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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Category: Environment

  • Miami is the top US city for foreign businesses

    The Financial Times and Nikkei have just published their inaugural Investing in America report, which looks at the best US cities for foreign multinationals to invest in and do business in.

    To come up with this, they used about three dozen different metrics — everything from openness to quality of life. From what I can tell though, it doesn’t appear that climate risk factored much into this ranking. It should.

    There’s a lot of Florida on this list and Miami comes out on top, largely because, last year, it had the most foreign direct investment per capita of any US city. It also has a well-connected airport, two of the largest shipping ports in the US, and an international population.

    Lots of people and companies are going long Miami right now.

  • Wineries are a leading indicator for climate change

    We have talked about this before on the blog, but wineries continue to be a great leading indicator for our changing climate. Above is a chart from the Financial Times showing the official start dates of vendange for two wine regions in France. The Champagne region is further north and so the harvest dates naturally tend to be a bit later compared to the Rhône region. But in both cases, we seem to be seeing a shift to about a month earlier: September instead of October and August instead of September. And the turning point, at least according to this data, appears to have been 1987. The winemakers interviewed in this article appear confident that they can continue to adapt and find ways to deliver wonderful bottles of wine. But of course, that is not what you should be worrying about when you see this chart.

    Image: FT

  • California is set to ban gasoline cars by 2035

    According to this recent New York Times article, California is set to put into effect a new mandate that would require 100% of passenger vehicle sales in the state to be fully electric by 2035. Included within this mandate are also interim targets: 35% of all sales by 2026 and 68% of all sales by 2030.

    When I first read the article, my first thought was: “Isn’t 2035 kind of far away? Can’t we do this sooner?” And this is usually how my mind works when I see some date in the future. But then I remembered that EV sales last year in the US only totaled somewhere around 5% of all sales.

    So there is work to be done, and mandates like this will certainly help. As I understand it, this will be the first mandate of its kind in the US and also one of the strictest in the world. A lot of other countries have simply set targets, rather than all-out bans.

    This is what it means to lead. You do things before others.

  • A case study in urban resiliency

    One of the most exciting city building projects going on in Toronto right now is the revitalization of the 715-acre Port Lands area (here’s a map if you’d like to get situated). Despite its massive scale, it doesn’t seem to be receiving a lot of attention. And that’s probably because, at this stage, it’s mostly infrastructure work. It’s just a lot of soil being moved around.

    But it’s of course important work. The mouth of the Don River (where it meets Lake Ontario) was never properly engineered for resiliency, and so the entire area is at risk of flooding. That’s why this $1.25 billion effort to re-naturalize its interface is currently underway. The above video does a good job explaining just what that entails.

    At the same time, it is creating a wonderful city building opportunity — new parks for the illegal drinking of craft beers, new wildlife habitat, new meandering rivers for kayaking, and of course new housing and new jobs. But when you look at what’s planned, it’s hard not to feel like we’re missing the mark in terms of density.

    The plan for Villiers Island calls for some 4,900 homes (according to this Globe and Mail article). And the plan for the entire area calls for only about 20,000 homes (according to this recent Bloomberg article). Surely there’s room for at least a few more — especially if we’re hoping to support a new LRT line to the area.

  • Insufficient electrical capacity until 2035

    One of the things that you need to do when you’re constructing a building is arrange for new utility connections. Sometimes there’s enough capacity to support what you’re building and sometimes the capacities need to be upgraded (which usually becomes the responsibility of the developer).

    But according to this recent Financial Times article, some new applicants in west London are now being told that there won’t be “sufficient electrical capacity for a new connection” until, oh I don’t know, maybe 2035. And it could affect all new housing projects with 25 or more units.

    This is a pretty wild piece of news. And it certainly won’t be good for overall housing supply. The three west London boroughs that are being impacted by this capacity issue were responsible for about 5,000 new homes between 2019-2020. That’s about 11% of London’s total housing supply.

    So what and who is to blame for this? The Greater London Authority is saying that data centers are at least partially responsible. Too many new data centers in the area with high electrical loads.

    I don’t know exactly what is going on here (maybe some of you do), but now feels like a good time to turn our attention to solar power. I recently visited a large 3,000 panel rooftop installation here in the Greater Toronto Area, and so naturally there is a blog post in the works. Stay tuned.

  • A cactus-inspired building in Arizona

    I was on a panel last month with Jamie Miller, director of biomimicry at B+H Architects, and he remined me just how much I am fascinated by the use of biomimicry in architecture and engineering. Nature is pretty impressive and I think there’s a lot that we can learn from her.

    Here is a recently completed example of what I’m talking about.

    The project is the new Pinal County Attorney’s Office in Florence, Arizona (designed by DLR Group). What the team did here was try and emulate the skin of the saguaro cactus. That ultimately translated into vertical self-shading fins on the envelope of the building.

    Here’s what that looks like (via DLR Group):

    Here is some evidence suggesting that the fins are truly helping performance (via Urbanland):

    And here is the explanation for why it works and why nature does this (also via Urbanland):

    Sit in front of a saguaro cactus for an hour and you will see the way it protects itself and thrives in the intense desert heat. Its vertical fins provide continuous self-shading and redistribution of heat. This ability to self-shade breaks sunlight up into smaller areas that shift continually, preventing any one area of the cactus skin from overheating. This adaptation not only makes the saguaro viable, but also gives it a beautiful and distinct character. Creating a 3-D computer-generated model of a saguaro cactus and using a daylighting simulation model confirmed that no part of the plant received more than 15 to 20 minutes of direct sun at any one time, avoiding the possibility of sunburn.

    How cool.

  • Toronto-Montréal should be a 2 hour high-speed train ride

    The Quebec City-Windsor corridor is the most densely populated region in Canada. The last time I checked Wikipedia, it was reported to house about 18 million people, or about half of Canada’s entire population.

    So it is not surprising that there have been numerous high-speed rail studies for this corridor over the decades, as well as studies for other important links in Alberta (Edmonton-Calgary) and other parts of the country.

    And yet, Canada remains the only G7 country without any high-speed rail. Though to be fair, the US doesn’t have all that much either; certainly with respect to the size of its population.

    However, there is some good news. In March of this year, the Government of Canada announced a Request for Expression of Interest related to high frequency rail service between Quebec City and Toronto. More information, over here.

    But from what I have read, it’ll be a faster upgraded service (~200 km/h), but not true high-speed rail (~250-300 km/h). I took the TGV from Marseille to Paris last summer, and this is how fast we were going:

    If we’re going to do this, let’s be the absolute best in the world and not settle for mediocrity.

  • Which is the most important when it comes to new housing?

    If you can’t see the Twitter poll below, click here:

    At the time of writing this post, affordability was number one, followed by design and beauty, and then sustainability.

    Some of you were right to point out that these options are not always mutually exclusive. Affordability and sustainability, for instance, can be mutually reinforcing.

    Building in walkable and transit-rich neighborhoods where parking is not needed is both good for overall affordability (parking is usually a loss leader) and better for the environment.

    But in other cases, sustainability costs more. Triple-glazed windows might perform better than conventional double-glazed, but they’re also more expensive.

    Now, as a general rule, I believe in working hard to find the mutually reinforcing opportunities. How can we check all of the boxes and not have to compromise?

    But sometimes there’s no other option. So it is interesting to see how people answer the above question. Not surprisingly, affordability is top of mind.

    Which would you pick?

  • Renewable power now accounts for about 13% of global electricity generation

    This is an interesting chart from Nathaniel Bullard over at Bloomberg Green. In 1985 (the start of this chart), coal-fired power was responsible for about 38% of global electricity generation. This particular stat hasn’t changed all that much since then — the current figure is around 36% — but renewables have gone from 0.8% to 13% of global electricity. That is something. Since 2010, renewables are adding about 0.8% market share each year, and presumably this rate will only increase going forward. (Here, renewable power is defined as wind, solar, geothermal, biomass, and small hydropower.)

    Chart: Bloomberg Green

  • [Video] City building to achieve our carbon emission targets

    Today was the SvNSpeaks event that I blogged about last week. As a reminder, the conversation was about how best to remove overly prescriptive and rigid development policies in order to better achieve our climate change goals. John Lorinc and I ended up agreeing on a lot of points, so maybe that suggests there’s a relatively clear path here. Now it’s just a matter of taking action.

    It was a recorded event on LinkedIn, so if you’d like to have a listen, you can do that over here.