Thank you, Jan Bergemann, for the nice book review of “Neighbors At War! The Creepy Case Against Your Homeowners Association.” Jan was one of the first warriors in this fight against the rogue HOA movement, back when I was too dumb to listen. He runs Cyber Citizens For Justice (CCFJ) and I know he won’t mind me linking back to him. He is a goldmine of information and wisdom on how Americans everywhere are unknowingly losing many of their Constitutional rights.
BTW, I’m migrating most of my blogging efforts over to NeighborsAtWar.com Check it out. Feel free to use & abuse.
Again, thanks Jan! And my very best wishes to you in 2013!
It’s not often that the lowly homeowner has much of a chance of getting a fair hearing in court. The vast majority of all rulings are against the homeowner and in favor of the private non-profit corporation. And many’s the judge who’s told a miserable homeowner that he or she should have read his covenants before signing the real estate documents.
Last week’s ruling, though, by the Supreme Court of Virginia was a clarion call to the National Homeowners Association Movement that it can’t stomp on the homeowner’s Constitutional rights forever. Basically the court ruled that the Shadowood Condominium complex in Reston, Virginia cannot assess fines against residents because there was no such permission granted in the development’s master deed. Bam! Pow!
Stone-faced attorneys in Virginia said the ruling will have a profound impact on 10,000 Homeowners Associations across Virginia. It certainly will have a profound impact on lawyers who make a fancy living from dragging homeowners into court over stupid covenant violations.
Just reading about the wrongdoing by certain Shadowood officials over the years is enough to make one weep. Millions of dollars spent on ‘improvements’ with no accounting oversight. Tens of thousands of dollars paid to certain HOA board members for ‘services rendered’. Towing cars right before Thanksgiving. Turning off the heat and air conditioning to ‘punish’ rule-breakers. It’s ugly, and I’ve linked to the Washington Post’s story below.
Law professor Evan McKenzie predicted in his last book, Beyond Privatopia, that Homeowners Associations were going to face a day of reckoning. He was precognizant, a man of real genius.
Folks, the mightiest dam in the world can collapse. The collapse, no matter how large, starts out with a microscopic fissure somewhere.
Oh yes, embezzling is endemic in American Homewers Associations. Just Google “homeowner association and embezzle.” Then stand back and watch the numbers.
The latest one is Dale Palmer, a Kansas City man who managed HOAs in Kansas, Missouri, Illinois and Wisconsin. This creep thought he could get away with embezzling more than 750,000 dollars. He’s going to prison for 46 months, but that’s a laugh. He’ll get off about two years for good behavior.
Treading where angels fear to go, a columnist for the Press-Enterprise in Inland Southern California wades into the swamp of HOA racism. He ponders whether a Sun City HOA there is racist, because it wouldn’t allow the NAACP to use its meeting house.
Certainly, racism is an oft-documented problem in American HOAs. There are too many such cases to even count. And subtle racism is even harder to measure. But many HOAs across the country have either no minorities at all, or percentages as small as one or two percent. While that’s no way to measure racial divides, it can make one pause and reflect.
In any event, this column by reporter Peter Surowski, is well worth reading.
