Category Archives: Government

Mama “Goes Grizzly” on HOA Bully

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guest blog by Nila Ridings
 
Just when I think I’ve read my craziest HOA story yet…here comes another!
 
Burl Fluharty, head of Westfields Condominium Association in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania must be on some kind of power trip. He’s decided that kids from an adjacent HOA-free subdivision should be subjected to his dictatorship, too! The two neighborhoods share a street, and Fluharty demanded they quit riding bicycles there….or he’d call the police!
 
“BACK OFF BURL!!!”  
 
Dorene Akujobi pounced like an Alaskan Mama bear protecting her cubs.  If her kids ride their bikes on the shared street, she’ll protect them from Burl’s verbal abuse.  She growled and showed her teeth and maybe her claws, too. “Bully Burl” has no jurisdiction outside of his HOA fiefdom. And Mama Grizzly stood her ground.
 
Fluharty, realizing his threats to call the cops weren’t scaring Dorene, tried another tactic. He had his HOA attorney, Robert Stewart, write a letter threatening a lawsuit. Fluharty must have been thinking “if I can’t scare her with the threat of cops, I’ll scare her with the threat of going to court! If it works on my turf, it should work on hers!” (And how nice that his HOA gets to pay this guy’s idiotic legal bills!)
 
As Fluharty continued to press his case, he argued that the real reason he wanted the kids off the street was because elderly drivers in his condos might not see them! It apparently didn’t dawn on him that elderly drivers who can’t see kids on bikes probably shouldn’t be driving.
 
But there was a lovely followup to the story as related in one of the comments below from a fellow neighbor: It seems the Township’s attorney wrote a letter to Fluharty telling him to cease and desist flinging his threats around the neighborhood. Even if he is an HOA president, there are limits to his power.   
 
Back to Mama Grizzly: “Way to go, Dorene!”
 

Changing Times

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I think it was Mark Twain who advised people to buy land because God wasn’t making any more of it. He also said, “No man’s life, liberty or property are safe when the Legislature’s in session.” His last witticism may have been more accurate than the first. 

Look  around the country where condos and residential high rises are being bought up by foreign investors. In Florida, California, Texas, Colorado, and Pennsylvania, senior citizens are buying small retirement homes where they hope to be comfortably living out their years. But as more and more of these apartments are turned into rentals, property values have plummeted.
 
Teresa Fusco of Reading, Pennsylvania found herself in a stunning situation. Her condo at Deer Path Woods was initially appraised at more than a hundred thousand dollars. She was one of eleven families who owned their homes outright. Ninety seven other units were held by renters, but the appraisals all said the units were worth about a hundred-thousand each. 
Then, Teresa learned that an investor was buying up all those rental units for about $7200 apiece, essentially giving himself almost 90% control of the entire complex. 
 
It gets deeper, still. 
 
The investor said that now he had all the votes he needed to control the association he promptly dissolved it. Throwing his new found weight around even more, the investor announced he was putting the entire complex up for sale. He got himself a new bulk appraisal which said the complex was worth far less than anyone imagined and the condominium was suddenly on the auction block. 
 
Any guesses as to who the top bidder was? Yep, the same investor who bought up all the rental units he had initially purchased and put up for auction. Except he now owned all those units which were once in private hands. Hands like those of Teresa Fusco.
 
Those former homeowners are just shaking their heads in bewilderment. This kind of thing can’t happen in America can it?
 
Well, it happened in Pennsylvania.
 
 
 

Wow! Any Doubt a Housing Collapse is Coming?

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This blog post is, indeed, a little esoteric. But many experts have predicted that another financial bubble is going to collapse, this one involving the HOA housing industry.

You really have to dive in between the lines of the story linked below. But this financial expert is predicting societal changes which actually could lead to a housing collapse in suburban America. He says the most dynamic part of our growing financial culture is the diversity of thought and creativity that’s only found in our inner cities and not in our stale suburban neighborhoods. He claims that our societal focus on suburban life is destined for failure and calls it “…the primary reason for global financial crisis.”

I’m no economist and my own predictions are far less sophisticated than his. But it boils down to the same conclusion: Sir Thomas More’s vision of Utopia is exactly backwards and is destined to collapse simply because the human spirit is not designed for life in Paradise. It’s evolutionarily designed for survival of the fittest. And the HOA Utopian model was never designed to handle the harsh realities of life. 

When those institutions which underwrite home loans discover that the typical Homeowner Association model does not protect or stabilize property values, when they discover that homes outside HOAs actually rise faster in value than those inside gated neighborhoods, when they finally discover that embezzlement is the Achilles heel of covenant controlled developments, then investor money will start flowing out of homeowners associations and back into more traditional neighborhoods.  

(click here for Richard Florida’s interview)

 

Paper? Plastic? Or Old-Fashioned Roasting Pan?

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Yes, Thanksgiving is coming.
 
Since becoming the sole caregiver of a loved one a few years ago, I’ve had to spend a little time in the kitchen trying to learn to cook. I passionately hate cooking. Recipes always seem suspiciously like the semester of chemistry I flunked in high school. 
 
But in the past few years I’ve been amazed at the number of folks who know nothing about paper bag-baked turkeys.
 
My mother, God rest her soul, didn’t know any other way of cooking a turkey. You basically prepare the Thanksgiving bird in your favorite way. Open a brown paper bag, grab a stick of butter with your hand and smear it all over the inside of the bag. Then slide the turkey in and tightly seal the bag.  
 
No, the bag won’t catch fire. And after the appropriate time in the oven you’ll taste an incredibly moist turkey.
 
Speaking of shopping bags, communities around the country are beginning to pass laws which essentially fine shoppers who ask for paper or plastic. But I promise you this: You cannot cook a turkey in a canvas reusable bag. Buttered or not.

The Hideous Underbelly of Power

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In my new book, Neighbors at War, I delve deeply into the lust for power and how easy it is for seemingly normal homeowners to go crazy when they get their first taste of power over their neighbors. We’ve seen it among Nazi prison guards, we’ve seen it among those who guard our jails, we’ve seen it repeatedly in double-blind science experiments.

“Power corrupts. And absolute power corrupts absolutely.” (Lord Acton)

But Pennsylvanians, shattered by the recent “Cash for Kids” scandal are still trying to wrap their minds around this one. Two former judges, Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan, reportedly accepted millions of dollars in bribes from privately owned juvenile detention centers for sentencing thousands of juveniles to those institutions. “Good Lord!” you say. “Impossible!”

When you put someone into a position of power in your neighborhood, be very, very suspicious of that person. Never let down your guard. In our current system in HOA Amerika there are no checks and balances. None, whatsoever. There’s no court of last resort. There’s no Due Process. In the vast majority of Homeowners Associations there are few records, poor accounting, often no audits. Our board members have complete and total power over our lives. We try to pretend that board members are fiscally responsible for how they govern. But they really aren’t.

Read about “Cash for Kids.”

And weep.

(upcoming documentary)