Welcoming Neighbours

You can buy a new house in an new neighbourhood, or a resale in an established neighbourhood, carefully selecting the assets you require in a home to obtain the best possible value for your money in the most significant purchase most people ever make - but you cannot choose your neighbours. Well, if there happened to be some way to make prior enquiries about the neighbourhood and the neighbours residing therein, perhaps an informed house-seeker could choose their neighbours.

How many people, in the throes of house-hunting give one single thought to whom they might be living next to, across the street from, or down the street from. Neighbours are only people like us - or not necessarily like us; people do celebrate different values, after all. And if you happen to move next to a household of louts whose uncouth and loud and sloppy behaviour directly affects your peace of mind, it's a misfortune.

There are worse things. Moving, for example, across the street from a pedophile, someone who invests his time and his energy in acquiring child pornography, and whose dreadful potential to some day violate a child - your child - is anyone's worst nightmare. How do you know? Well, for the most part, you don't. Unless, after you've committed to the house purchase and before you make the physical move a neighbour drops the casual word that the guy who lives in the house across the street is that pedophile.

Then perhaps you gulp hard, and decide that the house you've chosen may not be the house for your family, after all. You think about your two very young children and unsupervised playtime and worse-case scenarios given the proximity of a twisted mind become a possibility.

"Both children's bedrooms face him at the front of the house. Our son could be running through the sprinkler in the front yard. Maybe my daughter wants to ride a bike outside in a couple of years ... Are we ever going to feel comfortable having them out of our sight?"

And that, precisely, is the issue brought before an Ontario judge. Who has concluded that sellers do have an obligation to alert potential buyers of such situations. We expect people to divulge that there is asbestos in their homes because it poses as a carcinogenic danger, why not expect that people have a similar obligation to innocent buyers to alert them to future problems with neighbours?

Jason Dennis and Rebecca Bound launched a suit over a house they bought in Bracebridge. They bought the house and prior to moving in discovered that a close neighbour had been convicted of possession of child pornography, ten years earlier. Pedophiles are pedophiles; a prison stay is not a cure. General knowledge of that type should be revealed to parents of young children. The sellers claim they had no idea ... though their neighbours clearly did.

That house is back up for sale again; Jason Dennis and Rebecca Bound and their children will not be moving in. They are completely up-front, frankly informing would-be buyers of the existence of a problem across the street. They feel they will take a loss in the sale of the house, and are prepared for that. Their children's welfare and their peace of mind is at stake.