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.

Subscribe

  • Elevate 2024

    December 9, 2024 · View original

    I just landed in Miami for the annual Elevate conference that is taking place here at the Fontainebleau Hotel. I’m an ambassador for the event and I’m also moderating a panel on Tuesday afternoon about resident experiences in multi-family buildings. So for the next few days, I suspect I’ll be writing about the conference and some of my takeaways.

    I love Miami. It’s one of my favorite cities. I love the weather. I love the vibe. I love the entrepreneurial spirit. And I love that Spanish can feel like the first language here. It’s almost always the first thing I hear when I get off the plane and there’s something oddly comforting about that even though I don’t speak a word of it. Maybe once I’ve mastered French I’ll turn to Spanish.

    What’s less great about Miami, though, is the traffic. Between Art Basel and the herd of elephants on the beach that everyone is talking about right now, the traffic in this city is bad. Like, Toronto bad. As I write this post, I’m looking out the window at Collins Avenue, and it’s been completely jammed the entire time.

    The Miami region is car oriented and car-oriented cities do not deal well with sudden spikes in demand. It usually breaks them. They’re also harder to scale up. So this region will have some big decisions to make as it continues to grow. That said, I’m noticing a lot more bike lanes across Miami and Miami Beach, and lot more people cycling and using e-scooters. That’s good.

    I know there’s a fairly large contingent of Toronto real estate people here this week, so if you’re also in town and attending Elevate, please do get in touch.

  • Toronto is getting a new chief planner

    December 8, 2024 · View original

    Just over a year ago, Toronto’s former chief planner, Gregg Lintern, announced that he would be retiring at the end of 2023. Here’s the post I wrote thanking him for everything he had done for our city. He was a positive force in so many ways and I remember feeling sad at the time.

    Following the announcement, nobody knew who would replace him. But I remember thinking to myself, “you know who would be fantastic for this position, Jason Thorne.” Jason and I met when Slate first started investing in Hamilton (he was the general manager of planning and economic development). I then became an avid follower of him on Twitter, which is the case for many people in our industry.

    In 2018, we even got a few planners together for a bike ride around downtown Toronto to look at some new city building initiatives. In a nod to Jerry Seinfeld, we called it “planners on bikes getting coffee.” We really should reignite this meetup.

    Fast forward six years and this week it was announced that on December 30, 2024, Jason will assume the role of Toronto’s chief planner. This is great news for our city. He is a true city builder and he understands the task at hand. Toronto is one of the fastest growing global cities in the world and yet we are battling with the transition from a car-oriented suburban region to a multi-modal urban center.

    This is why traffic is so crippling and housing is so expensive. We haven’t fully embraced this future urban state. But real progress is being made, and I think you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who cares more about cities and who spends as much as time as he does thinking through the ingredients that make them great places to live, work, play, and invest.

    Congratulations on the new role, Jason!

    If you’d like to follow Jason, check him out on Bluesky. I think this is where he is now most active.

    Cover photo by Scott Webb on Unsplash

  • Bitcoin is up, condos are down

    December 7, 2024 · View original

    This is how the meme goes:

    At the time of writing this post, Bitcoin is up ~129% YTD. One Bitcoin is now US$101,256.70, which is a big deal in that it’s a nice round milestone and it sounds like an impressive number to most people, including me. The result is that more people now want to buy Bitcoin, hence the above image. Now, this may turn out to be a good time to do this, or it may not be, I really have no idea. But as a crypto believer and long-term holder, I’m certainly happy to see this momentum.

    At the same time, the current crypto market makes me want to buy less of it. Ethereum, which makes up the majority of my holdings, is also up this year. But I was dollar-cost-averaging more of it over the past few years when it was dropping and sentiment seemed to be against it. That, to me, felt like a better time.

    My favorite investing framework is one that I have written about many times before on this blog and one that people far more successful than me like to talk about. It goes something like this: you want to be right about things that most people think are wrong. Said differently, you want to aim for non-consensus bets, and that’s because it’s pretty hard to find value when everyone else is chasing the same thing. Markets are competitive.

    So as a general rule of thumb, if you can find opportunities that you believe wholeheartedly in, but that many people think are dumb, then directionally, you’re probably getting warmer. Obviously, you can’t believe in something and then be wrong about it. That’s not productive. But if you start with something that many/most people are critical of and then work backwards, you might find something interesting.

    I am reiterating all of this today because of our current market dynamics: crypto is way up, as you know, but many real estate markets are way down. For example, here in Toronto, few people are buying pre-construction homes, whereas a few years ago, they were lining up and banging down the doors of sales offices. We have moved from consensus to non-consensus.

    This is making for a challenging development environment. But at the same time, I think it’s a wonderful opportunity for people looking to buy/rent a home and for real estate companies willing to grind it out and be creative. Legacy deals will need to get worked out and competition is only going to lessen as groups leave the market to focus on other things, like buying Bitcoin above $100k.

    More specifically, this is what I’m excited about right now as a developer:

    – It is significantly easier to buy wonderful real estate. There’s far less competition, and so the opportunity is there to structure creative deals. This is especially valuable for smaller companies like ours. – You have to know what you’re doing to be successful. The market isn’t going to bail you out. You need to roll up your sleeves and execute on your strategy. – Creativity and new ideas are now being rewarded. A red hot market only strengthens our bias toward the status quo. Everything is working, so why change? Except now it’s not. So what are we going to do?

    Market cycles are a healthy phenomenon. And I think we’ll start the next cycle in a better place. Housing will be more affordable and projects will be better tailored toward end users, among other changes. But in the interim, there is now this great opportunity to be right about things that most other people think are wrong. And that’s because so much feels wrong. But that’s okay. Because it’s actually the exact precondition you want.

    Disclaimer: Nothing in this post should be construed as investment advice. I am long Ethereum and Toronto housing, and I don’t plan to change this, but you should do your own homework.

    Cover photo by Saad Salim on Unsplash

  • Where rich people are moving

    December 6, 2024 · View original

    Henley & Partners is a firm that specializes in residence and citizenship by investment. What this means is that if you have a lot of money and you’d like to take take up residency somewhere else, or if you’d like to start a company somewhere else, they can probably help you with that. And, if you’re a country, they can also help you design a program to attract the above rich people.

    As a result of being in this line of work, the company has a pretty good understanding of where rich people are going. This year, for example, they are forecasting that approximately 128,000 millionaires from around the world will end up moving somewhere else. This doesn’t mean that they’ll simply get residency in another country; it means they’ll start spending greater than 6 months each year there.

    It’s interesting to look at these provisional flows.

    Here are the countries where millionaires are currently leaving:

    And here are the countries where they’re going:

    The United Arab Emirates isn’t very big. It has somewhere around 11 million people (2024 estimate). This makes the US about 30x bigger in terms of its population. And yet, they seem to have designed a pretty good mouse trap for catching millionaires. Having no income taxes helps. But the same could be said for a number of the countries on this list: relatively small and jockeying for high-net-worth individuals.

    Cover photo by Fredrik Öhlander on Unsplash

  • Local, and global

    December 5, 2024 · View original

    Real estate development is often described as a hyper local business. You need local relationships and you need to understand the nuances of your market so that you can identify opportunities and best manage your risks. This is all true. New buildings don’t exist in a vacuum; they are the result of land use policies, politics, economic conditions, culture, and countless other very specific factors. So when capital invests with a local “sponsor”, they are expecting that developer to have the knowledge and experience to navigate all of these local risk factors.

    At the same time, the world is only getting smaller and more interconnected. The result is that there are many things that aren’t actually different across markets. For example, I find it interesting that, today, you can speak to a developer on the other side of the world and for it to feel like they’re living the same life: “yeah, so, office vacancies are up (though we’re looking at conversions), residential demand is down (individual investors have left the market), but there’s still demand for student housing and distribution centers.” On some level, we are all living and operating in the same market.

    So perhaps a better way to think about real estate development is that it’s both local, and global. And you need to be able to operate at all of the different scales in between. You need to worry about what’s happening down the street and the R-value of your wall assemblies in the context of your local climate, but you also need to think about the macro environment. And this is likely to become only more true as time goes on and as new technologies continue to bring us closer.

  • Living Breakwaters

    December 4, 2024 · View original

    The obvious response to sea level rise and storm surges is to try and keep the water out by building things like walls. But there are other options. At the southern tip of Staten Island, New York, for example, a new near-shore breakwater system was just completed this past October.

    Designed by landscape architect Kate Orff of SCAPE, the project cost $111 million, runs about 2,400 linear feet, and is designed to “break” future storm surge waves as they approach the coast. This won’t completely eliminate the risks, but it will help to reduce them.

    At the same time, by slowing currents next to the shoreline, these barriers are expected to reduce shoreline erosion (and eventually reverse it) and improve the overall habitat for plants and animals along it. The breakwaters themselves are also intended to attract organisms, hence the term “living.”

    It’s a novel approach when it comes to flood infrastructure in the US. But it’s certainly not a new idea:

    > Breakwaters is an ancient idea for how to protect shorelines – and the people who live close to them – by building underwater seawalls to defend a harbor or a beach from the force of waves. Kate has designed an extraordinary, modern-day interpretation, the Living Breakwaters, which will not only protect humans and revitalize the coastline of New York City, but also restore lost marine biodiversity. This is a visionary project that tackles the full task of adaptation, and which has the capacity to inspire and to positively impact vulnerable shorelines worldwide.

    It’ll now be interesting to see how this performs during storms. But in the meantime, you can find more information about the project on SCAPE’s website.

    Photo from SCAPE and Ty Cole

  • Project Bench rezoning approved

    December 3, 2024 · View original

    Today I have two things to share.

    One, I’m not very good at following proper protocols during council meetings. You know, where you’re supposed to direct communication via the chair person and say things like, “Through you, Mr./Madam Chair.” I will work on improving this.

    Two, I’m thrilled to report that, last evening, the proposed zoning and Official Plan amendments for Project Bench were approved by the Town of Lincoln Councillors in an 8-1 vote. This is following the positive planning staff report that I wrote about last month. Once again, this is an important milestone for the project and we’re excited for the next steps.

    At the same time, we recognize that change can be difficult. And this development represents change for the community. Three people from the community spoke last night in opposition of the project.

    I spoke to one of them after the meeting and he was very respectful and said, “congratulations.” But he also went on to say, “I hope that you and the team will continue to work with the community as you have been doing.” My response was, “absolutely we will.”

    Onward.

    Update: Just to be clearer on the planning process details, last night was the Town of Lincoln’s Committee of the Whole meeting. The Committee of the Whole has three areas of focus: community services & infrastructure, general business & finance, and planning & economic development. All Town of Lincoln Councillors, including the mayor, voted on the project at this meeting. The next step is for the Committee’s recommendation to go to Council for final approval, and this meeting is scheduled for December 16, 2024. Following this, a formal Notice of Decision will be issued.

  • World’s best cities

    December 2, 2024 · View original

    There are countless rankings of cities out there. And most of them probably don’t mean very much. But the concept of a “global city”, as coined by Saskia Sassen in the early 90s, is still immensely fascinating to me. And that’s because there is, in fact, an order. There are cities that are less and more important to the global economy.

    To this end, Resonance Consulting has just released their annual ranking of the world’s best cities. And this year, they’ve introduced something new to their methodology: perception data. For this, they partnered with Ipsos and asked more than 22,000 respondents across 30 countries the following three broad and open-ended questions:

    1. What are the top 3 towns or cities you would most like to live in someday? 2. What are the top 3 towns or cities you would most like to visit in the next 12 to 24 months? 3. What 3 towns or cities do you believe currently offer the best job opportunities?

    The intent with these questions was to not anchor people to a specific list of places, and to not necessarily anchor people to big global cities. Maybe the best job opportunities are believed to be in small towns that most people aren’t thinking about. The result is that thousands of different towns and cities were mentioned during the survey period.

    While this didn’t necessarily impact the cities and usual suspects that you would expect to see in a ranking like this — cities like London, New York, and Paris — it did change certain things and offer some interesting insights. For example, the strong global perception of Sydney helped to move it into the top 10 for the first in the ten-year history of this report.

    On the other end of the spectrum, negative sentiment (outside of China) toward Hong Kong caused the city’s ranking to drop precipitously. It is now ranked 97th, behind cities like Naples (Italy), Birmingham (UK), and Rochester (US). Singapore, in case you’re wondering, is ranked 5th:

    Broadly speaking, the perception data also served to remind us that we continue to have a bias toward cities. When people are asked where they want to live, visit, and work, they still think of the world’s biggest and most important places. So despite the rise of decentralizing technologies (i.e. Zoom) and the bad things that happened to cities as a result of the pandemic, big cities remain at the center of the global economy.

    This is not at all surprising.

    Cover photo by Aaron Gilmore on Unsplash

  • Stop with the suburban setbacks

    December 1, 2024 · View original

    I’ll be the first to admit that I have an urban bias. I like walkable narrow streets. I like being able to cycle around. And I like not having to drive when I want to do things. But this can create a city-building blindspot and Paul Kulig, Principal at Perkins&Will Toronto, reminded me of that this week. Here’s a tweet where he compares two streets, both of which have a right-of-way width somewhere around 40m:

    > Tweet: @donnelly_b Both these streets have similar, 40+ metre rights-of-way. One is designed for people, the other prioritizes getting 18-wheelers on and off the 400. https://t.co/w1Ou7ULFGK

    The image on the left is Prenzlauer Allee in Berlin. And the image on the right is Finch Avenue West in Toronto. Despite both having light rail running down the middle, one of these streets is walkable, vibrant, and generally urban, and the other is very suburban. What this reminds us is that a wide street isn’t necessarily an insurmountable challenge. It’s ultimately how we design that street that is the make or break.

    Here’s another look at Prenzlaurer Allee:

    In addition to transit running down the middle of it, it also has a ton of on-street parking. In many cases, the cars are parked perpendicular to the curb. So it’s not like this street isn’t also accommodating to motorists. The key differentiator is how the buildings are placed. They come right up to the street and are accompanied by a great pedestrian realm (note all the patios below).

    This is one of the things that Toronto needs to be focused on following the investments made in public transit on streets like Finch and Eglinton. We don’t want generous setbacks on these streets. Make them 0m. Towers in a park kill any chance of street life. We can talk all we want about “active frontages” on our arterial roads, but who wants to sit on a patio on a street like Finch? Nobody.

    But as Berlin shows, there’s absolutely no reason why we couldn’t change that. Thanks for the reminder, Paul.

    Cover photo via Google Street View

  • Ontario cities are finally lowering development charges

    November 30, 2024 · View original

    If you’re a longtime reader of this blog, you might remember this post from 2020, which was about a cost comparison that developer Urban Capital had done between a project they completed in 2005 and a project they were doing in 2020. What they uncovered was that the biggest culprit in terms of rising costs was none other than development charges. This line item had increased by 3,244%!

    Everyone in the development industry knows that this is the reality. Not only have developers needed to carry a big budget for development charges, but they’ve also had to carry allowances for escalations; and that’s because they have tended to jump multiple times throughout the course of a single project. It’s frankly hard to keep up.

    So for anyone to say that development charges have generally increased at the rate of inflation — which some do say — I’m guessing they don’t know math, they don’t know how inflation works, or they’re lying because taxing new homes is politically easier than the other ways of collecting municipal revenue.

    Thankfully, the Bank of Canada has an easy-to-use inflation calculator. And if one were to plug in 2005 and 2020, it would tell you that over this 15-year period, the average annual rate of inflation was 1.63% and that, as a total percentage change, this equates to 27.43%. So, 3,244% vs. 27.43%. It’s not even close.

    For a long time, nobody cared to listen to developers complain about this. The market was, you know, too good. Isn’t this just developers being greedy? Well, that is no longer the case and consumers are waking up. Here’s an excerpt from a Globe and Mail article published this week:

    > But cities started to enjoy that revenue stream too much. They began to gorge on development fees, a flow of money that allowed politicians to keep property taxes low. Who was going to complain? Future owners of homes are often people who don’t yet live in the city and can’t vote. It’s the city-building equivalent of that Monty Python joke about an innovation in how to raise government revenue: taxing foreigners living abroad.

    But even more importantly, municipalities are now waking up. Last week, the City of Vaughan — which previously had the dubious distinction of the highest DCs in the Greater Toronto Area — announced that it would be reverting back to the rates they had in effect on September 18, 2018, and that these rates would remain in place until November 19, 2029.

    This takes the development charge for a single-family home from $95,466 per unit back down to $50,193 per unit. This is significant! And given the current strains on housing affordability, these savings will almost certainly flow through to end purchasers. (FYI, all of the developers who have signed the CANT pledge have all agreed to pass on any tax savings dollar for dollar.)

    Here’s a quote from Vaughan Mayor Steven Del Duca:

    > Development charges have become an unfair tax burden on homebuyers. Too many of our residents, in particular young families in our community, have seen their dream of buying a home close to where they grew up, disappear completely as housing prices have spiraled out of control.  We have a housing affordability crisis and it’s time for us to get real about the solutions needed to solve it. Today’s decision by Vaughan Council to dramatically reduce our development charges for the foreseeable future is a strong step in the right direction. I urge other municipalities to follow our lead and do the right thing.

    He makes a good point. It behooves other cities in Ontario to follow their lead.

    Cover photo by Allen Y on Unsplash