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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  • Build Toronto advocates for congestion pricing

    September 26, 2025 · View original

    Back in the spring, I wrote about a platform called Build Canada. More recently, this same group launched their first “city project” called Build Toronto (which is not to be confused with the city corporation that ultimately became CreateTO). Similar to Build Canada, they publish regular memos and advocate for policies and projects that will help build Canada’s largest city.

    Their most recent memo is by the CEO of A2X, Jamie McDonald, and it covers a topic that we discuss a lot on this blog: congestion pricing. Jamie talks about the drag that congestion has on the region’s economy (upwards of $45 billion every year?), the numerous successes we can point to from around the world, and then lays out the following proposal:

    – Create a downtown congestion pricing zone – Introduce dynamic highway pricing across the GTA – Guarantee fairness and predictable exemptions – Invest in alternatives before launch

    This is the way. And it remains deeply disappointing that we don’t have the political leadership to move this forward. Instead, we sit in traffic. But after a decade of writing about it, I think I’ve said about all I can say about the virtues of congestion pricing. We absolutely know it works. Now we just need to spread the word and continue to apply pressure. I’m glad that groups like Build Toronto are helping to do exactly that.

  • Let’s make more Ossington Avenues

    September 25, 2025 · View original

    I was out for dinner last night on Ossington (here in Toronto). Afterwards, my business partner Rick and I walked the street for a bit. It was a beautiful evening. Every restaurant had their doors and windows open. All of the patios were full, many with the kind of awnings that I love from Paris. And in between these patios were endless options for beautiful window shopping. So during our walk, we couldn’t help but say to each other, “man, what an awesome street.”

    Our line of thinking then went here: How did this ~600-meter stretch of street between Queen and Dundas become one of the coolest retail streets in the city? As you might expect, it follows the typical urban trajectory. It was a seedy street with cheap(er) rents. Then the artists and creatives started moving in, along with OG dive bars like Sweaty Betty’s. And then the city implemented a brief moratorium on bars and restaurants because things were getting a bit too fun.

    I also think it’s fair to call Ossington’s rise as being a spillover from Queen Street West. As rents rose on Queen, Ossington became a natural outlet. It was in the right location, and it already had a commercially-oriented and fine-grained ground plane, meaning the buildings could be easily repurposed for galleries, bars, restaurants, and whatever else. This is also why the strip just dies north of Dundas — there are no more suitable buildings.

    To show you just how entrenched this built form was and is, here are a few archival photos from the 1920s and 1940s:

    Beyond this, there’s nothing particularly special about Ossington as a street. It has a 20-meter width, which is typical of most of Toronto’s central main streets, and it’s filled with a bunch of 2 to 3 storey buildings. So another thing it does is make you wonder: How many more Ossington Avenues could Toronto have if only we created the right preconditions for new businesses and ideas to flourish?

    Of course, not every street can be an Ossington. What I’m talking about is simply creating more walkable, mixed-use streets. That’s a lot harder to do when you don’t have the bones that Ossington had, and you have primarily large lots and/or residential uses. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. As Toronto works to intensify its major streets, it’s crucial that we also consider what the ground plane might one day want to become.

    More on this in future posts.

  • Accelerating and compounding Canadian entrepreneurship

    September 24, 2025 · View original

    I was just reading about Simple Ventures. They are a Toronto-based venture builder that has raised $15 million to help create 25 high-growth companies headquartered in Canada by 2030. Some of their investors include TD Innovation Partners, Sun Life, Sobeys, and Harley Finkelstein (President of Shopify).

    Now, I’m not a venture capital expert, but this seems to me like a relatively small amount. (They plan to raise another $5 million by the end of the year.) So I would encourage more institutions and rich people to step up with their wallets, because you have to applaud their mission:

    > “We are coming together to issue a call to action – bring Canadian talent home,” said Rachel Zimmer, exited founder and Co-Founder and CEO of Simple Ventures. “This funding will allow us to build great Canadian Headquartered companies. Now is a crucial time to join our mission to put fire in the Canadian engine.”

    > Canada still has 100,000 fewer entrepreneurs than it did 20 years ago, despite the population increasing by over 10 million during the same period. At the same time, nearly one-third of Canadian immigrant entrepreneurs move to the U.S., citing limited support for scaling businesses at home. Simple Ventures tackles this problem by sourcing new company ideas, validating them, and pairing them with Canadian leaders to co-create ventures.

    There’s absolutely no shortage of smart, ambitious, and entrepreneurial Canadians. Where we need to improve is in commercializing and scaling our ideas. And it’s crucial we do this as quickly as possible because there are powerful compounding benefits to entrepreneurship.

    When a new company scales, it creates jobs, wealth, and knowledge. These ingredients can, and usually are, used to start a growing subset of even bigger companies. Venture capitalist Fred Wilson once referred to this as The Darwinian Evolution of Startup Hubs.

    > If you study Silicon Valley, what you see is something that looks like a forest where trees grow tall, produce seeds that drop and start new trees, and eventually the older trees mature and stop growing or worse, die of disease and rot, but the new trees grow up even taller and stronger.

    > If you drill down a bit deeper, you see that the founders, investors and early employees generate a tremendous amount of wealth from these big successes. The later employees don’t make as much wealth but they do learn a ton and make enough money that they don’t need to work for someone else and so they strike out on their own and are often funded by the folks who made the big money in the prior startup. That’s how the seed drops from the tree and starts a new tree growing. This continues on and on and on.

    When you think of startups and entrepreneurship in this way, you start to see just how important it is for us to keep growing our forests, instead of chopping down our trees and shipping them to the US. This is an exercise in city and nation building. And so I wish the team at Simple Ventures nothing but success.

    LFG, Canada. If you’re working on something and would like to pitch SV, click here.

  • Penn launches new program in property development and design

    September 23, 2025 · View original

    I’m excited to learn that the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design has just launched a new master’s program that is intended to fill the gap in education between design and real estate development. It’s called the Master of Science in Design with a concentration in Property Development and Design (or MSD-PDD).

    From the sounds of it, it’s an expansion of the certificate program in real estate development that I did while I was there. Good. It’s also something that I’ve been advocating for at the University of Toronto for over a decade. We need more bilingual city-building professionals who understand both design and real estate development.

    My initial comment is that I hope they’re really drawing on and leveraging the resources of the Wharton School. That’s what will really make this program stand out against many similar programs. When I was there, I remember them having two different real estate finance classes: one for MBAs and one for designers (which had been made deliberately easier).

    I thought this was bullshit, so I met with the program coordinator and requested to be admitted to the MBA one. He strongly advised against it and said that it’s, you know, really hard. But that only made me want to take it even more. I ended up getting an A.

    So my piece of unsolicited advice for this nascent program is: don’t baby the designers when it comes to business and finance. Because the market certainly won’t.

  • Toronto is finally intensifying its neighborhoods

    September 22, 2025 · View original

    > Tweet: It’s happening. Toronto is intensifying its neighborhoods with fourplexes, fiveplexes, sixplexes, and laneway homes. https://t.co/ARCHTjWI65

    Bianca and I went for a walk around the Junction over the weekend, as we like to do, and I was pleasantly surprised to find a number of “multiplexes” under construction. That is, small infill rental projects with four or five homes, sometimes including a laneway house at the back. (Sorry, no sixplexes were spotted just yet.) It immediately made me think, “Wow, it’s happening! Toronto is intensifying its neighborhoods.”

    For those of you who haven’t been following closely, many of Toronto’s neighborhoods have been bleeding population over the past few decades. It’s only where we’ve allowed larger-scale new developments that we’ve really seen populations increase. That’s what has precipitated our current push to expand housing options in our low-rise neighborhoods. And already, you can find evidence that it’s starting to work.

    That said, it’s worth mentioning a few things. Some of the planning notice signs that I stumbled upon dated back to 2022, and some were current. This raises at least two lines of questions. One, why is a small project that went to the Committee of Adjustment in 2022 still under construction? Was it because of planning delays, or something else? And two, why are today’s projects still having to go to the CofA? Are we still not there yet in terms of the planning policies?

    I don’t know the precise answers to these questions, but I do know that planning staff actively monitor which variances are requested and ultimately approved. If the same variance continues to show up, then it’s a clear indication that it should just become policy, and not be something that needs to be sought. This should give some comfort that we should only get better at facilitating this scale of housing.

  • US moves to grow tech employment in Canada, India, and China

    September 21, 2025 · View original

    The H-1B visa is a nonimmigrant employer-sponsored program that allows US companies to hire foreign nationals in “specialty occupations,” typically requiring a bachelor’s degree or higher. The vast majority of these occupations are computer-related (69% of petition filings according to 2017 data). And they are disproportionately filled with high-skilled talent coming from two countries: China and India (85% of filings for the same time period).

    So this week’s announcement that H-1B visas will now require employers to pay $100,000 per year per visa is a direct way of saying, “we want fewer people from China and India working in tech in the US.”

    But as with most economic policies, it’s more than that. And we already have the research. In 2020 (and then in 2023), Britta Glennon of the University of Pennsylvania (my alma mater) studied the effects of restricting high-skilled labor on offshoring. More specifically, she looked at two visa supply shock periods: the first being a 2004 cap that lowered H-1B visas by 70% and the second being a 2008–2009 lottery program which generated a random negative shock.

    What she uncovered in the first case was that the 2004 policy change increased foreign affiliate employment by 27%! And in the second case, a random one-percentage-point drop in H-1B visa supply caused an increase in the foreign affiliate growth rate of between 12 and 16%. Said differently, when H-1B visas become harder to get, US tech companies simply hire more people in other countries.

    More specifically, they ramp up hiring in these three countries: China, India, and Canada. China and India are what you might call a direct channel. The company just opens or expands an existing office by hiring the people that would have otherwise come to the US. Canada, on the other hand, largely serves as an indirect channel. We become a conveniently-located conduit through which US firms can hire the same high-skilled humans from China and India (because we don’t restrict high-skilled talent in the same way).

    So another way to interpret this week’s announcement is that the US is making deliberate moves to increase high-skilled tech employment in Canada, China, and India. That’s a good thing for these countries. Of course, the real opportunity is not as an affiliate or back-office location for US firms. The real opportunity is to harness this high-skilled talent and empower them to start their own companies in the countries where they will now live.

    Next to the US, China is likely in the best position to do that. But it’s also Canada’s opportunity to squander.

    Update: After clearly stating that it would be an annual fee of $100k and that the big tech companies all “love it,” it appears the US has backpedaled. It will now be a one-time fee of $100k paid at the time of petition filing. This is still a lot. Currently, the fees are in the hundreds of dollars.

  • None of us should be driving cars anymore

    September 20, 2025 · View original

    About a year ago, I wrote this post saying that autonomous vehicles were already safer than human-driven ones. This claim was based on safety data from Waymo and about 22 million rider-only miles. (Rider-only means no human driver.) A year later, Waymo now has over 96 million rider-only miles across Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix, and Austin (through to June 2025) — and their safety record is only becoming more compelling.

    Here’s an updated data set and a chart showing any-injury-reported crashes (average benchmark vs. Waymo):

    What immediately stands out is that Waymo has virtually eliminated the most common and deadly type of crash: vehicle-to-vehicle crashes within intersections. Compared to the benchmark, they are down 96%. They’ve also reduced single-vehicle crashes by 96%, pedestrian crashes by 92%, motorcycle crashes by 89%, and cyclist crashes by 78%. These are all remarkable figures and evidence that we are solving one of society’s greatest safety problems.

    It also tells me that, as humans, our driving days are numbered. Pretty soon nobody will want us behind the wheel of a car. It will be viewed as too dangerous. And that’s fine by me.

  • Running through New York City

    September 19, 2025 · View original

    YouTube video

    I’m not a runner. I’ve just never gotten into it. But I can appreciate why people love it, and I imagine that some of the things I love about cycling also happen with running. One of those things is the ability to experience a place while working out.

    Here’s an example.

    I think this recent video by Satisfy does a great job of capturing what it must feel like to effortlessly glide through a city like New York. They also picked the perfect song, so turn your sound on. If you enjoy running and/or NYC, you’ll enjoy the video.

  • The Coffee is coming to Junction House

    September 18, 2025 · View original

    Last week in Paris, we went to check out the above café called The Coffee. It was our first time. The brand is a Brazilian coffee chain founded in 2017 by three brothers who wanted to combine Japanese minimalism with the best of Brazilian coffee. Brazil, by the way, is the world’s largest producer of coffee.

    Since then, they’ve gone on to open nearly 300 stores around the world — from Rio de Janeiro to Paris and Seoul to Sydney. Earlier this year, they opened their first locations in Toronto: on King Street West, in the Financial District, and in Yorkville. And today, I’m excited to share that their next location will be at the base of Junction House.

    This feels like a perfect fit for the area and the building. One of the things that we tried to do with the design of the project was blend Canadian minimalism with the rich history of the Junction. So I’m happy to see this brand land here, especially since we (the developer) no longer own the retail component and weren’t involved in the leasing. Kudos to Lee Chow Group (the owner) and the JLL Retail Group.

    It’s exciting to see a global brand like The Coffee choose the Junction. They clearly know what’s up. I’m now looking forward to becoming a loyal customer.

    If you’d like to follow them on Instagram, here’s their Canadian account.

  • By 2080, nearly everyone will live in a city

    September 17, 2025 · View original

    Cities exist because they offer economic and social benefits. People generally come to cities to make money, find a partner, and interact with other humans. Occasionally, we underestimate this desire to cluster — which was the case during our recent pandemic. But the reality is that this is a human tendency that has existed for thousands of years and that also happens to be accelerating.

    I mean, as recent as 1980, only about 40% of the world’s population was living in an urban area. Today, this figure is closer to 60%, and by 2080, it is predicted that up to 90% of the people on this planet will live in an urban center.

    This will take the number of megacities with over 10 million people from 3 (in 1980) to nearly 100 in 2080 (according to projections from UN-Habitat). But here’s the thing: cities help people become wealthier, but once people become wealthier, they tend to have far fewer children. This inverse correlation is well established. So intuitively, there should be limits to the growth we are seeing.

    Here’s an interesting article from CityLab by Greg Clark, Borane Gille and Jennifer Dolynchuk that pegs this peak somewhere around 2080. We will still remain extremely urban, but overall our population will start to decline. And for some cities, like Tokyo, this decline has already started.

    Charts via CityLab