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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  • Register your interest for One Delisle

    Toronto will soon be home to One Delisle — the first residential building in Canada designed by visionary architect, Jeanne Gang of Studio Gang.

    Jeanne Gang is known for challenging the stylistic and technical parameters of architecture. Named one of the most influential people in the world by TIME 100 in 2019, Gang is a MacArthur Fellow and a leading advocate for gender equality in the field of architecture and design.

    Gang and her eponymous studio are responsible for some of the world’s most diverse and compelling buildings and spaces. One Delisle, as seen in the rendering above, will break from convention and refresh Toronto’s skyline. The rhythmic exterior maximizes natural light, views, and outdoor living for residents.

    One Delisle was revealed this evening for the first time to a select group of Toronto’s top real estate brokers. Follow #onedelisle on IG for some of the reactions. It was done online via a livestream, which was exceptional for what it was, but is obviously not as great as being in one room together. That time will return.

    At this point, we are thrilled to announce that we are opening up “limited registration” for the project. If you’d like to register your interest, you can do that now at onedelisle.com. However, to register at this phase of the project, you’ll need to pay a one-time fee of C$150.

    Why are we doing that?

    We’re doing it to ensure that those who are genuinely interested in a One Delisle residence get first access to the project when it launches next year. Anyone who registers during this “limited registration” phase will be guaranteed a private appointment at our sales gallery before the general public.

    So what else do you get?

    In addition to first access — including first access to the project’s terrace suites — limited registrants will receive a copy of Studio Gang: Architecture (retail price, US$100), an invitation to our One Delisle Film Series, an invitation to our launch event (including a talk with Jeanne Gang), as well as other exclusive news and updates.

    The other thing I’d like to point out about the project’s website is that the animation you see on the homepage (pictured above) will, in fact, change depending on the time of day wherever you are and when you visit the website.

    This allows you to get a feel for how the architecture might respond to light and shadow throughout the day and how it might be illuminated at night. What you’re seeing above is an artist’s impression of that night view.

    For more information and to register your interest, visit onedelisle.com.

  • Moving from the city to the suburbs and back

    This is an interesting story about a Toronto couple who got married about 20 years ago, initially lived in a small downtown condo, and then decided it was “time to adult” and move to the suburbs. They bought a 3,200 square foot home in Markham and lived there for a number of years. It had a lawn, a garage, and all sorts of other suburban comforts. But eventually they realized that they had made a mistake. They preferred the conveniences of city living over the amenities of the suburbs. Living in the city was simply better suited to their lifestyles. And so they sold their house, bought an epic 2,100 square foot penthouse in the Shangri-La Residences — which just so happens to be one of my favorite buildings in the city — and hired the design firm NIVEK REMAS to completely redo it. I think their new home turned out great and maybe you do too.

  • Learning from the Spanish Flu

    “We learn from history that we do not learn from history.” -Georg Hegel

    Back in March, I was reading everything I could find about COVID-19 and about pandemics. Eventually that tapered off. But this week I decided that it was time to go back and learn a lot more about the 1918 Spanish Flu.

    I’ve just ordered John M. Barry’s 2004 book called The Great Influenza. Bill Gates wrote about it over the summer — after he reread it — and said that it will teach you almost everything you need to know about the influenza. He also said that it’s never been more relevant.

    Despite happening over 100 years ago, there are no doubt lessons that we can learn from this great influenza. The most important being that leadership and honesty, of course, matter a great deal during a time of crisis.

    Barry also argues that the 1918 influenza was responsible for altering the flow of history. He makes the claim (convincingly according to Bill) that it was a contributing factor in the rise of Hitler and the start of World War II.

    So I’m looking forward to receiving my copy later this week. If you’d like to purchase your own, you can do that over here. And if you’ve already read it, please let me know what you thought in the comment section below.

  • A completely car-free neighborhood in Arizona

    The New York Times recently published this interesting piece about Culdesac and the completely car-free community that they are building just east of Phoenix in Tempe, Arizona (a place that is not generally known for its walkability). Culdesac calls itself the first “post-car real estate developer in the United States.” And so their Culdesac Tempe project has been designed to house 1,000 residents and exactly 0 cars.

    When the first phase is completed next year, residents will be restricted from having a car within the community and they’ll also be restricted from parking on any nearby streets. (This second stipulation was done to assuage concerns that a zero parking community would create a spillover effect in the surrounding area.) Instead, residents of Culdesac Tempe will rely on their local amenities, as well as on transit (it’s on a light rail line), biking, ride-sharing, and other forms of urban mobility.

    While this may seem kind of crazy for sprawling Arizona, the company’s thesis is both clear and clever. The future of American cities needs to be the kind of walkable urbanism that you find in places like the northeast. But at the same time, the fastest growing cities in the United States are generally in the Sun Belt. What they are doing is building walkable urbanism in the places where people clearly want to live.

  • Shrinking lot sizes and unit sizes

    Shane Dingman’s recent piece in the Globe and Mail about shrinking lot sizes raises two interesting points.

    One, new low-rise lot sizes seem to be shrinking and that’s probably a normal market outcome. Similar to the way in which average unit sizes have been generally coming down for mid-rise and high-rise product, it is a way to maintain some semblance of affordability in the face of ever-rising costs.

    The average price of a new condo in the City of Toronto last quarter was nearly $1,300 psf. That means that if you had an average unit size of 1,000 square feet, you’d have an average selling price of $1.3 million (to state the obvious). Not everyone can afford this ticket price, and so there’s downward pressure on unit sizes in order to get the face prices down.

    Two, developer margins aren’t increasing just because home prices have been going up. At best, they’ve remained constant (Shane provides a quantitative example in his article). But there are also many cases where margins are getting squeezed as a result of rising costs.

    All of this to say that I think we can continue to expect downward pressure on lot sizes and unit sizes as the Toronto region continues to grow.

  • Why do haunted houses look the way that they do?

    This short 5-minute video by Vox is a perfect example of how, just like with fashion, architecture and design tastes are always changing. The things we like at one point in time may not be what we like in the future. And it can go from extreme desire to extreme disgust. In this video, Vox makes the argument that the mansions of America’s Gilded Age are the reason why all haunted houses seem to look the same in popular culture and in our imaginations.

    Once the extreme desire of America’s nouveau riche (who were clearly trying to emulate rich Europeans), they fell out of favor with the arrival of modernism and a new cultural ethos. All of a sudden it wasn’t fashionable to have copious amounts of ornament and labyrinthian-like floor plans filled with a bunch of gaudy stuff. So the rich moved on and many of these homes fell into disrepair, setting the stage for spooky thoughts.

    What’s interesting about this phenomenon is that it can make it difficult to discern what has design and cultural value and what doesn’t. Because something that has value today, may not have perceived value tomorrow (and it may also become the backdrop for future horror movies). Of course, the opposite is also true. We could hate something today, but eventually learn to love it.

    Brutalism is perhaps a good example. Though there seems to be a groundswell of people interested in preserving this style of architecture, I continue to think that it remains a generally unloved kind of built form when it comes to the general public. So does that mean it has little present and/or future value? That’s not a straightforward question.

    The other thing I find fascinating about this haunted house phenomenon is that it shows how one thing can lead to another. If the typology of haunted houses is a result of the Gilded Age mansion, then it’s also important to consider that the Gilded Age mansion is arguably a result of the new wealth that was being amassed by some Americans at the end of the 19th century.

    The Gilded Age was a period economic expansion for the United States. New fortunes were being made via rail, steel, tobacco, and other industries. (Inequality was a concern.) And this new wealth was naturally looking for a way to show off (as it usually does). That happened to manifest itself in ornate European-like mansions. But had that not happened, would haunted houses look the way that they do today?

    Happy Halloween.

  • Urbanation releases Q3-2020 market update — new condo sales reach record high

    Urbanation just released its Q3-2020 market update for the Greater Toronto Area and the data is very encouraging for the new condo market. Here are some of the highlights:

    • There were 6,730 new condominium unit sales in Q3. This represents a 30% year-over-year increase.
    • More of this growth happened in the suburbs (905) with 3,834 units sales vs. 2,536 unit sales in the City of Toronto (416).
    • Of the 6,694 units that launched for sale in Q3, about 3/4 of them sold. This is the highest absorption rate since Q4-2017.
    • The average selling price for a new condo launched in Q3 was $1,044 psf (GTA average). This is up 3.5% compared to last year.
    • New launches in the suburbs sold for an average of $915 psf. New launches in the City of Toronto sold for an average of $1,275 psf.

    I reckon that many of the people purchasing right now are looking through and to the other side of this current macro environment. They recognize that things will get better and that the Toronto region will continue to thrive. That’s certainly how I’m thinking about it.

    For the full Urbanation news release, click here.

    Photo by Warren Wong on Unsplash

  • The world’s best cities

    Whenever you see a best-of-anything ranking, you should probably ask yourself what the hell “best” even means. In this case, Resonance Consultancy is ranking the world’s cities based on six alliterative categories: place, people, programming, product, prosperity, and promotion.

    Some of these metrics are qualitative, but many are, in fact, quantitative. Number of COVID-19 infections in 2020; number of direct destinations served by the city’s airports; number of foreign-born residents; number of top-rated restaurants (TripAdvisor); most Instagram check-ins, and so on.

    The result is this list of the world’s best cities:

    1. London
    2. New York
    3. Paris
    4. Moscow
    5. Tokyo
    6. Dubai
    7. Singapore
    8. Barcelona
    9. Los Angeles
    10. Madrid
    11. Rome
    12. Chicago
    13. Toronto
    14. San Francisco
    15. Abu Dhabi

    I arbitrarily chose the top 15 cities in order to make sure that Toronto was included in this ranking. If you’d like to download a full copy of the 2021 World’s Best Cities report, you can do that over here. I recommend you check out their performance criteria.

    Toronto, for example, performs very well when it comes to “people.” That’s fairly consistent across most of these rankings. But it didn’t fare so well when it comes to “place.” That category includes things like the average number of sunny days and the number of high quality sights & landmarks.

  • Is that delay really necessary?

    The big news this week in Toronto planning & development is the province’s decision to approve three downtown development projects using a tool known as a “ministerial zoning order.” The impetus for doing this was to speed up the approval and delivery of about 1,000 affordable housing units (along with about 2,000 market-rate units).

    The province has made it clear that it wants to do what it can to reduce red tape and unnecessary delays when it comes to building new affordable housing. But this, not surprisingly, upset a number of local councillors who feel the province is overstepping and not allowing the city to govern its own city building affairs.

    Alex Bozikovic’s view in the Globe and Mail this week was: hey, maybe that’s not so bad. The planning process is painfully slow (and political). And Toronto is going to need a lot more housing over the coming years and decades. So why not speed up its delivery? Especially when there’s an affordable housing component and the architecture is exemplary.

    The reality is that our housing delivery system is rife with tensions. A big part of the process is predicated on local voters, who already live in a particular place, opining on their own interests and on the interests of people who don’t yet live there. The incentives in place are anything but aligned.

    We can debate which level of government should have more power and what might be considered an unnecessary delay, but what is clear to me is that it should not take 2-5 years to get new housing approved in this city.

  • The game of life

    “Anxiety is experiencing failure in advance.” — Seth Godin

    I mention and quote Seth Godin fairly often on this blog and so it only seems right to share this recent podcast that he did on the Tim Ferriss Show. Broadly speaking, the conversation is about “the game of life, the value of hacks, and overcoming anxiety.” I think most of you will find it useful regardless of what you do and what you’re involved in. It’s over an hour long, but there’s a full transcript available if you’d prefer to read, rather than listen. If you’re looking for something even shorter, here’s a quick video by Tim Ferris that has Seth talking about why worrying isn’t productive and that it’s really in service of our need for status quo and reassurance.