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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  • Introducing Propeur

    May 22, 2026 · View original

    I sat next to a software developer at my friend’s wedding a few weeks ago, and I figured I would ask him the obvious question: “What percentage of the code that you write today is now being done through AI?” At first he was reticent to answer, but eventually he told me that it’s, like, the majority. That sounded right.

    I then decided to pull out my phone and force upon him something that I’ve been vibe coding. I’m sure he found this boring, but his response was interesting nonetheless. He said, “This is the future of software. It is going to be both highly personalized and built by actual users. And because of this, it’s going to be better software.” In other words, accountants will build what they need, photographers will build what they need, and real estate developers will build what they need.

    What I showed him was Propeur.com, a residential property management platform tailored toward small Ontario landlords that I have been building for my own purposes and as a tool that Globizen can use for its infill rental projects. It’s still early days and there are bugs to work out, but here’s what you can do so far:

    – Add your rental properties and receive a Monday morning email with a summary of what happened over the last week and what’s on the horizon. – Manage tenants and rental units, including move-in and move-out dates, and all of the critical dates surrounding rental increases. – Automatically track current debt balances and maturity dates. – Store all relevant property documents, and have them automatically labeled and categorized in the appropriate folders. – Create a public property profile for both on-market and off-market units (here’s an example). – Sync bank accounts and categorize expenses by property and unit. – Export transactions to a CSV, filtered by property, date, and revenue/expense category. – Log maintenance requests and automatically email them out to a contractor or maintenance person (the next step will likely be some kind of tenant portal). – Export tax reports at the end of the year.

    Again, it’s still very much a preliminary beta release and there are certainly bugs. But already, I find myself using it almost daily. If you’re a small landlord in Ontario and would like to give it a spin, you can sign up here. I’d love to get your feedback on the platform. And if it’s something you find useful, please feel free to drop me a line and I’ll buy you a coffee.

    Cover photo by Alexander Andrews on Unsplash

  • The end of zero marginal cost

    May 21, 2026 · View original

    The conventional beauty of the internet and software was that it had effectively zero marginal cost. That is to say, it might cost you a lot of money to create something initially, but once created, you could scale it very quickly, more or less for free. This has been a great way to make money, and it’s the opposite of something like real estate development where everything takes forever and costs too much money.

    But the landscape has shifted rapidly. Dror Poleg wrote this week that intelligence, rather than software, is now eating the world. The fundamental difference is that while software had zero marginal cost, AI does not. When we ask AI something, it has to reason it out in real time, and in order to do that, it needs to consume lots of energy and compute.

    That changes things:

    > As a result of the above, we are seeing something we’ve never seen before: Software demand is beginning to bump into physical constraints. The world is struggling to allocate sufficient land to build data centers and to produce and redirect the energy required to meet AI demand. Tech giants like Google, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft are spending an unprecedented amount of money to build these new data centers, but they are approaching their financial limits. Google has recently partnered with Blackstone, one of the world’s largest landlords, to expand and expedite the construction of new data centers.

    > All this sounds like great news for real estate developers. Finally, order has been restored in the universe: If you want to grow your business, you need to pay more rent; the natural scarcity of land is asserting itself. Instead of software eating the world, it is now the world that is eating the free cash flow generated by software companies.

    However, these specific dynamics may only remain true in the short to medium term. As dystopian as it may seem, there is indeed an organized and real effort to bring data centres into space. Some of the advantages of this include abundant, continuous energy and zero land-use constraints to fetter growth. Now, I don’t know enough to comment on the feasibility or timing, but it certainly sounds like great fodder for a Black Mirror episode.

    Cover photo by SpaceX on Unsplash

  • An original piece of the Eiffel Tower from 1889 is up for sale

    May 20, 2026 · View original

    In 1983, the Eiffel Tower underwent a significant structural renovation that included the removal of an original helical staircase used to bring visitors up the tower. New elevators were installed in its place, and the specific section connecting the second and third floors was dismantled and cut into 24 sections.

    Four of these sections were saved for French public heritage, and the remaining 20 sections were auctioned off to the public. Since then, these stair sections have traded for staggering numbers, with the record being Section No. 13 selling for €523,800 in 2016.

    But now, for the first time since the original 1983 auction, Stair Section No. 1 is about to hit the market through Artcurial. The pre-sale estimate is €120,000-€150,000, but as is customary with auction houses (and auction dynamics in general), I’m sure this is a deliberately low number.

    If any of you are in the market for an original Eiffel Tower staircase from 1889, you can register for the auction here, which is scheduled to take place on May 21 at 2pm Paris time. I’ll be checking in from afar with curiosity. Because somebody is really going to want this.

    Photos from Artcurial

  • Are short-haul flights on the way out?

    May 19, 2026 · View original

    Jet fuel costs have nearly doubled since the US and Israel attacked Iran in February. This is obviously straining the overall economics of air travel, but the most impacted segment is the one that has always been tenuous: short-haul flights.

    As I understand it, airlines generally prefer flights that are at least 2 hours long. Takeoff and landing consume the most fuel, and add a lot of wear and tear on a plane’s equipment, so you want a long enough flight to amortize these costs. This is why for the 10 years spanning 2016 to 2026, US flights spanning less than 250 miles declined by 11% — the largest drop of any route length.

    Now, in some cases, these short-haul flights are simply necessary loss leaders. For example, the flight from Milwaukee to Chicago is comically short. It’s only about 70 miles, translating into an actual cruising time of around 20 minutes. But it’s an important route for connecting passengers and the overall hub-and-spoke airline model.

    This also makes it slightly harder for rail to effectively compete, because you need to solve for two clear passenger demands (again, assuming they’re connecting): (1) people leaving Milwaukee will want to check their bags at the point of departure and (2) they don’t want to arrive downtown, they want to arrive at the airport for their connecting flight.

    That said, both of these wants are solvable. Hong Kong, for instance, allows in-town check-in where passengers drop their bags downtown before boarding the airport train. This is particularly convenient if you have to check out of your hotel and need to rid yourself of your luggage until you arrive at your final destination.

    Very cool, so what’s my point?

    I mention all this because if short-haul flights are the flight segment that airlines don’t love to operate, then it only strengthens the opportunity for high-speed rail to fill this gap in the market and become a seamless component of overall global mobility.

    Here in Canada, the obvious opportunity is the Toronto-Montreal corridor. This is arguably the single best opportunity in North America when you consider its geography, construction viability (lots of undeveloped land to lay new track), and ability to replace short-haul flights. The broader Windsor-Quebec City corridor is also, as we know, the densest part of Canada with roughly 50% of our entire population.

    But the overall opportunity is twofold: it will service origin-destination travel and it will connect Toronto and Montreal as global airport hubs. In fact, this is one of the stated reasons for why Air Canada joined the high-speed Alto project as a core consortium partner:

    > Connections with other modes of transport, such as rail or bus, are part of the solutions the company is already developing to offer the most relevant mobility option, responding in a sustainable way to the specific needs of each of its customers. In the longer term, the contribution of its expertise to the Cadence team will enable the airline to contribute to the harmonious integration of a future intercity rail network with existing airport hubs in the Quebec-Windsor corridor, for the benefit of all travellers.

    Here’s a specific example. Montreal largely serves as Canada’s direct gateway to France’s secondary cities, Francophone Africa, and the Mediterranean. So if you live in Toronto and want to fly to Marseille or Algiers or Mallorca, you are going to connect in Montreal (or connect across the Atlantic somewhere in Europe).

    The multi-modal train option would include an in-town baggage check at Union Station in Toronto, a 3-hour train ride to Montreal, a seamless rail connection from Gare Centrale to YUL (with the REM airport train set to open in 2027), and then your flight to Europe or Africa.

    The overall travel time should be comparable, except in the high-speed rail option you’d have more uninterrupted time to work, watch a movie, or sleep. And now that Air Canada gets to rid itself of its less profitable (or unprofitable?) short-haul flights, it should have the margin to aggressively market these tickets.

    If this customer experience is designed properly — with one booking, competitive fares, clean transfers, and convenient baggage handling — it will quickly dominate the market. We know this because it’s already working in Europe.

    Cover photo by 7 on Unsplash

  • Are home prices and social media the reasons we’re having even fewer babies?

    May 18, 2026 · View original

    Now that we are expecting our first child, it appears to me like everyone around us is also having babies. This is almost certainly some kind of frequency bias at work, because I know that the fertility rate in Canada is officially ultra-low (the technical term) and falling globally. According to a recent Financial Times article by John Burn-Murdoch, two-thirds of the world’s countries are now averaging a fertility rate below the replacement rate of 2.1. And in 66 countries, including Canada, the number is now closer to one than to two.

    The obvious explanation for these falling rates is economic. Children are expensive and require a lot of work, which can make things difficult if you don’t have a sufficient amount of money and/or time. This is why there’s a strong inverse correlation between birth rates in the developed world and the developing world. Generally speaking, as a country develops, its birth rate drops.

    One very specific reason for this appears to be the cost of housing. Indeed, studies have found causal links between rising housing costs and declining fertility rates. And this could be one of the reasons why there’s often a spread between what women report as being their ideal number of children and the actual number they have. Perhaps they wanted more, but they didn’t have that extra bedroom in the home.

    On top of all this, there’s a growing realization that there’s another powerful force at work here: social media. Young people are increasingly spending their free time on their phones, forgoing in-person social gatherings and therefore missing out on opportunities to find people who would like to have sex with them. A compelling dataset for this hypothesis is the fact that while the number of children per mother seems to have stabilized in many countries, the overarching problem is that fewer women are becoming mothers in the first place.

    Another dimension to social media is that it distorts our perception of the world. In the same FT article, demographer Lyman Stone is quoted as saying: “If you spend lots of time socialising with your peers in the real world, your standards [for a potential partner] are anchored in the real world. If you spend your time on Instagram, your standards are anchored to an artificial sense of what is normal.”

    The world is increasingly viewing social media as this generation’s smoking. However, it’s unreasonable to think that smartphones and social media will ever go away. If you’re trying to market anything today, that’s where the eyeballs are. But I do think all of this only strengthens the case for us to build more walkable, urban, and inclusive neighbourhoods; cities where it’s possible to walk to a corner store and bump into a neighbour along the way. Not only is human interaction nice, but it has been shown to increase social trust within communities.

    In my view, car-oriented communities and self-driving cars that people will sit in for hours only exacerbate the problems of loneliness and social isolation. Cities are ultimately markets. They are labour markets and, yes, they are dating markets. The best cities reduce the friction around people doing business, trading goods and services, having fun, and meeting people. And it sounds like we could use more of that, not less, right now.

    Cover photo by camilo jimenez on Unsplash

    Charts by John Burn-Murdoch via the Financial Times

  • How to fall in love with Toronto

    May 17, 2026 · View original

    This weekend I went on a long bike ride across the city with my friend Ev (who, by the way, just recently got married. Congratulations again to you both!). This was not a ride to pump my feeble Strava stats, but a ride to see and explore our wonderful city. And once again I was reminded that one of the easiest ways to fall in love with Toronto is to get on a bike and ride across it. Biking offers the best of both worlds: it’s both fast and efficient, and it’s granular. You can easily slow-ride through smaller spaces or quickly get off and walk them.

    If I’m ever in the mood to elicit a shitstorm of negative reactions, all I have to do is go on Twitter and tweet something pithy about how much I love Toronto. I don’t know why so many people seem to react like this, but I genuinely feel this way about our city. City-building is a slow process, but a spring ride after a cold winter will reveal to you all of the projects we’ve been working on quietly in the background: new streets, new mid-block connections, new public spaces, new businesses, and beautiful architecture.

    Of course, not all of it is exceptional. At one point, Ev and I came across two newly constructed courtyards in the middle of large developments that will remain unnamed. One was beautiful and held the promise of businesses and F&B lining its edges, while the other was empty and grim looking. We then turned to each other and said: “Isn’t it amazing how different these not-so-different courtyards are?”

    But objectively, there’s so much that we are getting right. New streets are now subdividing formerly large, unwalkable blocks. Existing neighbourhoods are growing, adding sustained urban vibrancy. New megaparks, like Biidaasige Park in the Port Lands, have already become fantastic, well-used spaces, setting the stage for new urban neighbourhoods to crop up all along their edges. And many of our new buildings are, quite frankly, gorgeous.

    Most importantly, though, people are using these spaces — a lot. They’re filling sidewalks, hanging out on patios, and cycling on new bike lanes. It’s easy to focus on the things that Toronto isn’t or doesn’t have, just like it’s personally easy to focus on what you may not be or have. Bringing positivity doesn’t mean ignoring the challenges that our city is facing, but being grateful for everything we are achieving is a great way to reframe our perspectives toward an abundance mindset.

    If you’re looking for an easy way to do that, try getting on a bike on a beautiful sunny day.

  • The Atlas of Greater Paris

    May 16, 2026 · View original

    Occasionally, writing a daily blog has its perks.

    Last month I wrote a post called “The radical transformation of Greater Paris” and, in it, I mentioned that Apur (a French non-profit focused on urbanism that I follow) had just published a new book called Atlas de la Métropole du Grand Paris.

    I also mentioned that I hadn’t been able to find a shop that would ship to Toronto, but that if anyone happens to be in Paris, it’s available in bookstores over there. Volume is apparently a great store for people who like the kind of things we talk about on this blog.

    Following the post, I got an email from Ryan Taylor at Parcel Economics who more or less said, “Hey, I’m leaving for Paris soon. Want me to grab you a copy of the book? I’ve learned a lot from your blog over the years and thought I would offer.”

    Now I have the book:

    Ryan, thanks for transporting what is a fairly substantial book across the Atlantic. If any of you are in need of a land economist, reach out to Ryan and the folks at Parcel Economics. He’s both a nice and smart guy.

    Enjoy the long weekend, everyone.

  • How A4 paper and Japanese architecture share the same geometric logic

    May 15, 2026 · View original

    This post is ultimately going to be about architecture, but bear with me while I get there. The international standard for paper sizes has three series: A, B, and C. From this standard comes A4 paper, which many of you might recognize as the most common paper size in the world, serving as the standard for most business documents. However, not all countries use this sizing. Canada and the US, for instance, use Letter-sized paper instead of A4, which is simply a result of a historical norm. Canada tried to switch to the international standard (ISO 216) when we started adopting the metric system in the 1970s, but our deep economic integration with the US made it simply too cumbersome to juggle different sizes of paper.

    The beauty of A4 paper is that it follows something known as the Silver Ratio (which equals 1 : √2 or 1 : 1.414). Its exact dimensions are 210 x 297 mm. What’s important about this ratio is that it allows for a perfectly recursive system. It works like this: A0 paper is 841 x 1189 mm (the same Silver Ratio) or exactly one square metre. If you fold this paper in half along its long side, you get two pieces of A1 paper with the exact same ratio. If you repeat the same fold, you will then get A2 paper, and so on, all the way down to A10 paper. The Silver Ratio is the only rectangle where, when you fold or cut it in half, the proportions stay exactly the same. This is a neat feature because it means there’s no waste when manufacturing different paper sizes.

    So, what does this have to do with architecture?

    Well, the Silver Ratio is heavily embedded in Japanese architecture and heritage. In fact, it’s also known as the “Japanese proportion.” It has long been appreciated for the scale it creates — it’s more square and humble, as opposed to rectangular and grand — and for the modularity that it affords. Indeed, the recursive nature of the ratio makes it practical for construction and perfectly suited to the Japanese concept of mottainai, which is a term that describes a deep sense of regret when things are wasted. A good example of this concept in practice is the recently completed Circularity Cabin by architect Takaaki Fuji. A simple family home made from standard store-bought timber, the 60 m2 structure follows a strict modular system to minimize waste and improve efficiency.

    Mottainai might be my new favourite Japanese concept.

    Cover photo by Takuya Seki via Never Too Small

  • Toronto Pearson breaks ground on one of Canada’s largest airport expansions

    May 14, 2026 · View original

    Toronto Pearson Airport has just announced a $3 billion investment called LIFT, which stands for Long-term Investment in Facilities and Terminals. (This feels like a “how do we make this acronym work” kind of name.) The investment includes an upgraded baggage system, an expansion of the airfield to 2.2 million square metres, and a bunch of new tech.

    Following this, the plan is to refresh Terminals 1 and 3, and look for opportunities to create some net-new terminal space. And when it’s all said and done, the program is expected to grow the airport’s capacity to about 65 million passengers per year by the early 2030s.

    My first reaction when I read the announcement was, “Great, let’s make Pearson better.” My second reaction was, “Why only 65 million passengers? Why not 100 million or even 125 million?” (Side note: I love airports and I think it would be a lot of fun to design and/or work on one.)

    For those of you who are curious, here are the top 10 busiest airports in the world by annual passenger volume (according to Gemini):

    My follow-up question to Gemini was my second reaction: Why not target 100 million passengers? The response I got was, “Yeah, well, the airport is physically constrained and simply doesn’t have the room for this kind of volume.” So then I asked it to give me the land area in both acres and square kilometres for the same list of airports:

    The obvious question: If Tokyo and London can achieve close to 100 million passengers on less than 4,000 acres, why can’t Toronto? Gemini then said, “Okay, yeah, I guess it might be possible,” but then gave a number of reasons why it’s currently more challenging; everything from the layout of the runways to the high percentage of origin & destination travel over connecting flights.

    I frankly don’t know enough about the operations of international airports to comment intelligently, but at the end of the day, the LIFT program is fundamentally about densifying the existing airport lands and unlocking additional capacity. And that’s what it will take to eventually get to 125 million!

    Cover photo by Michael on Unsplash

  • Jesta Group announces $30M bulk condominium buy in downtown Toronto

    And a larger $500 million condominium program

    May 13, 2026 · View original

    Montreal-based Jesta Group has just announced the acquisition of a bulk condominium portfolio in downtown Toronto valued at $30 million. This also marks the launch of a larger $500 million program targeting more than 1,000 residential units over the next 12 months. Here’s a snippet from the press release:

    > “Toronto’s fundamentals remain strong and the current market environment has created a unique window to deploy capital at scale,” said Anthony O’Brien, Senior Managing Director at Jesta Group. “We are aggressively pursuing opportunities that fit this investment ethos and encourage developers with qualifying inventory to reach out directly.”

    Anthony’s email is [aobrien@jesta.com](mailto:aobrien@jesta.com).

    Sentiment seems to be changing here in Toronto. Maybe it’s because summer is coming and the winter was long, or maybe it’s because our looming supply bottom is drawing nearer. Regardless, a $500 million program certainly suggests that somebody believes we are at or near the bottom.

    Cover photo by Rodolfo Flores on Unsplash