As many of you know, Arizona’s George Staropoli is one of the pioneers and heroes of our movement. I just wish I had his IQ and his intellect. In the essay linked below he performs surgery on the lie that HOA industry representatives constantly spread through our legislatures. Print it out and place it on the desks of each man and woman in government.
https://pvtgov.wordpress.com/2015/10/07/cai-maintains-hoas-are-protected-by-and-do-not-violate-the-constitution/
Yes, I know I’ve posted this before, but because we get new readers here every day, many will not ever have heard this Pete Seeger classic. Enjoy!
If you believe that, then you’re visiting the wrong shrink!
No, Your HOA absolutely does not protect your property values. Your HOA is there to keep track of your net worth. Your net worth (not just your home value) is pledged to a community pool which can be used whenever necessary to cover the cost of lawsuits, repairs, maintenance, insurance, embezzling board members.
All neighborhoods age, that’s just a fact of life. But developers get special breaks for cramming more homes into smaller spaces, and often those developers are just self-centered and financially motivated to cut corners. Meanwhile, building inspectors look the other way knowing it’ll be years before construction problems start becoming apparent.
When a mortgage or financial crisis hits and HOAs don’t maintain the common areas wild things start happening. A few homeowners lose their homes. Then a few more. Suddenly, there’s not enough money in the budget to maintain the common areas. More homes or condos are turned into rentals. Crime increases. More lawsuits are filed. Then it gets especially messy as the entire neighborhood collapses. Who’s still around to claim, “Our HOA protects property values?”
A prime example is linked below:
(Georgia condo complex gets trashed)
It looks like our side won a small but significant legal battle. A federal judge has ruled that a debt collector’s law firm can be held liable when it presents false information received from the client. The debt collector had inflated its claim against a homeowner by thousands of dollars, the same thing HOA debt collectors do all over the country. Finally! Finally, a law firm gets smacked for false representation!
Now we need a case where the HOA itself is also found liable for hiring crooked debt collectors who use crooked lawyers.
(link to law firm that wins legal ruling)
I’ve written about this before. But here’s another great column from the Aspen Times. Wages are so out-of-control in this Eastern Hollywood Town, that the City of Aspen is using taxpayers’ money to pay for the maintenance of Homeowners Associations where all the ‘low-income’ workers live. The whole system is warped in more ways than can be easily discussed. But the columnist linked below does a pretty good job.
Homeowners Associations are a national scandal waiting to burst. But making the taxpayer pay the cost of keeping this scam going is just stretching the imagination too far.
(link to Aspen Times story on taxpayer funded HOAs)
