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.’
My job is just too easy. Lots of people read this blog site and you’d think I’d struggle to come up with a new subject each evening. But with people around the country gradually waking up to the HOA scam there are stories everywhere about out-of-control Homeowners Associations.
The link below deserves reading. It’s a tiny Homeowners Association in Arizona that suddenly decided it needed two lawyers and a security guard at its annual meeting. The HOA hired a new management firm which is fining homeowners for a bizarre range of ‘violations.’ So homeowners suddenly have to pay fines, pay for unneeded lawyers and an unneeded security patrol just to make sure nobody protests the hiring of such people.
Those of us who follow such things know that the U.S. Constitution doesn’t protect people in Homeowners Associations. The one exception, of course, is if you’re ‘colored,’ whatever that means. There actually is some case law to protect racial minorities and the handicapped. But other tenets of the Constitution? Forget it. Due process? Forget it. Free speech? Forget it.
This latest story comes from a Fort Collins, Colorado resident who put up a Bernie Sanders sign on her balcony. It was OK for a while. After all, it’s a college town and college kids are taught all about the Constitution. They just aren’t told that Homeowners Associations are private corporations in which residents don’t have access to the Bill of Rights.
It’s amazing how much kids improve our lives. And since the typical Homeowners Association has no interest in improving the lives of families it’s not impossible to imagine that some HOA boards will do everything in their power to drive families out.
Or another thousand dollars. A couple of Homeowners Associations in Southern California are still trying to figure out how much was stolen from them. Fortunately, at least one of them had insurance but it’ll be a while before they find another insurance company. HOAs are getting a stinky reputation in the insurance industry because embezzling is so rampant. The seemingly massive theft linked below is just another average day of looting the HOA treasury.
