I follow Institute for Justice on social media. See the link below for their recent press release about the Pleasant Ridge neighborhood of Charlestown, Indiana. This is yet another case where the city seeks to declare several city blocks “blighted” and to use state grant money to purchase 350+ homes for the paltry sum of $6000 each.
According to a June television report (link below), which includes interviews with Pleasant Ridge residents and Charlestown Mayor Bob Hall, early plans for development are to create a mixed use neighborhood consisting of duplexes, single family homes and affordable housing for seniors. In other words, probably another HOA, this one subsidized by tax dollars.
The Maple Hill Homeowners Association is becoming the laughingstock of Bear, Delaware. There are only 23 homes in this HOA, but these idiots have picked the most unbelievable fights with each other and have made their own neighborhood toxic to anyone thinking of buying a home there.
Dues are cheap. About $280 a year. But the petty bickering and the downright nastiness has churned up more than $45,000 in legal fees as various neighborhood crybabies run to the courts to try to get their problems solved.
We have a huge, systemic problem in the US. It used to be that regulation was enacted and enforced to protect the People, the taxpaying constituents of government. The purpose of regulation was to uphold individual rights and to honor our federal and state Constitutions.
Over the years, that original purpose has been perverted by pervasively symbiotic public-private partnerships between large corporations and every level of government. Unfortunately, many of America’s elected public servants have sold out to special business interests that contribute heavily to campaigns and pay lobbyists to create and promote self-perpetuating legislation. Even some of our elected judges have shifted their loyalties to corporate and government cronies instead of individual Americans.
It always saddens me to see these stories. But with the number of flag fights going on around the country, is it any wonder that many of us think of the HOA movement as fundamentally anti-American? The latest is the Fieldstone Homeowners Association in Greenfield, Indiana.
Some stories are just too weird to embellish, even for the sake of humor. But the U.S. Senate seat from Iowa may boil down to a neighborhood dispute over chickens.
Democratic Congressman Bruce Braley is running for Senate in a razor thin race. Braley has a vacation home in the ritzy Holiday Lake neighborhood in Brooklyn, Iowa. Covenants in the neighborhood say, “No animals or birds other than household pets can be kept in the subdivision.” But one of Braley’s neighbors (also a registered Democrat) keeps chickens on her property as ‘therapy animals’ for mentally handicapped youngsters.
