In fairness, shouldn’t I once in a while run a post involving someone who’s all in favor of HOAs? Don’t hate me, but here it is. I imagine a number of readers of Neighbors At War can pick this one apart feather by feather and nut by nut!
(link to Hignell HOA Management Company)
What is it about the ‘control’ issues many HOA board members have? And why is it that brand new Ford F-150 pickups are so hated?
The board of the Kimry Moor Homeowners Association in Fayetteville, New York has decided that homeowners David and Arna Orlando are scofflaws because they park their pickup in the driveway instead of in the garage.
Never mind that people all over this HOA park their trucks in their driveways.
No, I strongly suspect the issue isn’t the truck. It’s that somebody on the board thinks the Orlando family are of the wrong race, the wrong income level or because their kid might have smart-mouthed a board member’s kid at school.
I hope the Orlando’s attorney looks at an almost identical case in Texas where the owner of the Ford F-150 got sued for his truck…and he actually won the case against his power-mongering HOA. It’s too bad that HOA homeowners have to pay special assessments to support this kind of insanity.
(link to latest HOA lawsuit against an F-150 owner)
(for the Orlando’s attorney, this might save you a couple minutes of research time)
And yet another!
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/07/28/florida-man-spends-k-right-park-driveway/
The number of embezzlements by HOA officers is almost laughable. I’d say unbelievable but that’s not the right word. Greed is part of the human condition and has been around since Cain and Able.
Still, you’d think that some embezzlers would feel a little bit guilty.
Enter Elizabeth Mills Wilson, treasurer of the Manor at Harmon Lake Homeowners Association in Forsyth County. Now I’m not saying she’s guilty. That’ll be determined by a jury, or by a guilty plea. Her Sheriff’s booking photo makes her look a little bit arrogant. 
But then, you’d have to be a little arrogant to steal $40,000 from your neighbors. A judge will give her a suspended sentence and maybe a tongue lashing. What this country really needs is some real lashings!
One of the most fundamental problems with the American HOA system is that it actively encourages apathy among its residents. In a hostile neighborhood, homeowners are afraid of being targeted for public shaming or humiliation. It makes neighbors paranoid of each other, afraid to be activists. After all, most of us want to live in private homes in a human quest for peace and quiet. That, in turn, makes people unwilling to participate in the governing process. Stay home, don’t make waves, don’t stand out from the crowd. Beyond all else, don’t show up at HOA meetings.
Bam! That’s the dynamite!
Once you remove a majority of the neighborhood from the governing process, small-minded power-hungry dictators are free to threaten, defame, cheat, steal, and embezzle with pure abandon. It’s hog heaven for human swine. With tiny majorities behind them they rise to the top where they create neighborhood havoc, usually by finding and tormenting a handful of targeted ‘unwanteds.’ An unwanted homeowner can be anything from a single mom to a family with a Down’s Syndrome child, to unmarried couples, black families, Jews, gays, lesbians, essentially anyone the dictator on the board thinks can be easily targeted. It’s fundamentally good war strategy. Don’t give the enemy a reason to fight back, turn the enemy against itself. Churn up chaos and drive homeowners further behind their shield of apathy.
That brings us to a crazy situation in the Gilbert Homeowners Association in Dallas. A single man owned a condo for years but his domestic partner is not listed as an owner. He’s deemed by the HOA to be “a guest.” The HOA board in its lawsuit against the couple said, “Ken Ray (the guest) is not an owner of the condo….under current Texas law he is, therefore, not a member of the Association.”
It gets a whole lot crazier. The two men claim they tried to get the association to repair a leaking sprinkler back in 2008. The repair never happened. The two domestic partners began to get a little more aggressive in trying to get the HOA to fulfill its obligations to repair the damage. One of the men discovered the contractor who was supposed to do the repairs was a daughter of a board member. The homeowner demanded to see the HOA’s financial records.
That’s when the proverbial “ship hit the span.”
The two domestic partners claim they were indirectly threatened with “use of a firearm.” Their sprinklers were purposely turned off damaging their landscaping. The front gate entry code was changed so that the buzzer went to the management company, not to the mens’ condo. Threats were made to physically remove “the guest” from HOA property. The men were prohibited from hiring their own contractors to repair damage caused by the board’s neglect.
The lawsuits and counter-suits mean the eventual legal bills will stretch into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. A jury verdict against the HOA could conceivably stretch into the millions.
If so, one more American HOA could be forced into bankruptcy. It’s happened before.
“I see stupid people. They’re everywhere. They walk around like everyone else. They don’t even know that they’re stupid.” -slight rewrite from The Sixth Sense, 2007
(link to Dallas Observer story)
Well, at least one Florida lawyer is warning all Homeowners Association residents that they’d better start buying bear-proof trash cans. Seems that if a homeowner fails to buy one of these $140 trash cans a person mauled by a bear can start filing negligence lawsuits against every homeowner for miles around. Dang! I wish I’d gone to law school.
Colorado has its own bear problems. Aspen is especially famous for the dozens of bears that roam the downtown area each night. Bear maulings, of course, are a bad deal for the victims.
But my evil mind is running some quick calculations. 64 million HOA homeowners, each needing at least two bear-proof trash cans. That’s 128 million cans times $140 apiece. My mind doesn’t even calculate that high, but wouldn’t you like to buy stock in a trash can company? Heck, I’d be satisfied with just getting a dollar per can.
