support for the country.

    But one flag that I have yet to find is the Canadian flag. That is, other than the one this yahoo was waving around during the Ironman competition. I think that needs to change. Canada is widely considered to be the second most important country, after France, within La Francophonie.

    Plus, with Canada looking to aggressively deepen its economic ties with the EU and with Air Canada announcing direct flights from Toronto to Nice starting next summer, I think Nice should expect greater Canadian influence going forward.

    I have put out a formal request to President Macron, Prime Minister Carney, and the Ville de Nice. I’ll let you know how they respond.

  • Nice, September 2026

    I have my Fujifilm camera with me on this trip, but it’s been a bit much to carry it around throughout the day with Vivienne and all of her various belongings. So these photos are all shot on iPhone. Sometimes I remember to shoot in RAW (for better post-production), but most of the time these are just quick snaps with the default settings. In my opinion, the photos don’t have the same colour depth and overall richness as the ones I get from my Fujifilm.

  • The Venice syndrome — or is it?

    We were walking through Old Nice today and we stumbled on a fresh pasta shop called Clé aux Pâtes (highly recommend). I went in to grab supplies for dinner and then started chatting with the friendly lady behind the counter. She explained to me that all of the pasta is made on-site every morning and that the shop has been there since 1932.

    I then made a comment that their customer base must have changed considerably over the decades. Underlying this statement was an assumption that it is now mostly tourists. But she corrected me and said that lots of locals also shop there. I then turned to look at the line behind me and, for what it’s worth, there was French being spoken.

    But I left thinking about the composition of the neighbourhood. Old Nice is made up of several statistical areas. The oldest and densest is called Vieux Nice-Sainte-Réparate. It’s just under 50,000 square metres, which is about the size of the Distillery District in Toronto. As of 2022, it had a total full-time population of 1,187 people. This works out to a respectable figure of 23,912 people per km2.

    However, the area’s population has been in decline since at least 2007, when it had 1,798 people. The obvious culprit is more hotels, short-term rentals, and secondary homes. I had Gemini review the area’s census data, and it estimates that only somewhere between 35-45% of the area’s housing serves as primary residences.

    This data would suggest that Old Nice is another example of what has been called the “Venice syndrome.” Tourism is now the trade, leading to a decline in population. But it’s interesting to think about the extent to which the area may also serve as an open-air mall for locals. That’s a more resilient place to be. Of course, all I have to go on is a pasta anecdote.

  • How do you make a street less touristy?

    La Rambla is arguably Barcelona’s most famous street. It’s a tree-lined street that runs 1.2 kilometres from the Plaça de Catalunya in the north to Port Vell in the south. Its origin dates back to the 15th century when the original stream was drained and the semblance of a street started to emerge.

    In the centuries that followed, the street came to serve as an important anchor for urban life in Barcelona. It provided a spine of open space within a dense medieval fabric of narrow streets. But alongside the rise of Barcelona as a global tourist destination, the street came to be seen more as a place for tourists than as a place for local urban life.

    This desire to create more “sustainable tourism” is one of the impetuses behind the ~€56 million revitalization project that is currently underway and is expected to be completed in 2027.

    But this raises a fascinating city-building question: How do you actually make a street less, you know, touristy? Tourists like visiting Barcelona and walking on this street, and so aren’t business owners going to just naturally cater to them? And aren’t landlords just going to rent to whoever will pay the highest rents?

    Here’s some of what Barcelona is doing:

    • Transversal flows: This one is fascinating to me. It was found that tourists tend to walk the street longitudinally (up and down), whereas locals tend to walk it transversally. In other words, locals are more likely to cross it coming from one of the surrounding neighbourhoods. The new design now privileges these more local flows.
    • Expanded pedestrian zones: Car traffic is being reduced to one 3.5-metre lane in each direction. This frees up more space for pedestrians, which is expected to help with overcrowding.
    • Room for culture: Dedicated spaces are being created to allow for more cultural programming. This is also part of a broader strategy to elevate the kind of tourism that the city receives.
    • Commercial licensing restrictions: As I understand it, the city is actively working to limit the licenses given out to souvenir shops (and the like) along the street. A meaningful amount of retail is also housed in kiosks and stands within the public right-of-way, where the city has even greater control.
    • Mercat de la Boqueria: One of the main anchors on La Rambla is the publicly owned market. But over the years, the product mix started to skew toward ready-to-eat foods and other to-go products designed for tourists. New restrictions have been put in place, or will be, that cap tourist-oriented offerings at 50%, allowing more space for local shopping needs. Interestingly enough, I have read that the merchants were in favour of this cap because the emphasis on tourist products was driving down margins. You instead want people coming in and grocery shopping for their families.

    These are just some of the initiatives that are being undertaken to rebalance La Rambla and find a more sustainable equilibrium between tourists and locals. It also dovetails with some of the other broader moves that Barcelona has implemented, such as its short-term rental ban and the right of first refusal (ROFR) that it enjoys over certain buildings and homes in order to grow the city’s public housing stock.

    It’ll be interesting to evaluate the effectiveness of these moves once the street is complete. La Rambla has many centuries of history and it has always evolved alongside Barcelona. Today is no different.

    Images from Barcelona City Council

  • Le col de Vence — testing the Ironman cycling course in Nice

    So, it turns out that if you want to do the 92-kilometre Ironman World Championship bike course in Nice, it’s a good idea to practice a little beforehand. At the very least, you probably want to get on your bike more than a handful of times. I tried it today and came up short.

    The circuit includes le col de Vence at its summit, which is a 9.7-kilometre stretch with a 963-metre peak elevation and an average pitch of 6.6%. I was within 6 kilometres of the top, but my quads completely seized up and I turned back towards Vence, then continued south back to the water.

    I really wanted to get there and reward myself with a sugary crêpe, but my legs were saying otherwise. I’ll be back, col de Vence.

    Shoutout to Guinness World Record holder Austin Kjorven, who will be representing Canada at the Ironman this weekend and has no problem climbing le col de Vence. He was also super patient as I attempted the climb. Follow him here.

    The course:

    What I did:

    The ride:

    Some of the local cycling infrastructure:

  • Gone ridin’

  • Travel isn’t always pretty

    Sometimes there’s an elevator down to the metro, but more often than not there isn’t. 

    Sometimes there’s AC, but oftentimes there isn’t.

    Sometimes Vivienne is peacefully sleeping in her stroller or carrier, but sometimes she’s having a diaper blowout meltdown and screaming loud enough that passersby start giving concerned looks.

    Traveling can be positively inconvenient at times. We’ve never traveled with so much paraphernalia before. We’ve never had to keep breast milk chilled on ice and think about bottle expiries while navigating busy metro trains with no room for our stroller. 

    But in my mind it’s like exercising. It’s work, especially with kids, but it changes you for the better. We also want Vivienne to grow up to be adaptable, resilient and patient in the face of hot, urine-soaked transit elevators and the like.

    As Anthony Bourdain once said:

    “Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.”

    We finished our week in Paris, walking and taking transit everywhere. We didn’t step into a car once. We averaged just over 10k steps a day, which is significantly lower than what we would have done sans baby, but it’s still respectable. 

    Seeing the data on my watch and my surging step count reminded me how sedentary my life has gotten over the last two years while working from home (at least from a steps per day perspective).

    It’s unacceptable and I need to make some life changes when I get back to Toronto. But for right now, it’s time to head south.

  • Raw meets refined

    I love how Saint Laurent’s creative director, Anthony Vaccarello, has taken a form of brutalism — corduroy-imprinted concrete and generally raw and exposed materials — and elevated it to high fashion. It’s a perfect example of “raw meets refined.” And you’ll find this approach in its stores all around the world, including in Toronto on Bloor Street. For me, it’s also a great microcosm of Paris. This is a city with a deep, rich history, but one that isn’t afraid to disrupt that history and look forward when it makes sense to do so.