I don’t know much about swingers’ clubs. Yeah, I’ve been on a few vice raids in my career of such clubs. And one such raid was on a home in Greenwood Village, a super-ritzy HOA just south of Denver. Even for a hardened investigative reporter it was pretty eye-opening. So this headline caught my eye.
Swingers Club May Be Forced to Produce Guest List
Seems that an HOA lawsuit against a Texas homeowner may lead to some interesting discovery, i.e., the guest list of all those who’ve attended swingers’ bashes in the past few years. One doesn’t usually think of HOAs as being bawdy. But as a former Texan, I can say that Texans can be just as raunchy as people in any other state.
The link below is from the Las Vegas Sun newspaper and the column is a so-so explanation of Homeowners Associations. For the completely ignorant it may have a couple of bits of knowledge. The major reason I’m linking it is not because of the column. It’s the comment by a reader about something happening in his own HOA. That single comment is more informative than a dozen Las Vegas Sun columns.
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.
guest blog by Deborah Goonan (Independent American Communities)
Several states are talking about the need for laws requiring that HOAs be open and provide full disclosure to buyers and current owners alike. Several, such as Florida and California, have already enacted laws meant to prevent corruption and self-dealing.
But it isn’t working, because states choose not to enforce violations of the very laws they created. It is up to the owner to initiate a law suit in civil court, and most owners cannot afford to pay an attorney thousands of dollars to enforce open meetings, full access to records, and consumer disclosure statutes.
