One of our frequent contributors to this site used to be a researcher for a conservative think tank in Colorado. He says he recently dropped by the Republican booth at the Louisville town fair and made a point of asking opinions about HOAs. He asked about Captain Michael Clauer, the Texas man whose HOA home was illegally seized and sold while he was assigned to a war zone in the Middle East. It’s absolutely a violation of federal law for an overseas serviceman to be treated like that.
Well, our friend says the Republicans at the booth said, “Captain Clauer agreed to the covenants. He chose to live in an HOA. He didn’t have to buy into one of them.”
Jeesh! The ACLU occasionally stands up for a Constitutional right here and there. Republicans traditionally believe in smaller government and protection of property rights. The rampant abuses of homeowners by HOAs should be in the crosshairs of both the left and the right, the Democrats and the Republicans. But we’ve got idiots on both sides of the political aisle. With 63 million people living in HOAs, that’s a heck of a lot of votes. It sounds like we may have to do a lot more educating of people in both the red and blue states.
I’ve got to believe, though, that great masses of Republicans and Democrats believe HOA abuse has gone too far. The smart candidates ought to put HOA reform in a prominent place on their platforms.
August 15, 2014 will be a day Frank and Amy Taddeo will celebrate for a long time. Their cheap condo investment in Meridian Condos paid them millions in the courtroom, thanks to the stupidity of American Invsco and Koval Flamingo!
The two companies converted apartments into condos and spiffed them up. But the floor tiles they used illegally exceeded the load bearing limits of the structure. Lawsuits for breach of contract have been flying. Fortunately, there haven’t been any building collapses.
But where were the city engineers? City inspectors? Heck, even an interior designer would have questioned that much weight being added to the flooring.
It’s a rare court victory. But whether this family will collect has to be up in the air. There are 200 units in Meridian. If each owner won 2.4 million dollars in court that adds up to 480 million dollars.
As I’ve said many times on this blog, our nation is facing a massive financial crisis involving a pending collapse of the dollar, with nowhere to hide. All it will take is a tipping point, just a single event. It could involve an investment gone wrong, a weather event, a crisis involving war between two nations anywhere in the world, or some moment where the world fears the stability of the US dollar. Mortgage companies will massively decrease lending for home purchases. And there’s no doubt these same mortgage companies know that the most fragile investments are in Homeowners Associations where property values can become wildly unstable because of misfeasance or malfeasance by HOA officers or managers.
But the science story linked below is one I’d never considered.
Despite FCC rulings that support amateur radio hobbyists and the installation of ham radio antennas, Homeowners Associations have mightily resisted. Hobbyists have been harrassed, fined, and sued by HOAs which insist that neighborhood covenants don’t have to pay attention to federal law.
But there’s a new bill introduced in Congress which could prove interesting if it gets wide support. Republicans and Democrats are signing on to the bill. Hobbyists are mounting a nationwide campaign to get it passed into law. Of course, the HOA industry is fighting it tooth and nail, claiming such nonsense as “this is a bill that would invalidate all CC&Rs.”
But as our frequent guest blogger and commenter, Deborah Goonan, says, it’s an example of how going federal can bring results.”
One of my brothers is an attorney in Washington State. He and I don’t quite see eye to eye on the national disgrace known as Homeowners Associations.
So I was sort of stunned this afternoon after listening to him being interviewed on a Seattle radio station. I never knew that he was a historian and expert on the American Revolution. And I didn’t realize how articulate he was on the importance of revering and respecting the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.
I have a link posted below to his interview. You’ll have to wade through about 13 minutes of babble about restaurants and cuisine. You can quickly skip ahead to the second section to hear my brother’s interview.
But as you listen to Gregory Lucas talk about what led to the American Revolution and the formation of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, try to compare some of that to our current revolution against the abusive and fascist HOA movement.
Our anti-HOA movement is all about the rights our forefathers reserved for us and how in recent years we’ve allowed our homes to be swallowed by massive corporations which don’t have to honor any of our traditional rights.
If you end up listening to this interview, please give me some advice on how to steer my brother over to our side in the HOA fight.
