Posted on 02/11/2013 12:50:46 PM PST by OKRA2012
A confrontation over a political sign and a community's Home Owners Association has occupied four years and nearly half a million dollars in legal fees.
(Excerpt) Read more at global.christianpost.com ...
Nope. The studies I’ve seen indicate homes in an HOA sell for the same price as homes without, when controlled for region, age and style. At least here in Arizona, I’ve NEVER seen an ad boasting about having an HOA.
A study might very well fail to find any long-term benefit.
The last time I lived in a HOA neighborhood, I tried to mow my lawn and couldn’t get the mower going. I waited a couple hours until my husband got home to start it, and put it back in the garage after mowing.
I got a letter complaining that I was “storing my lawn mower” in front of my house.
I think typically there will be a process within the Bylaws which allows modification of the Bylaws. In the case I'm familiar with, any change in the Bylaws requires a supermajority vote of three-fourths of the unit owners.
These three-fourths, in effect, are powerful enough to exercise ANY control over the common property that a single individual could exercise over property the he alone owns. This possibility, that the remaining one-quarter of unit owners might have imposed upon them some very inconvenient controls, are exactly why I would never live in such a place.
But I did buy such a place for a relative. Due to the nature of common ownership, he is able to live in a very nice "apartment" but, in effect, he owns part of the common areas and he is able to live in a better place than if he was just a renter.
Typically, the Board members are protected from suits by the members of the HOA. If the Board violates the Bylaws, then a member of the HOA sues the HOA. The association is typically required to carry insurance for just such occasions. The worst you can do to a Board member is to remove them from the Board or possibly have them jailed for fraud if there was fraud involved.
I can imagine that the HOA in the article will suffer a significant rise in the cost of their insurance policy. This alone should motivate the members to choose better Board members.
The membership of the association should have recognized that the HOA was in the wrong long before anything like $400K in legal expenses was incurred. You snooze, you lose.
I was President of a small HOA for about 18 months. Whenever there was a conflict, I tended to move very slowly like a glacier moving a very large stone. There was plenty of time for an affected member to get out of the way, but once I determined that the Board was in the right, the process moved right along.
“HOAs - For the little “Hitler” that lives in all of us.”
Firearms for the rest of us. :) Used to be if you didn’t like someone or things they were doing, you would embarrass them out of there. Ostracize them. No lawyers, just social pressure.
A friend recently purchased a home that had been vacant for over half a year. During that time, the yard died. Less than a week after he moved in, he got a letter from the HOA complaining because his law was brown. He contacted the Board President, and told him it’d been that way for six months, that he’d just moved in, and he’d get to it once he got unpacked, but that wasn’t acceptable. So he went out, bought some lawn paint, and painted it an obviously phoney green. When one of them remarked about how it looked, he said, “yep, natural grass would have been better, but you didn’t want to wait for that.” He’s now put the “new lawn” project on the bottom of his to do list.
“those in the business of creating HOAs are in the business of maximizing values”
If the person developing an area does a good job of matching restrictions vs benefits, then you are right. If the person misjudges those, then you are wrong. The problem from a homeowner perspective is that you are interested in RESALE value. Based on my limited experience, people who run for the BOD in an HOA and who are active in governing an HOA are people who love rules and regulations, regardless of the desire of the community.
That is why we typically had a two year cycle: one BOD would run things quiet, and people would relax. The next BOD would want to ‘improve things’, and work on a bunch of new restrictions. The homeowners would hear new rules were being developed, would insist on seeing them, and would then organize a recall. The second BOD would resign to avoid recall, and a new BOD would form and try to run things smoothly.
Then the cycle would repeat.
In a townhouse situation, or in a place with small lots and lots of community property, I can see where some might think the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.
Personally, I will never live in an HOA again. I moved here before the HOA formed, and was drawn by CC&Rs that were VERY relaxed (no barb wire, no shooting on your 1 acre lot, etc). But the first BOD tried to impose very stringent rules, so much so that the developer tried to sue them!
At a minimum, I think every HOA should have CC&Rs that require a public vote of the homeowners to approve any new rules. That is the only way to ensure the new rules are acceptable to a majority without going thru multiple recall elections and the bitterness that follows.
When we voted on keeping or disbanding the HOA, only 15% voted to keep the HOA. I think that speaks volumes about how an HOA can run crazy. FWIW, 6 months prior to the vote to disband, I pointed out to the BOD that their desire to pass new rules had a good chance of killing the HOA forever. They didn’t believe me...
The solution to the nine hundred buck fine would have been to send them a check along with a demand letter for the return of the money, then just file a small claims action if they didn’t cough it up. I think the retaliation by refusing to approve the remodeling permit was probably the issue that put it in the big bucks class.
“The developer applies rules to all the lots, each both burdened and benefited. He selects the rules based on what will enhance the value the most for the buyers (maximizing his profits. It might be limitations on outdoor pets, or basketball hoops, or setbacks, or color schemes. Or an agreement to pay to maintain a pool or clubhouse, or airstrip, or gun range.
That is all his right as a private property owner.”
Well, maybe and maybe not. There’s a common law called the dead hand doctrine that can be applied to restrictive deeds. It originated in medieval times when churches owned all the property, and all property was passed down to heirs with ecclesiastical restrictions on how the property could be used. The dead hand doctrine came into being when people objected to how they could use property they paid for. Legislators passed laws that said that the dead hand cannot reach out from the grave and restrict a property owner’s legal enjoyment of that property as they saw fit.
There was a recent federal case where the dead hand doctrine overturned a restrictive property deed although I can’t think of it now.
It does make sense. Why should property owners be shackled on how they can use property that has restrictions on it written by someone who owned it 100 years ago? It has its uses.
I won’t even take a guess on how dead hand would fare against the right of association.
HOAs should be deemed municipal entitities and subject to state and federal constitution laws and restrictions.
HOAs are not about value for the owners, HOAs were and are about profit centers for the developers.
“In the case I’m familiar with, any change in the Bylaws requires a supermajority vote of three-fourths of the unit owners.”
Must be nice. In the HOA I was in, a majority vote of the BOD would create binding rules on the HOA. On a 2-1 vote by the BOD, a paint scheme requirement was added to the rules.
I suspect the HOA in the article ran into problems from playing favorites. That was another problem in our HOA. If you were friends with the BOD, you could do no wrong. If they didn’t like you, you would not get ANY improvement approved, and you would get monthly nastygrams. The HOA complaints against homeowners rarely involved a violation of a written rule. I was one of several homeowners who threatened to sue the HOA for trying to impose fines based on personal whim. And it sounds like the HOA in the article may have tried that as well, although the details are missing.
The association is typically required to carry insurance for just such occasions.
I thought this was the way HOA members could sue the board.
Otherwise why bond board members?
Regardless, I know I’d be raising some hell at board meetings and use incitement of homeowners tactics to make board members lives miserable.
I’m on a HOA board now and have been in the past 11 years. Lucky we have always had good caring members with common sense and reasonable homeowners. Never a problem in the 11 years I’ve lived here.
Around here you are only allowed to see the HOA rules at closing. It's awfully late to back out at that point so you are stuck no matter what the rules are.
I lived in a condo that had 15 units. We had regular meetings where our “leaders” decided what “we” were going to do. Three months later, we’d have another meeting over the same issues. Nothing ever actually got done because the board members didn’t want to do it themselves, and in a small project there’s no one else.
When I moved out ten years ago, the board had just decided that a tree in front of the building needed to be removed. The guy who voluntarily maintained the landscaping, and who liked that tree, said he wasn’t going to volunteer to cut it down, put the appropriate tools in front of the Board President’s unit, and walked away. Ten years later, the tree was still there.
Since then, I’ve been happily residing in an apartment. Somebody else fixes stuff, and I just pay the rent on time. Six months ago though, we got a new manager who wants to “improve things”. Oh Lord, it’s the small people (small almost any way you define it) with big authority problem again.
Around here you are only allowed to see the HOA rules at closing. It’s awfully late to back out at that point so you are stuck no matter what the rules are.
Moreover, around everywhere else I know, the rules are *recorded* like all other deed restrictions and transactions, and a matter of public record.
Yes, I agree, we also give de facto approval of the US Government by paying taxes.
The difference is, tax's are compulsory. As of right now, there is a choice as to whether you want to live in an HOA.
As I posited further down the thread, what happens when there is no choice but to llive in an HOA?
BTW, nice to see you, hope all is well!
A better report, even if it is from the Washington Post. The HOA imposed fines, which a court said they had no right to do under the CC&Rs. In another matter, the courts found the rejection of the improvements were made in an arbitrary manner at a secret meeting.
Using arbitrary standards is one of the issues I threatened to sue our HOA over, since they regularly were threatening to fine homeowners for stuff not found anywhere in writing.
You think the HOA elections are about anything more than “hey, who is willing to put up with the crap for the next 3 years”?
In all my years in an HOA community, I don’t remember a single time when anybody running for the board was asked anything about their beliefs.
When the board was getting too uppity, I just got a few people each year to sign up to be members, and that put and end to that.
BTW, the world does not revolve around “you” :-) Sometimes, “you” is just a generic term; especially when it is qualified to indicate people who take a certain action — the part you didn’t quote.
On the other hand, when you enter a partnership, there most certainly is a form of control. If you got married, you would know that. Marriage is a form of partnership, and once married, you don’t get to do “whatever you want”. Heck, if you enter the partnership of “having sex with a woman”, and you got her pregnant, you’d know that such a partnership comes with control over your earnings, when you had to pay child support.
And if you and your neighbor decided it would be cool to buy a boat together, and you weren’t smart enough to sign a contract, you’d be pretty pissed off I imagine if he decided it would be cool to make it into a land sculpture, such that you couldn’t use it for it’s intended purpose.
Seriously, I don’t believe you really didn’t understand the issues involving common, shared property. A 6-year-old understands that sharing involves rules.
If a community has a pool, or a playground, or a sign at the entrance, you are going to need a way to determine how to keep up the sign/playground/pool, what rules will be enforced, how to collect money, and the like. It has nothing to do with “wronging”. You need to pay the lifeguard, and put the chemicals in the pool, and keep that stupid renter from 100 of his clan members to an all-day beerfest.
Same article, not at the WP:
http://www.kansas.com/2013/02/10/2670545/homeowners-association-spat-brings.html
Not if you're running Firefox with the AdBlock plus plug-in...
8^)
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