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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  • Toronto cycling year in review

    April 17, 2026 · View original

    The City of Toronto just released its 2025 Cycling Year in Review report. You can download it here. At the highest level, Toronto is now considered to be the 7th most bike-friendly city in North America, according to the Copenhagenize Index. Our snowier sibling, Montréal, is number one on the continent. And globally, we’re ranked 55th.

    Neither of these positions is particularly impressive given our scale and prominence as a global city, but progress is being made. In 2025, City Council approved 33 km of new bikeways, installed 14.11 km, and upgraded 9.02 km. Our infrastructure continues to get better.

    What I find particularly noteworthy and telling, though, is the adoption of the city’s bike share network. 2025 was another record year, with 7.8 million rides, representing a 13% increase from 2024. We’re still not at the level of Montréal, which recorded 13 million rides in 2024, but adoption is growing quickly.

    We have gone from around 665,000 rides in 2015 to nearly 8 million in the span of a decade. That’s a compounded annual growth rate of approximately 28%! Once again, we are reminded that if you build it, and make it easy and safe, more people will ride bicycles.

    Cover photo by Jason Ng on Unsplash

  • Are HST and DC rebates enough?

    April 16, 2026 · View original

    In addition to the recently proposed HST rebate for new homes, the federal government and the province of Ontario announced that they will be providing funding to help municipalities reduce their development charges by up to 50% over the next three years. And according to some estimates, these two measures will temporarily cut the cost of building a new home in Ontario by something in the range of 15-20%.

    From what I have seen, most, if not all, of these savings are now going to the consumer. As Mike Moffatt points out in this recent Globe and Mail article, developers are passing them along because of competition, because they need to compete with lower-priced resale homes, and because, frankly, it’s the only way to try and unstick this market.

    What is not so clear, though, is whether this is enough. Moffatt argues that “now that new homes can be sold at prices that make them viable to build, more homes will be built, adding further downward pressure on resale prices.” This is certainly one of the policy goals — to get more developers building again. But I don’t think we’re there quite yet. I guess we’ll find out soon enough.

    Cover photo by Jaipreet Singh on Unsplash

  • Success is making Miami into something else

    April 15, 2026 · View original

    Miami is a popular place these days for a whole host of reasons, namely that it’s sunny and warm, it doesn’t have state income taxes, and the broader market doesn’t seem to think that climate risk will pose an insurmountable challenge in the foreseeable future.

    But beneath the surface, there are shifts taking place. HOA fees and insurance premiums are rising (some people have a different view of climate risk), and the city is becoming increasingly unaffordable for the middle class.

    Between July 2024 and July 2025, Miami-Dade County lost an estimated 10,115 residents. This was the third-largest absolute population drop of all US counties last year, though it should be noted that this can be largely explained by changing immigration policies and a meaningful decrease in international migration.

    There are still plenty of people moving to the city; they just tend to skew richer. According to data from 2023, the average inbound salary was $178,000, and the average outbound salary was $89,000. The net result (via the Miami Herald):

    > Higher earners are moving here, lower-wage workers are leaving and the population as a whole has started to shrink. That’s not good for a community’s long-term economic health.

    Wealth is a good thing. But is it now too much of a good thing? At the very least, it demonstrates the fragility of finding the elusive equilibrium between being a successful city and remaining affordable and accessible to the middle class.

    To paraphrase Jane Jacobs, “The more successful a city is, the more it is under pressure to be something else.”

    Cover photo by Sarah Thorenz on Unsplash

  • How an architect mandate segments the French housing market

    April 14, 2026 · View original

    It is very common for jurisdictions to mandate the use of a licensed architect when building homes and buildings above a certain size. This is true in Ontario, and it’s true in places like France, though the thresholds can vary widely and change over time. Currently, the threshold is 150 m2 in France. Okay, so what? Well, it turns out this simple rule has second-order consequences, as they often do.

    Here’s a fascinating research paper by Antoine Levy titled Regulating Housing Quality: Evidence from France. One of the things he looks at is the distribution of floor area in new housing units over time, from before there was an architect requirement threshold (ART), to the moments where this threshold was gradually lowered:

    Prior to there being a threshold (1976), the chart shows a positive skew, but with a clustering of homes somewhere around 100 m2. Importantly, the distribution shows a smooth progression. But once an ART is implemented, the distribution then starts to show a clear spike right before the threshold, followed by a cliff and a “missing mass.”

    This, of course, makes sense. The market is pushing up against the glass to avoid having to use and pay for an architect. And the “missing mass” is the market shifting supply to below the threshold, or sufficiently beyond it. I mean, if you’re going to surpass the threshold, you may as well do it confidently.

    Now here’s where things start to get more interesting. Levy finds that this threshold acts as a focal point that segments the market. Households above the threshold tend to have higher incomes, and homes just past the limit were on average 8-10% more expensive to build. This additional cost cannot be justified by the addition of the architect’s fee alone.

    On the other side of the threshold, the concentration of demand “up against the glass” was shown to create economies of scale through more standardized home design and production. In other words, the threshold incentivizes the market to get really good at designing and building a certain scale of home.

    It was also shown to unintentionally promote greater housing density, because what the threshold does is create a soft cap on housing consumption for a large segment of the market. As you can see in the bottom right chart above, it effectively pulls supply back and under the threshold, away from larger homes and larger lots.

    It may seem fairly innocuous to mandate that people use an architect above a certain scale, and I will forever be a proponent of great design, but as Thomas Sowell once said, “there are no solutions, only trade-offs.”

    Cover photo by Alex Tyson on Unsplash

    Chart from Regulating Housing Quality: Evidence from France

  • Land is not the problem right now

    April 13, 2026 · View original

    This is a follow-up to yesterday’s post about too many people allegedly speculating on underutilized urban land. Over the weekend, I saw Patrick Condon, a professor at UBC and author of the book “Broken City: Land Speculation, Inequality, and Urban Crisis,” argue that “urban land is the impossible-to-ignore driver of the housing crisis.” Is it really? Let me offer the developer’s perspective and explain what has happened in Toronto.

    It is certainly true that the price of development land appreciated rapidly toward the end of the last cycle and that, at the time, there was enough margin for developers to bifurcate the work of zoning land and actually building out projects. But since 2022, that has gone away, and we have seen a dramatic correction in pricing.

    According to Bullpen and Batory’s Q4-2025 High-Rise Land Insights Report, the average sold price for a high-density site in the GTA has gone from $119 per buildable square foot in 2019 to $78 per buildable square foot at the end of last year (a ~34% decline).

    But this is a blended average. In my experience, the falloff in pricing has been even more dramatic and, in many cases, land now feels illiquid. With rents declining and new condominiums not selling, what’s the value? Land prices are a function of what you can do with the land. If what you can do disappears, so too does the value. Land is not the problem right now.

    But even if we were to ignore current market factors, it’s debatable whether land prices were really the primary driver of unaffordable housing. About six years ago, Toronto developer Urban Capital published a pro forma comparison between a project they did in 2005 and a project they were doing in 2020.

    What they found over this 15-year period was that construction costs increased by 91%, land costs increased by 160%, and government fees and taxes increased by some 413% (development charges alone increased by 3,244%!). The price of development land certainly increased, surpassing the rate of inflation, but we can’t ignore that roughly a third of the price of a new home became government fees and taxes.

    Today, there are countless development models that don’t pencil even if you plug the land value in at $0. That tells me that we’ve got bigger problems.

    Cover photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

  • Carrots over sticks

    April 12, 2026 · View original

    This recent article by Inga Saffron in the Philadelphia Inquirer is behind a paywall and so I, admittedly, haven’t read it. But it seems to cover a common urban dilemma: Center City Philadelphia has too many surface parking lots while simultaneously having a need for more housing. The problem, as the argument goes, is that the city’s tax system is under-assessing vacant land, creating an incentive to sit on it, and a disincentive to develop new housing. The solution: tax land more; tax improvements less.

    (Forgive me if this isn’t entirely accurate with Saffron’s position.)

    It’s a classic “stick versus carrot” approach. Let’s beat landowners and developers into building more housing. Now, in some situations, I can see the allure of this line of thinking. If we’re talking about someone who has owned a surface parking lot for many decades and it’s generating a nice stream of cash, there might be little incentive to develop it or sell the land to someone who will develop it. But as a general rule, I believe that carrots are far more productive than sticks.

    I have at least two concerns with trying to tax landowners into compliance. One, you have to be careful not to create a double-edged sword. Taxing based on the “highest and best use” can work to suppress some of the small businesses that make cities great. For example, should a site with a local bookstore in a small heritage building, or a mom-and-pop restaurant in a single-storey building, be forced into higher-density housing? I don’t think so.

    Two, blaming low taxes for the lack of housing can distract from the more fundamental question: Why aren’t more developers building housing if there’s a need and an availability of land? When I lived in Philadelphia during grad school, I remember developers telling me the following: “The thing about Philly is that the build-costs are the same as New York (Philly is a strong labour union city), but the rents you can command are obviously nowhere near the same.” Sticks don’t work if the math doesn’t math!

    I don’t know how the market has evolved since the late 2000s, but I do know that developers want to develop. And they will do so if the economics make sense and the right carrots exist.

    Cover photo by G Visuals on Unsplash

  • Most people don’t want Paris, they want a city that looks like Paris

    April 11, 2026 · View original

    I recently came across this tweet by Patrick Collison, the CEO of Stripe, where he argues that the YIMBY movement “employs an inadvertently dishonest sleight-of-hand” when it promises “Paris-scale density” only to ultimately deliver something quite different in cities.

    In the post, he shares a fairly banal mid-rise development that looks nothing like Paris, and then says that if we’re talking about Paris-style building, he’d be all for it, and likely voters would be too. His point seems to be that if only we made developments more beautiful, fewer people would oppose them.

    I had to read the tweet a few times to make sure I was understanding it correctly because the “Paris-scale density” language was throwing me off. Paris is not a medium-density city. It’s a high-density city and generally considered to be the highest-density city in Europe. Is this the Paris promise?

    I don’t actually think most people want Paris; they want a city that looks like Paris, and that’s because they ignore most of its urban ingredients and only focus on the two most obvious things: (1) its outward architectural expressions and (2) its modest building heights.

    Paris-scale density is single-stair buildings with minimal setbacks and stepbacks, dark light wells, tiny 130-square-foot studios in the penthouse, no parking minimums, and area population densities that can exceed 50,000 people per km2. Is this what most voters want, provided they look pretty?

    For the purposes of this post, let’s just run with the argument that urban environments people broadly feel are beautiful would elicit less NIMBY opposition. Just build Paris-like buildings. Unfortunately, I also don’t think the answer is as simple as this.

    As Sam Deutsch of Better Cities points out, this runs counter to NIMBY history. Let’s not forget that the Paris everyone visits today was vehemently opposed during the time of its initial development and that the city’s most iconic structure was called a hateful column of bolted sheet metal, among other things.

    Beautiful buildings and great places are, of course, fundamental to cities. But even then, expect turbulence along the way.

    Cover photo by Deniz Bireroglu on Unsplash

  • One front door

    April 10, 2026 · View original

    In April of 2025, a bill was introduced in Washington, DC, called the One Front Door Amendment Act. It aims to do what many cities are now working on or considering, which is to allow single-stair/egress buildings up to six storeys. This, as most of you know, is very common throughout the world. It’s a key ingredient in fine-grained infill housing, but it is generally not permissible in Canada and the US above certain build heights. In DC, I understand the current limit is 3 storeys.

    The bill had its first Council reading last month and it passed unanimously (13-0). There is the small problem of there being no funding to enact the bill (it was passed “subject to appropriations’), but I call that a minor detail. The deadline for the Department of Buildings to issue new rules is July 1, 2027, which means this is how long they have to find the money and then do the technical work required to allow these new single-stair buildings. It’s not done yet, but from the outside, it appears to be progressing.

    Now the obvious question becomes: what the hell is taking Toronto so long? What is our deadline for implementation? As far as I know, there isn’t one. (Please correct me if I’m wrong.) We now permit 6-storey apartments along all “Major Streets” in the city — from a planning perspective, at least — except the economics do not work at scale, and the requirement for two exit stairs remains one of the major obstacles. Enough with the navel-gazing. Let’s get building, Toronto!

    Cover photo by Andy Feliciotti on Unsplash

  • How Ontario’s new HST rebate changes new home pricing

    April 9, 2026 · View original

    On March 25, 2026, the Ontario government announced that it would be expanding the HST rebate to lower the cost of new homes. Here’s the full media briefing PDF. Since then, every developer, lawyer, and sales team in the city has been scrambling to figure it all out and incorporate it into their projects. This includes us.

    Today on the blog, I thought it might be useful to do the following: (1) explain how I understand the proposed rebate program works (or will work, to be exact), (2) talk about how I’m seeing the industry respond to the announcement (naturally, there’s been some criticism), and (3) shamelessly plug one of our HST rebate-eligible homes at Junction House.

    First, I need to caveat this post by saying that, oh boy, I’m not an accountant or lawyer, and that this proposal is still subject to regulatory enactment. So, I could be wrong about something, the proposal might not get passed, or maybe something outrageous happens, potentially precipitated by a post on Truth Social. Do your own research. Talk to your advisors. Having said all this, the industry fully expects this to pass, and developers are already relying on the fact that it will, perhaps by this summer.

    Second, it’s helpful to understand how new homes are typically priced in the market and how the existing new home HST rebate works. Developers in the Toronto market typically price their homes inclusive of HST, but net of the current new home HST rebate. As it stands today, this rebate caps out at $24,000, translating to an effective HST rate that is lower than the current rate of 13%, depending on the price of the home.

    Let me explain:

    – Price on the purchase agreement: $925,000 (again, this is inclusive of HST but net of the $24k rebate) – Base price excluding any HST = ($925,000 + $24,000) / 1.13 = $839,823.01 – HST payable to government = $925,000 – $839,823.01 = $85,176.99 – Effective HST rate = $85,176.99 / $839,823.01 = 10.1% (which is less than 13% because of the $24k rebate)

    In practice, the way this typically works is that the buyer, who is assumed to qualify for the rebate, assigns it to the developer as part of the closing process. The developer receives the benefit of this rebate, and so they only need to remit the remaining 10.1% to the government. Importantly, this particular rebate is meant for people intending to move into the new home. If they are not doing this, then a separate rebate process applies.

    Now, here’s what’s proposed for the new HST program, which is available only for purchases made between April 1, 2026 and March 31, 2027, and applicable to homes used as a primary place of residence or as a residential rental property:

    – Up to $1,000,000: Full 13% HST rebate (up to $130,000). – $1,000,001 to $1,500,000: Flat maximum rebate of $130,000. – $1,500,001 to $1,850,000: The rebate phases down proportionally from $130,000 to $24,000. – Over $1,850,000: The rebate is capped at the standard Ontario maximum of $24,000 (same as today).

    Given that most developers have been pricing inclusive of HST, but net of the current rebate, there’s some math involved to figure out what purchasers will ultimately be paying for a new home bought over the next 12 months. But for homes under $1,850,000, the answer is less than before! (More on this below.)

    Another important question is how this will work given that the eligibility time period has started, but the proposal hasn’t passed and isn’t in force yet. The way we are thinking about it is generally in the following two ways.

    If a purchaser is buying a new home and closing on it today, they will have to pay the HST as has been customary in the past, but then the expectation is that, once the proposal is enacted, the purchaser will get it refunded (as per the above). Going back to our $925k example above, the $85k would still get paid up front, and then remitted to the government, but then the purchaser would get it back, bringing their net price down to $839k.

    If a purchaser is buying a new home today and expecting to close on it after the proposal is enacted, one reasonable assumption is that the proper protocols will be in place such that the purchaser isn’t paying the HST upfront only to get it back later. In our example, they would instead be paying the $839k up front. Developers are contracting for this scenario today, but how exactly the paperwork will flow in the future remains TBD.

    One of the unexpected benefits of this proposal, at least for me, is that it has me thinking more in terms of net prices, excluding any HST. And I like this better. I think it’s a more transparent way to communicate with purchasers. We as an industry should use this moment as an opportunity to move toward this practice.

    In fact, what I would like to be able to do is enumerate the following to buyers: “Here is the price of your new home. Now let’s add the HST, development charges, education development charges, parkland dedication fees, community benefit charges, and so on.” Because I think, only then, would it become clear to the general public how much we tax new housing.

    Now let’s talk more broadly about how the market is responding to this proposal.

    One of the criticisms of this proposal is that it will only serve to increase developer margins. And indeed, this proposal does represent a cost reduction in development pro formas. But what I will say is that every single developer that I have spoken to is using this as an opportunity to reduce their pricing and pass along the savings (typically 1:1) to new home buyers. The reality is that the market is too soft to do anything else.

    This is a perfect example of the cost-plus pricing model that we often talk about on this blog. Developers typically price based on their costs. Now that costs have come down (because of this proposal), they are lowering their prices accordingly. And those who do not follow suit will no longer be competitive in the market.

    The market froze out in recent years because, suddenly, the price people were willing to pay for new homes was less than developers’ costs. The floor had been reached. But now the floor has been lowered in a direct effort to clear out inventory and reset the market. It’s a good time to be a new home buyer, and I have already started to feel a change in sentiment across the industry.

    On that note, I would like to turn your attention to a penthouse suite at Junction House that we just listed for sale. It’s a two-bedroom and two-bath home and, yes, it’s HST rebate-eligible! It’s one of my favourite suites in the building. If you’d like to learn more, reach out to Paul Johnston at Unique Urban Homes ([paul@pauljohnston.com](mailto:paul@pauljohnston.com)).

  • The return of the American rowhome

    April 8, 2026 · View original

    My internet friend Bobby Fijan is one of the founders of a mission-driven company called The American Housing Corporation. It was founded in 2024. They opened their first factory in Austin in 2025, and they’re now actively working on their first collection of modular homes.

    The mission is both simple and awesome: The American middle class can no longer afford a family-oriented starter home in the cities they love. This has people leaving cities, abstaining from having kids, and forgoing economic opportunity.

    To correct this, they’re going back to what they refer to as “the original American urban home” — the rowhome. And they’re working to perfect it through vertical integration and a modular approach where prefabricated components are built in a factory and then shipped flat-packed to the site.

    They’re obviously not the first company to try to reduce the cost of new housing through prefabrication, but they believe that total vertical integration will make them different. And boy, would I like to see them succeed.

    If we truly want to bring down the cost of new housing, we need to (1) stop taxing it like we want less of it and (2) think of it in every possible way as a repeatable product and not as a custom prototype.

    Good luck, team!

    Photos from The American Housing Corporation