Get caught drunk driving and you might get a year behind bars. Embezzle a million bucks, cost fifty people their homes and you get 30 days!
Massoud Aaron Yashouafar is known in three states for his enormously fishy real estate deals. And he’s the big cheese behind the Paradise Spa scandal in Las Vegas. Much of the Homeowners Association burned to the ground in 2010, but somehow a million dollars in insurance money found its way to Yashouafar’s pockets instead of the homeowners.
Originally, the burned condos could have been rebuilt. But it took so much time to deal with the ruins that the county finally demolished them. To rub salt in the wounds of the homeless HOA members the county filed liens on the ruined units and sent the owners bills to pay for the demolition job. Ah yes, all those displaced homeowners are still on the hook for monthly dues!
An expose’ by the Denver Post shows that many Colorado homeowners have been forced to pay legal bills to law firms which had never filed foreclosure lawsuits against their properties.
“Phantom court cases” the Post calls them. Homeowners afraid of losing their homes have been sent legal bills by county public trustees saying that foreclosures could not be stopped unless homeowners forked over the legal fees for these nonexistent lawsuits.
The homeowners always did.
Grift? Graft? Regardless of what it’s called lawyers and law firms are rarely, if ever, sanctioned. They participate in confiscation of private homes yet if they’re caught they face no penalties. Our society has been turned upside down. Shoplift more than $200 in Colorado and you face prison time for a felony. Steal thousands of dollars from distressed homeowners and you can buy your kid a Ferrari. A strange legal system in this country.
Some homeowners describe it as such. But when HOAs lawyers advise it to do the kind of thing linked in the video below, it’s worse than a scourge. It’s actionable illegal conduct. What if this homeowner had to leave home to attend to an emergency at a local hospital? This would be a lawsuit with no bottom line on damages. This lawsuit could cost the HOA millions and millions of dollars.
Nevada, where HOA bigwigs have been smacked with dozens of federal indictments and convictions for racketeering, is now leading the nation in trying to offer due process to homeowners. It’s only a proposal in the Nevada Real Estate Division, but what a concept!
Due process.
It’s just a handful of words in some obscure part of the Constitution.
But it’s almost beyond comprehension that Nevada homeowners might someday have real access to the Bill of Rights.
Builders of a ritzy high rise co-op in the big apple are raising eyebrows for figuring out how to lower their taxes from 22 million to just a half million dollars a year. Extell is building the fancy Upper West Side luxury tower where rich folks can buy a unit facing the Hudson River for 1.3 to 15.9 million dollars.
But New York has a tax loophole which gives millions and millions of dollars to developers who include a little bit of ‘affordable housing’ in their high rises. In exchange, developers get to jam more units into the development and offer those extra ones to the po’ folk. Extell will provide 55 low income units on the lower floors of the backside of the building, which face an alley.
The catch is, the rich folk and the po’ folk are never supposed to mix in this building. The building’s millionaire residents will have a grande entrance on the front of the building, and a prestige address at 40 Riverside Boulevard. Low income families have a separate entrance in the alley.
Some New York politicians say it smacks of feudalism and classicism.
The developer thinks the only thing it smacks of is millions of extra dollars in profits.
