Don’t think for a moment your HOA has any sympathy for your religious views. Across the country there’ve been plenty of homeowners who were forced to shut down their Wednesday night Bible studies because it meant one too many cars parked on the street or the driveway.
In Katy, Texas, a young lady named Meagan Schmidt joined a church a few months ago. She says the church changed her life so much that she wanted to tell others. So she put up a small sign in her yard that said, “Journey Church.” But the Highland Creek Village Homeowners Association says it’s a commercial sign and blatantly violates neighborhood covenants.
The young lady is resisting and even tried to explain her side to the board members. They shouted her down. Now it’s fines and liens and pending lawsuits. The HOA has even cancelled pool permits for the family’s kids.
In days of old, Texans would have resorted to six-shooters at sundown. These days it’s all about shaming the kids until the parents submit.
Highland Creek Village HOA. Another one to avoid like the plague.
Steam is rising from the ears of homeowners rights advocates in Arizona over a supposed ‘jam-down’ of a last minute bill controlling Homeowners Associations. At first glance it looked as if there was a little for everybody in the bill, but analysts are saying a lot of people got hoodwinked. Either Governor Jan Brewer, herself, was hoodwinked…..or more likely, she was the Hoodwinker-in Chief because she signed it into law.
More to come as we count the wood ticks in the picnic basket.
Hundreds of thousands of homeowners across the country are getting educated about Homeowners Associations. They’re not doing it by reading my book, or any of the others on the market. They’re learning by cold, hard, first-hand experience.
A lady in Houston, Texas named Crystal Stemberger is an author, a successful personal finance blogger, and a fulltime blog advertising manager. Her business and blog are called Budgeting the Fun Stuff. And it really is a fun site for browsing.
But the reason I’m mentioning her is an excellent blog she wrote about her experience as a new member of a Texas Homeowners Association, where she’s discovering the unnecessary and demeaning bullying which is targeting her. A weed, a wrong-headed claim that her car was parked on the street for longer than the mandated six hours. Threats of fines. Not only is her column good, the many comments below it are also informative. And it shows that the word is spreading about the vulgarity of rogue Homeowners Associations. The national HOA movement is slowly killing itself.
Las Vegas homeowners are lucky in one respect: They have Darcy Spears of KTNV-TV, who does frequent investigative reports under the “HOA Hall of Shame” moniker. Her latest report involves a dysfunctional HOA called the First Light Homeowners Association.
The board of First Light is apparently somewhat vicious to many individual homeowners. They hate the spying, the discrimination, the retaliation, the indiscriminate towing of cars. People are afraid to go home. They’re afraid to open their mailboxes because of the threats, the fines, the foreclosures.
I should also mention the massive decline of property values in Las Vegas Homeowners Associations.
Caveat emptor, buyer beware.
First Light is a neighborhood you might not enjoy living in.
No army can operate without generals, officers and foot soldiers. It’s the foot soldiers who are thrown into battle and suffer the most injuries and fatalities.
My father, a Lt. Colonel who commanded a tank battalion in Europe in 1945, was massively wounded when a bazooka hit his tank in the German town of Kaiserslautern.
All his life we kids asked him questions about being an officer in the military and what the experience was like. He refused to answer those questions, always referring to the heroism of foot soldiers who paid the highest price in the war to defeat facism. His biggest love in life was the common soldier who fought on the front lines.
My reason for writing this: There are foot soldiers in the war for a return to Constitutional rights in HOA Amerika. They don’t have websites, they don’t get interviewed, they don’t write talked-about books. But their research into the ugly, systematic abuse of homeowners, along with their ongoing emails which inform us of abuses we’d never know about otherwise, are invaluable in our battle.
Cynthia.
Jim.
Brad.
Nila.
Jonathan.
And many others.
Our community is too small, because we’re able to identify most of our ranks by first names only. But it’s growing, I promise you it’s growing.
