Quick! We need tree extensions in River Grove at Merritt Island, Florida before Pat Fitzgerald rips his Magnolias from the earth! His HOA is fining him $5000 because a couple of Magnolia trees he planted were too short. He’s already spent $1500 in an effort to mediate this idiotic dispute. Miracle Grow doesn’t work fast enough for this HOA board.
So, kiss those trees good-bye, Pat. Don’t you know you’ve destroyed all the property values in your neighborhood?
That’s right, Richard Rahn of the River Grove HOA board says Pat’s short trees have got to go! Yes, go! Not grow! I’m thinking things were better when board members didn’t make public comments. Because now that this board member has spoken out, HOAs everywhere should change their by-laws requiring elected officers to have an IQ of at least 50!
Pat never dreamed his military service during The Gulf War was going to be matched by the danger of growing trees in his front yard. But insanity never ceases to exist in HOAs!
I never want to jump too quickly on the ‘race bandwagon,’ but this one is really weird. The story is from Northern California.
The Tennis Villas at Blackhawk Homeowners Association has banned the three children of a mixed race couple from playing outside, from trick-or-treating and from using any of the common areas in the gated neighborhood. Seth and Carolynn Neri say their children have been ‘targeted’ by the HOA. One of their sons wrote a letter to all thirty neighbors introducing himself and asking them to change their minds about the ‘no playing’ rule. Two letters came back marked, “No!” and “No Way! Move.”
The Neris’ lawyer says the actions are in violation of federal housing law and a lawsuit has been filed against Tennis Villas and Community Association Management. The lawsuit alleges that the president of the HOA board told the Neris that some people in the neighborhood were upset that the new family was a mixed race couple.
The HOA board and its management company have not returned phone calls to the media.
Believe it. They never will.
But when those thirty neighbors start paying special assessments for all the legal bills and inevitable federal fines and civil judgments they’ll soon be racking up, they might get the message.
I like to pass along good resources and blogs whenever I run across them. Here’s another.
Roger Wood heads a law firm in Arizona which recently filed a class action lawsuit against more than two dozen HOA management companies accusing them of illegal collections efforts against homeowners. That case is still pending.
Wood maintains a website where he occasionally writes blog entries, two of which caught my attention. One is a clever paraphrase of a passage from the Book of Matthew. The second is a discussion of a ‘cone of silence’ or force field that HOA attorneys put between board officers and homeowners, essentially to shut homeowners up…and increase their legal fees to the HOA of course. I wish we had a Roger Wood in each state in the nation.
Wood has given me permission to send you to his blog.
Hopefully, by the time these boys are buying houses HOAs will no longer exist. But if they do, I doubt they would even think of bullying their neighbors.
A newly elected HOA treasurer in Georgia allegedly siphoned 43,000 bucks out of the checking account of his Homeowners Association. At some point he must have panicked and he started slamming money back into the account 10,000 dollars at a time!
I can just picture him picking up a copy of Neighbors At War at the airport bookshop, reading it on the plane, and then scrambling to pay back the money before he was accused of a felony.
Too late.
Even if you pay it back it’s still felony theft. Of course, he’s innocent until proven guilty.
