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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Tag: cities

  • Is laneway housing a good idea or a bad idea?

    As a follow up to my recent post called “Disrupting everything”, I thought I would share this talk by venture capitalist Chris Dixon at Y Combinator’s Startup School. In it, he talks about why good ideas often seem like bad ideas at first.

    Chris frames the discussion by saying that when you have a good idea—that everyone else thinks is a bad idea—you effectively know a secret. But by a secret, it’s really that you believe something that nobody else believes to be true. So much so that when you try and tell everyone else about your secret, they all think you’re crazy, which is frustrating because it seems so obvious to you.

    He then provides a number of characteristics that can help you identity good ideas that seem like bad ideas:

    • Powerful people dismiss them as toys.
    • They unbundle the functions done by others.
    • Did it originate as a hobby?
    • Do they challenge social norms?

    Now, he’s obviously talking about startups, but I think the framework can apply outside of the technology world. I think it can apply to cities. 

    To give you one example, let’s consider laneway housing. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ll know that I’m a big supporter of laneway housing in Toronto. But that it’s something the city generally does not support.

    However, there are laneway houses being built and they’re being built by architects and progressive urbanists. Some might even call it a hobby, because it remains a pretty tough business model at the moment.

    Personally, I think one of the main reasons the city is unwilling to formally allow laneway housing is because it challenges social norms. I’ve read the staff reports and the meeting minutes: people think it’s weird to live off a laneway. In fact, in one case somebody asserted that since laneways are generally undesirable urban spaces, anybody who would want to live off one is almost surely a social degenerate.

    But there’s absolutely nothing inherent to human beings that says we can’t live off a 5m wide street or that we can’t have a “house located behind another house.” Those are simply constructs we’ve created for ourselves.

    So the next time you hear about an idea that you think seems like a bad idea, ask yourself: Is it really a bad idea or does it just make me feel uncomfortable because it contravenes the norm? Taking yourself out of your comfort zone is a good thing. It’s how we grow.

  • Disrupting everything

    Last year when I started working on Dirt—which was really my first startup—I had a number of people say things to me like: “Wow, that’s quite a change, going from real estate into tech.” But that’s not the way I saw and see it.

    I don’t think you can silo industries like that anymore. Technology is touching everything. Some would even go so far as to say that every company in the world is, or will be, a software and technology company.

    The way I looked at it was that I was starting a technology-enabled real estate company. I was hoping to leverage the internet to improve the way things are done in an existing industry. Of course, by improve I really mean disrupt—which is arguably the biggest buzzword in the tech community today:

    “Disruption is not so much a trend as an especially lucrative world philosophy favored by technophilic entrepreneurs. It’s the only path towards progress. If you’re not disrupting something you might as well go collect kindling and roast raccoon meat in the hills of Cupertino.”

    A good example of how disruptive innovation is reaching all sectors of the economy, including government, is the New Haven-based startup called SeeClickFix (which I discovered via This Big City). What it does is allow citizens to report non-emergencies (like potholes) to their local government. Governments can then respond and manage these tasks. (Sorry Rob Ford. Now you don’t need to return all those phone calls.)

    But moreover, I think it shows that technology is not only going to disrupt business and industry, it’s going to disrupt the way cities function and the way we live. I don’t know what that’s ultimately going to look like, but I can already feel it underway.

    Albert Wenger, of venture capital firm Union Square Ventures, recently argued—in a talk at DLD—that we are still in the midst of a transition from the Industrial Age to the Information Age. And I buy that. With every new disruption, we’re one step closer to completely making that transition. But we’re not quite there yet.

    The Industrial Age drove people out of cities. It made cities dirty and undesirable. But in the Information Age, cities are damn important and it’s where people want to be. Look at all the people rushing back to urban centers.

    So if technology has the power to disrupt business, industry, and cities, I suggest we stop just thinking about technology in isolation and remember the powerful words of Marshall McLuhan: “The medium is the message.” Don’t just focus on the obvious or you’ll miss a tidal wave of change happening beneath the surface.

  • Capital of the world

    If you had to pick one, which city would you consider to be the “capital of the world?” There are no other instructions. Just select whatever first comes to mind. If for whatever reason you can’t see the poll below, click here.

    If you’re curious about where the above list of cities came from, they’re simply all of the Alpha++, Alpha+ and Alpha cities according to the Globalization and World Cities Research Network (GaWC). The list may be a few years old though.

  • What real estate developers do and why I became one

    I met up with a friend yesterday after work and the topic of my blog came up. He said he loved the content, but that he would like to learn more about the inner workings of what it means to be a real estate developer. His belief was that there are lots of city blogs out there, but rarely do you get the candid perspective of a developer.

    I immediately thought this was a good idea for one simple reason: When I’m at a party and I tell someone that I’m a real estate developer, oftentimes they have no idea what that means. They usually think I’m a real estate agent. Or they ask me to explain a typical day. Either way, I’ve found it generally smoother (and more impressive) to just lie and say I’m an architect.

    So I’m going to do just what my friend suggested. I’m going to make an effort to talk more about what it means to be a real estate developer. And to kick it off, I thought I’d start with some of the basics and then talk about how I got into the business.

    Real estate developers are effectively the entrepreneur that make a new building happen. They go out and buy the land, they put a team in place (architect, engineers and so on), they get the necessary approvals to build (with the help of the team of course), they finance the deal, and then they get a builder to actually construct the project.

    Developers are like an orchestra conductor. They don’t play any instruments, they just direct the performance.

    But at the same time, developers assume 100% of the risk of the project. If the building fails (because you can’t sell the condo units or lease out the space), that all falls on the developer (and his/her investors). All of the other team members are getting paid based on the services they provide. They’re consultants.

    This distinction is what (can) make real estate development so lucrative—with risk comes reward. And I’ll be completely candid in saying that this is part of the reason I decided to get into development. I was training to be an architect and I started realizing that I could make more money as a developer.

    But I also came to the realization that as a developer I would likely end up having more say over the built environment. That’s the unfortunate reality of my industry. Even though architects spend far more time than your average developer thinking about what makes buildings and cities great, I would argue that they don’t have nearly the same amount of say. Because if they did, we probably wouldn’t have so many crappy buildings in our cities. But it’s this way because architects aren’t assuming the risk.

    Part of me used to actually feel bad about switching over to the dark side, which is how some architects refer to the development game. But the best way to summarize how I feel today is through what an architect friend told me a few years ago: “Brandon, cities don’t need more architects that care about design. We have lots of those. Cities need more developers that care about design.”

    And so that’s what I became. A developer who loves design and cares deeply about one of our greatest assets—cities.

  • Annual US Federal infrastructure budget

    I was browsing through Vishaan Chakrabarti’s new book, A Country of Cities: A Manifesto for Urban America, and I was struck by a diagram outlining the annual US Federal infrastructure budget. Here it is:

    It comes as no surprise, but it’s still a good reminder of how heavily subsidized roads and sprawl are. So the next time somebody argues that suburban sprawl is a natural market outcome, remind them of how much government encouragement it took.