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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  • 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.

    Cover photo by Agathe

  • What does Toronto want to be?

    So, what bold and uncomfortable 21st-century master plan should Toronto adopt? I don’t know exactly, but what I was getting at in my lead-up post is that it’s hard not to sometimes feel like Toronto is trying to run a 21st-century global city on a 19th-century Victorian street grid, surrounded by Houston.

    In the core of the city, we have narrow, generally 20-metre rights-of-way. Many of these east-west arteries are beautiful streets to walk on with fine-grained retail patterns, but the streets themselves have slow-moving streetcars in the middle two lanes and on-street parking on both sides. The result is streets that don’t move and are frustrating to navigate for all users: drivers, transit riders, and cyclists. It can take an hour to drive 10 km.

    Other major streets don’t have streetcars or much retail activity, but the land-use pattern reflects a bygone era. It doesn’t make sense to have only single-family housing on Toronto’s busiest arteries. It’s time for these streets to grow up. (To be fair, the City of Toronto is trying to achieve this with its new Major Streets policies, but the development economics do not make these changes feasible at scale.)

    As you move out of the core, Toronto’s major streets naturally widen along with the recency in which they were built. Now we have the opposite problem where we’re faced with “stroads” with little to no urbanity. Overall, it’s the result of a city that grew organically over time without the same kind of defined plan seen in cities like New York, Barcelona, and Paris (after it had already been built out).

    Here’s the thing: Toronto’s low-rise single-family era is over. Virtually the only single-family housing that gets built nowadays is when somebody demolishes an existing house and builds anew. The future is a uniformly higher-density city built on the backbone of robust transit, vehicular, and cycling networks; not a monocentric downtown that people commute to.

    So what might that mean exactly?

    To start, I believe it means getting our transit vehicles onto their own dedicated lanes, widening certain major streets (for the benefit of cars), shrinking and pedestrianizing others (for the benefit of human-scaled urbanism), carving through new major streets to fix connectivity gaps, and pricing congestion as a means of funding constant transit expansion. My fellow urbanists may not want to hear me advocate for the selective widening and creation of arterial roads, but we have to stop pretending that cars are going to disappear.

    Once the bones are in place, it’s then a matter of getting the land-use policies right and letting the private sector do what it does best — build for the future. Now, I don’t profess to know the exact combination of major street widths, one-way patterns, and whatever else should be done, but I do feel strongly that it’s time for a bold and uncomfortable 21st-century master plan for Toronto.

    What does Toronto want to be? We should host an international design competition and find out.

    Cover photo by Oles Borys

  • The entire city is your backyard

    I rarely watch any TV, but when I do, I enjoy browsing YouTube. One of my favourite channels, one that I have mentioned before on this blog, is Never Too Small. It’s a look at small urban spaces from around the world, with the architect or designer walking you through their intent and the various design details. Whenever I watch an episode, I usually get excited about the possibility of buying some piece-of-shit apartment in Paris and turning it into something cool. One day.

    Now NTS has a new series coming out, and it’s premiering this week on July 30. It’s called My City, My Backyard, and it’s a look at cities, specifically through the eyes of creatives. I already know that I’m going to like it, and I love the title. When you live in a city, the entire city is your backyard and amenity. The first city in this new series also happens to be one of my favourite cities: Marseille.

    Marseille is having a moment right now, and that’s not just my confirmation bias speaking. In 2024, the city saw 19.5 million overnight stays, which were a 20% increase compared to the year prior (they hosted 10 medal events during the Paris 2024 Olympics). But even if you strip out its Olympic boost, tourism is rising. Spring 2025 recorded a 7% year-over-year increase, which included a 19% increase in international visitors. Summer 2025 visitors were also 10% higher than in 2023.

    What’s driving this, beyond its vibrant culture, great restaurants, and breathtaking landscapes, is that Marseille has just the right amount of edge. It’s not always a hyper-polished Instagram moment; it’s an effortlessly cool place where finding an uncomfortable rock next to turquoise waters will give you everything you need.

    In other words, it is a place that feels authentic. And in a world of global sameness and AI-generated simulacra, I think many of us are now seeking that authenticity — something that feels real and a little raw. Marseille has that in spades. Oh, and if any of you happen to visit la plage de Maldormé, let me know if my unauthorized sticker is still there.

    Here is NTS’s channel in case you want to check out Marseille this week.

    Cover photo by Jeet Sandhu

  • Customer-centricity reduces risk

    Real estate can be an abstract concept. If you’re a capital allocator, it might be a line item in one of your spreadsheets. Or, if you’re a developer primarily focused on zoning and entitlements, you might think in terms of gross floor area. How much density do I have, and what is it going to be worth?

    This is not to disparage any one component or participant within the development supply chain; it is simply to say that development is long and complicated, participants will naturally specialize, and everyone will have a lens through which they see things.

    But at the end of the day, these activities ultimately come back to fundamentals: the real estate needs to house people and things, and do something. Gross floor area has value on a spreadsheet because it can be turned into something. And it is ultimately that something that determines how much it is worth.

    If you’re a developer selling entitled land, your direct customer is the next developer, the one who will ultimately build out the site. Then, that developer’s customers are the people who will ultimately buy, rent, and occupy the space. And in some cases, those customers will also have their own customers, if, for instance, they choose to buy a space and then rent it out to somebody else.

    So there are layers to this. But regardless of where you might sit within the chain, I think it’s always helpful to focus on the customer, or customers. It’s harder to be wrong with your assumptions if you drill all the way down and consider the end use cases.

    Cover photo by Israel Andrade

  • A new study on missing middle building codes

    We talk a lot around here about the surprising difficulty of building small-scale apartment buildings. Here’s a post from earlier this year where I outlined a working list of policies, codes, and approaches that would need to change in order to unlock more of this housing type.

    But my list was just that — a list — and the reality is that each individual item can be shockingly complex. To that end, here’s a recent study, published by the Neptis Foundation, called “Ontario Building Code Missing Middle Study: Bridging the gap between houses and high-rises.”

    The authors are Conrad Speckert of Semibold Solutions (who has appeared on this blog in the past) and Jack Keays of Vortex Fire Consulting, and I encourage you to download a free copy. I haven’t gone through it yet, but I will, because we are actively working on projects at this exact scale.

    Enjoy the weekend.

    Cover photo by Danish Prakash

  • Standing inventory is clearing out, but a major condo supply crunch is coming

    Urbanation just released its Q2 2026 new condominium sales report for the GTHA (Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area). New condominium apartment sales posted their first year-over-year gain since 2023, with 702 home sales, representing a 52% annual increase. Anecdotally, I will also say that those of us in the industry can feel these winds changing.

    These figures are still well below the 10-year average, but the market is starting to do what it needs to do, and what the new (and cumbersome) HST rebate is intended to do. Standing inventory is getting sold, and I suspect the second half of this year will look even stronger as the industry figures out how to actually paper and administer this rebate.

    Importantly, the rebate is not helping pre-construction sales (though that’s just one factor). Q2 saw just 50 sales. Basically, nothing. This makes sense because the new rebate requires the purchase agreement to be signed before March 31, 2027. That’s not enough time for most pre-sale programs, but it does create a sense of urgency around standing inventory.

    So, what we are seeing today is a new condominium market that has refound price discovery and is starting to clear out already-built standing inventory, but one that is not producing a meaningful amount of new housing starts. As Urbanation says in its release, “condo supply is set to see its largest ever decline in the coming years.”

    Cover photo by Narciso Arellano

    Chart from Urbanation