Category Archives: The Book

guest blog by Deborah Goonan

This is yet another story that illustrates that poor HOA management affects not only owners, but also tenants. Let’s face it many HOAs, and especially condos, would not survive without rental income paid by tenants. But tenants are treated like second-class citizens, especially in HOAs. They usually have no voting rights, yet tenants must follow all of the often convoluted and arbitrary rules that the Board and Manager can enforce. Many times, tenants are not even made aware of the rules they are supposed to follow, unless the owner or the owner’s rental agent provides a written copy at the time the lease is signed. Too often, that doesn’t happen.

Last week in West Palm Beach, 20 tenants got a rude awakening. On their way to work, or getting their kids to school, they realized their cars had been towed. The condo manager claims the vehicles didn’t have the proper parking permits, so the towing company that has the contract for the Association was authorized to come in and tow cars over night. In the video link below, one resident shows a copy of a Warning Notice that was left behind, after her car had apparently been towed. Several residents contacted City officials from West Palm Beach, but they were told that this is a private matter on private property. So each one of them had to cough up $150 to get their vehicles released.

Most, if not all, of this conflict – and a slew of angry tenants – could have been avoided with better communication, so one has to wonder, why weren’t the rules made clear? Were there advance warnings? Or were these tenants expected to be mind readers? I have personally experienced some of these shenanigans as a tenant. Let’s say the manager fails to let tenants know well in advance that the parking lot is being seal coated. A notice is placed in the doorjamb of your apartment with less than 24-hours notice. Maybe the wind blows it away, maybe you sleep in late after working until midnight, or maybe you’re out of town and don’t get the notice. So the “preferred” contractor of Management tows your car and several others.

Which leaves us to wonder, were these tow-fests created by inconsiderate negligence or by design?

link to news video about cars towed in West Palm Beach condo

guest blog by Nila Ridings

Forget the permit. In this new Soho condominium building in Lower Manhattan, the parking space comes with a hefty price tag of $1,000,000,00. Certain restrictions apply.

If you sell your condo you must also sell your parking space. Actually, you don’t own the parking space. It’s on a 99 year lease, but you must find a buyer anyway. Ah, yes the HOA trickery is already present in the sales process. But since you pay one million for the parking space the HOA does not charge a monthly fee.

Let’s say you get behind on your $10,000 monthly HOA fees. (That would be the amount if you lived in a cheaper unit) Will the HOA be able to repo your car because it’s parked in a space that you don’t have title to? Or since you don’t pay monthly dues on your parking space can you just go live in your car?

Will this parking space offering start a new trend in HOA and Co-op insanity? From the contents of this article it looks like it’s headed in that direction.

What will the developers think of next?

(link to New York Times article on parking spot)

guest blog by Deborah Goonan

This story illustrates some disturbing, negative social trends in HOAs.

City House is a non-profit organization that teaches life skills to youths at risk for homelessness, age 18-22. The organization also provides supervised transitional living in a home environment for these young adults, efforts that have proven successful for more than two decades.

But after City House obtained and remodeled a 5-bedroom home in one affluent Texas HOA, Plantation Resort HOA 2 filed suit to block the youths from moving in.

According to the report, the HOA has concerns about negative effects on property values, and their legal suit argues that a household of unrelated youths does not fit the definition of “single family use” as defined in their Covenants and Restrictions.

Why is this disturbing?

Starting in the early 20^th century, US Developers, landowners and homeowners began to use private deeds with Restrictive Covenants as a way to exclude particular non-Caucasian, non-Christian groups  – such as African Americans, Asians, and people of the Jewish faith – from owning, leasing or occupying homes, with the possible exception of servants. The FHA’s practice of “redlining” further institutionalized the notion that the presence of the “wrong type” of people led to neighborhoods with lower property values. These practices continued even after the Supreme Court decision in Shelley v. Kraemer in 1948, because, although discriminatory covenants were found by the court to be unenforceable, they were not deemed invalid until passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, and sex. Familial status and disability were added in 1988 as additional protected classes. However, even to this day, discrimination occurs in less overt forms.

Plantation Resort 2 HOA happens to be an affluent neighborhood, and apparently some (though not all) homeowners – who would not appear on camera in the video link below – have “mixed feelings” and think that City House should take their operations “elsewhere.”

What is the objection? That these youths may come from poor families of diverse backgrounds? That the living arrangement is not a traditional family?

Perhaps they are of the mind, “HOAs are not for everyone,” a comment we hear over and over again from HOA proponents. Really? With HOA communities dominating most metropolitan areas, and rapidly spreading beyond the suburbs, where are people who do not fit into the HOA supposed to live? In my opinion, this is a classic case of Not-In-My-Back-Yard.

More fundamentally, WHY should certain groups of people be discouraged or denied housing? This issue was supposed to have been resolved with Fair Housing legislation. But because most HOAs are private corporations, they continue the process of creating Restrictive Covenants that do not overtly violate fair housing laws, yet somehow manage to get around the major intent of law. According to hud.gov, the law allows a narrow window of exemption for “housing operated by organizations and private clubs that limit occupancy to members,” an exception that does not appear to apply to PR2 HOA.

What is the underlying intent of PR2 HOA’s “single-family use” restriction? In this case, the HOA rule for “single family use” has the effect of discriminating against poor, unmarried young adults who must live together to share expenses. So does this HOA really intend to disallow roommates? Hopefully the matter can be resolved amicably. Unfortunately, disadvantaged youths have already been given the message that they are not welcome at Plantation Resort 2.

We are left to consider: Has the proliferation of private HOAs created new ways to discriminate against certain groups of people by way of creative rule-making? Do these communities now foster fragmentation and exclusion by social class?

(link to news video and transcript)

 Additional References:

http://portal.hud.gov/hudportal/HUD?src=/program_offices/fair_housing_equal_opp/FHLaws/yourrights

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122484215

http://www.bostonfairhousing.org/timeline/1920s1948-Restrictive-Covenants.html

http://depts.washington.edu/civilr/covenants_report.htm#_edn10