Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 64

Engaging in physical activity is unequivocally associated with improved health outcomes. But are certain physical activities better than others? And what might the implications be for how we design our cities?

Here is a brand new study that examined the relationship between specific types of physical activity and the risk of death, using two large cohort studies with more than 30 years of self-reported data.

The study included information on walking, jogging, running, cycling (including stationary machines), lap swimming, tennis, climbing flights of stairs, rowing, and weight training.

It's important to note that this is an observational study using self-reported data. There are limitations to this. One question mark is around intensity. When someone reports swimming for an hour, it could be vigorous or casual. And the researchers note that long, low-intensity physical activities could bias the observed associations toward the null.

With this caveat out of the way, here's what they found:

Their two key findings were that (1) most physical activities lower mortality rates in a non-linear way when you do more of them, and (2) mixing different physical activities is associated with lower mortality, independent of total activity levels. Variety is good.

Interestingly enough, the most effective activity at lowering overall mortality is the simplest one: walking. It was found to reduce all-cause mortality by about 17%. This is the difference, or maximum observed benefit, between the highest walking group and a sedentary baseline.

Once again, the data clearly shows that walkable cities can help produce meaningfully better health outcomes. So, if, like me, you subscribe to the philosophy that there's no greater luxury in life than our health, well, then there's perhaps no greater luxury than living in a walkable city.

Cover photo by Alain ROUILLER on Unsplash

Back in the fall of 2006, almost twenty years ago, Sam Zell's Equity Office Properties Trust announced that it had entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by Blackstone Real Estate Partners, in a transaction valued at approximately US$36 billion. This was a massive deal at the time, so much so that Sam Zell would later come to the University of Pennsylvania, where I was in grad school at the time, to talk to real estate students about how smart he was.

The transaction closed in 2007 and, in hindsight, it looked like he had timed the peak of the real estate market perfectly. But in all fairness, when asked about his clairvoyant timing, his response was that he had no idea (probably with a strong expletive somewhere in the middle). His honest answer was that Blackstone simply offered him a price for the portfolio that was greater than their own internal valuation, and so he accepted it.

Another question that he was asked went something like this: "Blackstone is likely going to break up the portfolio, sell off the assets individually or in chunks, and make boatloads of money. Why didn't you just do that?" Despite the peak-market timing, this statement ended up being true. Blackstone generated something like a $7 billion profit on the deal.

But Sam's response was that he couldn't. He cited an esoteric IRS rule that stipulates that once a REIT decides to sell all of its assets and formalizes a liquidation plan, it has a 24-month window to do so, or else get hit with additional corporate taxes. Regardless of the specific IRS section, his reasoning was simple: you never want to be a seller when buyers know you need to sell by a certain time.

This is, of course, intuitively true. Negative leverage is bad in negotiations. In other words, it is highly unlikely that Sam could have generated the same $7 billion profit. I mean, as far as I can tell , Blackstone didn't sell the last office building from the portfolio until 2018, over a decade later.

I was reminded of this principle when reading Prime Minister Carney's speech to the World Economic Forum this week. (This entire post was the best real estate segue I could come up with.) If you haven't read or heard it yet, I would strongly encourage you to do so. Leverage is crucial in negotiations, and it's best to do everything you can to manufacture it.

Cover photo by Kyle Fritz on Unsplash

My palms are sweating as I write this post, because even the thought of someone free soloing a skyscraper makes me clammy. (Free solo means climbing with no ropes.) But that's what climber Alex Honnold is scheduled to do live, on Netflix , on January 23, 2026, at 8 PM ET.

He will be climbing Taipei 101, which is over 500 meters tall, one of the tallest buildings in the world, and formerly the world's tallest. Dubai's Burj Khalifa stole this superlative in 2009 when it was completed.

My palms continue to sweat, but Alex is of the opinion that, as far as enormous towers go, this one is relatively safe for free soloing:

Honnold said the shape of the building makes it safer to climb because there are balconies every eight floors. “You could actually fall in tons of places and not actually die, which makes it safer than a lot of rock climbing objectives,” he said.

I can see the logic.

The architecture of Taipei 101 consists of inverted trapezoids that are stacked on top of each other. Each is 8 storeys tall and they angle outward as you move up, creating a roof condition or terrace on top of each module.

Eight is an important number in Chinese culture because of a homophone in Mandarin; the number sounds like "to prosper" or "to make a fortune." So that's why the modules are the height that they are.

It is now also dawning on me that the nested modules of One Delisle are 8 storeys tall. That's good! This was never talked about during the design phase, but now that I'm aware of it, I'm going to pretend it was deliberate.

I guess this also means that One Delisle would be a relatively safe building to free solo climb. Please, nobody try this.

Good luck, Alex.

Cover photo by Timo Volz on Unsplash