George Staropoli is one of the most astute and most articulate people in the national Homeowners Rights movement. The link below is his take on the historic HOA battle going on in North Carolina. Have everyone you know read his post!
Who doesn’t love omelettes for breakfast and chicken sandwiches at other times of the week? But just keep those chickens out of my backyard!
Backyard chicken coops are one of the privileges of rural living. Two or three laying hens can feed a family forever. But the astonishing growth of Homeowners Associations has led to a pathological contempt for any neighbor who dares keep a pet chicken.
We’re not talking about roosters crowing at the crack of dawn, here. Just chickens.
But for many of the growing number of condo commandos and lawn nazis a backyard chicken is about as attractive as ticks on a picnic blanket.
Oh, the omelette’s OK. Just as long as it has no connection to my neighborhood.
http://www.wvec.com/news/Backyard-chicken-law-not–202352431.html
Amanda Rhett must have thought she was living on a different planet last week. She had to face the board of the West Trop Homeowners Association to defend herself against a photograph showing two pieces of dog poop in the private back patio area of her home.
The offending feces were left by Amanda’s little miniature Yorkie. It’s not like this terrier was terrorizing the neighborhood by depositing ‘S’ bombs in all the common areas. It was two dog poops the size of a child’s little finger on this lady’s private patio.
It was either pay the $100 fine or find a new place to live.
Actually, this whole story is a really rather creepy. The photographer, obviously a member of the HOA staff, had to trespass onto this woman’s property, lean way over her private balcony rail to snap his photo of the offending poops.
This guy’s got a problem.
Talk about a feces fetish.
In my forty years doing investigative reporting for all three major networks, I don’t think I remember even hearing of a Homeowners Association problem more than once a decade. All of a sudden that’s just about all anyone’s talking about.
There are newly proposed bills in Colorado, Texas, Nevada, Florida, North Carolina, California and a half dozen other states I can’t immediately bring to mind. Most of these proposed laws are aimed at curbing the rampant abuse by Homeowners Associations against individual homeowners.
Did you get that? HOA boards abusing homeowners? Individual citizens who theoretically should have certain God-given rights under the Declaration of Independence and the entirety of the U.S. Constitution?
At what point in our history did we lose those rights? Why are we having to go state-by-state, facing down a self-admitted 44 billion dollar HOA management industry in an effort to claw back what was already ours? And how did this 44 billion dollar HOA management industry arise? Why didn’t we see it coming?
Oh there were a few folks hoisting the storm warning flags, Evan McKenzie, George Staropoli, Jan Bergemann, Johnnie and Beanie Adolph and a few others who were just as important. But where the hell were we, just lollygagging in the surf as the hurricanes approached?
I have to admit I was dumber than dirt just a few short years ago. But suddenly I’m finding myself blown away by this evil wind we call supervised living. It was supposed to be so Utopian, so good for our souls to be living in complete peace and harmony with our neighbors, as we occasionally bowed, and scraped and paid homage to the few people who volunteered their time to become leaders of our oh-so-nicely laid out communities.
All of a sudden we saw the nastygrams jammed in our doorways, “Your grass is too long, your dog is too big, you have one too many friends parking his car on the street.” And we suddenly started getting fines if a dog (presumed to be mine) was photographed squatting in the Open Space, or an unsupervised child was playing on the front lawn. The fines led to debt collectors and excessive attorney’s fees and sometimes even the confiscation of a home before the ink had even dried on the original mortgage.
What in Sam Hill happened? Harkening back to another Samuel whose wit and wisdom was far greater than mine, “No man’s life, liberty or property are safe when the Legislature’s in session.” (Sam Clemens)
Instead of all these individual state efforts, how about a single U.S. Supreme Court decision that rules that private non-profit corporations cannot dominate over private homes, or dictate personal behavior?
Our home is our castle. Isn’t it?
They’re often called SLAPP lawsuits, a frivolous suit filed just to shut up an annoying critic. The acronym stands for “strategic lawsuit against public participation.” SLAPPS were sometimes used by major companies to hush up environmentalists. Sometimes it was used the other way around. The bottom line was that lawyers were hired to cause the other side great expense and great anxiety, nothing more, nothing less.
SLAPP lawsuits have made their way into the world of Homeowners Associations, too. If you don’t like the neighborhood critic, just hammer him with a SLAPP lawsuit. But there’s a troubling little annoyance called ‘The First Amendment’, and a troubling little Supreme Court decision called ‘New York Times vs. Sullivan’ that essentially says if you’re a public figure you’ll get nailed if you try to jam up the Free Speech rights of the neighborhood critic. A public figure has to be able to prove ‘actual malice’ in a lawsuit against someone who’s just expressing an honest opinion about what’s right and what’s wrong. It’s more complex, of course, but I go into the subject in detail in my new book, “Neighbors At War!”
But the commentary linked below shows that it can be very expensive for an HOA board member to use neighborhood monies to fund a lawsuit against the local loudmouth. Nobody wins in these idiotic SLAPP lawsuits. Everybody loses, that is, with the exception of the lawyers who file and defend such lawsuits. They always make money. That’s why there are so many lawyer jokes in the public discourse.
The wisest words in the story linked below: Get over it. Move on.
