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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  • Austin legalizes single-stair apartment buildings up to 5 storeys

    April 11, 2025 · View original

    Yesterday, Austin City Council voted 10-1 in favor of a building code amendment that will allow single-stair apartment buildings up to five storeys and with 4 homes per floor. This is progress. Austin now joins Seattle, New York, and possibly other US cities in allowing this building type, which is a type that is widespread outside of North America. Paris, for instance, allows single-stair buildings up to 50m.

    In all of these newly allowable cases, there’s usually a requirement to sprinkler the building and cap the number of homes per floor, among other life safety requirements. What I’m not clear on, though, is how flexible these new codes are in allowing larger apartment buildings.

    In my opinion, it’s better (and hopefully more accurate) to think about unit maximums on a per stair basis as opposed to a per floor basis. Because that’s how you create larger point-access block buildings: you cluster multiple blocks together, each with its own exit stair. Is that allowed in these building codes? I’m not exactly sure, but one would hope.

    Regardless of this important detail, I continue to be impressed by Austin’s willingness to drive positive change in its housing market. It makes you wonder: What the hell is taking Toronto so long? Single-stair buildings up to 6 storeys should already be permissible. We should be leading.

    Cover photo by Clark Van Der Beken on Unsplash

  • The more you give, the more you get

    April 10, 2025 · View original

    Just in case you’re looking for an opportunity to read some more about tariffs, Howard Marks has a new memo out titled “Nobody Knows (Yet Again).” In it, he talks about comparative advantage, how global trade has benefited Americans, and what this could mean for the future.

    Here’s an excerpt that I found interesting specifically because I’ve also been thinking about the parallels with Brexit:

    > I consider the tariff developments thus far to be what soccer fans call an “own goal” – a goal scored for the other side when a player accidentally puts the ball into his own team’s net. In this way, they’re highly analogous to Brexit, and we know how that turned out. Brexit cost the British mightily in terms of GDP, morale, and alliances, and it harmed their reputation for governance and stability. All of this damage was self-inflicted.

    In the memo, he also provides an important history lesson:

    > To cite one more factor that has made the world a better place, I describe the behavior of the U.S. in the post-World War II period as “generosity toward the rest of the world stemming from enlightened self-interest.” Under the Marshall Plan, we gave (not loaned) billions of dollars with which Western Europe rebuilt. Likewise, between 1945 and 1952, General Douglas MacArthur oversaw the reconstruction of Japan and the strengthening of its economy. Since then, the U.S. has (a) distributed extensive foreign aid, (b) invested heavily in healthcare in developing nations, (c) created programs that bring foreign students to the U.S. and vice versa, and (d) beamed positive messages to people throughout the world. These are all instances of generosity. In each “transaction,” we gave more than we directly got, and a cynic might say we acted like suckers. > > Yes, these things can be described as largesse, but as the National Archive puts it, the Marshall Plan “provided markets for American goods, created reliable trading partners, and supported the development of stable democratic governments in Western Europe.” That’s a pretty good payoff. People in other countries received lots of freebies, but certainly these programs helped the U.S. by restraining communism, bringing nations into defensive alignment with the U.S., and contributing to the U.S.’s position as the world’s most prosperous nation. I have no interest in seeing the U.S. turn isolationist.

    Unfortunately, greater isolation will almost certainly be one of the consequences of Trump’s tariffs. It doesn’t matter that many of them have now been paused; the damage has been done. We’ve seen this spastic movie before. In fact, they could all go to zero tomorrow, and there would still be damage.

    This is an enormous change to the world order.

    Cover photo by taro ohtani on Unsplash

  • Make Toronto a 24-hour city

    April 9, 2025 · View original

    Reece Martin is perhaps best known for his YouTube channel focused on transit. He has over 330,000 subscribers, and I have mentioned him a few times over the years on this blog. But he has since retired from YouTube and he now has a new blog called “Next Toronto,” which you should all subscribe to. I just did that today.

    In his latest post, he makes “the case for a 24-hour Toronto” and compares our city to various other global cities around the world including New York and Tokyo. This post really resonates with me and I agree with his view that there’s something quintessentially urban about things being open all the time, or at the very least open late.

    According to ChatGPT, Toronto is a “semi 24-hour city.” Its deficiencies:

    Here’s how I generally think about it.

    Step 1 is reasonable daytime hours. As a North American, I still find it frustrating how some/many restaurants in Europe close between lunch and dinner. Call me spoiled, but what if I got held up at work and couldn’t eat during the generally accepted time? Or if I went to the gym in the morning and now I suddenly have a dire caloric deficit?

    Step 2 is staying open kind of late, including on Sundays. A few weeks ago I was driving around the suburbs of Toronto — on a Sunday — and I decided to take advantage of this rare occurrence to stop in at what’s called an enclosed shopping mall. So I got all the way there, pulled confidently on one of the front doors, and then realized it had closed 2 hours ago.

    Step 3 is the rarified big leagues; you’re a “24-hour city.” Reece gives the example of Apple’s Fifth Avenue store, which, in case you forgot, never closes. I don’t typically shop for consumer electronics at 3AM, but I might. And there’s something oddly comforting about knowing I could. This isn’t possible in all cities, but it is in New York. That says something.

    Cover photo by Jan Weber on Unsplash

  • Introducing: Global City Builders

    April 8, 2025 · View original

    This week, Globizen announced a new journal series called Global City Builders. The idea is pretty simple. It’s about having conversations with city builders from around the world who are working to create better places. This obviously includes people like architects and developers, but it might also include artists, local entrepreneurs, activists, and countless other change agents. The format is a simple Q&A and for this first one we spoke with Paris-based Avenier Cornejo architectes and its two founders: Christelle Avenier and Miguel Cornejo. Here’s the link. I hope you enjoy it.

    If you or someone you know would like to connect with us about future editions of Global City Builders, feel free to reach out to [hello@globizen.com](mailto:hello@globizen.com).

    Cover photo by Charly Broyez via Avenier Cornejo

  • Environmental site contamination primer for developers

    April 7, 2025 · View original

    One thing that you need to do in Ontario if you are converting a development site to a more sensitive land use — so for example, taking a commercial site and converting it to residential — is file what’s called a Record of Site Condition (RSC) with the Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks (MECP). This is an important risk consideration because it’s complicated, expensive, and it typically takes a long time; meaning it can delay an entire project or make it infeasible all together.

    At a high level, here some things you should consider as a developer (though please keep in mind that I am not an environmental engineer and that you should obviously seek professional advice when dealing with environmental matters). If the site is clean and free from environmental contaminants, then the process is relatively straightforward. Complete your environmental investigations (i.e. drill boreholes) and then submit all your findings to the Ministry. Filing an RSC, in this scenario, should be fairly low risk.

    Soil and groundwater contamination

    However, things get a lot more complicated if you have environmental contamination, which is most often the case with urban sites. Developers usually assume a site is contaminated until proven otherwise. When you have contamination it can occur in two ways. You can have soil contamination and/or you can have groundwater contamination. The latter is worse for at least two reasons: (1) water, as you know, moves around and so it’s harder to delineate and clean up and (2) it can expose you to additional liability if it’s migrating off-site.

    Point number two can be a serious risk and there’s lots of case law out there that will tell you that. If you think you might be in this situation, you definitely want to do your homework and get some sound advice. But for the purposes of this post, you should just know that soil contamination is easier to deal with than groundwater contamination.

    Two main approaches

    Once you’ve established that you have a contaminated site and you know the actual contaminants and their concentrations, there are generally two main paths you can choose to ultimately reach a point where you can file an RSC with the Ministry. One, you can remediate the site, which means removing the contamination by physically taking it off site, doing injections, or by some other means. Or two, you can do what’s called a “Risk Assessment.”

    Option 1 – Remediation

    This option is more challenging if you have groundwater contamination because it’s harder to be confident that you’ll be able to get it all. So oftentimes groundwater contamination will lead you toward option number two below. But if all you’re dealing with is contaminated soil and you feel confident in your delineation (i.e. you’ve determined the extents of it), then it’s fairly common to just remediate it during construction. And if you’re building something like underground parking anyway, it often makes sense to do exactly this. Industry people call this a “dig and dump” approach.

    However, there are cost and schedule impacts associated with this approach. Removing and disposing of contaminated soil costs money — there’s a premium. So a typical approach is to test the soil as you’re excavating it to determine what’s clean and what’s contaminated. This process of stock piling and testing requires addiitional effort, but without it you’d have to assume that 100% of the soil you’re excavating is contaminated and that’s often a more expensive proposition. Regardless of your exact remediation approach, you will need to budget both time and money.

    Option 2 – Risk Assessment

    The simplest way to understand a risk assessment is that it’s a way of saying, “we all acknowledge that this site is contaminated and that we’re not going to clean it up, but we’ve accurately assessed all the environmental risks and, if necessary, we will implement appropriate risk management measures.” Again, this approach can be useful if you have groundwater contamination or there’s some other reason why it’s not reasonable or feasible to simply remediate the site. Maybe you don’t need or want to excavate and so this would be a significant incremental cost.

    Now, there are different streams of Risk Assessments. Some take longer than others. But on challenging sites, it would not be unheard of for the process to take between 2-3 years, and sometimes even longer. This can cause significant delays to a project, especially in municipalities where they maybe aren’t as accustomed to dealing with contaminated infill sites and they haven’t gotten their head around things like conditional building permits. (Conditional building permits can allow a project to continue moving forward while a developer works to file their RSC, among other requirements.)

    Barrier to new housing

    Finally, I would like to highlight the barrier that the above processes represent for the delivery of new housing. This is especially true as Toronto and other cities work to encourage more infill housing. Small projects with little or no parking (i.e. no undergrounds) are challenging and expensive to remediate because there’s usually no planned excavation. At the same time, these projects don’t have the luxury of waiting around for 2-3 years while a Risk Assessment works its way through the Ministry. The entire project timeline might be shorter than this.

    Obviously human safety is paramount. That should never change. But I feel strongly that we’re going to need to find ways to streamline the environmental approvals for new housing. Otherwise we’ll continue to restrict large portions of our cities from becoming new homes. The requirement to file an RSC could alone kill the feasibility of a small-scale housing project. And that’s why it was one of the points in my recent post about “how to improve the feasibility of infill housing.”

    Once again, I will remind all of you that I am not an environmental engineer, or an environmental lawyer, or anyone besides a generalist developer. Though I have had to deal with this process on virtually every site I’ve ever worked on. It’s complicated and every site is unique — so as a developer, it’s important to do your own homework. This post is simply intended as a basic environmental primer for developers, and as a way to further highlight one of the many barriers to new infill housing.

    Cover photo by Anastasia Meraki on Unsplash

  • French classes and the work of Georges Eugène Haussmann

    April 6, 2025 · View original

    Some of you might remember that I grew up going to a French school here in Toronto. My mom had rightly decided that I should be able to speak both of Canada’s official languages. But truthfully, I never really loved it as a kid. I started midway through elementary school and so I always felt a little insecure about my French abilities. Which is partially why in the fall of 2023, I decided to enroll in night classes at Alliance Française. I’ve been doing it ever since and I can feel my French getting markedly better. There’s also something deeply nostalgic about being in a French class.

    Generally speaking, the classes are pretty relaxed (sometimes we learn grammar and sometimes we just talk about delicious cheeses), but at the end of last year I decided to register for the DELF exam. DELF stands for Diplôme d’études en langue française and it’s a diploma for non-native speakers of French offered by France’s Ministry of Education. It’s offered at various proficiency levels and I registered for level B2, which France describes in the following way:

    One of the reasons why I registered for this particular level is that it will soon become the minimum level of language proficiency required to become a French citizen. Currently you need the equivalent of B1, but starting January 1, 2026, I understand it will jump up to B2. I, of course, don’t know if I will ever need this, move to France, and/or seek to become a citizen, but it became a goal. I told myself that I wanted the diploma that proves one’s French is good enough to be an actual citizen. I guess it was a way to conquer my childhood insecurities.

    So I’m happy to report that I ended up taking the exam in early March and that last week I received my passing grade. I scored just under 90%. (My weakest section was the handwritten essay.) After I got the news, I came home to the below book sitting on the kitchen counter with a bow and thoughtful handwritten note from Bianca — in French I would add — congratulating me on achieving this goal. One of the first things I said was, “wait, when did you buy this? How did you get it so quickly?” And she responded with, “I ordered it a long time ago, because I knew you’d pass.”

    The book is called Paris Haussmann and it’s a comprehensive look at Haussmann’s 19th century plans for the city. It covers every scale, from the city’s boulevards (morphological scale) down to individual floor plans for each building type (typological scale). It’s a truly extraordinary book and it’s also highly relevant to one of the things that Globizen is focused on right now, which is the building of infill housing on Toronto’s major streets. The urban context isn’t exactly the same, of course, but there’s a lot to be learned from this human-scaled building type. So even if you aren’t trying to overcome some childhood insecurity related to the French, I highly recommend you check out this book.

    Cover photo via Pavillon de l’arsenal

  • Why aren’t Japanese toilets more popular?

    April 5, 2025 · View original

    Things have been pretty serious around here lately. We’ve been talking a lot about isolationist tariffs that make zero economic sense and that have been blatantly miscalculated, and so let’s switch gears and talk about something a little more fun: toilets.

    If any of you remember my post from earlier this year called “Takeaways from Japan,” you might remember this:

    > Our toilets are in the stone ages. You’re not going to get yourself clean with just paper. You need a comfortable warm seat and highly adjustable jets of water. I never fully appreciated this need before the trip, but now I’m a true believer. It’s time for a new toilet.

    Well, I meant it when I said it:

    This week, I finally got around to installing a new TOTO WASHLET seat on my existing toilet. My bathroom may now look a little more geriatric, but it’s a fantastic quality of life upgrade that more people, outside of Japan, should adopt. So why don’t they?

    The TOTO WASHLET seat was first created in 1980. And since then (and up until 2022), the company has reported selling more than 60 million units, with the majority of them being sold in Japan. As of 2021, it was believed that over 80% of Japanese households were equipped with some sort of heated bidet toilet.

    Market penetration is much lower in the West. In the US, ChatGPT think it’s less than 5%. And based on anecdotal evidence, this does not seem far off. I almost never see them in public places (though The Butcher Chef here in Toronto has one) and I rarely see them in people’s homes.

    My gut is that it’s a combination of a lack of awareness and people thinking it’s weird and/or unhygienic. I mean, is that wand clean? But if you travel to Japan, you will have an aha moment. So maybe TOTO needs to figure out a way to export this moment to the rest of the world through, oh I don’t know, some sort of public toilet program.

    Note: This post is not sponsored by TOTO. But I really wish it were, because then maybe I would have gotten my seat for free.

  • This is how long it will take the world to fully replace the US export market

    April 4, 2025 · View original

    We all know what happened this week:

    > Donald Trump’s decision on April 2 2025 to enact sweeping “reciprocal” tariffs on US trade partners will go down as one of the greatest acts of self-harm in American economic history. They will wreak untold damage on households, businesses and financial markets across the world, upending a global economic order that America benefited from and helped to create.

    We also know it was based on highly questionable math:

    > His “reciprocal” levies amount to a back-of-the-envelope calculation. They take trade partners’ US trade deficit in goods as a share of imports from that country, and then divide it by two. This is not a calibrated attempt to equalise tariff and non-tariff barriers facing US exporters, perceived or otherwise. It is, however, a reckless repudiation of all trade agreements the US has signed, as well as a deeply flawed plan to attract foreign manufacturing investment.

    So what happens next?

    Assuming this behavior persists, the US will continue to isolate itself from global trade, and the rest of the world will pivot and quickly move to trade more freely among themselves. This maybe isn’t as problematic as some might think. Today, the US represents about 13.5% of global goods imports, which is down from almost 20% in 2000. And the biggest drivers of global growth are now China and the Euro area.

    To that end, here’s a fascinating study from IMD Business School that looked at how long it will take for various trading partners to completely wean themselves off of the US. And to do this, they looked at non-US import growth for the 10-year period from 2012 to 2022, and then extrapolated. This is what they learned:

    What this chart says is that by the end of this year, some 70 US trading partners could, in theory, replace the loss of the US export market so long as non-US growth continues as it did in the past. And by 2039, the number jumps to over 140 trading parties. 2039 is obviously a long ways away, but I think it’s noteworthy that year one in this specific chart already starts with 70.

    Importantly, Canada does not fall within this initial bucket. Based on the study, we are in the danger zone. That is, exports to the US make up more than 10% of our GDP and it will take more than 10 years for full export recovery. But again, this is based on historic non-US growth. So all this means is that the status quo cannot continue; we need to dramatically increase this growth rate and do it as quickly as possible.

    I hope our leaders recognize the urgency of this, because nothing can be taken for granted when it comes to the US right now. We need to be hyper focused on full trade recovery as soon as possible. Canada needs to be open for business to the world.

    Cover photo by Ben Wicks on Unsplash

  • Housing is expensive in Ontario

    April 3, 2025 · View original

    The Missing Middle Initiative, which is a research group housed at the University of Ottawa’s Institute for the Environment, just published this detailed report on Southern Ontario’s housing affordability crisis.

    As we know, things are not good: In 2005, 21 of 26 single-family house markets in Southern Ontario could have been classified as either affordable or deeply affordable for middle-class families, and none were unattainable.

    Today, none of these markets can be considered affordable or deeply affordable, and 11 of them are now unattainable. In every single one of these markets, buyers should expect to pay 25% or more of their pre-tax income on mortgage payments.

    Below is one of their charts showing the price-to-income ratios for single-family houses in various markets since 2005. Outside of the Greater Toronto Area, the turning point toward worsening affordability was generally in 2016, and the peak was in 2022.

    Here’s some historical context. Canadians who had mortgages in the late 70s and early 80s often like to talk about how crippling rates were back then. But interestingly enough, monthly payments — relative to wages — are actually worse today than they were during this high-rate period (according to the report).

    This is partly because home prices were a lot lower back then and so high rates didn’t have the same impact to mortgage payments. Instead, the two worst periods of time for affordability (payments relative to wages) were during the late 80s housing boom and then during/after the recent pandemic.

    Following the real estate crash of the early 90s, monthly payments relative to wages declined along with home prices. And they didn’t return to the same levels seen during the preceding boom until 2022 — some thirty years later.

    The same thing is happening right now. This reset is naturally improving affordability. But it really should be viewed as an opportunity to course correct before the next cycle begins. MMI’s report does a good job explaining that housing is objectively less affordable today than it was for prior generations.

    Charts from the Missing Middle Initiative; cover photo by Victor Ballesteros on Unsplash

  • What housing type have you lived in the most throughout your life?

    April 2, 2025 · View original

    I started thinking about this the other night. For the first 18 years of my life, in other words, up until I moved away to university, I lived for the most part in a detached single-family house in the suburbs of Toronto. But since then, I have almost exclusively lived in apartments/condominiums ranging from converted houses to high-rise buildings.

    This was true when I was at the University of Toronto and it was true when I lived in Philadelphia for grad school. In my first year of grad school I lived in a converted house in a questionable area of West Philly. In my second year I lived in a high-rise brutalist building. And in my third year I lived in a small three level walk-up apartment above a pet store and a really great deli. This perhaps not surprising given I was a student.

    But since moving back to Toronto, the same has been true. I initially invested and lived in a single-family house, but then decided I preferred living in a condominium and so I have done that ever since. Maybe this changes with kids or maybe it doesn’t. But it’s interesting to think about the housing types we have chosen or were handed. Location and other factors certainly play a role.

    What housing type have you lived in the most throughout your life? Let us know in the comment section below.

    Cover photo by Michal GADEK on Unsplash