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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  • Is cycling an inferior economic good?

    Across most global cities, higher household income tends to correlate directly with higher rates of car ownership, solo car commuting, and vehicle miles travelled. So, one could argue, as many do, that cycling is what economists call an inferior good, meaning that as incomes increase, demand for cycling decreases.

    But this isn’t perfectly true. Data from the US — an obviously car-dominated place — has shown that bicycle demand is actually U-shaped. A 2013 community survey showed that the poorest quartile of Americans accounted for 39% of bicycle commuting, whereas the wealthiest quartile accounted for 20%. It was the people in the middle who biked the least.

    In the case of the poorest quartile, it is out of necessity; for the wealthiest quartile, it is a choice, often for health, environmental, and overall efficiency reasons. Cycling saves time and money.

    It could also be the case that the wealthy are able to live closer to work in more walkable communities, and so biking becomes a more tenable option. Irrespective of the reason, it casts doubt on the argument that cycling is truly an inferior good.

    I actually think that the more fundamental cause is our built environment. If you design a place for cars, then of course, as people make more money, they’re going to choose the more convenient option and drive more. It’s what you’ve been optimizing for.

    On the other hand, if you design for transit or cycling, then you start to break this relationship with income.

    Consider that in some of the wealthiest arrondissements in Paris, private vehicle commuting is less than 10%; that in Manhattan, the majority of households do not own a car despite having incomes that far exceed the US national average; and that in Copenhagen, high-income earners in the city centre cycle at the exact same rate as low-income earners.

    Wealthy people will always optimize for convenience. In a car-centric city, that means driving. But this doesn’t mean that cycling is an inferior good; it just means we’re building inferior cities.

  • Do children need to grow up in a detached home with a backyard?

    This is a perennial debate in urbanist circles.

    Mike Moffatt, founding director of the Missing Middle Initiative, recently wrote about it in The Globe and Mail and, not surprisingly, he cites survey results indicating that, if you ask most people in this part of the world, 90% will tell you that a two-storey single-detached house with a backyard is the most suitable for a young family.

    However, a survey doesn’t actually answer the question. You need data. One challenge in parsing the data is that families who buy two-storey single-detached houses with a backyard also tend to be wealthier, more financially stable, and consistently employed. These features are broadly good for child development.

    But according to Moffatt, if you strip away these variables, most of the advantages typically associated with this housing type disappear, except for one: access to green space.

    Kids need space to play, and it’s good for development. But does the green space need to be a private backyard attached to the home? The article also cites a study from Scotland that determined the answer to be yes. Private green spaces where kids can play independently with minimal parental supervision are better than public parks.

    Perhaps.

    Scotland would fall into the “part of the world” that has a cultural bias toward single-family housing. There are many cities and places where most people live in multi-unit housing — places like continental Europe. Are the children there, you know, less developed?

    There seems to be a general consensus that children need exposure to green space. Here, for example, is another study from Barcelona. But because single-family housing is so rare there, the researchers didn’t even consider that option.

    Instead, they focused on urban spaces, finding that (1) green spaces proximate to schools were actually the most critical for cognitive development (versus near home and along their commute) and (2) trees and vegetation are an important filter for urban air pollution. So at this point, I’m going to reserve final judgement.

    That said, the value of green spaces in general leaves city builders with an important insight: you may want to start with the green space strategy and then figure out the building type. Because there’s an argument to be made that it’s one of the most important pieces for families.

  • The context behind the viral Edmonton multiplex site

    I’ve had a few people respond to my recent post about the multiplex battle underway in Edmonton, and so I now have a bit more information. The address of the house in the photo is 10014 147 Street NW. Here’s a post-construction photo from the street:

    Here’s a street view image showing the two flanking multiplexes under construction:

    Here’s how close the house is to the LRT station currently under construction at Stony Plain Road & 149 Street (this is the Valley Line West extension):

    Here’s the route map:

    And finally, here’s the station’s location in relation to downtown:

    Customarily, this is exactly what you want to do on top of and around new transit investments. You want to build density. Transit investment and land-use policy, as I like to harp on here, are integral to one another. And if you do everything correctly, you won’t have to worry about parking minimums.

    Happy Thanksgiving weekend, everyone.

  • How cities change their minds

    Toronto, like all great cities, is in constant change and transition. I did a search through my blog archive this morning (okay, AI did) and I found it telling to see the things I was writing about and advocating for in the early days, some 10 years ago.

    We used to talk about eradicating parking minimums, and it was a novelty whenever a new project was built with zero spaces. But now we don’t talk about that. Parking requirements? What are those? We let the market determine how much might be needed, if any at all.

    We also used to talk a lot about laneway housing — a lot. For decades, daring architects and urbanists were navigating labyrinthian land-use approvals to build the odd one for themselves. Oftentimes they were only permitted if a pre-existing coach house was already on the site. But as a rule, laneway houses were bad and not permitted.

    Critics were concerned that they would erode the fabric of our low-rise communities and overrun them with renters. I remember people telling me this to my face at committee meetings, and reading comments from folks who believed that laneways were unsavoury places, and so surely only questionable people would want to live in one.

    Fast forward to today, and laneway and garden suites are standard practice across Toronto. They are no longer novel. They’re just part of the housing supply that Toronto now builds. In fact, in many new housing projects, they are the most desirable suite on the property.

    Shifting scales, I also remember the challenges that the team initially faced in getting One Delisle approved at the intersection of Yonge & St. Clair. At 155m, it was the tallest development approval at the time, and it’s currently the tallest constructed building in the submarket.

    One of the criticisms was that it was not in keeping with the scale of the office buildings constructed at and around the intersection between the 1960s and the early 1980s. But is that where the line should be drawn? Let’s not forget that before its post-war development boom, Yonge & St. Clair was a predominantly low-rise area. Surely this jump in scale provoked similar concerns.

    The planning deal that was struck over the last development cycle was that low-rise neighbourhoods would go largely untouched and that density would be concentrated around transit stations and in specific nodes. These nodes were the housing supply outlets. The inverse would have been to redevelop our low-rise neighbourhoods.

    Today, the only comments I hear about One Delisle’s height are that it’s not tall enough given its beautiful architecture. Opinions clearly evolve, and sometimes the things we’re unsure about aren’t so bad after all. In fact, sometimes they can become a defining characteristic of a place.

  • The viral housing photo that triggered provincial overreach in Alberta

    Here’s a polarizing photo of the backyard of a house in Edmonton flanked by two multiplexes under construction. For additional drama, it was also taken with an ultra-wide lens, which is evident from the stretched-out walkway in the foreground. But even still, it is indeed a photo of a single-family house between two larger multi-unit buildings.

    When I first saw the photo, via this tweet, I actually read it all wrong. What I thought was the concern — underutilized residential land — was not the concern. The concern was too much housing. More specifically, too much infill rental housing.

    So much so that one of the next tweets I saw was the premier of Alberta, Danielle Smith, using this exact photo to say that the province would be coming over top of Edmonton to overturn its multiplex permissions and return the city to the “density and height rules that were in place before 2024” along with “common-sense minimum parking requirements.”

    This, in my opinion, is provincial overreach (which sadly happens here in Toronto too) and a shortsighted approach to city-building. Now, I don’t know the address of this house (I tried to find it), nor would I be familiar with the area, but I do know that cities all across North America are taking an important and critical look at their low-rise neighbourhoods.

    We know that many of them are unaffordable, car-oriented, and actively losing population. To turn back the clock and return to parking minimums is to restrict housing supply and signal that Edmonton is not yet prepared to be an urban leader in the 21st century. Alberta likes to tout its “free-market” brand, but of course this move is anything but.

  • The irony of neighbourhood stability

    From a planning perspective, Toronto’s low-rise Neighbourhoods are considered to be “physically stable” areas, meaning that any change must be gradual and sensitive to the existing scale. In practice, however, we know that these areas can be anything but stable once you look deeper.

    A recent Globe and Mail analysis of census data for both Toronto and Vancouver once again reveals what we already know: Canadians are living longer, having fewer children, and consuming more square footage per person. The result is a declining population base in many — and in some cases most — parts of our already built-up areas.

    The Globe compared figures from the 1971 and 2021 censuses for both Toronto and Vancouver, examining the population of “dissemination areas” – each one an area of a few blocks, typically home to about 500 people.

    In the Vancouver region, 21 per cent of those areas declined in population over those 50 years, losing 76,424 people in total. Many other areas failed to keep up with the quick growth of the region.

    In the Toronto region, the pattern is much more stark: Almost three-quarters of those established areas had declined by 2021, shedding a total of 540,789 people.

    Here lies the irony: policies designed for stability led to losses equal to the size of a small city. And it’s one of the reasons why there’s such a groundswell of interest in intensifying existing neighbourhoods. It’s a way to correct for a demographic shift that has hollowed out neighbourhoods, closed schools, and left existing infrastructure underutilized.

    Maybe we’ll even get them back to what they once were.

  • A stack of single-family houses on Avenue Road

    I stumbled upon this proposal for 996-998 Avenue Road after Chris Spoke stumbled upon it. It immediately stood out to me because it’s a site we looked at when it was for sale, and because it’s a handsome-looking proposal designed by Richard Wengle.

    The minor variance application is for a new eight-storey building with 6 residential units, 1 surface visitor parking space, 6 long-term bicycle spaces, and 12 parking spaces in two underground levels (accessed via a parking elevator). This description alone should tell you the target audience, but here’s the typical floor plan:

    The fact that this 2,790-square-foot plan only has two bedrooms tells you that this is geared toward wealthy empty-nesters (although the family room could very easily be converted to a third bedroom). So the project is effectively a stack of single-family houses, each with two parking spaces.

    This is a segment of the Toronto condominium market that has proven to be the most resilient in the current environment, but who knows how deep that demand goes. Whatever the case, it does feel appropriate for this submarket.

    I’m not suggesting that this kind of unit mix should be aspired to everywhere, but this overall scale of housing is something we should be replicating all across Toronto’s major streets and avenues.

    That we’re starting to see more of it feels like a maturation of the Toronto market, or perhaps it’s just a sign that larger projects are significantly harder to underwrite today.

  • The recurring promise and resistance of prefab housing

    It’s important to always remember that the idea of prefabricated housing has been around for a very long time, and yet its history is perhaps best described as a recurring cycle of revolutionary promise versus structural resistance.

    Some markets, such as Sweden and Japan, have managed to find success, with the majority of their low-rise housing now industrialized or at least involving factory-made components. But in many, or most, other markets, the prefab landscape remains checkered with bankruptcies.

    I was reminded of this when I watched this video about the 22 Parkside house in London by Richard and Su Rogers. Originally designed in 1967 for Richard’s parents, the house used prefabricated elements, such as simple steel frames and bus windows, with the hope that it might serve as a solution to Britain’s housing crisis.

    Richard jokes in the video that it never happened, but it remains a seminal modernist house nonetheless. (I love the yellow frames.) This problem is not as easy to solve as it may seem, because it’s not just a design and engineering problem.

  • The $1.3M house built on a leftover triangle

    blogTO just wrote about 61 Seaton Street, which is a house on an atypical triangular lot in downtown Toronto and is on the market right now for $1,329,000. The story goes that this lot sat vacant for decades before architect Paul Reuber bought it in the late 1990s and took on Toronto’s zoning by-law to build what you see here. My rough estimate is that the lot is around 115 square metres, which isn’t that small, but it is a triangle:

    I love these kinds of irregular sites because they force creativity and offer a way to unlock hidden value. Our cities are full of neglected micro-parcels, but they often go undeveloped because of land-use policies or because the economics don’t work. Yet small or irregular sites are part of what gives cities their character. If any of you have an oddball parcel of land that has been sitting vacant for decades, drop me an email.

    Parcel map from the City of Toronto

  • Fruktkiosk

    I’m a big proponent of urban kiosks for two reasons: 1) they can animate and anchor public life without a big footprint (see Lisbon) and 2) they can offer a low-cost option for small entrepreneurs to start something up. It can be a form of fast, low-friction real estate in an industry where most interventions are anything but fast and low-friction.

    For example, when we were in Paris last month, we were walking back to our hotel one evening after dinner and I naturally thought to myself, “We need crêpes.” So, I checked what was on our route home and I found a little kiosk aptly called Le Kiosque. They had crêpes, and the place was busy with lots of people speaking French.

    It’s located between the Grand Palais and a park on the Champs-Élysées, so if it were not for this kiosk, there wouldn’t have been anything available to us in this area, and we would have risked returning crêpe-less!

    These kiosks, as we have seen in Lisbon and other places, can also be downright beautiful. Here’s a fruit stand in Stockholm designed by DinellJohansson architects. It’s green, it has an awning and lights, and a nice yellow sign on the top. I’d share a photo here, but I don’t want the photographer to get mad at me, which sometimes happens. So click the link.

    Stockholm, like Toronto, also experiences snow and winter. It shows you that these urban interventions are weather-agnostic. Cities are missing a big opportunity by not allowing and/or encouraging more urban kiosks.