Welcome to the first part of Living on the Edge, a three-part series by Spectator reporter Matthew Van Dongen.

Hamiltonians already know fighting gravity is an uphill battle. They’re used to the unique challenges of hosting a Mountain in the middle of their city, like paying more for snow-clearing, replacing brake pads more often and watching more closely for falling rocks than your average city slicker.

Many residents will argue it’s a small price to pay for fantastic vistas, trails, parks and waterfalls. But the cost of that beloved geography is now on the rise — for all taxpayers, whether you live on the edge or not — thanks to a mix of historically-bad planning, surprisingly good marketing and an inexorably-changing climate.

The city is being asked to save or buy homes historically built too close to the edge. Escarpment rocks — and the walls meant to keep them in place — are falling more often on our Mountain-climbing roads. Even our visitors are literally falling for our waterfalls with alarming frequency.

The proposed solutions to those problems come with big dollar signs and tough questions.

Do we have a moral or legal obligation to buy homes teetering on the brink? Do we spend tens of millions of dollars protecting motorists on escarpment roads but put off Mountain-climbing bike lanes? Should we fence off nature to save careless visitors from themselves?

The Red Hill Valley is slowly devouring Donna Dobroski’s precariously-perched home. The edge of the four-storey-high, forested valley slope — a “dream backyard” for kids before it morphed into a homeowner’s nightmare — is inching inexorably closer to the back door of the brick bungalow at 18 Sinclair Ct.

Over 45 years, erosion has gradually won the battle against three wooden boundary fences, the willow trees planted to stabilize the 12-metre-high slope and even a makeshift retaining wall of stacked cement blocks and railway ties.

But the real problem is an alarming series of cracks spreading through her foundation. Her walls, inside and out. Even the concrete garage floor, one half visibly sunken compared to the other.

The 70-year-old grandmother wanders through her tidy dining room and lifts up strategically-placed family photos to reveal spiderwebs of damage on the walls. She points upwards to a seemingly random piece of wood trim that doesn’t completely hide another crack growing across the ceiling.

She wants to stay, but there’s only so much family photos can do to preserve the structural integrity of your home.

“It’s a heckuva predicament. It breaks my heart to even think about leaving, but common sense tells me I should take whatever help I can get and try to find a new home,” said Dobroski, who appealed to the city for help and is mulling a council purchase offer made on compassionate grounds.

The teetering home is actually a predicament for all Hamilton taxpayers, whether they live on the brink or not.

Climate change is accelerating the consequences of poor planning more than half-a-century ago that allowed hundreds of homes to be constructed close to the top of creek valleys and the scarp edge of urban Hamilton. In some cases, too close. And when the city steps in to help, everyone pays.

A fair question to ask is whether the city is actually obligated to help out scarp-edge homeowners who find themselves on the literal brink of financial ruin.

City lawyers maintain in a report the municipality is not negligent or liable for Dobroski’s predicament.

The longtime homeowner, on the other hand, argued the city should consider fixing the eroding slope since the valley is municipally-owned. The city also made the rules — long since changed — that allowed the home to be built near the edge in the first place.

The city agreed to investigate — and an engineer soon quashed Dobroski’s dreams of staying put, estimating it would cost at least $250,000 to stabilize the shifting slope. The work would also have meant clear-cutting trees other homeowners depend on to block noise from the Red Hill Valley Parkway.

“He told me this house should never have been built so close to the edge,” said a chagrined Dobroski. “Today, it wouldn’t be.”

Donna Dobroski’s distress: The corner of her house has settled, causing an ugly crack in the brick wall due to erosion into the Red Hill Valley behind her home. | John Rennison, The Hamilton Spectator Today, the Hamilton Conservation Authority enforces a minimum six-metre setback from “stable top of slope” for such builds. (The city and Niagara Escarpment Commission also have a say on development along the urban scarp edge of the Mountain.)

Those setbacks also grow based on studies of slope and geological stability, risk of erosion from watercourses and other factors. “There’s a lot more science involved today than even 30 years ago,” said watershed engineering director Scott Peck.

So far, the city has not comprehensively studied how many homeowners might be living dangerously close to the edge.

But the conservation authority’s “hazard land” map shows hundreds of residential properties backing onto creek valleys in Hamilton, particularly in the east end.

In the old city, seven estate homes atop the Mountain look directly down on the Claremont Access, while close to 30 houses on Mountain Park Avenue line the urban escarpment edge — including one that doesn’t have a backyard at all, only a recently approved deck extension sticking out into the air above the lower city.

Dobroski’s home isn’t the first to be purchased by taxpayers — and it won’t be the last, predicted her ward councillor, Chad Collins. Her home wasn’t even the first bought by the city on her street.

Collins said the city has “set a precedent” in the past by offering help on compassionate grounds. “Part of it is recognizing that at the time when these houses were built, in the ’40s and ’50s, the setback regulations we now have simply did not exist,” he said.

“Now we’re seeing the effects of climate change on private and public property. We’re seeing it along the Red Hill, we’re seeing along escarpment crossings. It’s not something we can just ignore … but the implications are costly.”

The cost of compassionate purchases is certainly on the rise.

Consider:

• City records show a different Sinclair Court home with bowing foundation walls was purchased for $165,000 by council in 2004 and lumped in with the parkway-building project in the valley below.

• The city paid $278,000 to buy Abacu Mendonca’s Hixon Road home in 2013 after flooding collapsed part of his backyard into the Red Hill valley, leaving his back door less than a hockey-stick-length from the brink.

• The city and Dobroski haven’t finalized a deal for her home yet. But market value trends suggest homes on the street are worth between $300,000 and $400,000.

The city doesn’t always agree to help. But sometimes it still has to pay.

The city denied responsibility for a collapsing east end home nearly two decades ago — but ended up being forced to pay for a drawn-out lawsuit and court-ordered slope monitoring.

The lawsuit with a Quigley Road housing co-op started when a townhouse started to tilt over the edge of the Davis Creek valley. It was condemned by the city and torn down.

It’s not clear what the city paid to wage that legal battle over nearly 20 years. But in 2014, a judge ordered the city to monitor slope movement below the co-op as well as foundation cracks in two townhouses for the next decade to ensure no other buildings topple over the cliff.

Teetering house syndrome is certainly more pronounced along the Red Hill Creek and its tributary valleys.

But the city is increasingly turning nervous eyes to the urban escarpment — which in some areas looms 100 metres above the lower city, or as high as Stelco tower.

The Hamilton East Mountain Community Group approached council this spring with a list of concerns about sink holes along the brow and slowly eroding backyards.

“We want the city to pay more attention to what climate change is going to mean for our community,” said Kate Fraser. “There are a lot of people living along the brow.”

Further west, engineers are particularly preoccupied with failing metal retaining walls along the Claremont Access that have repeatedly collapsed or burst apart, leading to road-closing landslides.

Harry Stinson watches nervously from above as the city tries to fix the problem.

“My yard goes right to the edge,” said the well-known developer, who bought his toney cliff-top home above the Claremont about nine years ago. “I can peer over and watch them chewing away at the rock.”

The aging metal bin walls at the top of the access hug the edge of his backyard.

The city now plans to remove all or most of those old metal panels — at a cost of close to $10 million — but has yet to settle on how to make the bared cliff face safe in future.

A consultant’s report says the ideal option would be to cut large, terraced “steps” into the escarpment slope to minimize future landslides. But doing so “will likely have property impacts” on homeowners living along the brow.

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The north end of Stinson’s home is a couple of long strides from the scarp edge. He admits to feeling “unnerved” by the prospect of the city eating away at the cliff below his backyard. “I’m not concerned it’s going to fall down tomorrow, but it does cross one’s mind,” he said.

Stinson emphasizes he doesn’t regret buying the “breathtaking” view overlooking the lower city and harbour, even with the risk to his backyard posed by erosion — and possibly, municipal construction beneath him.

“I’m reminded why I did it every morning when I look out the window,” he said.

“But it is disconcerting to feel like there isn’t really a plan (for access erosion),” he said, noting the city has not contacted him about any implications of wall removal. “I’m not convinced the city really knows how to deal with this.”

The city actually just started working on a new plan: specifically, an escarpment-wide Mountain access maintenance strategy.

The strategy is more focused on preventing rocks from falling on roadways than, for example, the prospect of brow homes tumbling into the lower city.

But the work slated to start this fall will help the city understand how quickly the urban escarpment face is actually disappearing. That has implications for Mountain roadways, infrastructure and, yes, homes.

“I think we need to get a handle on how quickly that erosion is happening,” said Mountain councillor Terry Whitehead. “Maybe someday the city is going to end up debating whether to buy up some of those homes (along the brow.)

“Maybe that’s 40, or 50 or 75 years away — or maybe it’s a lot sooner than we think. The point is, we don’t know.”

That’s part of the reason Hamilton has hooked up with McMaster University professor Carolyn Eyles, who is preparing a hi-tech study of erosion rates along the urban scarp face with help from her students.

But don’t expect an easy answer on how quickly Mountain brow backyards are disappearing. The slow retreat of the hard-capped shale of the Niagara Escarpment has been underway for millions of years, but its progress is not uniform.

“It would be very difficult to give a generic average, because the actual geology, the properties of the rock layers, can vary dramatically even over a 100-metre section,” said the glacial sedimentologist.

“The one thing we know for sure is that it’s going to keep going, so you have to plan for it,” she said.

A hospital on the edge The view from the Sherman Cut of the Juravinski Hospital and Cancer Centre's structural overhang | John Rennison,The Hamilton Spectator In case you wondered, the Juravinski Hospital and Cancer Centre is not about to topple off the edge of a cliff.

Yes, people do wonder.

Typically, they email or write letters to The Spectator asking about the uniquely-perched former Henderson hospital whenever a new “escarpment falling down” story is published.

“What kind of engineering considerations went into the rebuilding of parts of Juravinski Hospital directly on the edge of the escarpment?” asked Jim Foreman by email after reading about a new city effort to measure Mountain erosion. “It’s rather breathtaking, really.”

“I hope their research and convictions in the enduring stability of that section of the Mountain is well-founded, for the sake of the patients, employees and taxpayers,” wrote Ancaster resident Beverly Myhal in a letter to the editor after a landslide.

The short answer to everyone’s question comes from Carol Whiteman, a senior project manager for capital development with Hamilton Health Sciences. “The sedimentary rock is solid,” she told The Spectator. “That’s why we were able to build so close to the edge.”

There has been a hospital on the brow since 1917. The former Henderson hospital stretched most of the way to the Sherman Cut decades before modern building setbacks came into play.

The four-storey redevelopment finished in 2012 offers patients — particularly long-term stay candidates for bone marrow transplants — one of the best views of the lower city and harbour.

The hospital is separated from the natural scarp edge by parking and Mountain Park Avenue. But the east end of the building comes to within a couple of feet of the Sherman Cut, a narrow, sheer-walled access blasted out of the escarpment rock decades ago to connect the upper city with both legs of the Sherman Access.

Whiteman said hospital redevelopment planners spent “years” studying and then justifying the rationale for redeveloping what is now one of Canada’s busiest cancer centres right on the brink.

She said engineers, geoscientists and other experts had to satisfy regulators and Infrastructure Ontario about everything from the stability of various rock layers to the impact of traffic vibration before the 425,000-square-foot, $180-million redevelopment got the go-ahead on its current footprint.

Around 50,000 cubic metres of rock was excavated to build a foundation that was reinforced with 120 truckloads of concrete and 40 tonnes of steel rebar.

The city and hospital later shared the cost of installing protective mesh over the wall of the Sherman Cut that lines up with the hospital wall above.

That screen doesn’t stop weather and natural erosion from eating at the wall, of course.

But the city monitors that erosion and the hospital regularly inspects its own facility and so far, no extra protective work is deemed necessary, said Sam Sidawi, Hamilton’s asset management head.

In theory, the rock face underneath the hospital could be shored up with a retaining wall, if needed, he said. “But the hospital is responsible for the structural integrity of its facility,” he noted.