If you believe that, then you’re visiting the wrong shrink!
No, Your HOA absolutely does not protect your property values. Your HOA is there to keep track of your net worth. Your net worth (not just your home value) is pledged to a community pool which can be used whenever necessary to cover the cost of lawsuits, repairs, maintenance, insurance, embezzling board members.
All neighborhoods age, that’s just a fact of life. But developers get special breaks for cramming more homes into smaller spaces, and often those developers are just self-centered and financially motivated to cut corners. Meanwhile, building inspectors look the other way knowing it’ll be years before construction problems start becoming apparent.
Many will recognize the acronym KISS. It stands for Keep It Simple Stupid.
The question is asked: “How do we wake up the legislators so they will understand the extent of the abuse and destruction the modern day HOAs are inflicting on homeowners? Sending a KISS message such as the following is concise and a summary of the horrible HOA truth. As I see it, there will be a powerful message and a great deal of education in these paragraphs if they read like this:
I’ve written about this before. But here’s another great column from the Aspen Times. Wages are so out-of-control in this Eastern Hollywood Town, that the City of Aspen is using taxpayers’ money to pay for the maintenance of Homeowners Associations where all the ‘low-income’ workers live. The whole system is warped in more ways than can be easily discussed. But the columnist linked below does a pretty good job.
Homeowners Associations are a national scandal waiting to burst. But making the taxpayer pay the cost of keeping this scam going is just stretching the imagination too far.
Many homeowners are dismayed when they start looking for a lawyer to represent them against a Homeowners Association. Such law firms are close to non-existent. Lawyers who align themselves with such organizations as Associa and CAI make a massive amount of money. But defending individual homeowners against HOA abuse is almost always a money-loser.
So I’m happy when I can pass along the name of a homeowners’ rights law firm. The Herb Milgrim Law Firm in Fort Lauderdale is a name you Florida homeowners should keep track of. They don’t blog often but their blogsite, linked below, is worth checking every so often. And I’m still collecting names of other good law firms around the country. If you run across a lawyer or law firm that stands for the rights of individual homeowners, please email me their names.
Egads! I’ve never met Sara Benson, never even talked to her on the phone, but I’d have an affair with her in an instant, if she’d agree! (Yep, I’m not very classy, but I’m sincere!)
This incredible Illinois Realtor has discovered that up to 80% of Illinois Homeowners Associations are unknown and untracked by the state! The implications are massive. It means that huge numbers of Americans have signed away their access to rights conferred by the U.S. Constitution by buying homes in private corporations where they’re lying naked in front of all their fellow homeowners. They think they’ve bought private homes, but what they’ve actually bought is shares in unregulated corporations in which they can be taxed, liened, sued and bankrupted with their life savings going into a common pot owned by all their fellow neighbors.
