Key Highlights
- New garden suites in Toronto are causing privacy issues for neighbors.
- Sandy Chambers and others express anger over the loss of backyard privacy.
- The city’s updated planning rules allow for easier construction of these units.
In a city where the sky is increasingly spoken for, the backyard has long been imagined as a last redoubt of privacy—a small patch of green where one might sit without being seen. However, in East York, that imagination has met a new reality, and the meeting has not been gentle. Sandy Chambers returned from a week's vacation this past summer to find a six-metre-high, two-storey building looming over her back fence, complete with a picture window that looks directly into the yard she once used without thought. "After you get past the shock there's a little bit of anger," she said. "I lost all privacy in my yard; I stopped using my yard."
The structure in question is a garden suite, built under planning rules the city updated in 2022 to allow homeowners to construct self-contained units in their backyards with fewer restrictions. The intent was gentle infill housing, a quiet response to a housing crunch that has made the city increasingly unaffordable for many. Instead of requiring a zoning change—which would have opened the door to public discussion—property owners now need only a building permit, provided the plan doesn't require variances. The numbers tell a story of enthusiasm: 34 permits in 2022, the first year, rising to 361 by 2025. Staff say 627 have been built, with another 755 under construction.
For Chambers, the enthusiasm of the many has become the disruption of the one. She has erected a large screen on her backyard shed to block the view from the new picture window, planted trees across the back of her yard, and ordered dozens of lawn signs that read "Save Our Neighbourhoods. No 2-storey Garden Suites Without a Say." An online petition has gathered about 80 signatures. Her neighbor Rosanna Manarin, who has lived in the same house for 25 years, described the new structure with a phrase that carries its own quiet weight: "a watchtower." "Your oasis is completely gone," she said.
What complicates the grievance is the law's quiet clarity. Both Chambers and Manarin acknowledge that the homeowners are well within their rights under the new rules. The city's response, in an email to CBC Toronto, was measured: staff recognize that new construction can raise concerns about privacy, sunlight, and construction impacts, and that these concerns are understandable—but they do not, on their own, provide a basis to withhold a building permit if the project complies with the building code. The law, in other words, has already decided what a backyard is for, and it has decided that it is for more than one household's privacy.
Real estate broker Justin Bregman noted that the market is beginning to register the shift. "It's a turn off," he said of the effect on resale value when a two-storey structure blocks a neighbor's backyard. "If all of a sudden there's a two-storey, or a 20-foot high building that's completely blocking your backyard, that absolutely is going to affect value." The city does not track complaints about garden suites, but anecdotal evidence suggests a quiet friction between a policy designed to open neighborhoods and the people who live in them, who did not expect the opening to happen next door.
The debate, such as it is, resists easy resolution. The housing crisis is real, and garden suites are one of the few tools the city has to add density without tearing down what exists. But so is the loss of a backyard's light, its privacy, and its sense of being a place apart. Toronto real estate lawyer Bob Aaron noted that backyard privacy is never guaranteed in an urban neighborhood, and that most people with a two-storey house can see into a neighbor's yard. The truth of that observation does not make the picture window any less intrusive. It simply names the bargain the city has made and asks who is expected to bear it.
AI Image Disclaimer: The visuals accompanying this article are generated by AI and are illustrative only; they do not depict the actual garden suite, the neighbors, or the specific properties involved.
Published by Banx Network. This article is part of the Banx decentralized media programme, powered by the BXE token on the XRP Ledger.
