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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  • The toughest market I have faced in my real estate career

    Once a year, I teach a session in Carleton University’s Certificate in Real Estate Development program. That once a year is coming up this Thursday, and so I’m spending today (Sunday morning) preparing for the class.

    This is the third time I’ve participated. And my usual topic is to cover the complete condominium development process, provide commentary on what’s happening in the market, and then discuss how developers might best navigate whatever it is that’s going on.

    These latter points are particularly important today. A lot has changed over the last year. In fact, you could rightly call it a real estate sea change.

    This is the toughest market that I have had to face in my real estate career. 2008 was certainly bad. I couldn’t find work in the US at that time, or in Ireland where I had spent a summer working for a real estate firm. But I did manage to find work in Canada. Here, things didn’t feel quite so bad.

    According to all the gray hairs, the early 90s recession was considerably worse. That was the really scary time in Canadian real estate. (See: Bay-Adelaide stump.) But already today, the comparisons have started: “This is feeling more like the early 90s than the GFC.”

    It’s probably too early to really tell. But regardless, this downturn is going to mean problems for some, and opportunities for others.

  • Framing nearing completion at Parkview Mountain House

    The building season is short in Park City. There was still snow on our site in May and there was snow again on our site by October. You can certainly build through the winter, but it’s not ideal. It slows you down, and so the team has been racing to get “closed in” before the real winter weather arrives. (Park City Mountain Resort opens for the season on November 17.)

    Right now, it looks like we’ll be finished framing by early next week. We have our framing inspection scheduled with Summit County on Wednesday. Here’s a progress shot of level three from last week:

    This is the top floor of the house, which will house the kitchen, dining area, living room, terrace (which is where the above photo was taken from), and two bay windows. The far one is going to serve as a seat in the living room, and the closer one (on the right) is going to be a workspace area. In both cases, they’re designed to orient you towards the trees and the mountain.

    Overall, this was Mattaforma’s design strategy — to create a kind of introverted house. The windows facing the street are generally small and placed to frame very specific views of the landscape; whereas the windows facing the trees and mountain are generous. The intent was to always connect you with nature as you move throughout the house.

    Sadly, PMH won’t be available for rent this winter. But if you’d like to get on the list for next summer and winter, click here.

  • That time Anthony Bourdain visited Toronto

    I’m a big fan of Anthony Bourdain and I have seen a lot of his shows. However, up until last night, I was under the impression that he had never done an episode about Toronto. Turns out I was wrong. Yesterday I discovered that, back in 2012, he did one as part of his two-season show, The Layover.

    As a born and raised Torontonian and as a fervent supporter of this city, I’m always a combination of excited and nervous before I watch a show like this. I’m excited because I love Toronto and I like seeing it showcased. But I’m nervous because, what if they don’t do a good job showing it off?

    Maybe it’s hometown insecurity, or maybe it’s just my inner desire to want to properly sell Toronto to the rest of the world. Either way, my mixed feelings were not unfounded.

    The episode opens with Bourdain coming into downtown from the airport and immediately saying, “It’s not a good looking town. They sort of got the worst of the architectural fads of the 20th century. It looks like every public school in America, every third-tier city library, Soviet chic, butt-ugly, glass box.”

    Things get generally more positive after this initial impression, and eventually Bourdain does admit that the city has great food, nightlife, diversity, etc. But there is this interesting moment in the middle of the episode where a bunch of Torontonians are asked: What one thing would you say best describes Toronto?

    Most didn’t know how to answer it.

    This got me thinking:

    What is our thing? There are, of course, the obvious answers. We are diverse. We have great ethnic foods. We have numerous sports teams. And people are generally nice. But these are a little too generic and boring for me. There are also truly unique features like our ravine network, but I wouldn’t call this our single most notable feature.

    The right answer, in my view, is that Toronto is the economic and cultural capital of Canada. It used to be Montréal (which you all know I love deeply), but that’s no longer the case today. Broadly speaking, there’s only one global city in this country and, like it or not, it’s Toronto.

    I think it’s important to recognize this ranking because economic opportunity is one of the principal reasons that people live in cities in the first place. And if we are to compete globally, we are going to need to be both confident about our place in the world and insanely ambitious about our goals.

    So that’s my answer: Toronto has global city status. But clearly we need to be much better at recognizing and building on it.

    Photo by Mvrkle on Unsplash

  • BC has proposed building more housing near transit

    These days, it is cool to be pro housing.

    Unaffordability has apparently gotten so bad that we are now seeing a groundswell of support for increasing overall housing supply. So politicians are doing things. And this week, the Province of British Columbia proposed some new legislation related to transit hubs.

    As proposed, the legislation will require BC municipalities to designate Transit Oriented Development Areas (TOD Areas), mandate minimum heights and densities within certain radii (broadly 800m in the case of rapid transit stations), and remove parking minimums.

    Not surprisingly, a lot of people are excited about this and, there’s no question, that this is directionally the right thing to do. But I have two immediate thoughts.

    The first is that the devil is always in the details. This all sounds good, but: Are the proposed minimum densities and heights going to be enough to stimulate development? For example, is 4 the right minimum FAR for 300m from a transit station?

    The second thought has to do with the level of excitement surrounding this announcement. (I’m going strictly based on Twitter, which admittedly could just be my bubble). The fact that city builders are so excited about this announcement tells us a lot about the current state of affairs.

    Because what this proposed legislation is more or less saying is the following: “Hey, here’s a great idea! Let’s build more housing around higher order transit and not force the market to build unnecessary parking.”

    Is this really something that should be considered novel? I thought this was just how cities should work.

  • The digital layer for the physical world

    This is one example of how AR (augmented reality) can be used in a large retail store:

    In this particular case, it’s an example of a customer being guided to a particular screw in a large hardware store.

    The company, which is called Hyper, is also working to expand their product to other physical locations, such as malls, campuses, airports, and hospitals. And broadly speaking, their mission is to “build the digital layer for the physical world.”

    Where they have started seems to make a lot of sense. If I’m in a large hardware store and I’m trying to find a very specific product, I’d be more than happy to pull out my phone and have it guide me there.

    I could also see myself pulling out my phone if I were standing in Yosemite National Park and I wanted to know all of the important points-of-interest. So from these perspectives, AR seems obviously useful.

    But these are discrete moments in time. I’m looking for something right now, help me. And this is arguably how we will all start regularly using AR — with our phones for brief periods of time.

    But at some point, it is likely to become more seamless and constant. Maybe that sounds far fetched (or completely undesirable). But I’m still hoping that this becomes possible with a cool pair of sunglasses.

  • Salt Lake City wants to build a new linear park around downtown

    It is well known that Salt Lake City has some of the biggest blocks and widest streets in the United States. This is typically a challenge if you’re trying to create a walkable urban environment; however, it can also be an opportunity, because it means you have a lot of public space that you can do other things with.

    It is for these reasons that SLC is working on something called the Green Loop:

    And the idea is to turn a ring of downtown streets into a new linear park that looks something like this:

    More specifically, the Green Loop wants to do the following five things (copied verbatim):

    • Develop a robust downtown urban forest
    • Serve as an active transportation corridor for walking and biking
    • Improve water quality through stormwater management
    • Create inviting social spaces that provide a variety of amenities and attractions
    • Create public front yards and gardens within the downtown that support the needs of all users

    In my mind, albeit as a non-Salt Laker, this has the potential to be truly transformational for the city and as impactful as the High Line was for New York. So if you are a local, I would encourage you to complete this short project survey. It’s open until Nov 30.

  • New York City has a lot of construction scaffolding

    More specifically, it has this many:

    This, according to a NYC government website, equals 8,660 active shed permits covering 1,959,444 linear feet. And on average, these construction sheds are erected for 493 days. If you’ve been to New York recently, this will all sound right to you.

    I thought I had read somewhere that this has to do with a property tax benefit. Something about if you keep your hoarding up after construction completion, you can avoid immediate reassessment.

    But according to some sources, the proliferation of sheds is mostly driven by the city’s Facade Inspection & Safety Program, which requires that all buildings taller than 6 floors have their facades closely inspected every 5 five years.

    So presumably, keeping these up for an extended period of time is the less costly and less risky option.

  • Multiple expression and our bias toward old architecture

    You may not have ever used this exact term before, but I’m sure that most of you know what it is. On his blog over the weekend, Witold Rybczynski wrote about a new architectural term he just learned called: “multiple expression.” What it refers to is the use of different architectural styles on a long facade in order for the building to appear as if it’s multiple smaller ones.

    And today, I would say that this is largely viewed as a positive thing. Typically it is done to “break up a massing” or create a “fine-grained retail experience.” In fact, you’ll find things like this in some design guidelines. Here’s one from Toronto’s mid-rise performance standards:

    This doesn’t explicitly stipulate that architects should use “multiple expressions”, but it does suggest that long repetitive facades are suboptimal, and that they should be broken up. But Witold’s view is the opposite. He argues that this “bespeaks a lack of confidence, a poverty of the imagination.” And he gives the example of Park Crescent in London, designed by architect John Nash.

    It’s long (well over 60m) and it’s repetitive:

    Perhaps a good counter example to this would be Mirvish Village in Toronto, which was designed by Henriquez Partners and which has been largely celebrated as a way of creating the feeling of fine-grained urbanism in a larger master-planned development. Here it is on Google, still under construction:

    So what is it that makes Mirvish Village a generally desirable outcome in today’s planning environment, even though I suspect that most people would still appreciate what John Nash did on Park Crescent back in the early 1800s? Are we saying — with our guidelines — that we like Park Crescent, but that we shouldn’t do that ever again today?

    And to what extent do age and architectural style play into these opinions? Are long repetitive facades over 60m acceptable as long as the architectural style is “Regency” and the buildings aren’t too tall? Is modernism the problem? Because here’s another example from London: The Alexandra and Ainsworth Estate.

    Built in the 1970s, it is a Brutalist housing estate with a largely repetitive design, and even a slight curve reminiscent of Park Crescent:

    Does this have confidence and imagination? Witold would probably say no.

    In the end, I guess the answer is that it all depends. Guidelines are just that — guides. They are not set in stone rules that must never be broken under any circumstances. That would be to reduce architecture to a strict science, and there’s clearly also an art component to building great cities.

    “Multiple expression” is usually done to create the feeling of finer-grained urbanism. But sometimes — if you’re old and regal-looking enough — the opposite can be okay too.

  • First concrete poured for One Delisle’s raft foundation

    This past week we poured the first bit of concrete in the giant rat slab foundation (or mat foundation) that sits, or will sit, at the bottom of One Delisle. At its deepest point, below the building’s core, it will be over 4m tall. Meaning, the area occupied by the gentlemen in the above photo will be fully covered in concrete when it’s complete. Note the height of the rebar in the middle of the photo. This picture doesn’t even do it justice, though. You need to be on site and down in the bottom of the hole to really feel it. There’s a lot of bar, and it’s going to be very deep.

    In our case, this raft slab foundation will, as it sounds, serve as the building’s foundation. This is what the tower will rest on. However, raft slabs can also serve the function of withstanding hydrostatic pressures from below (groundwater). That is the case with the raft slab foundation at Junction House given that we have a watertight “bathtub” design for the underground. However, that’s not the case here at One Delisle, as the groundwater levels aren’t as high and this will not be a “bathtubbed” underground. So the job of this giant slab is as a mat foundation.

    Disclaimer: I am not a structural engineer or a hydrogeological engineer. What do I know?

  • Is less people walking bad for traffic fatalities?

    Here’s some recent data, via CityLab, suggesting that Americans are walking less and driving less, but killing more people when they do drive around. (The report is based on data from 2019 to 2022.)

    My first reaction to these high-level findings is that they seem to make sense. This time period was the pandemic. And people were locked away at home (though I used to take some seriously long walks around downtown during this dark time).

    So I don’t know, I’m not sure we can conclude that walking less is truly a structural phenomenon. Similarly, I’m not sure that we can immediately conclude that cars are becoming increasingly more dangerous.

    According to Wikipedia, deaths per capita, deaths per billion vehicle miles traveled, and total deaths, have all been generally declining in the US since the 1960s.

    However, I do wonder if there’s some sort of correlation between people walking less and car-related fatalities. The most dangerous streets, in my mind, are often the ones that don’t have a lot of pedestrians.

    That’s why, broadly speaking, it feels safer walking around Manhattan than it does Los Angeles. So maybe less people walking is enough to trigger an increase in pedestrian fatalities.