What If Helen Keller Lived In An HOA?
guest blog by Nila Ridings
Where do these pompous, perfect, self-centered, and heartless people come from? Can we take up a donation and buy all of them a one-way ticket to Uranus?
guest blog by Nila Ridings
Where do these pompous, perfect, self-centered, and heartless people come from? Can we take up a donation and buy all of them a one-way ticket to Uranus?
It had to come sooner or later, swab your doggie’s cheeks and turn it over to the HOA. They’re going to trace each ‘doggie lawn ornament’ through the DNA lab and then fine the doggie’s owner for what wasn’t picked up.
Life gets so strange. We have on record an HOA president who ordered all homeowners to have their dogs take a dump on one specific homeowner’s yard. (Vengeance?)
But now, HOAs across the land are forcing dog owners to swab their doggies’ cheeks and send the Q-Tips off to the DNA lab. Then any dog who makes a ‘donation’ will have his ‘donation’ inspected for a DNA match. And the dog owner will then face a huge fine, attorney’s fees collection costs, interest, possible lien, foreclosure, and a sale of the home at auction.
“What hath God wrought?” (Numbers 23:23)
There’s yet another lawsuit in North Carolina involving an HOA’s use of phony bookkeeping to jam fees down the throat of an elderly homeowner.
Alan Elam says his family is being bullied by their Homeowners Association (so what’s new?).
Charlotte House HOA and William Douglas Management say HOA dues are late after 30 days. But when Elam is more then 10 days late, he gets fined. When he pays his dues, the fine is charged against next month’s rent which makes him automatically late for the next payment. The fines and late payments have added up to more than $10,000.
Elam’s attorney calls it ‘accounting trickery.’ He’d be more accurate to call it “Standard Operating Procedure.”
The Elam family is destined to lose this lawsuit and forfeit their home. That’s also standard operating procedure.
It’s amazing to discover how few people know that Homeowners Associations routinely discriminate against the handicapped. Despite federal law against such discrimination, HOAs generally do what they dang well please. Once in a rare while HUD will file a lawsuit. Invariably that means a huge fine assessed against every member of the neighborhood. You can be a completely innocent homeowner and suddenly find tens of thousands of dollars assessed against your home because some idiot on the board did something stupid.
This story is not about HOA discrimination, just the nastiness that routinely happens around families with disabled children.
Fountain is a small town on the outskirts of Colorado Springs. A family there has a 16 year old daughter with Cerebral Palsy. The City of Fountain gave them a permit to build a wheelchair ramp to their front door, but the neighbors are outraged. They say the wheelchair ramp could destroy their property values. The family says the next-door neighbors are threatening to sue.
If this actually was a Homeowners Association, the couple with the handicapped child would already be out on the street. It’s happened before.
It really has….happened before.
Can my Homeowners Association really take my guns away even if it’s without any mention on my lease or CC&Rs? Yes, they can and do. Across the country HOA boards have denied homeowners their Second Amendment right to bear arms many times. As I keep saying, HOAs are not subject to the U.S. Constitution so they can ban just about anything they want.
In a recent case in Texas a homeowner was hit with fines and threats of foreclosure because he ran a website where he sold guns. Mind you, not a single gun ever came through this property because the homeowner never received any shipments. 100% of his guns changed hands on the Internet.
There was a kerfuffle last week in Colorado, when Ross Management, a company that manages a number of neighborhoods suddenly passed an anti-gun ban on all its properties. (Trayvon Martin effect?) Many retired military live in Ross developments and they hit the ceiling. There was negative news coverage across the nation and Ross has kind of, sort of backed away from the gun ban. For now.
It’s not the first outrage by this property management group, either. Among the rules residents have to sign is that they are forbidden from ever speaking ill of Ross Management. So, the next step may be evicting those homeowners who dared to speak to the news media about the ban on guns.
We’ll see.