The unit composition is as follows:

• Ground and basement: 2 x 2-storey homes

• Levels 2-3: 6 x single-storey homes

• Levels 4-5: 3 homes, 2 of which are 2-storey homes

The other thing you’ll notice is that there’s a single access stair in the middle of the building. As compact as the homes may be, it is this point-access-block design that unlocks the site. To put the site area into perspective, it is almost certainly smaller than the average single-family lot in the central parts of Toronto. A 20′ x 100′ lot is 2,000 square feet, versus the 1,639 square feet we have here (though the proportions are different).

I’m not suggesting that 37.88-square-metre homes are the objective; rather, I’m suggesting that reducing the barriers to developing small infill sites will unlock new housing opportunities that can then be tailored to the needs of the market. Had two egress stairs been required for this building, it would look very different, and may not have ever been built.

Floor plans from Ryuichi Sasaki Architecture

Well, it turns out, I’m not alone in my appreciation of 900 Saint-Jacques. The Royal Architectural Institute of Canada and the Canada Council for the Arts have just revealed the winners of the 2026 Governor General’s Medals in Architecture (which are given to exceptional projects recently completed by Canadian architects) and it’s on the list.

Designed by Chevalier Morales architectes and Brian Elsden Burrows Architecte – Le Groupe Architex, the project is worth checking out if you aren’t familiar. Not just because of its beautiful facade, but because of its urban contributions to the Quartier des Gares. The jury called the site “prominent but hostile.”

Also on the list are two projects by Toronto-based gh3*, who some of you might recall are the architects behind our Project Bench. One is Windermere Fire Station and the other is O’Day-Min Pavilion, both of which are in Edmonton and are exceptional.

I could keep talking about more of the projects, but I’ll end by saying that this is the first time I’m learning about Kìwekì Point in Ottawa (designed by Patkau Architects and Janet Rosenberg & Studio — the landscape firm behind One Delisle). This is reason enough to book a trip to Ottawa.

Congratulations to all of the winners. For the full list of projects, click here.

Photography: 900 Saint-Jacques by Maxime Brouillet; O’Day-Min Pavilion by Raymond Chow

Underlying the physical environment (let’s call it the hardware of a place) is a cultural ethos that connects our spaces and influences our behaviors (let’s call it the software of a place). In the architecture community, this is often referred to as the genius loci, or the “spirit of a place.”

I was reminded of this when reading a recent column by Benedict Evans that starts with him reminiscing about the six years he spent living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area:

More fundamental than that, though, is the ethos and the sense of possibility. Of course, you’re going to do amazing things. Of course, you’re going to make a company – that’s what everyone does. Of course, this new thing is going to change the world. The world is malleable. You can do things. You can create a giant company from a PowerPoint in a couple of years.

This, of course, is a well-documented feature of the Bay Area. And its origins can almost certainly be traced all the way back to the Gold Rush of the mid-1800s when risk-taking misfits flocked to the region in search of overnight riches, transforming a sleepy hamlet into a place.

But even though the lineage may appear clear in the case of San Francisco, the genius loci of a place does not represent immutable code. It changes over time, just as the fortunes and influence of a city also rise and fall over time.

I often think about this in the case of my city, Toronto. Instead of being founded by maverick gamblers, the city was founded on an opposite set of principles: British imperial loyalty, Protestant morality, and anti-revolutionary order.

Toronto has changed a great deal since then, through massive waves of immigration and robust post-war expansion, and the city’s built environment has naturally transformed from orderly Victorian row houses to supertall towers.

But now, with the frenetic condominium boom of the last cycle in the rear-view mirror, there’s an increasing sense of what’s next. What will be Toronto’s genius loci of the future? That’s the exciting opportunity in front of us today and it’s up to us to decide. Indeed, the world is malleable.

Here are some things we can say about data centres right now:

• They create relatively few long-term direct jobs (though innovation spillover does exist when they cluster).

• They are power hungry.

• They are a core physical engine of the new global economy.

• They play to Canada’s physical and economic strengths as an energy superpower.

Meaning, Canada is uniquely suited to become a global hub for data centres and AI infrastructure. Canada has abundant energy, naturally lower cooling costs, geopolitical stability, and deep institutional capital.

The challenge is that we need to manage the negative externalities. No household, for instance, wants to pay higher energy bills.

We also need to make sure that there are long-term economic benefits for the country, and that we’re not repeating the old habit of “exporting” our resources to other countries so that they can innovate. That would be a bad deal.

The world is going to continue to need a lot more data centres, and Canada is in a unique position to lead and have control over its own destiny. Kevin offers a few ideas for what a better bargain might look like, if you’d like to have a read.

As a developer, you have to problem-solve within extreme constraints. There are zoning regulations, building codes, investor interests, neighbourhood associations, market conditions, and many other sometimes-competing demands at play.

The job of the developer is to navigate through this maze, rely on the expertise of others, and come up with the best possible solution. That requires creativity, and it’s what Cooper was getting at.

The process is also self-reinforcing: constraints are good for creativity. As filmmaker and actor Orson Welles once said, “The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.” In architecture school, we used to always say that the hardest thing is a blank canvas, because design is about solving problems. Constraints present problems.

Of course, developers can’t solve these problems on their own. They rely on talented multidisciplinary teams and the advice they provide. But it’s important to keep in mind specific professionals tend to view problems through the lens of their discipline.

A lawyer might feel strongly about a particular legal clause, or a structural engineer might view a particular design as optimal, but ultimately the developer is going to have to take these recommendations and evaluate them against the entire list of constraints they are facing. It becomes a creative trade-off.

The developer has to have the largest field of view. Seeing the whole board is how you make it out of the maze.

All I did was ask AI to tell me which places I have written about the most (Toronto was the undisputed number one). Then I created a bunch of corresponding post categories and batch-edited any posts that had these locations either in the title of the post or in a tag.

Now, if you’re interested in Marrakech but not Montréal, there’s an easy way to filter. Here’s what the Places page looks like:

This is one of the things I missed the most: the ability to easily search, sort, and go back to old posts. That was surprisingly difficult on Paragraph, and it felt to me like my posts were going into a black hole, never to be found again. Reading old posts and revisiting them with new thoughts is a big part of this writing journey.

I’m also excited to add to the Places page. Each one of the covers is a photo I took, and if I didn’t have any photos of the place, it didn’t get added to the page. We have some trips planned at the end of this summer and over the winter, including a bucket-list location for our 16th annual ski and snowboard trip, so stay tuned for more photos and places.

For example, a Big Mac currently costs US$6.22 in the US (as of July 2026 and according to The Economist). But in Switzerland, it works out to US$9.04, and in Taiwan, it’s US$2.42. This suggests that the Swiss franc is overvalued and that the Taiwan dollar is undervalued because, in theory, their currencies should adjust over time to correct such a large variation.

Now, I’m not an economist, but supposedly there is some directional validity to this line of thinking. However, it’s not entirely accurate. If you look at the various inputs that make up the price of a Big Mac, there are over 60 ingredients, including local real estate prices, the cost of labour, and utility costs.

Some countries may also have tariffs on certain ingredients, which would drive up the price for local consumers (yes, that’s how tariffs work), and some countries may have a higher willingness to pay for American fast food. If there’s a higher perceived value, McDonald’s can simply charge more.

So, the fact that a Big Mac costs significantly more in Switzerland does say something about the CHF, but it’s also an indicator that retail rents are somewhere around 3x what they are in Taiwan, among many other factors.

Now let’s consider a product that, unlike the Big Mac, can vary a great deal across countries: housing. A new home requires far more than 60 ingredients, but it similarly reflects local cost structures, including material inputs, labour rates, and any tariffs and taxes that might be levied on the product.

Every input, from time to development charges, gets factored into its end price, which is why, when a politician claims that something like inclusionary zoning represents a “no-cost affordable housing” solution, I wonder if they’re simply unclear on the economics or if they’re trying to deliberately misrepresent the situation.

At McDonald’s, the equivalent policy would be to require that every time someone buys a Big Mac, the restaurant must simultaneously offer 20% of a new Big Mac to another customer, below the cost of production. It should be obvious that this practice would require the original customer to pay more for that same Big Mac.

Images from The Economist

But it turns out that Paragraph wasn’t the best fit for me. I’m still long crypto and I have it set up to syndicate my posts to the old site, but I found the platform more restrictive than my old WordPress setup, and its recent update also pivots the product to much more of an AI-focused media platform (with more credits to buy), and that’s not how I like to write. I just want to open a blank post editor, write my own words (sometimes post photos), and then hit publish.

So, I’ve decided to return this blog to WordPress, but using a self-hosted setup (with Hostinger) and with my email newsletter being once again sent out by Mailchimp. To be honest, I really questioned this decision. Should I just use Substack like seemingly everyone else? Isn’t WordPress kind of old school? It’s certainly not the easiest to set up (I still have a bunch of housekeeping to do) and Mailchimp is going to again cost me hundreds of dollars per month given the size of my mailing list, but I decided it’s the best decision for me for two main reasons.

One, I want a site that is as simple and timeless as possible. I’ve been writing basically every day for 13 years and in my mind I’m going to continue writing for at least the next decade. Two, I want to be able to customize my site and my email newsletter as I see fit. This blog is a personal blog, but it is also intended to be the top of the marketing funnel for everything that I’m working on with Globizen. The simple idea is that someone discovers me through my writing, maybe something resonates, and then that leads them to one of our projects or to book a stay at Parkview Mountain House.

When you write every day, it’s easy to fall into a routine. Most days it’s a real commitment (okay, slog) to find the time to get something out into the world. But whenever I do a big reboot of the blog, I feel reinvigorated. It’s a time when I take the time to think about what I’m doing every day and then adjust as needed.

Going forward, you can expect to find the same content focused on real estate, cities, and design. But I’d also like to write more personal posts, more travel posts, and get back into sharing my photography. AI muted my desire to take photos, and as much as I think AI is wonderful, I’m feeling a bit of fatigue around it. Part of this return to WordPress is about getting back to basics: a very simple landing page with authentic words, photos, and links.

The only changes you should notice today are formatting ones, both at brandondonnelly.com and in your inbox. It’ll probably also take me another week or two to fully settle in with the new setup, but regardless, emails will continue to get sent out at 6 AM ET. Onward.

According to new research from Brookings, more than 100 local communities in the US have enacted moratoriums on data centres, and more than 300 state data centre bills were filed in the first six weeks of 2026 alone. Earlier this year, Sanders and AOC also introduced the AI Data Center Moratorium Act.

The reasons for this are clear. Brookings reports that the PJM grid region in the US (which serves about 65 million people) saw its power supply costs increase from about $2.2 billion to $14.7 billion in a single year, and data centres are thought to account for nearly two-thirds of the increase.

So, are the employment and economic gains worth it?

The new research from Brookings shows that not all data centres are created equal. Hyperscale data centres (like those built by Google and Amazon) can quickly become the largest taxpayers in a county. They also appear to create higher employment benefits compared to colocation facilities (where a landlord builds a data centre and then leases it out to remote tenants).

The largest employment effects were also seen when data centres cluster. This makes sense, and it's the foundation of cities. When people and uses cluster together, they produce larger ecosystem effects. Conversely, standalone facilities were found to result in modest gains. A data centre is not a labour-intensive operation in and of itself.

If you'd like to read the full Brookings brief, click here.

Photo by NASA

One of the comments that I used to get was, "Yeah, I don't know, Brandon, the floor plate is still looking pretty square." And I would respond with, "Be patient." For those of you who aren't familiar with the design, the entire tower gradually transforms from a square floor plate to a 16-sided circular floor plate.

Nobody makes this comment anymore.

I also really like Dion's photo because it shows the steel for the "crown" at the top of the building coming together. The height of the crown was something we fought for during rezoning. Studio Gang felt it was crucial for the proportions and slenderness ratio of the building. And we agreed.

I can tell you that it had us measuring the exact height of nearby church windows to see if this crown would shadow them at certain times of the day and year. I'm sure glad we did that.

Please keep the photos coming!

Cover photo by me

While I appreciate that school of thought and I know firsthand that when you have your own business you're on 24/7 (because of some unhealthy combination of drive and obsession), I also believe that the following two things are true.

One, we could all die tomorrow and it's important to take some time when you can. In fact, I'd say greater freedom is the objective. As Charlie Munger famously stated: "I did not intend to get rich. I wanted to get independent, I just overshot."

Two, as connected as we all are today, there's no way that when I'm crushing back bowls at high elevations I'm going to be able to respond as quickly as I do when I'm sitting at my desk for 15 hours a day. So I think it's important to let people know, "Hey, if I don't respond to you in 38 seconds, I have not died; you just need to wait a bit longer."

The signal is a recalibration of expectations, not of my level of commitment.

Cover photo by Luca Bravo

But they are confusing population density with land-use inefficiencies. This, I can only assume, is why some people arrive at the selfish conclusion that their city is full.

There are, of course, many counterexamples to this line of thinking. Paris, Seoul, Barcelona, Singapore, Tokyo, and many others have both high population density and are viewed as being highly livable and desirable cities.

Not all high-density cities are livable, but that's because other ingredients are missing. I will remind you that Tokyo once again placed first in Monocle's annual quality-of-life survey this year.

What I think gets missed are the following three key features of urban density.

One, dense cities dramatically lower the cost of delivering infrastructure over the long term and reduce per capita energy consumption.

Two, cities are wealth-generating machines and density drives "agglomeration economies." Put smart and entrepreneurial people in close proximity to one another, and good things happen.

Three, the only way to create an enormous, well-functioning city like Tokyo is on the backbone of transit. And the only way to make transit viable and convenient for most people is to build density all around it. Density is the unlock that makes it all possible.

Ironically, then, density is what can make cities feel less congested and more livable.

Cover photo by Agathe

In the core of the city, we have narrow, generally 20-metre rights-of-way. Many of these east-west arteries are beautiful streets to walk on with fine-grained retail patterns, but the streets themselves have slow-moving streetcars in the middle two lanes and on-street parking on both sides. The result is streets that don't move and are frustrating to navigate for all users: drivers, transit riders, and cyclists. It can take an hour to drive 10 km.

Other major streets don't have streetcars or much retail activity, but the land-use pattern reflects a bygone era. It doesn't make sense to have only single-family housing on Toronto's busiest arteries. It's time for these streets to grow up. (To be fair, the City of Toronto is trying to achieve this with its new Major Streets policies, but the development economics do not make these changes feasible at scale.)

As you move out of the core, Toronto's major streets naturally widen along with the recency in which they were built. Now we have the opposite problem where we're faced with "stroads" with little to no urbanity. Overall, it's the result of a city that grew organically over time without the same kind of defined plan seen in cities like New York, Barcelona, and Paris (after it had already been built out).

Here's the thing: Toronto's low-rise single-family era is over. Virtually the only single-family housing that gets built nowadays is when somebody demolishes an existing house and builds anew. The future is a uniformly higher-density city built on the backbone of robust transit, vehicular, and cycling networks; not a monocentric downtown that people commute to.

So what might that mean exactly?

To start, I believe it means getting our transit vehicles onto their own dedicated lanes, widening certain major streets (for the benefit of cars), shrinking and pedestrianizing others (for the benefit of human-scaled urbanism), carving through new major streets to fix connectivity gaps, and pricing congestion as a means of funding constant transit expansion. My fellow urbanists may not want to hear me advocate for the selective widening and creation of arterial roads, but we have to stop pretending that cars are going to disappear.

Once the bones are in place, it's then a matter of getting the land-use policies right and letting the private sector do what it does best — build for the future. Now, I don't profess to know the exact combination of major street widths, one-way patterns, and whatever else should be done, but I do feel strongly that it's time for a bold and uncomfortable 21st-century master plan for Toronto.

What does Toronto want to be? We should host an international design competition and find out.

Cover photo by Oles Borys

Now NTS has a new series coming out, and it's premiering this week on July 30. It's called My City, My Backyard, and it's a look at cities, specifically through the eyes of creatives. I already know that I'm going to like it, and I love the title. When you live in a city, the entire city is your backyard and amenity. The first city in this new series also happens to be one of my favourite cities: Marseille.

Marseille is having a moment right now, and that's not just my confirmation bias speaking. In 2024, the city saw 19.5 million overnight stays, which were a 20% increase compared to the year prior (they hosted 10 medal events during the Paris 2024 Olympics). But even if you strip out its Olympic boost, tourism is rising. Spring 2025 recorded a 7% year-over-year increase, which included a 19% increase in international visitors. Summer 2025 visitors were also 10% higher than in 2023.

What's driving this, beyond its vibrant culture, great restaurants, and breathtaking landscapes, is that Marseille has just the right amount of edge. It's not always a hyper-polished Instagram moment; it's an effortlessly cool place where finding an uncomfortable rock next to turquoise waters will give you everything you need.

In other words, it is a place that feels authentic. And in a world of global sameness and AI-generated simulacra, I think many of us are now seeking that authenticity — something that feels real and a little raw. Marseille has that in spades. Oh, and if any of you happen to visit la plage de Maldormé, let me know if my unauthorized sticker is still there.

Here is NTS's channel in case you want to check out Marseille this week.

Cover photo by Jeet Sandhu

This is not to disparage any one component or participant within the development supply chain; it is simply to say that development is long and complicated, participants will naturally specialize, and everyone will have a lens through which they see things.

But at the end of the day, these activities ultimately come back to fundamentals: the real estate needs to house people and things, and do something. Gross floor area has value on a spreadsheet because it can be turned into something. And it is ultimately that something that determines how much it is worth.

If you're a developer selling entitled land, your direct customer is the next developer, the one who will ultimately build out the site. Then, that developer's customers are the people who will ultimately buy, rent, and occupy the space. And in some cases, those customers will also have their own customers, if, for instance, they choose to buy a space and then rent it out to somebody else.

So there are layers to this. But regardless of where you might sit within the chain, I think it's always helpful to focus on the customer, or customers. It's harder to be wrong with your assumptions if you drill all the way down and consider the end use cases.

Cover photo by Israel Andrade

But my list was just that — a list — and the reality is that each individual item can be shockingly complex. To that end, here's a recent study, published by the Neptis Foundation, called "Ontario Building Code Missing Middle Study: Bridging the gap between houses and high-rises."

The authors are Conrad Speckert of Semibold Solutions (who has appeared on this blog in the past) and Jack Keays of Vortex Fire Consulting, and I encourage you to download a free copy. I haven't gone through it yet, but I will, because we are actively working on projects at this exact scale.

Enjoy the weekend.

Cover photo by Danish Prakash

These figures are still well below the 10-year average, but the market is starting to do what it needs to do, and what the new (and cumbersome) HST rebate is intended to do. Standing inventory is getting sold, and I suspect the second half of this year will look even stronger as the industry figures out how to actually paper and administer this rebate.

Importantly, the rebate is not helping pre-construction sales (though that's just one factor). Q2 saw just 50 sales. Basically, nothing. This makes sense because the new rebate requires the purchase agreement to be signed before March 31, 2027. That's not enough time for most pre-sale programs, but it does create a sense of urgency around standing inventory.

So, what we are seeing today is a new condominium market that has refound price discovery and is starting to clear out already-built standing inventory, but one that is not producing a meaningful amount of new housing starts. As Urbanation says in its release, "condo supply is set to see its largest ever decline in the coming years."

Cover photo by Narciso Arellano

Chart from Urbanation

In addition to Haussmann's renovation of Paris (1853-1870), I was also thinking about the Commissioners' Plan for New York City (1811), and Ildefons Cerdà's grid system of octagonal blocks for Barcelona (1859), as well as some more contemporary examples.

In recent years, Barcelona has revisited its grid system and pioneered a new set of "superblocks" that focus traffic along the periphery and create pedestrian-focused spaces on their interior.

The common thread among these examples is that they all represent a grand master plan. In the case of Barcelona and New York, it was a plan that served to guide development as the city grew. And in the case of Paris, it was a destructive plan that went back and redid what was deemed to have not been working. (In thinking about this now, it's probably best that I used Haussmann as the example in my tweet).

Toronto has never had such a plan. We flirted with the City Beautiful movement at the beginning of the 20th century — a movement intent on beautifying and introducing monumental grandeur to our cities — but, not surprisingly, we ultimately saw it as a superfluous and frivolous spending exercise.

Instead, Toronto has grown incrementally, becoming what I see as an accidental global city. We are no longer the ultra-conservative, deeply Protestant city that we once were, but at the same time, it's hard not to feel like we have a grid and public realm that doesn't reflect the city we have become today.

Toronto needs a bold master plan. And over the coming weeks, I'll put some of my ideas to paper. In the meantime, if you have any of your own, please feel free to share them in the comment section below.

Instead, the company is lobbying for a system that would require robotaxis, like Waymo, to operate on a ride-hailing network that also uses human drivers. This would give consumers the ability to access both. Do I want to make small talk or not?

Now, Uber's position in the face of autonomous vehicles has always been that human drivers aren't going anywhere because it's simply too expensive to own and operate a fleet of AVs based on peak demand times. The only option is to top up the supply base with human drivers, and this is why the Uber marketplace will always remain essential.

This narrative was initially supported by a series of announced partnerships, but now there seems to be a growing divide between the companies, and it's not so clear that Waymo needs Uber as much as Uber would like. Because if Waymo were truly concerned about having human drivers, then the two companies wouldn't be on opposite sides of the table with this bill. Uber knows this could be existential.

At the end of the day, Uber disrupted traditional taxis and changed how our cities operate. Autonomous vehicles are set to do the same. Should we feel bad? Monopolies are, of course, bad. But creative destruction is not.

Cover photo by Dan Gold

Home is not where you live, but where they understand you. — Christian Morgenstern

One of the things that I like to be annoying about on this blog is the fact that "home" is not a building type. I say this because "home" is often shorthand for ground-oriented, single-family housing. For example, someone might say to me, "Do you think you'll one day buy a home?" And I will be pedantic and say, "But I already own a home."

The words we choose, often because of cultural convention, show our biases. When people associate home with low-rise housing, I can only assume it's because many cities have had a long history of thinking of apartments as disease-breeding tenements. So we oftentimes see low-rise housing as homes, and apartments as something more utilitarian, like a unit.

But in the end, a home is not a building type; it is a psychological state of belonging. It is where comfort, safety, belonging, and identity hopefully all intersect.

One of the interesting things that Bianca and I have both noticed since bringing home our daughter, Vivienne, is that our feeling of home has been heightened. There's additional life within these four walls, and now it is also a place where she is kept safe and protected from the outside world.

I'm not sure if any of you have experienced this, but we both felt it immediately, and it has us saying to each other on a regular basis, "I love our home." And you know what? The view looks pretty great from up here.