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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  • More lights on buildings!

    Back in undergrad, I spent a summer living and working in Taipei and Hong Kong. It was my first time being in either of these cities and I absolutely loved it. I was studying architecture. I was really developing my love of big cities. And these felt like two very real and big cities.

    Below is a cheesy tourist photo that I paid someone to take of me from the Kowloon Pier. I still have access to it because obviously my mom has it framed and prominently displayed in her kitchen:

    I’m sharing this photo because one of the things that really stood out to me about Hong Kong, in particular, was how they lit their buildings. There were neon signs (which is something that Hong Kong is, or least was, famous for); lights shining up into the sky (bad, I know); and full light shows and animations across entire building elevations.

    I immediately thought to myself: “Why don’t we have fun like this? Especially considering that Toronto can get kind of dark during the winter.”

    Well, some twenty years later, we are now starting to have more lights. We fought hard for our placemaking sign at Junction House. The CN Tower has since been illuminated. And most recently, we got 160 Front Street West. But it turns out that building lights can be a little divisive:

    My view is exactly what it was when I first landed in hot and humid Hong Kong. And so I respectfully disagree with Jocelyn Squires (though I have great admiration for her work). Architectural lighting adds color and dynamism to our cities. It can also help our cities from all looking the same.

    Let’s stop being so conservative and have some fun. Nice work, 160 Front.

  • A lot less new housing

    During COVID, every developer was terrified that their costs were going to run way from them. According to this recent Globe and Mail article, residential building costs increased 55% since 2020. At the same time, city fees were being increased and some people, for whatever reason, believed this would not have an impact on home prices. Developers will always seek to profit maximize and charge whatever the market will bear, so why bother trying to reduce costs? This is/was one school of thought.

    Despite this cost fear, the market managed to keep up for a period of time. Capital was cheap, as we all know. And that kept things going, until it was no longer the case. According to the same Globe article, there are 83 residential projects and 28,428 homes that have not launched (sales) over the last two years in the Greater Toronto Area because of market conditions. This year alone, the number is estimated at 14,000 homes. So supply has fallen off, and that’s because demand and buying power have fallen off.

    But let’s think of this in economics terms. Price and quantity demanded are usually inversely correlated. Meaning, if the price of something goes up, demand will go down. And if the price of something goes down, demand will go up. So in theory, there are still prices that will get 28,428 people excited to buy a new home. I mean, if I were to list a condo in downtown Toronto for $500 psf right now, I’m pretty sure that most with the means would jump at the opportunity.

    The problem is that whatever these prices are, they are largely beneath the floor price of where most developers can build to today. Developers weren’t bluffing, costs really are too high now. And when this happens, the answer is simple: you can’t build. A new equilibrium will eventually be found. But in the short-term, we should all expect new housing supply to remain limited. And because there’s always a lag with real estate, the effects of this shortage will be felt in the years to come.

  • Best new tall building of 2023

    The Quay Quarter Tower in Sydney has been just been awarded the “best new tall building” of 2023 by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH). Deigned by 3XN and BVN, it’s a great adaptive reuse story.

    The project is a renovation and expansion of an existing 1970s building. And the team managed to retain 65% of the original structure (slabs, columns, and beams) and 95% of the original core.

    This results, according to their calculation, in 12,000 tons of embodied carbon savings. The equivalent of 35,000 flights between Sydney and Melbourne. At the same time, the team managed to add 45,000 m2 of new floor area to the site by grafting new slabs onto the existing ones.

    But let’s get back to these carbon savings.

    According to this site, there are 37 direct fights between Sydney and Melbourne each day. That’s about 13,505 flights per year, meaning that the carbon savings from not fully demolishing this building (and starting fresh) are equal to about 2.6 years of people not flying back and forth between these two cities.

    If you consider how long buildings typically last (this one was relatively young at under 50 years), it kind of makes buildings seem less bad. Of course, we’re only talking about and comparing embodied carbon. There’s also the ongoing operation of the building.

    In any event, a deserving project. Congrats to the team. For more on the project, click here.

    Photo via Dezeen

  • Creating homes for people

    Bill Gairdner of Gairloch Developments sent me this message the other morning:

    He is talking about Junction House and he is, of course, right. It is a very cool feeling to create homes for people.

    It’s not easy building buildings. People get upset at you. They tell you that you’re ruining their community. And broadly speaking, it can feel like every imaginable obstacle has been placed in front of you to make things more difficult.

    But at the end of the day, once the dust settles, there will be places to live where places did not exist before. And then people will move into these places and transform them into homes.

    They’ll make them their own, create new memories, and, in the case of the people that Bill was referring to, they’ll raise a family.

    I’m not trying to make this sound more grandiose than it deserves to be. But I am being honest when I say that I know the team feels both a sense of honor and a great sense of responsibility because of the work we do.

    You want people to be happy and you want the city to be a better place. So it’s hard not to feel a little emotional when you see people moving into a place that you’ve worked tirelessly on for several years.

    Yeah, it is a cool feeling, Bill.

  • Higher development charges, less federal money

    Metro Vancouver, which includes the City of Vancouver and 20 other municipalities, is proposing to increase its development cost charges (DCC):

    Metro Vancouver is proposing to increase DCCs by roughly $23,000 per new single-family home; $21,000 per new townhome; and $14,000 per new apartment. For example, fees for a townhouse in Vancouver will rise from $10,027 today to $30,861 by 2027.

    In response to this, federal housing minister, Sean Fraser, has just pulled $138 million in funding that was intended to accelerate housing permits and new affordable housing projects in Surrey and Burnaby.

    This makes some sense. Because it is pretty weird to say, “Hey, we need more affordable housing. Give us some money for this and, while you do that, we’re also going increase the cost of building new housing.”

    Of course, this is the whole growth-should-pay-for-growth mantra. And supposedly, there’s growth-related infrastructure that needs to be built.

    To be fair, Metro Vancouver is also proposing to increase its property taxes: 12% in the first year, 11% for the next two years, and then 5% for the next three years. So this is not all going onto new supply.

    I don’t know enough about the finances of Metro Vancouver to comment on these numbers specifically, but I do think it’s important that policy makers understand what the current market environment means for new housing.

    It is difficult, and in many cases impossible, to underwrite new housing projects today. Which means that even if all fees and charges were to remain unchanged, we are going to see a decrease in new housing supply.

    Photo by Matt Wang on Unsplash

  • Canada has an existential productivity problem

    Canada has a lot going for it:

    By land mass it is the second-largest country in the world, with the longest coastline. Bookended by the vast Pacific and Atlantic oceans it has enormous trading advantages, alongside access to the largely untapped Arctic to its north. It is a net energy exporter; it has the third-largest proven oil reserves and is the fifth-largest producer of natural gas — but it also boasts large deposits of critical minerals vital to the green energy transition. And, of course, it borders the world’s largest economy.

    And yet:

    By purchasing power parity, its economy is ranked 15th globally by size, behind the likes of Turkey, Italy and Mexico. The OECD has forecast Canadian per capita gross domestic product growth up to 2060 to be the lowest among advanced nations.

    The problem:

    Poor productivity is at the heart of the country’s growth challenges. In an hour a Canadian worker produces just over 70 per cent of what an American can — that’s below the euro area and even the UK based on 2022 data. Many would have expected the resource-rich economy to benefit as globalisation powered forward, but its relative labour productivity has actually slipped since 2000.

    The solution is probably a simple one: We need to innovate, invest more in R&D, and create stronger links between research and Canadian businesses. But executing on this has proven difficult:

    Enormous efforts have been made to understand why businesses in Canada invest so much less in R&D than their counterparts in the U.S., much of Western Europe, South Korea and Japan. Is it our reliance on the export of natural resources and agricultural products? Is it reduced incentives to innovate for our heavily regulated and profitable oligopolies in sectors such as banking and telecommunications? Is it our decades-old reliance on incentivizing industrial R&D through federal and provincial tax credits?

    It’s hard to imagine a more important topic affecting all Canadians. So I would encourage you to read this recent opinion piece by David Naylor (president emeritus of the University of Toronto) and Stephen J. Troops (president of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research).

    It’s a balanced piece. Neither of them are arguing for “empty credentialism” or for research that remains in academia. What matters is what we do with the work that our smartest minds are doing. And the overarching point is that innovative research needs to find demand within Canadian businesses.

    Right now, we’re very bad at this. That needs to change.

    Chart: Globe and Mail

  • Blockchain gas fees are dropping — that’s good

    I watched the BlackBerry movie the other week and right away I thought, “whoa, is Jim Balsillie really like that?” Supposedly, kind of. Either way, it was a good movie that naturally ended with the fall of BlackBerry, with Balsillie not getting an NHL team, and with Mike Lazaridis dismissing the first iPhone as a toy. “Who wants to use a phone without a keyboard?”

    We all know these stories. In fact, they feel trite in retrospect. There’s Blockbuster, Kodak, and countless others. But these moments are clearly a lot harder to identify in the moment. And today, at least for me, it feels like this moment for crypto and blockchains.

    It’s easy to dismiss this space. Among other things, a blockchain is an objectively worse database. They’re slower than today’s alternatives. They require more computing power. There’s no customer service when something goes wrong. And, it generally costs a lot more to save new information to a blockchain (this cost is called a gas fee).

    At the peak of the market in 2021, the average quarterly gas fee (cost per transaction) on the Ethereum network reached about US$37. Given this, nobody wanted to use this database to buy a $2 coffee. (However, many people were, at least at the time, willing to use it to buy expensive NFTs.)

    But as Tomasz Tunguz outlines in this great post called “Gas Gas Revolution”, the cost of saving data to a blockchain has dropped dramatically over the last few years. And all signs indicate that this trend is only going to continue. So what happens when it becomes cheap/basically free to save to these worse databases?

    Well, if you believe that “decentralized” and open databases are going to unlock powerful new innovations, the correct answer is probably: a lot. And then all of a sudden, they’ll be better databases.

  • More food trucks, please

    There’s no real secret to having a vibrant food truck and street vendor ecosystem. You basically just need to allow it, and then get out of the way and let entrepreneurs do what they do best.

    When I went to grad school in Philly, I used to eat from food trucks all the time. I could get a breakfast sandwich and coffee in the morning. I could get a burrito for lunch. And I could get a vegetarian lasagna for dinner. There was no shortage of options.

    This same kind of ecosystem does not exist in Toronto, but it’s only because we’ve decided we don’t want it to.

    Images: New York City

  • Another look at downtown recoveries

    Back in the spring, I wrote about a study that was done by the University of Toronto and the University of California, Berkeley that measured “downtown recoveries” using mobile phone data.

    In other words, it looked at where people’s phones were lingering to try and determine if they were back in the office and doing things downtown.

    The headline finding was that San Francisco had the lowest recovery quotient (RT) and that Salt Lake City had the highest, alongside cities like San Diego, Baltimore, and Bakersfield.

    But why was there such a spread in recoveries?

    One possible explanation was commute times. The cities with the lowest average commute times seemed to generally perform better in this study and have higher recovery quotients. But it’s maybe more nuanced than this.

    Here is a recent Brookings article by Tracy Hadden Loh that looks at this same study. And to give just one example, she notes that San Diego’s airport happens to fall within the same zip code as its downtown. Meaning, airport traffic would have been picked up as downtown traffic.

    The article also includes the above chart, showing the amount of downtown apartments built since 2019. I don’t think I knew that Chicago was so prolific.

  • Family-sized apartments are a luxury good

    My friend Alex Feldman sent me an article from the Philadelphia Inquirer this week called: Why is it so hard to build family-sized apartments in Philadelphia? As is the case in many/most North American cities, the article talks about how the majority of new multifamily builds are filled with studios and one bedrooms.

    It then goes on to suggest that some of the reasons for this include: cultural biases in favor of suburban living, antiquated building codes (such as the requirement for two means of egress), exclusionary zoning ordinances, bad urban schools, financing availability, and so on.

    This is something that we have talked about many times before on the blog and, while I do agree that it’s complicated and that there are many variables to consider, I think the key factor remains price. As I said before: “Everybody wants a 3 bedroom condo until they see what they cost.”

    So I think this is probably the most important point in the article:

    Partly that’s because Philadelphia, unlike Boston, New York, and Washington, has a vast supply of rowhouses that are still affordable to people in a position to buy. For those who prefer new construction, the past couple decades have seen a burst of modern rowhouse building.

    If large multi-family apartments were more cost effective than Philadelphia’s vast supply of rowhouses, I am certain that demand would increase markedly. But that is not the case. So I think a more accurate way to view large apartments is as a luxury good. They’re a terrific way to live, if you can afford it.