I was near the area so on a whim I decided to carve out a few minutes from a very busy day and see…see what my old neighborhood looks like today. My very first house was one of the smaller ones with it’s big trees, a red brick ranch with zoysia grass, and hand-picked by my dad. He called it my “starter” home.
Together, we remodeled the kitchen and I worked every weekend on one project after another after Dad died. I had an arsenal of tools and endless energy. My neighbor lady told me her husband always said I was the hardest working woman he’d ever seen. According to her, he would see me pull up in my little sports car, jump out in my high heels and suit with my briefcase in hand, and race inside. 15 minutes later I’d reappear in my overalls with my aluminum ladder (another gift from Dad) and up I’d go to clean the gutters. Back down to mow the lawn and grab the extension cord so I could trim the shrubs. Occasionally needing a bandage for a cut or scrape and once the ladder dipped and caught the ground while I was carrying it and smacked me in the eye. I wore a really deep purple, red, and black eye for several days after that. I was always busy, but I never knew somebody was observing my routine until Mrs. Neighbor told me. Today, I don’t recall her name.
What I do recall was Dad making sure I did not buy a house with an HOA. After this HOA nightmare I have been living, I observed my old neighborhood with a peaked and open-minded interest. I had totally forgotten about the pink house! It was pink before I moved there in 1984. No two houses look the same. Many had American flags flying today…and always did. Some with swimming pools and others with porch swings. Some ranches, some two stories, and one that has totally gone away. Possibly earlier today? I don’t know, but the bulldozers were still there and the earth looked freshly dug but the house was gone from the corner lot.
Today’s visit confirmed one thing for sure; that this HOA-Free neighborhood did not lose its value. I sold for double what I paid and today that house is worth double that amount. The people that bought it still own it. The city records say the average price in Southmoor Gardens is $188K but there are houses valued at $500K. Imagine that! Houses holding that kind of value with basketball goals, American flags flying, various house colors…even a pink one…fences of different styles, every color in the crayon box for front doors, paver bricks and concrete driveways and even one with gravel. Swing sets, gazebos, and wrap around porches. Nothing looked “junky” but it all looked lived in. Every single house seemed to sing “Home Sweet Home” in Kansas as I passed by.
Do those 700 residents realize they are living in a piece of paradise? Do they realize how all the HOA and CAI snobs scream about the surefire guarantee of a pink house destroying the property values in the neighborhood? Well, it’s impossible to argue with happy neighbors and increased property values, isn’t it?
Yes, I know I’m harping, but every time I see one of these outrageous stories about homeowners not being allowed to display the Stars and Stripes I’m going to erupt.
As I’ve said before, I have five family members buried in Arlington, another war hero family member buried in a National Cemetery in Portland, Oregon. These men and women stood for a principle, that the American ethic means something. It means we’re courageous in the face of evil. It means we stand up for what’s right and against what’s wrong. It means that when we realize we’ve made a mistake we have a Constitution that allows us to correct it. It means if our leaders in the White House, the Congress, the Senate or elsewhere are too wimpy or too cowardly to stand up for what’s right, we have the right as American voters to toss their butts into the street.
For this Vietnamese hero fighting for his right to fly the American flag in a Houston apartment complex, I say we support him in every way possible.
I hate to call it a character flaw while still admitting the possibility that I’m sometimes loathe to reveal ‘insider information’ about the Neighbors At War website. But it’s clear it’s becoming a growing clearinghouse of ideas proposed to solve a serious social problem. Sure, I’m a mercenary trying to pump up sales of what my ego tells me is a pretty good book. At the same time, large numbers of people are actually coming together and learning and sharing ideas on how we radicals, we wretched masses of the discontented can come together to have a profound impact on changing a very flawed American institution.
But once again, the numbers are part of the story. And here they are. By the end of June more than 3 million pages of material from this website will have been taken into the public domain over the past twelve months and used, hopefully, to educate other people about the dangers of living in, or getting involved with a Homeowners Association.
388 thousand visitors have taken the time in the previous twelve months to read, copy and pass judgment on these pages. And that means that all 388 thousand visitors have decided that Neighbors At War, not only gives them a forum where they can exchange ideas, but it also gives them new ideas about understanding a unique American conundrum: Why are so many millions of Americans willing to voluntarily surrender fundamental human and Constitutional rights in order to ‘join’ mini-Socialist enclaves where ‘groupthink’ is used to homogenize the thoughts and behaviors of all other members. Is small-scale Socialism as expressed in the HOA model really as fearsome as many of us think? Spying on neighbors to model and control behavior just seems so fascist. What am I missing?
I keep warning about the impending crash of the American Homeowners Association as we know it. You bought into your HOA because you thought it would protect property values. A few HOAs actually did maintain their value for a while. But just give it time. Throw a few lawsuits around, fine a few dozen homeowners for petty violations that could easily have been handled in a more genteel way. But there’s a moment coming when homeowners will just lease out their homes to get away from screaming board members.
A funny thing happens when the number of rental homes reaches a certain percentage: Mortgage companies quit lending. Then more homes are converted to rentals. More nastiness from the board. At some point your $200,000 investment becomes worth about twenty or thirty thousand. Then you have a neighborhood like the one linked below. Imagine owning a home in TymberSkan on the Lake.
From Florida to Overland Park, Kansas to Nevada and Crooked California a growing number of once thriving Homeowners Associations desperately need to be bulldozed.
I’ve concentrated far too heavily on the term “Homeowners Association,” using it as a generic term for HOAs, Condo Associations, Property Owners Associations, co-ops and all other forms of private government housing. But that means I’ve neglected to pay special attention to co-ops, the kind of housing agreements that are more common in New York than German Cockroaches.
(Sometime, remind me to tell you the story of how I was almost arrested for sex assault on a Times Square elevator! Yes, it involved a woman and a German Cockroach. Some things aren’t funny until much, much later.)
In any event, Habitat Magazine is designed for New Yorkers who live in the parasitic environs of the ‘co-op.’ And they suffer along with the rest of us.
It seems that a New York prosecutor has suddenly discovered that fraud and embezzlement occasionally happen in New York co-ops. (Editor’s comment: “Duh.”)
They haven’t named the suspected management company, yet. But New Yorkers might someday discover what those of us in ‘fly-over’ country have known for years. YOUR ASSOCIATION IS CORRUPT!
Sad to say, but if you confer on some uneducated board member shmuck the ability to drain the co-op account, what in tarnation does that mean? It means your HOA board member is an embezzling shmuck! It’s the most unreported felony in the FBI crime stats! But New Yorkers are really just as stupid as the rest of us. They talk faster than we do. But they’re still just as stupid.
What I do recall was Dad making sure I did not buy a house with an HOA. After this HOA nightmare I have been living, I observed my old neighborhood with a peaked and open-minded interest. I had totally forgotten about the pink house! It was pink before I moved there in 1984. No two houses look the same. Many had American flags flying today…and always did. Some with swimming pools and others with porch swings. Some ranches, some two stories, and one that has totally gone away. Possibly earlier today? I don’t know, but the bulldozers were still there and the earth looked freshly dug but the house was gone from the corner lot.
