Well-known anti-socialists have have compared tightly controlled neighborhood governance with being the kind of radical socialism from which they escaped. But does that mean that anti-HOA activists are right-wing, left-wing, or libertarian?
For the life of me I can’t understand how you can tie protection of a homeowner’s rights to any political faction.
Under the U.S. Constitution you have the right to be free from invasive government in your home, your person, your private papers. There are people in every single political faction who don’t want the cops kicking in their doors, even if the cops are wearing HOA armbands.
Sure, you’d like to control the next door nutcase who intentionally damages surrounding property values. But city and county codes do a pretty good job when properly enforced. And to restrict that nutcase’s rights you have to limit some of your own.
The bigger problem is not political beliefs, but rather the fact that agenda-driven people who suddenly discover themselves in a position of power very often have trouble controlling their own tyrannical compulsions. Those power-mad compulsives don’t represent any particular political party.
So those opposing that kind of tyranny aren’t necessarily tied to any political faction.
An expose’ by the Denver Post shows that many Colorado homeowners have been forced to pay legal bills to law firms which had never filed foreclosure lawsuits against their properties.
“Phantom court cases” the Post calls them. Homeowners afraid of losing their homes have been sent legal bills by county public trustees saying that foreclosures could not be stopped unless homeowners forked over the legal fees for these nonexistent lawsuits.
The homeowners always did.
Grift? Graft? Regardless of what it’s called lawyers and law firms are rarely, if ever, sanctioned. They participate in confiscation of private homes yet if they’re caught they face no penalties. Our society has been turned upside down. Shoplift more than $200 in Colorado and you face prison time for a felony. Steal thousands of dollars from distressed homeowners and you can buy your kid a Ferrari. A strange legal system in this country.
Some homeowners describe it as such. But when HOAs lawyers advise it to do the kind of thing linked in the video below, it’s worse than a scourge. It’s actionable illegal conduct. What if this homeowner had to leave home to attend to an emergency at a local hospital? This would be a lawsuit with no bottom line on damages. This lawsuit could cost the HOA millions and millions of dollars.
Nevada, where HOA bigwigs have been smacked with dozens of federal indictments and convictions for racketeering, is now leading the nation in trying to offer due process to homeowners. It’s only a proposal in the Nevada Real Estate Division, but what a concept!
Due process.
It’s just a handful of words in some obscure part of the Constitution.
But it’s almost beyond comprehension that Nevada homeowners might someday have real access to the Bill of Rights.
Builders of a ritzy high rise co-op in the big apple are raising eyebrows for figuring out how to lower their taxes from 22 million to just a half million dollars a year. Extell is building the fancy Upper West Side luxury tower where rich folks can buy a unit facing the Hudson River for 1.3 to 15.9 million dollars.
But New York has a tax loophole which gives millions and millions of dollars to developers who include a little bit of ‘affordable housing’ in their high rises. In exchange, developers get to jam more units into the development and offer those extra ones to the po’ folk. Extell will provide 55 low income units on the lower floors of the backside of the building, which face an alley.
The catch is, the rich folk and the po’ folk are never supposed to mix in this building. The building’s millionaire residents will have a grande entrance on the front of the building, and a prestige address at 40 Riverside Boulevard. Low income families have a separate entrance in the alley.
Some New York politicians say it smacks of feudalism and classicism.
The developer thinks the only thing it smacks of is millions of extra dollars in profits.
