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: 2000 vs. 2025

    Last week, Joe Berridge, Partner at Urban Strategies, gave a presentation at the Institute on Municipal Finance & Governance titled, Toronto: The Accidental Metropolis. I’ve seen Joe give similar presentations to this one before, and I always thoroughly enjoy his focus on Toronto’s position as a global city.

    Here is a slide from the presentation that projects out Toronto’s population to 2071 and compares it to the largest cities in the US.

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    But the two slides that have been really making the rounds online are the following ones. The first is a rendering of what downtown Toronto looked like in 2000. 

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    I remember this time clearly. Queen West seemed to end at Spadina. King West and Ossington weren’t things. And “Richmond and Adelaide” felt like the greatest club district in the world. (If you’re not from Toronto, these references will likely mean nothing to you. Sorry.)

    The second slide is a rendering of what Toronto will look like in 2025. The transformation is just incredible.

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    I’ve seen some people comment that the Toronto of 2000 was relatively affordable; the Toronto of 2018 is unaffordable; and the Toronto of 2025 will be even more unaffordable with all of this new development.

    But I don’t understand that logic. Considering the growth rate shown in the first slide, imagine how unaffordable this city would be if we weren’t building new places for people to live and new places for people to work.

    For the full slide deck, go here. And for recent aerial photos of Toronto’s downtown core, check out my Instagram page.

  • Vancouver revisits laneway house program

    Vancouver is light years ahead of Toronto when it comes to laneway housing/suites. And by light years I mean that their Laneway House (LWH) Program is about a decade old now.

    Last month the City of Vancouver published this staff report which outlined recommendations for improving the program. It includes simplifying the regulations, reducing processing timelines, and improving livability in LWHs.

    This aligns with their Housing Vancouver Strategy (2018-2027), which has set a target of 4,000 new LWHs over the coming ten years. That may not seem like a lot and certainly it won’t solve everything, but I reckon that 4,000 is better than 0.

    The city also estimates that approximately 50% of these new LWHs will be two and three bedroom homes, which makes them a viable housing solution for families who want to remain in the city. (Related post: Where are all the kids?)

    There’s a lot of good stuff in the staff report if you’re so inclined, but I’ll leave you with a few facts about the current LWH program in Vancouver. 90% of LWHs are built along with a new house. And 45% of all new houses, so almost half, are now built with a LWH.

    Only 10% of LWHs are single storey, which certainly helps to support the above percentage of two and three bedroom homes. And in both 2016 and 2017 over 500 building permits for LWHs were issued each year.

    So 4,000 LWHs over the next decade may actually be a fairly conservative estimate. Thank you to Michael Geller for sending me this staff report.

    Photo by Spencer Watson on Unsplash

  • We’re new here. Find your home.

    A simple registration page is now live for our upcoming Junction House (condo) project. We also got this neat sign made:

    Of course, eventually there will be a full website, but this is for people who want to get on the early registrant list and tell us what they are looking for in a new home. Early registration. Early access to suites.

    We’re thrilled with the way the overall brand & identity is coming together for Junction House and we think it reflects the architecture and our project ambitions. 

    Hopefully you all like it as well.

    Photos by Vanderbrand

  • Guide to hotels, inns, and hideaways

    Monocle has a new guidebook out that is dedicated to hotels, inns, and hideaways. It also has a particular emphasis on the “honest, charming, quirky and independent.” So forget the conventional 5-star hotels. Hotels are fascinating places, even in today’s world of Airbnb. If you’re planning a trip or planning to start a hotel, this may be a useful handbook for you. Pick one up, here.

  • Where are all the kids?

    This evening, when I was reading the internet, I came across this New York Times article from 2017 talking about how San Francisco has the lowest percentage of children of any of the largest cities in the U.S. It’s around 13% of the population. (Supposedly it was the second lowest in 2015. Pittsburgh was first.)

    The article goes on to claim that the city has approximately the same number of dogs as it does children. That number is somewhere around 120,000. Not surprisingly, many blame the city’s prohibitive housing costs as the main culprit for the lack of kids. Families simply cannot afford to live in the city.

    This got me searching for more information. Richard Florida looked at similar data back in 2015, but it’s important to note that he looked at metro areas and not the city propers. So the data doesn’t speak to whether families were forced to move out from the urban core to the suburbs in search of more affordable housing or for more space.

    Nevertheless, he finds no statistical association between the share of children in a city and things like urban density, economic output per capita, or median home prices. He instead finds that the share of children is positively correlated with two main factors: immigration and with ethnicity – specifically people of Latin origin.

    Click here if you’d like to read the rest of Florida’s analysis. And if any of you have additional data on this topic, please do share it below. I think I’m going to continue digging into this question of kids and cities.

    Image: Photo by William Bout on Unsplash

  • Photography heli tour

    Tonight I went a photography heli tour with @normandthegang. 

    I took almost 500 photos, including a bunch of aerials of our development sites. And we got lucky with a pretty spectacular pink sunset. 

    Here is a photo that I took of the CN Tower with my Fuji X Series (35mm prime lens):

    Lake Ontario actually looked like that. This is not post-production chicanery. Follow me on Instagram to see the rest of the photo series.

    Thanks again for the invite Norm. That was a lot of fun. 

  • How New York City became boring

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    On the cover of the July 2018 issue of Harper’s Magazine is a picture of New York City – with Rafael Viñoly’s 432 Park Avenue as the focal point – and the title: Death of a Great American City. New York and the Urban Crisis of Affluence.

    The long-form article is by Kevin Baker and it is an account of how New York City has transformed itself over the past few decades from a place of culture and character (and of cockroaches and discarded crack vials) into a place for the ultra-wealthy to buy ultra-luxury real estate that may or may not sit empty for more often than it is occupied.

    “As New York enters the third decade of the twenty-first century, it is in imminent danger of becoming something it has never been before: unremarkable. It is approaching a state where it is no longer a significant cultural entity but the world’s largest gated community, with a few cupcake shops here and there. For the first time in its history, New York is, well, boring.”

    This narrative and/or phenomenon is of course not unique to New York City, though it is surely more pronounced when you are one of, if not the, preeminent global city. In fact, I was sent this article by a reader who was wondering about the possible parallels here in Toronto. Thank you Natasha.

    The desire, which is how Baker ends his article, is that New York City should be a city of “workers and eccentrics” as well as “visionaries and billionaires.” It should be a place for “street photographers” and “hedge fund operators.” That sounds like a pretty cool place to me.

    But we all know how challenging this has proven to be for cities.

    Photo by Dean Rose on Unsplash

  • Traffic signal inequality

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    David Levinson, who is based Sydney and authors the Transportist – a blog you should follow if you don’t – has a recent post up about signalling inequity and “how traffic signals distribute time to favour the car and delay the pedestrian.” In it he provides some background into traffic signal coordination (introduced in New York City in 1922), as well some some suggestions for how we could and should be prioritizing pedestrians.

    Here is an excerpt from the article:

    There is a reason that traffic engineers don’t automatically allocate pedestrian phases. Suppose the car only warrants a six second phase but a pedestrian requires 18 seconds to cross the street at a 1 meter/second walking speed. Giving an automatic pedestrian phase will delay cars, even if the pedestrian is not there. And there is no sin worse than delaying a car.  But it also guarantees a pedestrian who arrives just after the window to push the actuator passes will wait a full cycle.

    Sometimes pressing the walk button appears to do nothing. I suppose that’s why some cities call it the “placebo button.” And in other cases if you don’t press the walk button you’ll never get a walk sign. That’s usually a strong indicator that you are located in an environment not intended for pedestrians. David’s article also has me curious about the relationship between traffic signals/pedestrian phases and urban form. I bet you could tell a lot about the latter simply by understanding the former.

    Image: Transportist

  • SoCal Googie

    I must have been sick for this lesson in architecture school, because I just discovered, through Curbed, that there is a subset of mid-century modern architecture known as Googie. It originated in Southern California in the 1940s and was all about the future, car culture, the Space Age, and the many other things that dominated the postwar years. Think starbursts, curvaceous geometric shapes, and bright colors. We all know the architecture. But did you know it was called, Googie?

    Supposedly the Googie movement was given its label by architecture critic Douglas Haskell, who used it in a derogatory way to describe criticize the architectural fashion at the time. Googie was the name of an actual coffee shop in West Hollywood designed by John Lautner. And that’s something that is noteworthy about Googie. It was a form of architecture for average buildings: coffee shops, gas stations, motels, and those sorts of things.

    There will always be critics who eschew that which is fashionable at the time. I suppose one could argue that if you’re being fashionable, then you’re not being timeless. Because fashion is about what’s current. And good architecture should be timeless, right? But there’s something so fascinating about a kind of built form that perfectly captures a particular time and place. Middle of the 20th century. Car-oriented Southern California. 

    Sometimes good architecture and design also needs a bit of time and distance in order to fully appreciate it. What was once garish may one day become treasured. Just give it a generation or two.

    Photo by ian dooley on Unsplash

  • 2720 Dundas Street West

    If you’ve been in the Junction lately, you have probably noticed some activity at the location of our proposed Junction House. Here is a photo that I took this morning of 2720 Dundas Street West. (Sidebar: What an absolutely gorgeous summer day in Toronto.)

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    We’re giving the front a coat of fresh white to mark the beginning of the registration phase. Pretty soon you’ll be able to leave your name with us so that we can send you insightful emails and get in touch with you when condo sales begin. 

    At some point 2720 will become home to the Junction House sales office (maybe we’ll even call it something pretentious like a presentation gallery). But that point is not right now. 

    I can, however, tell you that in addition to superkül (architecture), we are working with Paul Johnston / Unique Urban Homes (sales), Dialogue 38 (interior design), and Vanderbrand (creative agency). 

    I am also personally spending a lot of time obsessing over kitchen details and other minutia. I think Charles Eames once said, “The details are not the details. They make the design.”

    If you’d like to be kept in the loop on Junction House, you can follow Slate Developments (nascent account), the Globizen Group, and myself on Instagram. And of course, you’ll also hear all about it on the blog. Have a great weekend friends.