Sorry about getting behind on my Neighbors At War blogs but I have been slogging through this Denver blizzard. At first I didn’t think it was such a big deal, but that was before I got my Blazer and my snowplow stuck in ditches. Oh, and trying to dig out neighbors has been a huge stress producer. This really wasn’t much in terms of a Denver blizzard. We had one in March of 2003 that left snowdrifts up to twenty feet high. But this one, despite being just a couple of feet, is the wettest snowfall I’ve ever seen.
It seems some homeowners in the Savanna, Georgia area have their panties-in-a-bunch over what they believe is an illegal kickback scheme between developer DR Horton and the cable company. They’ve filed a lawsuit saying they’re each being cheated out of $100 a month.
Sadly, they won’t win. Homeowners almost never, ever do, especially against giant developers like DR Horton. Nope, the developers have the inside track with local government officials. There’s lots of money that slides back and forth at that level.
Still, you’ve gotta give these homeowners credit for trying.
Every once in a while I have to leave the HOA brain drain and just sit back and reflect. The HOA mess can make a person pretty negative. So it’s good once in a while to just rinse it all off, sit back, be amused and amazed at the good things in life. And when I run across a story like this one it needs to be shared.
Well, golly gee! A small group of Congressmen have discovered that tax jurisdictions have been selling tax liens to investors who, for a tiny bit of money, can buy up properties where taxes weren’t paid and auction them off to investors. That’s been going on forever. When I was a teenager I bought a tax lien in Seattle for 70 bucks. Never made a dime from it and I ended up giving it back to the city.
I’ve written about this before. But here’s another great column from the Aspen Times. Wages are so out-of-control in this Eastern Hollywood Town, that the City of Aspen is using taxpayers’ money to pay for the maintenance of Homeowners Associations where all the ‘low-income’ workers live. The whole system is warped in more ways than can be easily discussed. But the columnist linked below does a pretty good job.
Homeowners Associations are a national scandal waiting to burst. But making the taxpayer pay the cost of keeping this scam going is just stretching the imagination too far.
