Who lives beside you never meant more than in this age of pricey realty and home obsession

Anne Kingston – Macleans

Bad-neighbour sto­ries typ­i­cally involve noise, park­ing, property-line dis­putes, unkempt yards, sofas on the front porch. But res­i­dents of an afflu­ent north Toronto enclave, tell the tale of a more recent neighbour-from-hell vari­a­tion: the admin­is­tra­tive ter­ror­ist. The con­flict began in 2008 between a promi­nent busi­ness­man and the owner of the con­struc­tion com­pany that built his house—a $400,000-plus project—who also lives in the area.

The busi­ness­man accused the builder of sub­sti­tut­ing infe­rior mate­ri­als and not fol­low­ing plans or hon­our­ing his war­ranties. “He was a shoddy builder,” he alleges. One frus­tra­tion, he says, was that the exte­rior win­dow sur­round was built with six-inch stones, not 10-inch stones. Another was the builder had been slow to fix an out­door tap that topped up the swim­ming pool.

The builder tells a dif­fer­ent story: “[The client] spent more than he intended; he asked for things that weren’t part of the con­tract, and he man­u­fac­tured defi­cien­cies.” The mat­ter went to court, result­ing in suits and coun­ter­suits; issues remain before the courts, which is why none of the par­ties agreed to be named.

A few months into the fight, wit­nesses report, the busi­ness­man turned into a neigh­bour­hood building-code vig­i­lante, call­ing in inspec­tors to check other houses the builder had con­structed in the area, even report­ing hedges that were mere inches higher than code allowed.

“He would get up at 6 a.m. every morn­ing to move his car three houses to block access to a build­ing site,” the builder claims. The busi­ness­man coun­ters that the builder blocked his car and spewed obscen­i­ties one morn­ing when he was dri­ving his chil­dren to school.

When the busi­ness­man saw the builder’s name asso­ci­ated with the annual fair for the local school, which his chil­dren attended, he threat­ened to pull his own spon­sor­ship. “He told the prin­ci­pal, ‘I’ll bury you in pol­icy,’ ” says a neighbour.

The busi­ness­man says he reviewed the school bylaws and noticed the school was in fla­grant vio­la­tion of many of them. One casu­alty was a lot­tery for the day­care cen­tre, which was shut down for lack of a proper licence. “They lost 40% of their fund­ing,” says his neigh­bour. He even tried to ban cot­ton candy at the fair because it didn’t com­ply with the school’s healthy-eating policy.

“The nit­pick­ing was unbe­liev­able,” says one res­i­dent. “He could have cured can­cer with the time he put into cre­at­ing prob­lems in the com­mu­nity.” The businessman’s vig­i­lance “cre­ated total para­noia,” says a neigh­bour, so much so res­i­dents were afraid he’d report their annual Canada Day fire­works dis­play, which didn’t have a licence.

And so when he ran for school PTA, neigh­bours ral­lied to pro­vide babysit­ting ser­vice and car­pool­ing so peo­ple could get out to vote to block his bid. “We’d joke about putting a sign on his lawn that said ‘For sale by neigh­bours,’ ” says another neigh­bour. The builder doubts his foe will ever move: “He’ll be with me for life, like a cancer.”

Like most sto­ries involv­ing neigh­bour­hood dis­putes, the con­flict lacked the extreme or crim­i­nal angle required to make head­lines. Nor was it posted on the grow­ing spate of blogs like The Stu­pid Neigh­bour that allow peo­ple to vent about the “idiot” liv­ing next door. But it’s a mod­ern urban para­ble reveal­ing a chang­ing neigh­bour­hood dynamic in an age where “com­mu­nity” exists online and “social net­work” is a vir­tual construct.

With the advent of two-income fam­i­lies, the work­place has replaced neigh­bour­hood as the hub of social inter­ac­tion. TV is a lag­ging indi­ca­tor of the trend, as Three’s Com­pany and Sein­feld have been replaced by The Office and House. When neigh­bour­hood does serve as a set­ting, it’s a seething pit of dys­func­tion, à la Des­per­ate House­wives and Jer­sey Shore.

Dis­ci­ples of the great neigh­bour­hood activists Jane Jacobs and Robert Putnam—people who talk of the “social cap­i­tal” cre­ated by strong neighbourhoods—are alarmed by what they see as a weak­en­ing of com­mu­nity ties. “For many peo­ple, neigh­bour­hoods are just the place they sleep,” says Mark Cajab, an exec­u­tive direc­tor at Tama­rack, a Water­loo, Ont.-based insti­tute that pro­motes com­mu­nity engagement.

We’re a cul­ture dis­pro­por­tion­ately invested in the lives of strangers, Cajab points out: “We’ll grieve for Princess Diana but not know our neigh­bour has ter­mi­nal can­cer.” And that’s a big prob­lem, he says. “We know from research that the less or weaker the social cap­i­tal, the lower the qual­ity of life in terms of safety, health, everything.”

A 2009 study by British hous­ing provider Cir­cle Anglia sug­gests dis­en­gage­ment from neigh­bours is des­tined to rise: almost all (96%) of peo­ple over age 65 knew their neighbour’s names; only 66% of peo­ple under 25 did. It’s a prob­lem here, too, accord­ing to a 2005 StatsCan study that revealed that between 61% of rural res­i­dents knew all of their neigh­bours, but only 16% of those liv­ing in major urban cen­tres did. (Que­be­cers were least likely to know their neigh­bours and Mon­treal­ers the least likely to trust them.)

The sit­u­a­tion is at such a cri­sis point that police in Peel, Ont., launched a “Know Your Neigh­bour” pro­gram to encour­age res­i­dents to gather names and con­tact infor­ma­tion of at least five neigh­bours in an attempt to strengthen neigh­bour­hood surveillance.

It’s a plight high­lighted by the CBC show All For One, in which designer Deb­bie Travis criss-crosses the coun­try bring­ing com­mu­ni­ties together by ren­o­vat­ing the house of a deserv­ing local—the modern-day ver­sion of a barn raising.

There’s decided irony in the fact neigh­bour­hood fab­ric is fray­ing in an HGTV-obsessed soci­ety. The fact that one’s house is one’s biggest finan­cial invest­ment and great­est source of hap­pi­ness and self-expression, requir­ing noise-producing, neighbour-alienating remod­el­ling, is a recipe for conflict.

Pay­ing more than half a mil­lion dol­lars for the priv­i­lege of liv­ing cheek-to-jowl, ten­e­ment style, can cre­ate a near-absurd focus on ter­ri­to­r­ial bound­aries. “You wouldn’t believe the sorts of calls we get, says Todd Hall, a detec­tive on the Toronto Police Ser­vice. “Peo­ple com­plain about a neigh­bour water­ing his lawn who got their lawn wet or who shov­elled snow on their prop­erty or a tree limb that’s over the prop­erty line.”

Often, such com­plaints reflect other griev­ances, says the busi­ness­man in North York, who found him­self sued by his two imme­di­ate neigh­bours for prop­erty encroach­ments, bat­tles he won. “I know [the builder] put them up to it,” he says.

The grow­ing num­ber of peo­ple liv­ing alone and migrat­ing to con­dos also inevitably yields con­flict, even at the swanki­est addresses. In 2009, Madonna’s neigh­bour Karen George sued the man­ager of their New York apart­ment build­ing for fail­ing to stop the singer from using her apart­ment as a rehearsal stu­dio; “noise and vibra­tion poured through the walls,” George alleged.

Height­ened mod­ern sen­si­tiv­i­ties only mag­nify the prob­lem, as revealed in a recent social eti­quette col­umn in the New York Times: the writer was upset because her neigh­bour on the other side of a shared wall—whom she’d never met—used per­fumed air fresh­ener; she had a “severe fra­grance allergy” and didn’t know what to do.

The para­dox of sin­gu­lar condo life is that it requires greater social­iza­tion and community-building skills, says Misha Feld­mann, a Toronto crim­i­nal lawyer who used to prac­tise real estate law, where he rou­tinely wit­nessed “bizarre, egre­gious, anti-social behav­iour” and res­i­dents gang­ing up in high-school-style cliques.

In one instance, res­i­dents tar­geted some­one whose dog was three pounds over the weight limit. Another case involved a res­i­dent who ran a “very, very smelly” tofu-making oper­a­tion in his unit that vio­lated a nox­ious fuels law. “It’s hugely expen­sive for every­body,” says Feld­mann. “Even res­i­dents who are unin­volved shoul­der the costs.”

But where laws exist to warn prospec­tive buy­ers of the pres­ence of urea formalde­hyde foam insu­la­tion, there’s no oblig­a­tion to tell them about toxic neigh­bours. A cou­ple who lived in an east end Toronto duplex, rent­ing out the sec­ond floor, tell the story of a new neigh­bour who moved in and started a ren­o­va­tion project that began every night after midnight.

One night, he wil­fully took a sledge­ham­mer through an upstairs wall, stand­ing face to face with their pet­ri­fied ten­ant. Police were called; they sued for dam­ages, and won, but real­ized they had to sell. They felt some guilt about not inform­ing the next owner about what they were get­ting into, says the hus­band. “But we made $250,000, so that helped soften it.”

Slowly, how­ever, the spec­tre of bad neigh­bours is influ­enc­ing pol­icy. In the U.K., there’s an attempt to table a law that will make it eas­ier to evict peo­ple con­victed of anti-social behav­iour. “For too long, too many ten­ants have lived in fear of neigh­bours from hell,” British Hous­ing Min­is­ter Grant Shapps said.

“Neigh­bour­hood” has also become a fash­ion­able mantra in munic­i­pal and provin­cial gov­ern­ments, to the point where mil­lions are being ear­marked to build stronger com­mu­ni­ties. Edmon­ton has launched the $50-million “Great Neigh­bour­hoods Ini­tia­tive.” Man­i­toba has “Neigh­bour­hood Alive.” Cal­gary, Lon­don, Ottawa, Toronto all have sim­i­lar pro­grams on the go.

But as the north Toronto exam­ple proves, noth­ing unites a com­mu­nity like a com­mon enemy. “We were a tight com­mu­nity before,” says a res­i­dent. “Now we’re even tighter.” The busi­ness­man def­i­nitely felt “ostra­cized,” he says. “But there’s enough other peo­ple to hang out with; those peo­ple think they own the community.”

The builder says he feels sorry for the chil­dren, now enrolled in pri­vate school, who’ve been left out of birth­day par­ties and sleep­overs. But the busi­ness­man says the con­flict has pro­vided a learn­ing expe­ri­ence. “They’ve seen how impor­tant it is to stand up for prin­ci­ples and not give in to a bully,” he says. As for his house, he loves liv­ing there. “It’s a great house. And now that we’ve learned so much, we would def­i­nitely build again.”

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Lau­rin & Natalie Jef­frey are Toronto Real­tors with Cen­tury 21 Regal Realty.
They did not write these arti­cles, they just repro­duce them here for peo­ple
who are inter­ested in Toronto real estate. They do not work for any builders.
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