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: housing

  • Why new homes will not kill the vibe in Bloor West Village

    I learned about this development proposal over the weekend through a Toronto Star article that I couldn’t read because it was behind a paywall. Oh well, here’s the Twitter post and the headline: “Once built, the 60-unit tower will be the only one on the strip. Locals say it will kill the area’s vibe.”

    The original proposal was a 16-storey mixed-use building at 2273-2279 Bloor Street West in Bloor West Village, but through negotiations with the City, it was reduced to 14 residential floors plus a mechanical penthouse wrapped with indoor and outdoor amenity spaces. The height is just under 50 metres, and the resulting FSI for the site is 9.2. What you see above is the revised massing (via UrbanToronto).

    So, will it kill the area’s vibe?

    One way to look at the proposal is that it’ll be the “only one.” But the other way to look at it is that we’ve historically underbuilt along one of our major subway lines and that it’s a positive indicator that we’re now seeing proposals like this being brought forward. This is good. It’s a fine-grained urban proposal with 50% two- and three-bedroom suites and zero parking.

    The question we should be asking ourselves is: how do we encourage more of this? The future of Toronto lies not in the two- to three-storey buildings you see depicted above, but in a mix of denser buildings that will unlock additional homes in the city and allow Toronto to wean itself off its dependency on the car. People are what create the vibe.

  • The context behind the viral Edmonton multiplex site

    I’ve had a few people respond to my recent post about the multiplex battle underway in Edmonton, and so I now have a bit more information. The address of the house in the photo is 10014 147 Street NW. Here’s a post-construction photo from the street:

    Here’s a street view image showing the two flanking multiplexes under construction:

    Here’s how close the house is to the LRT station currently under construction at Stony Plain Road & 149 Street (this is the Valley Line West extension):

    Here’s the route map:

    And finally, here’s the station’s location in relation to downtown:

    Customarily, this is exactly what you want to do on top of and around new transit investments. You want to build density. Transit investment and land-use policy, as I like to harp on here, are integral to one another. And if you do everything correctly, you won’t have to worry about parking minimums.

    Happy Thanksgiving weekend, everyone.

  • The viral housing photo that triggered provincial overreach in Alberta

    Here’s a polarizing photo of the backyard of a house in Edmonton flanked by two multiplexes under construction. For additional drama, it was also taken with an ultra-wide lens, which is evident from the stretched-out walkway in the foreground. But even still, it is indeed a photo of a single-family house between two larger multi-unit buildings.

    When I first saw the photo, via this tweet, I actually read it all wrong. What I thought was the concern — underutilized residential land — was not the concern. The concern was too much housing. More specifically, too much infill rental housing.

    So much so that one of the next tweets I saw was the premier of Alberta, Danielle Smith, using this exact photo to say that the province would be coming over top of Edmonton to overturn its multiplex permissions and return the city to the “density and height rules that were in place before 2024” along with “common-sense minimum parking requirements.”

    This, in my opinion, is provincial overreach (which sadly happens here in Toronto too) and a shortsighted approach to city-building. Now, I don’t know the address of this house (I tried to find it), nor would I be familiar with the area, but I do know that cities all across North America are taking an important and critical look at their low-rise neighbourhoods.

    We know that many of them are unaffordable, car-oriented, and actively losing population. To turn back the clock and return to parking minimums is to restrict housing supply and signal that Edmonton is not yet prepared to be an urban leader in the 21st century. Alberta likes to tout its “free-market” brand, but of course this move is anything but.

  • A stack of single-family houses on Avenue Road

    I stumbled upon this proposal for 996-998 Avenue Road after Chris Spoke stumbled upon it. It immediately stood out to me because it’s a site we looked at when it was for sale, and because it’s a handsome-looking proposal designed by Richard Wengle.

    The minor variance application is for a new eight-storey building with 6 residential units, 1 surface visitor parking space, 6 long-term bicycle spaces, and 12 parking spaces in two underground levels (accessed via a parking elevator). This description alone should tell you the target audience, but here’s the typical floor plan:

    The fact that this 2,790-square-foot plan only has two bedrooms tells you that this is geared toward wealthy empty-nesters (although the family room could very easily be converted to a third bedroom). So the project is effectively a stack of single-family houses, each with two parking spaces.

    This is a segment of the Toronto condominium market that has proven to be the most resilient in the current environment, but who knows how deep that demand goes. Whatever the case, it does feel appropriate for this submarket.

    I’m not suggesting that this kind of unit mix should be aspired to everywhere, but this overall scale of housing is something we should be replicating all across Toronto’s major streets and avenues.

    That we’re starting to see more of it feels like a maturation of the Toronto market, or perhaps it’s just a sign that larger projects are significantly harder to underwrite today.

  • The $1.3M house built on a leftover triangle

    blogTO just wrote about 61 Seaton Street, which is a house on an atypical triangular lot in downtown Toronto and is on the market right now for $1,329,000. The story goes that this lot sat vacant for decades before architect Paul Reuber bought it in the late 1990s and took on Toronto’s zoning by-law to build what you see here. My rough estimate is that the lot is around 115 square metres, which isn’t that small, but it is a triangle:

    I love these kinds of irregular sites because they force creativity and offer a way to unlock hidden value. Our cities are full of neglected micro-parcels, but they often go undeveloped because of land-use policies or because the economics don’t work. Yet small or irregular sites are part of what gives cities their character. If any of you have an oddball parcel of land that has been sitting vacant for decades, drop me an email.

    Parcel map from the City of Toronto

  • How efficient core design unlocks small-footprint infill housing

    In today’s edition of How Does Europe Build Such Nice Social Housing?, let’s look at this 8-home project in Pantin (outside of Paris) by Atelier Fuso. (Credit to Philip Oldfield for the tweet that alerted me to the project.)

    First, some stats. The project is 6 storeys (R+5 in European nomenclature), so it’s exactly the kind of housing scale that is contemplated on an as-of-right basis along Toronto’s Major Streets. It has 394 m2 of residential area and 34 m2 of ground-floor commercial. So, about 4,607 square feet of total area. Interestingly enough, this is less than the total area of most infill multiplex projects in Toronto. That tells us the site is compact.

    Second, I’d like to draw your attention to Atelier Fuso’s drawings:

    They combined all of the project’s elevations and plans into single drawings, which is a neat way of showing you the relationship.

    Lastly, let’s look at the project’s costs. The architect’s website shows €1.6M. Whenever I see a cost figure like this, I always assume it’s just the hard costs, and it excludes softs. Whatever the case, €1.6 million to CAD = C$2,544,160. Divided by 4,607 square feet = $552 psf. That feels high for just the hard costs. Are the soft costs less or more than here? I don’t know.

    But once again we are reminded that part of the reason Europe is able to build such nice mid-rise buildings is that they’re able to build on extremely compact sites. And the reason they’re able to build vertically on such compact sites is because they’re able to design building cores that look like the one shown in the above drawings.

    Urban housing like this is comprised of leasable and non-leasable areas. The former generates revenue, and the latter does not. The more developers are able to optimize and reduce the non-leasable areas, such as the core, the more they can build small. That’s a positive thing for cities.

    Image and plans from Atelier Fuso

  • Housing on the Line

    One of the fundamental truths about cities is that transportation and land-use planning are integral to one another. The most successful cities understand this and build density on top of transit, and build transit where density can and will go. See, once again, the Tokyo model. It’s for this reason that I think the Superkül-led conceptual project called Housing on the Line is an important one for Toronto. While the projects are speculative, they remind us that many of our transit stations are severely undeveloped, including ones we’ve only recently built. Why?

    Description:

    Housing on the Line, a conceptual project and architectural exhibition conceived and initiated by Superkül, will open to the public next Thursday, September 24th in Liberty Village. Developed in collaboration with six other firms – COMN Architects, Dubbeldam Architecture + Design, Gabriel Fain Architects, StudioAC, Studio VAARO, and Suulin – the project proposes speculative designs that integrate multi-unit residential buildings with smaller existing subway station sites along TTC Line 2 Bloor-Danforth. Each firm’s proposal treats a different subway station along Line 2 as a creative canvas for imagining innovative typologies and context-appropriate design that delivers human-scale character, enhanced amenities, and community connectivity.

    Details:

    Housing on the Line | Opening Reception
    Date: Thursday, September 24, 2026
    Time: 6:00–9:30 pm
    Location: The Bakery, 2 Fraser Ave, Toronto
    RSVP: adele@superkul.ca

    If you can’t make the opening reception next Thursday, you can also visit between September 25-27, during the hours of 10am-5pm.

    Project credits (in order): Superkül, Studio VAARO, Gabriel Fain Architects, Dubbeldam Architecture + Design

    Image credits: All renderings by Aron Lorincz Ateliers

  • New acquisition for Globizen Flats: 571 Oakwood Avenue in Toronto

    This week, Globizen announced a new acquisition for our Flats division: 571 Oakwood Avenue in Toronto.

    This is an exciting moment for us because it marks the first project in our strategy of unlocking underutilized urban sites to create thoughtfully crafted, design-forward rental homes in walkable, transit-oriented communities across Toronto.

    The mission is simple:

    • Fill a Housing Need: We believe there’s a gap in the market for spacious, well-designed, family-oriented rental homes at accessible price points.
    • Support Toronto’s Urban Evolution: We believe that Toronto is at a unique turning point in its urban history, transitioning from a monocentric downtown surrounded by low-rise suburbs to a polycentric city that fundamentally rethinks its relationship to the car.
    • Invest in Renewable Energy: Canada needs more clean energy capacity. We see this as an opportunity to create a decentralized renewable energy asset alongside our communities.

    Globizen Flats is a response to these beliefs.

    Check out the full post in the Globizen Journal. You can also subscribe and follow Globizen Flats (@globizenflats) on Instagram.

    As an aside, I initially created the above toilet image as a joke. It’s a photo of the bathroom in the existing house on site. But my partners thought it was cool and that we should share it publicly, so here we are. I bet that toilet was the neatest thing when it was first installed.

  • How Junction House built laneway towns for urban families

    Junction House was designed with 7 laneway towns on the north side of the building. The above photo is from 2023, right after we installed the wayfinding signage, which is why you can see the construction fencing sitting in the laneway. Alongside Superkul (architects), we made the design decision to incorporate ground-related towns for two reasons.

    First, we are supporters of laneway housing, and one of our city-building agendas is to find ways to revitalize and animate these spaces in Toronto. Incorporating laneway towns was a natural way to do this.

    Second, we were able to tuck these two-storey suites into the same height as our ground-floor retail on the south side. This meant that, even though our sales team was advising us that these would likely sell for a relatively low price per square foot compared to the rest of the building, it was the right business decision. It was still more accretive than additional single-level retail (or retail with a far less valuable mezzanine space) or some other unproductive back-of-house space.

    As a development aside, we originally designed these towns to be raised up from the laneway, accessible via a few steps. But during the rezoning process, the city asked us to shave down the overall height of the building to meet some symbolic height in metres that the local City Councillor demanded we achieve. It was frustrating, but we complied, and that’s why the towns are designed the way they are.

    Looking back on these suites a few years later, I continue to believe that we made the right big-picture decision, especially because of how they are now being lived in. These suites have a very high percentage of families with young children — children who often make use of and play in the quiet laneway.

    In hindsight, this makes perfect sense. These are larger, grade-related suites that offer some degree of relative affordability. In my view, it’s further evidence that not all families want to flee to the suburbs. We just have to find ways to deliver the right kind of urban housing for them.

    Second photo by Doublespace Photography

  • Site Tour: Craft Residences in the Junction

    This week, my friend Bill, who is the founder of Gairloch Developments, took me through his Craft Residences project. Bill has done and is doing a number of beautiful projects in the Junction and Craft is one of them.

    When we met up on Dundas, I immediately complimented him on the project’s use of green (which is, of course, Globizen’s brand colour). Craft has green brick mortar, green windows (on the outside), and green picket balcony guards. Love it.

    His response was, “It feels to me like a housing project you’d find in London.” And I think that’s exactly right.

    There are some design details that objectively just cost more to design and build. Often the simpler the detail, the more expensive it is to build. As one of my favourite design sayings goes, “Only the rich can afford this much nothing.”

    But there are other design details that don’t cost more; you just have to give a shit and make good decisions. Bill gives lots of shits, and it shows in his work. I’m super happy that he’s building in the Junction. Below are my photos from the site tour.

    P.S. Globizen has an upcoming, soon-to-be-announced project where we’ve been looking at design details to specifically communicate our brand. Some of them will be green. Please take it as a compliment, Bill.

    Update: Craft Residences was designed by BDP Quadrangle. Heather Rolleston is the principal in charge and senior designer.