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 best and brightest from around the world

    February 22, 2026 · View original

    It’s not hard to notice that public sentiment in Canada toward immigration has shifted dramatically over the past few years. When I tweet something positive about immigration, I know full well that the comments will be overwhelmingly negative and searing (mind you, it’s Twitter).

    But this isn’t just the case on social media. A 2025 survey by the Environics Institute and TMU showed that the majority of Canadians believe there’s simply too much immigration. And a more recent survey by Research Co. found that almost half of Canadians — a number that is up 9% since July 2025 — believe immigration is having a mostly negative effect on the country.

    While I can appreciate where this is coming from, I think it’s important to keep in mind that immigrants in Canada account for approximately one-third of all business owners with paid staff. They help create jobs. And they represent the majority of business owners when it comes to sectors like restaurants, grocery stores, and truck transportation. In sectors like “computer systems design and services” it’s roughly 50/50 between immigrants and Canadian-born citizens.

    Some of Canada’s most notable companies and brands have also been founded by immigrants: Shopify, BlackBerry, Aldo, Magna, Hakim Optical, Molson Brewery, and many others. And in the US, it is reported that at least 59 of the top 100 highest-valued unicorn startups have a foreign-born founder! So, I am of the strong opinion that Canada benefits enormously when the best and brightest choose to come to our country in search of opportunity. It boosts prosperity for everyone.

    But let’s consider three objections that I have heard.

    The first is that immigration is good, but we stopped attracting the best and brightest. Fine; if that’s the case, we should better optimize for attracting the world’s top talent. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

    The second is that it’s important to first stop the best and brightest who are already here from leaving. And I would agree that this is critical. The “brain drain” needs to be stemmed. But at the same time, these do not need to be mutually exclusive activities. In fact, it may be best to think of it as solving the same problem: increasing opportunities for everyone both attracts and retains talent.

    Lastly, I hear some people talk about “cultural continuity.” The argument is that economic prosperity isn’t everything. We need to also think about our national identity and the value of our local customs. I believe wholeheartedly in a strong Canadian identity. I’m profoundly proud to be Canadian. But what, specifically, must be continued? What should be allowed to change?

    Let’s consider my favourite city in the world, Toronto.

    For roughly a hundred years, Toronto was an intolerant and primarily Anglo-Protestant city. Should that still be the case today in the name of “continuity”? If so, it’s likely I wouldn’t have been born here. I was raised Catholic, I went to a French-speaking school, and my ethnic background is primarily Irish, French, and Chinese (via South America).

    Would the Protestants of Toronto have accepted my kind? It’s unlikely on three accounts. Catholics were a problem. A French school would have been viewed as a rebellious political statement. And the Chinese Exclusion Act may have precluded my bloodline before I was born. A little discontinuity has been good for me — and others.

    Photo by Richard Hong on Unsplash

  • How cities shape our daily steps

    February 21, 2026 · View original

    In some ways, the findings of this walkability study should feel intuitively obvious. But at the same time, it’s an important reminder that we are all products of our environment. If you grow up and live in a city like San Francisco, there’s going to be a higher probability that you will choose a career in something tech-related versus if you’re in, say, Scranton, Pennsylvania. If you grow up and live in a city like Copenhagen, there’s going to be a higher probability that you will cycle versus if you’re in, say, Badger, Alaska.

    And, it turns out, if you live in a walkable city, you’re more likely to walk. Importantly, it doesn’t appear to be because of some sort of “selection effect,” meaning that people who like to be active naturally gravitate to more walkable cities. In the study, researchers analyzed smartphone data from 2013 to 2016 for 2 million people, including more than 5,000 people who moved during this time. What they found was that after relocating to a more walkable city, people took on average about 1,100 more steps a day (roughly 11 minutes of extra walking).

    The inverse was also true: people who relocated to less walkable cities tended to walk less. Again, on some level, this may seem intuitive, but it shows just how mutable our behaviours are. People will generally do what their built environments have been designed to accommodate — whether that’s driving, cycling, or walking. Perhaps this also explains why, when I’m traveling, I want to buy that absurd article of clothing that I know I’ll never wear back home in Toronto.

    At the time, and in that environment, it feels appropriate.

    Cover photo by Abby Rurenko on Unsplash

    Map from Scientific American

  • The Toronto Effect

    February 20, 2026 · View original

    A few weeks ago, we spoke about the dramatic change that Toronto’s East Bayfront has undergone over the last two decades. It’s now a place. I also shared a time-lapse video from Waterfront Toronto showing how the Parliament Slip was landfilled in order to improve the street network in this area. If you missed it (and you like to nerd out on construction), it’s worth watching.

    In addition to this, Waterfront Toronto has (just?) released this interactive website showing in more detail what’s planned for the Quayside area. And if you make it all the way to the end of the experience, you’ll land on the below image, which shows some towers and the site earmarked for a school and potential cultural destination.

    Clicking on the site leads to this pop-up:

    Schools are obviously critical. Education is the number one predictor of household wealth. Build it. But I also think it’s important that we take advantage of this opportunity to build a truly remarkable cultural destination on Toronto’s doorstep. This is an opportunity for a globally recognized symbol that elevates the city’s brand, drives tourism, and serves as an economic development catalyst.

    So I would like to encourage those in charge to take this seriously. (If Globizen can help in any way, give us a call.) The right way to do it would be to host an international design competition and put the challenge to the world’s best architects. This is not the time or place to be timid. Rather, it’s the time and place to beat our chests. This could be a Sydney Opera House or Bilbao moment.

    Actually, it could be something even greater: The Toronto Effect.

    Cover photo by Antonio Gabola on Unsplash

  • Waymo needs way more vehicles

    February 19, 2026 · View original

    Earlier this month, self-driving car company Waymo announced that it had raised $16 billion (largely from its parent company, Alphabet) at a $126 billion post-money valuation. This is a big number. And according to Bloomberg, the company’s annualized revenue run rate is around $350 million, meaning its current valuation is sitting at 360x revenue.

    Multiples can often be sky-high for new, huge-bet companies, but Om Malik recently offered an interesting take on the “physics of the problem.”

    As of the end of 2025, Waymo was operating approximately 2,500 vehicles across its cities, with San Francisco and Los Angeles currently responsible for about 68% of the company’s rides. And these cars are already running 16 hours a day, with an estimated 18 minutes of average idle time between trips.

    To get from 400,000 trips per week (where they are today) to 1 million trips per week (where they want to be by the end of 2026), Om estimates that the company will need to add at least another 3,500 vehicles to its fleet.

    If I then ask Gemini to extrapolate this out such that its revenue increases enough to drop its multiple down to 30x revenue, the company needs a global fleet close to 25,000 vehicles. That’s ~22,500 more than it has today, and at $175k per Jaguar, that’s an additional $4 billion in vehicles.

    I guess it has the money for that, but it’ll be fascinating to see how easily the company is able to scale around the world. This year, the plan is to expand to 20 more cities (with a list that erroneously leaves out Toronto). If successful, this will have a profound impact on our cities. And the lofty valuation represents an expectation that it will be.

    Cover photo by Josh Hild on Unsplash

  • The myth of the full city

    February 18, 2026 · View original

    Whether it’s said out loud or not, invariably something like this comes up when talking about new housing development:

    > “There’s another solution,” says Lucas, mulling over the housing shortage. “I’m not saying I know what it is. Maybe the city’s full. What’s wrong with Windsor instead? Or Cornwall? A hundred years ago, manufacturing and employment were spread out way better than they are now. Everybody needing to be in Toronto and Vancouver is killing us.”

    So, is Toronto full? Do we need to return our urban economies to what they were a century ago? To use rough whole numbers, let’s consider that Toronto’s average population density (in the city proper) is upwards of 5,000 per km2. It’s much higher in the downtown core, but our low-density inner suburbs bring down the average.

    Now, let’s consider Paris, as we often do on this blog. Paris proper has roughly 1/6th the footprint of Toronto (again, the city proper boundary) and roughly 4x the population density (upward of 20,000 people per km2). So, if Toronto is full, what the hell is going on with Paris?

    Even Paris is nowhere near full. The opportunities for intensification in central neighborhoods may not be as obvious as they are in Toronto, but urban Paris continues to grow through small-scale projects, office conversions, and, most notably, through ambitious transit projects and mixed-use developments designed to stitch together the greater urban region.

    Cities do, of course, face constraints, but they’re never technically “full.” “Full” is generally shorthand for, “I already live here and I like the way things are, and so I would prefer no one else come and disrupt what I’ve presently got going on.”

    Because if this weren’t the case, then I suppose you might hear more people say, “I really wanted to move to Toronto, but it was quite literally full. Like, absolutely no physical room for me. I couldn’t do it. I would have had to sleep on the streets.” Nope. We’ve got a space allocation for you. In fact, if you’re in the market for a new home, give me a call.

    Importantly, this is different from a city being, maybe, too expensive. That is not the same as not having any more room. But the two are interconnected: saying a city is full and then blocking housing because of said fullness creates a self-fulfilling prophecy of artificial scarcity. This drives up prices and can then create a false sense of being full.

    Of course, in this scenario, you aren’t out of land; you’re out of permission to use the land differently. “Full” is a funny thing.

    Cover photo by Julian Gentile on Unsplash

  • The housing bias still holding back the Toronto of tomorrow

    February 17, 2026 · View original

    Last week, we spoke about one of Toronto’s failures when it comes to new “missing middle” housing, namely our inability to look forward to the Toronto of tomorrow, as opposed to only thinking about the Toronto of today. But let’s not forget that there are greater biases at play here influencing these outcomes.

    Beneath our concerns about not enough parking (how dare you wage a war on the car?) and congruency with neighbourhood character is a deeply rooted aversion toward higher-density apartment living; one that is arguably most prevalent in the English-speaking world.

    Consider Toronto’s response to the handsome Spadina Gardens apartment building at the start of the 20th century. We were certain that only people of questionable moral fibre would ever want to live in a four-storey apartment block!

    Since then, we’ve become far more open-minded, but survey people in the Anglosphere about whether they’d like to live in an elegant Parisian block, and you’ll often discover a stark preference for detached housing. In contrast, survey people on the European continent, or in Asia, and you’ll often see different preferences.

    Combine these preferences with the common law system prevalent throughout English-speaking countries — where individuals can more easily object to and block projects if, you know, the “vibe” is off — and the broad result is very different housing outcomes. There’s data to suggest that civil law countries tend to build more housing.

    Cover photo by Clarisse Croset on Unsplash

  • Housing starts in London were 94% below target last year

    How regulation and the loss of investor capital created a perfect storm for housing supply

    February 16, 2026 · View original

    London has an ambitious housing target of 88,000 new homes per year — yes, per year — over the next decade. This is part of a broader national goal to create upwards of 1.5 million homes in the UK. It’s an admirable goal, but the city appears destined to fail. According to a recent FT article by John Burn-Murdoch (their chief data reporter), London saw just 5,891 housing starts last year, which is 94% below its annual target and which represents a 75% year-over-year decline. When compared to many other global cities, London now ranks at or near the bottom when it comes to new homes per 1,000 residents:

    Burn-Murdoch cites a multitude of factors responsible for this suboptimal performance: onerous new safety standards following the horrific 2017 Grenfell Tower fire, more stringent environmental regulations (compared to other European countries), the disappearance of international buyers in the residential buy-to-let market, and increased demand for non-residential uses. What is obvious is that building safety is paramount and nothing like what happened with the Grenfell Tower should ever happen again. But with ~281,000 new homes approved but financially unviable, there does appear to be a desire to balance safety with supply).

    His third point is an interesting one in that parallels have played out in Toronto’s new condominium market. The pejorative narrative of “foreigners taking homes away from locals” is commonplace in cities all around the world, which is why Canada ultimately moved to temporarily ban foreign buyers. But what we start to see here is the impact on overall housing supply. Indeed, a 2017 study from LSE (cited in the above FT article) found that international capital and residential pre-sales are essential ingredients in de-risking high-density projects and promoting greater housing supply.

    Tying this all together, what has happened is the creation of an interdependency: we have made new housing developments so complicated and onerous to construct that the only financially feasible way to build them is to amortize all of the required time and money across bigger projects. Then, given the scale and cost of these projects, they have become dependent on investors and international capital to provide financing. Raise interest rates, remove the capital source, and then all of a sudden you have far less housing than 88,000 new homes per year.

    It is for reasons like these that I get frustrated when critics simply blame developers or investors for shortcomings in a housing market. Finding villains is a lot easier than doing the difficult work of unpacking what’s really going on and coming up with solutions.

    Cover photo by Gonzalo Sanchez on Unsplash

    Chart from the Financial Times

  • Stablecoins have created borderless value transfer

    February 15, 2026 · View original

    Stablecoins, as we have talked about, seem to be the first cryptocurrency use case that has achieved product-market fit. According to this recent piece by Chris Dixon in the Financial Times (which was later republished here), stablecoins moved over $12 trillion in value last year, even after filtering out stuff like bot activity. This is closing in on the $17 trillion in transactions that Visa processed last year; but crucially, stablecoin transactions are made at a fraction of the cost.

    It also doesn’t matter if people recognize that they’re using crypto or not. The backend is continuing to be abstracted:

    > People all over the world will barely recognise when they’re using stablecoins when making transactions supported by them. Most people will assume they’re just using dollars. And they will be, because the differences between a stablecoin and a dollar are becoming an abstraction for the end user.

    And the great promise is the following:

    > This isn’t just about payments. It’s a realignment of global finance. The internet gave us borderless communication. Stablecoins give us borderless value transfer. With clear rules and market structure in place, they can become both the pipes and the pillars of a new financial system.

    What’s also interesting, though, is that this shift seems to be strengthening US dollar dominance, as opposed to undermining it:

    > Stablecoin adoption also has an underappreciated second-order effect: The tokens reinforce dollar dominance in a multipolar world, creating a strong new source of demand for US debt. Leading stablecoin issuers like Circle and Tether already have nearly $140bn in direct holdings of short-term government debt, making them a top 20 holder of US debt today.

    If you’re looking to invest alongside this shift — and, oh boy, this is definitely not investment advice! — well, then, buying some Ether (ETH) may not be the worst idea. The majority of stablecoin transactions settle on Ethereum or on an Ethereum Layer 2, meaning that every time a transaction is completed, some amount of ETH is burned or destroyed. (Here’s a Coinbase referral link that will give you C$30 in Bitcoin (BTC) when you sign up and trade.)

    The bull case for ETH is that it will simultaneously become (1) the mandatory collateral and fuel for a new financial system, and (2) a deflationary asset, where more ETH is generally getting burned than is being created to reward network validators. Whether this will happen and boost the price of ETH, of course, remains to be seen. But in my view, the writing is very obviously all over the wall. Stablecoins have become part of the mainstream. The question is: where will all the value accrue in this new world?

    Cover photo by Kanchanara on Unsplash

  • The great density dilution

    Development density used to be hugely valuable in Toronto; now, it’s not.

    February 14, 2026 · View original

    Development density used to have significant value here in Toronto. Every square meter mattered. In fact, as many of you know, entire development businesses were centered around assembling sites, rezoning for the maximum amount of area, and then selling to another developer who would then build out the final project. The process of rezoning a site often takes years, and sometimes much longer, so there’s a logic to splitting up these efforts.

    But then demand waned and, all of a sudden, development density had much less value, if it was even liquid at all. This business model no longer works. On top of this, the City of Toronto is now in the process of updating its zoning by-laws to allow greater heights and densities across 120 major transit station areas and protected major transit station areas across the city. These updates are expected to be brought to City Council in the spring of this year.

    The result is that these areas will have minimum heights and densities that may take a site’s zoning from 4 storeys to 30 storeys. And the great irony will be that sites that spent years, and sometimes decades, battling for taller buildings, may soon receive as-of-right permissions that exceed their hard-fought zoning approvals. This is how much the planning and development landscape has changed in Toronto over the years.

    And it further reinforces the point I made back in 2024 when I wrote that development value has shifted from land to the build. Density is now widely available. Execution is what matters most today.

    Cover photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

  • Why Toronto is still failing when it comes to missing middle housing

    February 13, 2026 · View original

    In yesterday’s post, we spoke about the strengthening of Toronto’s urban grid and how the city has evolved and is evolving beyond a monocentric, downtown-oriented city. But in arguing this, I was careful to say that the policies and our efforts remain a work in progress. And that’s because, when the rubber hits the road, it’s not easy transforming car-oriented suburbs into something that resembles urbanity.

    Here, for example, is a six-storey infill apartment project proposed for Pharmacy Avenue, south of St. Clair Avenue East, in Scarborough. Pharmacy is a designated “major street,” so in theory, a project of this scale could advance straight to a building permit. But for whatever reason, the developer needed some planning variances and went to the Committee of Adjustment to ask for permission.

    The Committee recently said no:

    > “I understand it’s an arterial [and] I understand we want intensification along arterials,” one of the members said at the hearing, “but honestly, to shoehorn an apartment building into a lot like this doesn’t make any sense to me.” Tristone has appealed.

    Which is frustrating:

    > Blair Scorgie, Mr. Malhotra’s planning consultant, points to apparent contradictions in the city’s land use and zoning policies. While council voted in favour of such intensification on its major streets, including those in the suburbs, proposals that optimize what’s allowed run up against other provisions in the official plan that aim to regulate “neighbourhood character” as well as a host of highly site-specific zoning rules that predate the city’s 1998 amalgamation. > > “The fact that it appeared like `mini-mid-rise’ surrounded by bungalows has absolutely nothing to do with the policy and the regulatory framework,” he says. “That has everything to do with neighbourhood character and the prioritization of the existing context over the planned future context that’s envisioned by the city.”

    Blair hits the nail on the head with these comments. Six storeys shouldn’t matter. A lack of parking also shouldn’t matter. The reason the proposal was refused is because the lens of review was that of yesterday’s Toronto, rather than that of the Toronto of tomorrow. If the goal is more housing, and a medium-density grid that can support a comprehensive transit network, then these are exactly the kind of projects we should be building all across the city.

    And they should not necessitate any planning variances.

    Cover photo by Joaquin Alcaraz on Unsplash

    Project rendering from Noam Hazan Design Studio