I have enormous sympathy for people who buy into an HOA. Heck, I was dumb enough to do the same thing. Three times! But in retrospect, I was STOOPID! I was a lamb among the wolves. Never had a clue.
The biggest unreported financial crime in America is embezzlement from an HOA. The following story isn’t even extraordinary, it happens in city after city, day after day. But homeowners (like me) are just too witless to ‘get it.’ The HOA scam is beyond any reasonable explanation. If you’ve bought an HOA property you’ve just donated your life savings to a massive national criminal enterprise that the government will never investigate, expose, or end. Kiss your life savings, ‘Goodbye.’
Investigative reporters just LOVE websites like ScamBusters and Snopes. It saves us a lot of research time. Those sites are not always right and are subject to mistakes like most of the rest of us. But what a resource! Another of my favorite ones was CSICOP (Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal.) But that last one is a little esoteric.
I’ve just learned from one of my frequent email contacts that ScamBusters actually has a blog post about Homeowners Associations. It’s not perfect but it shows how suspicions about HOAs is going mainstream.
guest blog by Deborah Goonan (IndependentAmericanCommunities.com)
The HOA industry, and the politicians who support the industry – perhaps for dubious reasons – use the same talking point, over and over again:
“Vote the bums out!”
What a joke! As many have pointed out here on this blog, there are many factors that make a mockery of the fair election process in homeowners or condo associations.
The very first problem is that votes are allocated according to the corporate model of governance, and not based upon a democratic basis of “one person, one vote.” In Association Governed Residential Communities, voting interests (notice I did not say “rights”) are tied directly to the share of property owned within the association.
Why was I in Topeka testifying in front of the Kansas legislators today? HB 2557. Kansas now has this bill in the Local Government Committee being discussed to make amendments to the Kansas Uniform Common Interest Owners Bill of Rights Act.
The bill needs a lot of work but the legislators were all ears today. Some were very open about how they are hearing from more and more of their constituents that are having HOA problems.
Crazy story from the city of Commerce in Los Angeles County. A community newspaper reported on a growing scandal involving an alleged two million dollar kickback scheme involving the mayor of Commerce and several city officials. At least two of the officials live in a gated community there. Now an HOA board member, in the foulest imaginable verbal assault, has told the newspaper delivery guy that he’s no longer allowed to deliver the paper to homeowners in the HOA.
