Vicki Verville's home in Winnipeg has a spacious backyard, where she and Marley the Maltipoo can often be found in the warmer months. 'My backyard is my sanctuary,' she says.Shannon VanRaes/The Globe and Mail
Backyards and you
Is having a backyard important to your mental well-being? We asked Globe readers with all types of homes to share their perspectives.
Nearly every morning this summer, Vicki Verville savours her coffee in her Winnipeg backyard, tossing peanuts to the crows on the roof of her carport. Her Doberman, Sierra, sits beside her in a beat-up leather chair; Marley, the Maltipoo, curls up on the wooden table between them.
“My backyard is my sanctuary,” the retired probation officer says. She spends hours there until winter settles in, tending her vegetable garden, listening to the water ripple through her small fountain, contemplating the moon at night.
Without this space, she says, “I would feel like a prisoner in my own home.” Many years ago, when she first moved to the city, she lived on the 16th floor of a downtown apartment building, without a balcony, let alone a backyard. “Even just saying that makes my heart stop.”
And yet the dream of a house with a private backyard is growing more elusive for many Canadians, as more and more city-dwellers in this country are living stacked upon each other in those soaring grey towers that give Ms. Verville the shivers.
The ability to own an urban backyard is steadily disappearing, taking the dream of barbecue reunions, garden weddings, and parties under the patio lanterns along with it.
In a survey conducted in the fall of 2022 by Ipsos Public Affairs for the Nature Conservancy of Canada, 80 per cent of respondents said they were worried that future generations wouldn’t be able to access nature close to home.
As Ms. Verville asks: “How are kids going to learn what a butterfly is in their cement-encased community?”
Apartment complexes, like this one in Calgary, make up a fast-growing share of new construction in Canada.Louis Oliver/The Globe and Mail
But for cities facing a housing crisis, single-family homes on large lots is wasted space – and too expensive, anyway, for many Canadian families.
The fastest-growing building type between 2016 and 2021, according to Statistics Canada, was housing without backyards – apartments in high-rise buildings. That trend is continuing, especially in larger cities.
Construction numbers from the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation suggest that during the first quarter of 2024, there were nearly three times as many construction starts for apartments than for any other kind of housing in metropolitan areas with more than 50,000 people. A private yard in the country’s largest cities is becoming the wealthy family’s swimming pool of the past.
Canadian homeowners have long aspired to have their own green spaces like Ms. Verville's yard, but high housing prices have made that unattainable for many, especially in bigger cities.Shannon VanRaes/The Globe and Mail
For decades, backyards have been a housing aspiration for so many Canadians that giving them up will be tough – even though most people in cities around the world have long been living without them. But those places often possess what our densifying urban centres will need to prioritize, experts say: more well-designed public squares and parks, the kind of communal, green spaces that improve mental health.
Instead, many cities across the country are going more grey: according to a 2023 Statistics Canada study, large urban centres, on average, lost one-tenth of their public and private green space – that is parks, trees, yards, and grass – between 2000 and 2023, even as their population grew significantly.
Ask Barb Tecklenberg how she feels about her small backyard in Port Coquitlam, she answers: “Uncomfortably privileged and constantly wondering how to leverage it to help my kids.”
Commercials showing happy homeowners flipping burgers on the barbecue in their outdoor kitchens make her cringe. “It is elitist,” she says, “and far from the reality of the current generation.”
The 66-year-old says her eldest was lucky enough to buy a townhome 10 years ago, but she suspects the market for a home with a yard in Vancouver will be far too expensive for her two younger children.
For most of the current generation, Ms. Tecklenberg predicts: “the joys of a backyard are off the table.”
Cities with public urban greenspace, like the Don River Valley and ravines of Toronto, can offer residents a communal substitute for private backyards.Peter Power/The Globe and Mail
But do families need backyards to be happy and active?
“Backyards are overrated,” says Shawn Russell, a Toronto father of two. He and his wife intentionally bought a semi-detached home with a small backyard in the city’s east end to raise their family. They rarely use the yard. Their sons, now six and four years old, learned to bike on the sidewalk, and play at the nearby school and park.
Even during the pandemic, Mr. Russell says, the family spent most of their time outdoors in public spaces, including the streets that were closed to cars. “We want our kids out and about in the neighbourhood, and in nature.”
In Australia, where urban backyards have been sliced up for larger homes, studies have found that the size of the family backyard didn’t increase how often children played outside. As Mr. Russell recalls, “my family had a decent sized backyard growing up, and I spent my days in the forest and playing street hockey out front.”
Backyards are a North American obsession, observes Naama Blonder, a Toronto urban planner and architect, and the co-founder of Smart Density. Around the world, most city-dwellers live without one. But Canada’s urban centres can’t keep sprawling so that every resident can have a single family home with their own private patch of lawn. That would mean using up more land, requiring more expensive infrastructure.
Today, the pursuit of a backyard means middle-class families have to move deeper into the suburbs, facing longer commutes – and, paradoxically, less time at home. “Being stuck in traffic doesn’t make me happy,” says Ms. Blonder.
A 2023 survey of Vancouver residents cast doubt on the idea that denser neighbourhoods are inherently unhappier.Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press
Cities can certainly be noisy, stressful places. But they can also be vibrant, walkable, socially connected communities. A 2023 survey of 1,900 Vancouver-area residents suggests that density, on its own, doesn’t make people unhappy. Being a renter, living in a tiny apartment, and having a lower income was associated with poorer mental health. But the survey, conducted by the non-profit Happy Cities for Vancouver Coastal Health, found that the rates of well-being didn’t differ between high or low-density neighbourhoods; people living in apartments and row-housing reported the same happiness levels as those in single family homes.
“People get attached to certain ideas. This is what success looks like, or I need to be happy by having a backyard,” says Madeleine Hebert, who leads housing research projects at Happy Cities. “But what is a backyard providing for them – a place for their dog to play, their kids to play, a place to be alone, to garden? We can’t provide everyone with a backyard in a multi-unit building, but we can design those spaces.”
Designating more streets for pedestrians and cyclists is one way to open up existing space for outdoor activity, as Mr. Russell’s family found. For apartment buildings, designers might create gathering patios for smaller groups, in addition to rooftop terraces.
Ms. Hebert describes a new 12-unit building in Vancouver built around a courtyard with a shared backyard. “Walk around that neighbourhood and most backyards don’t have people in them,” she says. But in this backyard, kids from the units play together, watched over by the residents. “It becomes much more of a communal gathering space where people trust each other.”
Courtyards are a feature of many mixed-use developments in Vancouver, like these ones in the Granville Island and Kitsilano areas.Darryl Dyck/The Globe and Mail
In other words, happy cities build neighbourhoods, not just housing. With developers squeezing more homes into empty urban land, well-designed parks and public spaces have to follow in equal measure.
Ms. Blonder, for instance, lives in a three-bedroom condo in downtown Toronto, with her husband and two young children. The family spend their time barbecuing on the building’s shared terrace, visiting the city’s aquarium, or playing in one of three nearby parks. Her condo’s small balcony, she says, is mainly used so the kids can eat ice cream without dripping inside.
Her kids, she says, are not deprived. But she still hears it all the time: “Poor things, living without a backyard.” To which she answers: “There is no backyard that can compete with the amenities of a well-designed park.”
Bountiful urban green space, research shows, is an important happiness buffer from the stresses of city life. An international study published in May, 2021, used satellite imagery to compare the amount of green space to scores from the World Happiness Report in 60 cities; more green space was associated with happiness everywhere, but especially in higher income countries, such as Canada.
A June paper published in the journal Communications Earth and Environment by a team of Ottawa-based researchers looked at data across 26 Canadian metropolitan areas between 2007 and 2022. The study found that neighbourhoods with more diverse species of birds and trees also had higher rates of self-reported mental health – a finding similar to studies in several European countries. An American paper published in June suggested that exposure to neighbourhood green space in cities may also be associated with slower aging.
Neighbourhoods with a diverse mix of birds, like the cardinal in this Toronto backyard, can give residents a closer connection to the natural world.Melissa Tait/The Globe and Mail
And yet, as Canadian cities have sprawled over the last few decades, says Anneke Smit, the director of the Centre for Cities at the University of Windsor’s Faculty of Law, most have lost, rather than gained, green spaces of all kinds.
The federal government is trying to create large swaths of protected land with the country’s first urban national park strategy, announced in 2021. But neighbourhoods still need smaller parks, and tree-lined walkways, says Dr. Smit, especially in denser and lower-income areas where residents are less likely to have their own yards.
Parks are important for other reasons. Greenspace cools down cities and provides shade, as dangerous heat waves become more common. The combination of taller buildings and more trees was found to reduce daytime heat for pedestrians more than low-rise buildings with larger footprints, according to recent studies by environment researchers in Germany. Grass and trees hold moisture in the ground reducing runoff to drains and sewers, and lowering the risk of floods.
If anyone should be unhappy without a backyard, it’s Ryan Godfrey. He still reminisces about his childhood playing in the dappled shade of a giant oak tree in his family’s backyard in Oakville. A love of science led him to become a botanist, who now works for World Wildlife Fund Canada.
But Mr. Godfrey is living an ecologically satisfied life with his partner in a sixth-floor Toronto condo with a balcony, three metres wide and two metres deep. They have no plans to move, even when kids come along. The walkable city life has too much appeal, he says, and the nearby parks deliver more space and nature than any backyard could offer. There’s also the economics: to afford a single-family home, they would have to move much farther away from the city centre and rely on a car.
Instead, Mr. Godfrey has transformed his balcony into a lush garden, choosing plants that grow best on the side of a cliff, such as Virginia strawberries and the red columbine. In the summer, he says, “I sit outside and watch the sunset, and the common evening primrose burst open into fragrant yellow fireworks right in front of my eyes.” He watches spiders build webs across the balcony lights to catch flies, and a resident bee standing guard on his trellis during morning coffee. “It is really hard to argue I am not in nature,” he says.
Density has to be developed mindfully, he says, considering the mental health needs of the human who live there. And he wouldn’t want to be on the 20th floor of a skyscraper – that’s too far from the tree tops. But he imagines a day when his neighbours grow gardens, and they’ll be connected by pollinators travelling from balcony to balcony. Don’t worry, he says, “you will absolutely see butterflies in the city, if you keep your eyes – and your mind – open to it.” After all, he watches the monarchs migrate south past his balcony, every September.
Chloë Ellingson/The Globe and Mail
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that botanist Ryan Godfrey works for the World Wildlife Fund. He works for World Wildlife Fund Canada. This version has been updated.
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Some people seem to approach life with a contagious measure of cheerfulness. They respond to adversity with resilience. And they appear to consistently experience joy in small, but important ways.
As part of a year-long investigation of happiness, The Globe and Mail's Erin Anderssen is embarking on a project to interview the "happiest people in Canada," nominated by the people who know them, through work, friendship and family.
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