Tag Archives: HOA Neighborhood

Not HOA Related, But Really Hilarious & Lovely Corruption!

From The London Times: 

Outside England’s Bristol Zoo there is a parking lot for 150 cars and 8 buses.

For 25 years, its parking fees were managed by a very pleasant attendant….. He charged car owners $1.40 for parking, buses paid about $7.

One day, after 25 solid years of never missing a day of work and collecting all those fees he just didn’t show up. Managers of the zoo called the city council asking for someone to send down another parking agent to take his place.

The council did some research and replied that the parking lot was the zoo’s responsibility, not theirs. 

The zoo told the council that the attendant was a city employee, not theirs.

The city council replied that this parking lot attendant had never 
been on the city payroll.

After two and a half decades, this ‘parking attendant’ is undoubtedly sitting in his villa some where on the coast of Spain, Italy or France, laughing at the sucker he’d made of the system. 

He apparently charged the parking fee on his own. People gladly paid the parking toll to visit the zoo. 

All he had to do was show up each morning, collect the parking fees and stash them in his personal account.

For 25 years, he collected about $569 a dayl After 25 years, that amounts to a paltry 7 million dollars.

LOL! At this point, nobody even knows this shyster’s name. But he’s a genius.

And a millionaire. And nobody knows his name!

God bless you in your retirement, Sir!

How Can We React?

It has dawned on me several times over the past few years that HOA outrages are most often reversed when a rogue HOA gets a ton of phone calls and email from angry people across the country. If you know that you, as a board officer or manager, are being watched by the whole country, you might be a little less rotten to your neighbor. In a well publicized case where an HOA official’s viciousness is widely publicized, would that official be more willing to step back and mull over the action he or she is planning to take? Certainly, when you lift up a big rock the vermin tend to scatter in the light of day.

We currently have more than 31,000 people regularly reading this blog. That means an army of folks in every state. Should we begin publicizing home phone numbers, HOA phone numbers, email addresses and management phone numbers whenever we hear of the actions of a rogue HOA board?

I’d like to hear your thoughts publicly or privately. And if we ever began such a policy it would require your help to look up and verify any numbers or addresses of those we publicize.

Your thoughts?

Dont’cha Just Love Our Legal System?

The American legal system is the best, we’re told. Point out one that’s any better!

Well, I could certainly point out a number of other legal systems where the tort industry isn’t so rampantly out of control. The impossible cost of paying for medical malpractice suits, for example, has persuaded a lot of doctors to get out of their chosen profession. And it could very well be a driving force behind the move to Obamacare, a program which current polls say has only 12 percent support of the American public.

Ultimately, though, HOA tort lawyers are destined to kill the “goose with the golden eggs.” Rampant embezzling, harassment lawsuits and foreclosures can only lead to one thing: Mortgage companies will stop lending to homeowners in HOA Amerika. If U.S. Bank, Bank of America, or Wells Fargo are paying attention they’ll discover that loans are riskier inside Homeowners Associations. They’ll find that property values are not protected in the typical HOA. When that happens a lot of high-priced HOA lawyers are going to be looking for jobs at the local 7/11.

One can only hope.

Oh, How Sweet HOA Life Is!

Shadowglen Homeowners Association, Austin, Texas. Homeowners are beginning to get hefty fines if any vehicle parks in front of their house. It doesn’t matter if the car belongs to the next door neighbor, a delivery company or just a friend dropping by, homeowners are getting slammed with fines of $500 and more.

Isn’t it strange how all these HOAs start off so benign, yet end up so fascist? All it takes is a couple of new board members who suddenly find themselves in the first position of power they’ve ever possessed.

In my new book Neighbors At War, I explain the chemical reaction that happens in the brains of those who get that first taste of raw power. And in Chapter 15 there’s a discussion of two of the most controversial sociological experiments ever conducted. Each experiment attempted to explore what goes on in the minds of people who suddenly feel the need to damage another human being. In one of the experiments, the scientist pondered why it was so easy to persuade German guards to mindlessly slaughter prisoners of war. What he discovered shocked and outraged the entire psychology community.

There’s a reason that board members and managers in a place like the Shadowglenn Homeowners Association are often referred to as the ‘lawn Nazis’ or the ‘HOA Nazis’. Power is an incredible aphrodisiac!

(click here for KXAN-TV story)

http://www.kxan.com/news/local/austin/hoa-parking-rules-upsets-homeowners

 

How Many Conservatives ‘Get It’?

Historically, many Republicans and indeed many conservative Republicans have strongly supported the idea of Homeowners Associations. They falsely believe that the smaller a governmental entity gets the closer it is to the people. Many conservatives AND liberals have discovered over the past few years this is an empty-headed belief.

An old-time outdoorsman’s axiom is that if three people get into trouble in the wilderness two will always turn against the one. You can’t get any closer to true democracy than three people. And as John Adams and Toqueville warned us eons ago, we all need to beware of the “tyranny of the majority.”

Democracy is an ugly word unless it’s accompanied by guaranteed restraints like a Bill of Rights, due process, and an orderly court system. Always remember that a mob running down the street breaking windows and burning buildings is a true democracy.

If there is no set of checks and balances, it’s basic human instinct to try to dominate all those around you. And right there is the fulcrum around which the national Homeowners Association scandal spins. Without checks and balances there are no human rights. Believe it!

The article linked below is a couple of years old, but it’s fantastic when a columnist for the conservative Townhall.com begins to understand that the Homeowners Association Movement has the potential of being downright dangerous to the finances and freedom of individual homeowners. The real tragedy is that we don’t hear a constant drumbeat from both the Townhall crowd and the ACLU crowd. Anger at this national scandal is not conservative or liberal. Every political faction should be screaming at the outrages going on in every state in the union.

All that being said, the attached column is worth reading again.

(click here for Townhall column)

http://townhall.com/columnists/rachelalexander/2011/06/22/homeowners%E2%80%99_associations_becoming_unavoidable_and_quasi-governmental/page/full