Tag Archives: HOA Abuse

Madness In HOA Arizona

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guest blog by Jill Schweitzer

I’ve been taking HOA classes put on by the City for the last few years. I used to attend to learn, now I attend to see what I missed the first time around, what the HOA industry omits in the discussions, what blunders I am able to witness.

Recently I attended a class where the HOA attorney was discussing how he is representing an HOA which is suing an owner because he put an extra block on his block wall. He told us how the lawsuit has been a pending for a couple years and his fees are now up to approximately 22k.

The attorney then went on to say how he was basically looking forward to winning the lawsuit, putting a lien on the house and then taking the house.

I do not understand how Boards allow homeowners to be treated this way. That attorney’s attitude is horrible. No one should lose their home because they made their fence a little too high. No one should arrogantly state they are going to take someone’s home. There is too much power in HOAs, and in the actions of those in the industry.

This behavior simply wouldn’t happen if Boards smarten up…and if the laws were changed to protect owners. I highly doubt that an extra row of block impacted property values in that community.

One more note, attendees in class fill out a survey and make suggestions for future classes. The person who coordinates the classes then sends an email to all attendees with the results. I made two suggestions that were omitted from the email:

1. Have a class taught by an attorney who is not a part of the industry lobby groups.
2. Have a class taught by a particular attorney in Scottsdale who is offering arbitration at a much lower cost to owners. He is not a part of the industry lobby groups.

The powers-that-be must have decided those two suggestions were too outrageous. Or quite possibly there is some control over the content provided to homeowners and board members who attend classes. My goal is to have a class taught by non-lobby group attorneys in the near future regardless of whether the City sponsors the class.

Horrible House Color, & A Personal Memory

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Paint your house the wrong shade and you’ll get death threats! It’s happening to a couple in Texas who got permission to paint their house blue, but when the shade of ‘blue’ wasn’t specified they painted it teal blue. Amazing.

(story in London Daily Mail of teal house fight)

It brings back memories of one of my biggest gaffes. My first house in Denver was a dirty canary yellow and after living there a few years I really wanted to change it. I hired a painter and picked out a shade of soft gray that I thought would be very elegant. Since I was working 15 hour days at the TV station I wasn’t there when the painter did the house.

My wife called me at work and said, “You’d better come home immediately, there’s trouble with the neighbors.”

I raced home to find about fifteen or twenty neighbors gathered in the street in front of my newly painted house. But Good Lord, there was my painted house. The painter had used the correct shade of paint, but that house looked for all the world like the blue color you might see on a beached dead, rotting whale. It was horrible.

I assured the crowd that I would re-paint the house immediately and the second paint job was started the very next day, this time in true soft gray. There was no Homeowners Association. No threats of liens or lawsuits. There didn’t need to be. I just did what any one of us would and should do.

Once in a while I drive through that neighborhood of thirty-five years ago. The house is still painted soft gray.

 

It Just Never Goes Away

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I was watching a grandson’s football game this afternoon here in the Denver area. A familiar looking lady walked up to me and grabbed my arm. She said, “Remember me?”

Ugh! At age 66 I hate that question. So she reacted to my blank stare: “I was at your house several months ago and brought you a big box of records on your former Homeowners Association.”

Ah, yes, I got the connection. This lady and her husband were foster parents and they loved the neighborhood. Not knowing a thing about the national HOA scam, they blithely bought a house and moved in with three foster kids. Knowing how anti-minority, anti-Semitic and anti-queer this neighborhood is I wasn’t surprised she’d have trouble. She was in tears and I just didn’t have any good advice for her except to move out.

She says she was told by more than one HOA official “your kind isn’t appreciated in this neighborhood.” All her attempts to improve the exterior of her home were rejected. She and her husband were doing some interior improvements and she was told by a notorious lawyer who takes every opportunity to get on the board and stay there, that if even one nail is out of place he’ll force her to tear everything down.

Well, this HOA succeeded in driving her out of the neighborhood. She moved. And she said her new non-HOA home is a wonderful place where all the neighbors talk and get along. She did say she still loved this area and said she was going to inquire about whether some adjoining HOAs were any better.

“No!” I told her. I gave her the same old advice I give everyone. “THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A GOOD HOA. EVERY ‘GOOD’ HOA IS JUST ONE VOTE AWAY FROM DISASTER!”

It’s true. It’s very sad, but it’s true.

HOA Racism Remains

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In my book, Neighbors At War, I delve deeply into this nation’s history of the enforcement of racially restrictive covenants in millions of property deeds across the country. Yes, we’ve made a ton of progress in the last five decades in wiping out housing discrimination. But in little spots around the country the old mindset remains. Every time I see one of these stories pop up I consider it a national shame that a few people still live in the racist past.

A black man in Texas is in court trying to rent a home in an all-white property owners association. A covenant in the Clearwater Bay POA mandated that homeowners never rent or sell to “anyone of African descent.”

As I write these words I’m looking at an amazing anthropology article in the current issue of National Geographic. The article is about the recent discovery of a new species of bi-pedal hominid in a cave near Johannesburg, South Africa.  No matter what your religious or political beliefs are, every human being on the face of this planet is “of African descent.” The black man in that Texas POA should hire a few expert witness anthropologists for his federal discrimination case. They’ll be able to prove in court that not a single member of that Association qualifies for home ownership under its own covenants.

We are all black. And yes, black lives matter.

(link to KSLA story on Texas discrimination case)

(link to National Geographic story on Homo naledi, a new species on the human family tree)