Richards says a contractor first cut 17 of her trees, many of them mature, due to confusion or sloppiness about the property line. In the fall of 2020, Saade Group Development, which owns the adjacent property on the village’s main street, began cutting trees, then excavating a hill that buffered its site from two neighbours: one beside, one behind. Richards sat at her kitchen table with a stack of documents highlighted in yellow and indexed with purple stickie warning flags, frustrated to the point of tears.Ī little over 12 months after a neighbour began excavating without proper permits, almost nothing has happened to repair the damage, covered in an orange tarp fastened to her 1886 siding. “Is today the day my house is going to fall down?” “I just live in fear,” she said one day this week.
