People Jannett Ioannides calls “night stalkers” visit Courton Drive a lot.

Chalking tires, they patrol the crescent street in Wexford looking for illegally-parked vehicles.

On Courton, like everywhere else in Scarborough, that’s every vehicle left on the street overnight, and every vehicle on those parts of driveways the city owns, called the apron or windrow.

Permit parking doesn’t exist in Scarborough and since 2009, residents haven’t been able to apply.

For people like Ioannides, whose family has four cars and enough driveway space for two, that’s a problem.

“We have four cars because we have four adults in this home, four productive, working adults,” she said last week, adding she’s losing sleep because parking enforcers, summoned by someone on the street, are showing up at night.

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Ioannides gets up at 2:30 or 3 a.m. to move cars so they can’t be tagged under the City of Toronto’s three-hour rule, and so do some neighbours.

She sees no solution unless her street gets overnight parking permits, but almost every part of Scarborough is in an “exclusion zone” where such permits, even temporary ones for visitors, cannot be approved.

“We’re being bullied, and we have to take it,” Ioannides said. “There’s got to be an option for us.”

Michael Thompson, the local councillor, said overnight parking enforcement is “driven by the neighbourhood,” and not by enforcers hoping to tag vehicles.

He said he’s met with the family, as well as neighbours who don’t like what they’re doing with their cars. Those neighbours feel the Ioannides family is bullying them, Thompson said.

Many residents choose to park off their property because they don’t want to keep shifting cars around, he argued. Thompson said he suggested Ioannides empty her garage so a car can fit there.

Ioannides says her family’s single-car garage contains an antique car the family wants to keep. Thompson doesn’t care, added Ioannides, whose family delivered a letter this month to Courton homes, trying to rally support against parking “harassment” and for a petition for permit parking.

In 2014, they also accused the city of “over zealous” parking enforcement on Courton during a snowy winter, arguing it was unfair.

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This time, they’ve started a “neighbourhood watch” which leaves flyers on windshields with this message: “Your car was chalked last night so I wiped it clean for you. Pay it forward.”

Dan Salvatore, who parks his pickup in front of his house, calls the situation “horrible,” but says without the “neighbourhood watch” his stack of around 20 recent tickets would be higher.

“Sometimes they’re getting crafty. They don’t even chalk the tires.”

Russel DeZilva, another neighbour, said he feels the street is being targeted. “We have get-togethers all the time. For my visitors to pay for their parking (in tickets), it’s just not fair.”

Leaving cars on streets overnight is an issue across Scarborough, as many homes built with parking for one or two vehicles now have three or four, said Glenn De Baeremaeker, another local councillor.

“People who don’t like it, really don’t like it.”

De Baeremaeker said he gets calls each month from people who rent basement apartments in his ward without realizing there’s no street parking.

But giving them parking spots is up to landlords, said the councillor, who argued not every house can accommodate every family and their cars.

Nevertheless, De Baeremaeker last year successfully proposed removing a street in his ward, Pringdale Gardens Circle, from the “exclusion zone,” which could lead to permit parking there.

“In general, I don’t support it, but I think you have to look at exceptions,” he said.

Another councillor, Neethan Shan, said extended families in his Morningside Heights neighbourhood joined together to afford home ownership, so many homes have “four or six” cars.

“This problem is not going to go away,” said Shan, who believes Scarborough’s prohibition on applying for street parking “needs to be looked at,” and if re-elected, it’s an issue he’d raise.