“Oh. you’re moving into the neighborhood? I don’t really want to interfere with your attempt to lease or buy a home in this HOA. But I work for the government. And it’s my job to make sure the landlord didn’t make any misrepresentations to you when he agreed to lease or sell his home to you.
“For example, did the owner tell you whether the ratio of HOMEOWNERS to TENANTS was out of whack here? Since renters have a reputation for not properly maintaining their homes, FHA loans and company reimbursements may not be available to anyone in the neighborhood.
Whenever the news media start trolling for stories about HOA abuse, they seem to be buried with them. This was one of many uncovered by reporter J. David McSwane, of Denver’s Westword Magazine.
He reports that Angela Quinn, a resident in an HOA in Western Washington, was told she could not have an air conditioner in her rental home. She says her neighbor had an A/C unit, and since she was in her third trimester of pregnancy, she figured she could install one in a back window which was not visible from the street.
Despite a few changes in law in such states as Texas and Arizona, Homeowners Associations are developing an increasingly bad reputation because of the ongoing spate of news stories about homeowners abused by the HOA system. Homeowners wrongly believe that HOAs are created to maintain property values and help homeowners get along with each other. Nothing could be further from the truth.
There’s not much to do in Wellington, Colorado. It sits on the dusty plains of Eastern Colorado on the border with Wyoming, surrounded by corn and sugar beet fields. It’s an inordinately boring town that features a couple of local coyote packs, a small school, and an occasional June tornado that rips off some shingles and sometimes tips over an unwary cow. Sometimes a high school scandal erupts about which girl is going to be going away for little while to resume her high school education at another school or other time. Such high school diversions have caused titters and tutters among the local townsfolks for generations. It’s none of their business, of course, but in a small town such things are everyone’s business. Damn the nosy, but that’s about all the outrage that can really be raised.
Investigators of HOA corruption in Las Vegas have scored another bit hit. They have indicted a Bevery Hills man for felony embezzlement and theft. The indicment accuses Massoud Aaron Yashouafar of stealing more than a million dollars from the Paradise Spa Homeowners Association. Yashouafar was the treasurer of the HOA.
In the past two years, two fires have erupted in the complex in Las Vegas. Insurance companies gave Yashouafar up to a million dollars to repair the damage. But owners of units in the complex say they never received any insurance money, and to this day Paradise spa is marred by the two fires.
