I get email every day from frustrated homeowners who are being bullied by out-of-control HOA boards. I only wish I could tell all their stories.
The advice I consistently give is for people to recognize that by moving into a Homeowners Association you have essentially bought shares in a corporation where you have no rights under the U.S. Constitution. You have essentially put your net worth and the equity of your home up as collateral against all debts, legal judgments, and legal expenses racked up by your board members and its management company. You’re legally and financially responsible for paying expenses related to embezzlement and racketeering activities by board members. We saw that in Las Vegas over the past few months with the forty or so federal convictions of HOA thieves.
I tell people over and over again, learn what you’ve gotten yourself into. Educate your neighbors. Learn what and who the Community Associations Institute (CAI) is. This organization is one to be despised since it turned in the early 1990s from a homeowners’ informational group into a perverse lawsuit referral machine. Still, CAI testifies before state legislatures that it’s benign and “represents all homeowners.” It’s a blatant lie. Even one of its founding fathers, Lincoln Cummings, has some dismay about the direction his organization took.
Cummings was interviewed by Shu Bartholomew about the origin of this organization.
HOAs raise my blood pressure. But this story really hit hard. A 14 year old budding genius named Ahmed took an invention of his to school. It was a digital clock he made as an experiment. But something caused school officials to think he’d made a bomb and they called police. Ahmed was handcuffed and led away in front of schoolmates while the bomb squad dissected his science experiment.
I’m no science genius, but in 8th grade some 50 years ago I built a robot which I took to school. It was a three or four foot long ‘monster’ that I covered with a red bedspread and maneuvered down the school hallways. It looked for all the world like a huge stupid-looking lady bug. It even had eye holes and when fellow students looked down the eye holes the ‘bug’ spit ping pong balls at them. For that stunt I should have been arrested. But instead I got a science fair award.
Ahmed? Unlike me, this kid is going places in science. The school officials who had him arrested should have to spend a little jail time themselves. Shame on any system that rewards sloth and damages those who really try to make something of themselves.
Imagine living in the Vista Lago HOA in Orlando, Florida. What a nightmare. Two property managers claiming to be the legitimate ones, have hired and fired each other and filed liens against dozens of homeowners for unpaid dues. Many of those homeowners have been paying double and triple the dues and fines just for fear of losing their homes to whichever manager ends up winning the power struggle.
It’s hard to imagine the kind of unnecessary stress these homeowners are suffering.
Suppose you’re an older couple planning on the peaceful retirement life in a maintenance-free neighborhood. You take your entire nest egg and pay off the mortgage. Your new townhome, condo or single family residence is now yours….forever.
Oopsie! You learn that a developer wants to tear the whole thing down and build something new. You don’t want to move from your retirement home, but the developer gets a ‘majority’ of the residents to take his low ball offer to clear out. Not you. You want him to pay you fair market value. But because a ‘majority’ of your neighbors have moved out, what’s your fair market value now? It’s a heck-of-a-low lower than the others were paid. In fact, your quarter million dollar retirement home is worth ten cents on the dollar. Now the developer can get you tossed out by the courts and pay you nothing.
A few musings and ramblings on this watershed moment for millions of Americans.
A watershed moment is a point in time that changes everything; like the murder of President Kennedy, the crash of the Space Shuttle Challenger, the moment the towers fell. We all remember exactly where we were and what we were doing when we first saw the video of the attack on the World Trade Center. Since I customarily worked until two or three in the morning I was in bed when I got the phone call.
“Dad, are you watching TV?” my son asked.
“No,” I replied. “You woke me up.” I turned on the television just as the second plane hit.
“What does this mean?” he asked.
I simply told him, “It means we’re going to war.”
Watershed moment. There’s a place high in the mountains of Colorado that attracts many tourists. It’s a spot along the Continental Divide where you can theoretically drop a speck of water and the drop splits in half, with one half eventually ending up in the Atlantic Ocean and the other half ending up in the Pacific. One is the Atlantic Watershed, the other is the Pacific Watershed. A spot or an instant in time that changes everything. 9/11 did that for millions of us.
Today, I heard an NPR discussion about the fact that 25% of all Americans have absolutely no memory of that moment. They explained that kids under fifteen or sixteen were either not born yet or were too young to have any memories of that disaster. I was momentarily stunned to realize that so much time has passed yet the memory is so deeply burned into my mind. To kids 9/11 is just ancient history, not a real razor-like scar on the collective conscious.
