Dear Friends: I really don’t won’t to lose any of my regular readers. But it would be irresponsible of me to find a great HOA website and not let you know about it. This is a good one for you to mark and check in with regularly:
(click here for HOA Consumer Affairs)
guest blog by Nila Ridings
~follow up to blog of November 15th~
HOA members across the country are outraged to hear the story of 75-year old Ingrid Boak, who lost her mortgage-free home in Lexington, Kentucky. And it was all over a minuscule amount of HOA dues owed to Masterson Station.
Nathan Billings, the HOA’s attorney, says they followed the CC&Rs and it was all legal. Okay, but had there been a mortgage for $135k would this same procedure have been followed??? Admission has been made that MOST foreclosures by HOAs include an unpaid mortgage. Sorry, Mr. Billings, but this case smells worse than a pile of race horse manure!
Kentuckians are now scared of losing their homes and panic has set in. The checks are stacking up with delinquent dues payments. But don’t be jumping for joy too soon! Thanks to this story, far more home buyers nationwide have now learned the nasty, ugly and ruthless truth about HOAs! And you can bet their Realtors are going to hear, “Don’t show me any property with an HOA!!!
Hearing that a City Council member is supporting Ms. Boak gives us hope that the end result will be what’s morally right. Shevawn Akers has a Facebook page. What do you say? Let’s encourage her with our support so she’ll fight harder to save Ingrid’s home.
If Stephen Collins Foster were alive today he’d probably change his 1851 song title to, “My Old Kentucky Home before The HOA.”
http://www.kentucky.com/2013/12/03/2967748/masterson-station-foreclosure.html
guest blog by Nila Ridings
Kenneth Torrence is a Palm Beach sheriff’s deputy. His best friend is his mixed breed dog, Sasha. But they both have the misfortune of living in the Whispering Woods of Palm Beach Homeowners Association. Kenneth and Sasha have lived there for two years with no problems.
I think it was Mark Twain who advised people to buy land because God wasn’t making any more of it. He also said, “No man’s life, liberty or property are safe when the Legislature’s in session.” His last witticism may have been more accurate than the first.
This blog post is, indeed, a little esoteric. But many experts have predicted that another financial bubble is going to collapse, this one involving the HOA housing industry.
You really have to dive in between the lines of the story linked below. But this financial expert is predicting societal changes which actually could lead to a housing collapse in suburban America. He says the most dynamic part of our growing financial culture is the diversity of thought and creativity that’s only found in our inner cities and not in our stale suburban neighborhoods. He claims that our societal focus on suburban life is destined for failure and calls it “…the primary reason for global financial crisis.”
I’m no economist and my own predictions are far less sophisticated than his. But it boils down to the same conclusion: Sir Thomas More’s vision of Utopia is exactly backwards and is destined to collapse simply because the human spirit is not designed for life in Paradise. It’s evolutionarily designed for survival of the fittest. And the HOA Utopian model was never designed to handle the harsh realities of life.
When those institutions which underwrite home loans discover that the typical Homeowner Association model does not protect or stabilize property values, when they discover that homes outside HOAs actually rise faster in value than those inside gated neighborhoods, when they finally discover that embezzlement is the Achilles heel of covenant controlled developments, then investor money will start flowing out of homeowners associations and back into more traditional neighborhoods.
(click here for Richard Florida’s interview)
