Posted on 11/28/2022 7:20:39 AM PST by george76
I own a second home in Pagosa Springs, CO. A couple years ago the HOA for Pagosa Lakes went full dictator and declared war on short term rentals in Pagosa Lakes. We home owners were not able to vote on this; they simply declared it with minimal input from the owners. When I sent a scathing letter that included the “damn” word I was informed of another policy they enacted without input. If they don’t like your correspondence you are subject to a $500 fine for the first offense, $10,000 for the second and $20,000 for the third. Gee, what kind of message is that sending?
You can still offer up your home in Pagosa Lakes for a short term rental, but first you must buy a special expensive permit from the HOA and the county assessor will reassess your home at TRIPLE the market value and you will be taxed accordingly. Mission accomplished: most owners opted out of short term rentals.
When I bought my place five years ago approximately 70% percent of the homes in Pagosa Lakes were second homes for people living elsewhere (mostly Texas, according to our real estate agent), and I doubt that has changed much. This is what is called a resort community. Many of us purchased homes here because we wanted the option of short term rental income. The Board of Directors for the HOA laughably tried to rationalize their decision. The real reason is pure NIMBY; they and their friends can’t stand Texas riff-raff in Pagosa.
The Board says local workers cannot find affordable housing due to the homes being used for AirBNB. Sorry Board, not my problem. You are my HOA, not a social outreach program that I sponsor with my dues. I drove an hour each way to my job for most of my life and I had roommates until I was forty years old. You want to live in a resort community or other desirable place you got to suck it up.
Does the Board REALLY think those AirBNB homes will convert to long term rentals? Of course not! Those idiots know we want to visit our second home frequently and don’t want someone living there full time (whoops, give me a minute while I whip out a check for 500 clams, or am I up to ten grand?).
So how has this played out? No post-Covid recovery for Pagosa. The short term renters used to come in and spend like drunken sailors. It being a vacation they would bring extra money. They’d load up at the pot shops and the liquor stores because you can’t get pot in Texas, and because beer, wine, and liquor costs 30% more in The Lone Star State. They would ski at the nearby resort, because, you know, skiing sucks in Texas and they would enjoy the famous Pagosa hot springs. Imagine the rage this causes the Board. Texans in our hot springs! Gross!
Now the small businesses still surviving are largely up for sale. On top of that, 70% of the homes and businesses going dark in Pagosa attracted the tweakers from Durango, Sante Fe and Taos. Our home was recently broken into by a pair of meth heads from Taos, one of whom is currently in jail there. They lived in our shed for a week or two getting high on hand sanitizer and leaving a pile of cigarette butts and beer cans and broken glass on two doors. The responding sheriff’s deputies said this problem spiked shortly after the Board’s decision to eliminate short term rentals and is a continuing problem throughout Pagosa Lakes.
...
So the geniuses solved the worker rental housing crisis by eliminating many of the jobs. I picture the Board members sitting blissfully on their deck in the pines, wearing their masks, relieved at not having to hear rednecks or local workers living it up next door.
I offered this story to two “newspapers” in Pagosa Springs and received no replies. It probably radiated like nuclear waste from their screens, a veritable Cleveland Steamer. You see, advertising (i.e., survival) for these corndog wrappers comes mostly from the huge number of real estate firms in town. God forbid word gets out to potential buyers that the local HOA is fascist as Hell and does whatever they want with YOUR home and your home is not safe from tweakers.
It distresses me that I cannot ask these town newspapers to pursue important stories that affect their community. Their interests lie elsewhere.
I don’t know the laws in Colorado but this type of thing happens all the time in Florida.
My wife and I also own two residences, our primary house and vacation condominium, both in the state of Florida.
In Florida, each condo complex has a written set of rules that each owner is entitled to have a copy of, when the Condos were built the developer produces the documentation on the rules for the condo complex, once a certain number of condos are sold the developer turns over the documents to the HOA.
Things like length and terms of rentals will be contained in the condo documents.
In Florida the laws governing condos would prevent the board of directors from changing the founding documents on their own.
In addition, with regards to rentals, if the condos allowed short term rentals when a person buys into the complex, it’s against the law to change the documents to disallow short terms rentals after that point, unless you get 100% approval of the owners, which will never happen because one person can stop the change if they rent short term and don’t want to stop.
In Florida the laws would not allow what happened in Colorado to happen, if a Board tried to do that, some owner or group of owners would have to hire an Attorney and send the Board a letter advising them of their illegal action, if it went to court and the owners won, they would be entitled to attorney fees.
However, remember if you hire an attorney and file a lawsuit, you would be in effect suing yourself, because the Board would be using owner fees to fight the lawsuit and paying attorney fees if the owners won.
My wife and I at one time were involved in 3 separate HOAs and each one was the same, eventually it pits people against each other and end up causing people to hate each other.
I hate HOAs because of this.
You can always go back to your hometown area, of CA.
I’m sure you’ll make out, like a bandit, with the money you’ll save, doing so.
🙃
That's the collective result of public school indoctrination, allowed to get out and flourish,only to coelesce and form a government . . . which . . . . in their minds . . . . they always deserved and NOW they have it !
HOA’s are the clearest manifestation of what happens when private property is subjugated to socialist do-gooders. We own a condo in Mexico, again initially populated mainly by Texans for a surf destination and place to leave behind the petty annoyances of life in our overregulated North American world. A couple of years ago, the Colorado beautiful people showed up (along with a few from Idaho and Wyoming), who are mostly transplanted Californians.
The Colorado contingent won a majority of the board seats last meeting, and it has been nothing but one edict after another. They plan to re-write the bylaws and institutionalize their nanny-state policies. They can’t stand the local workforce who has served us loyally for 20 years, and plan to replace the entire administration. They want to micromanage in a culture where management is a figure of speech. Our once quiet place of respite is now a hotbed of contentiousness.
We are looking for a place further from the beaten path.
There was one important reason why I did this: During my home search I came across many listings in subdivisions where "No HOA!" was emblazoned on the ads as a major feature of the home. I would visit each neighborhood for every listing that interested me before I even bothered to schedule a tour of an individual home. Upon visiting these homes, the one thing that stood out to me was that the "No HOA!" homes were all in neighborhoods that looked like suburban slums. I'm talking about cars parked on lawns, garbage piled in back yards, campers and other assorted trailers parked on the street, etc.
An HOA is not ideal in many respects, but there is a reason why they are so attractive to many people.
My previous house had a HOA and only Democrat yard signs were allowed. If you put up a Republican one, they send you a letter reminding you that signs are not allowed. Meanwhile, the Democrat ones stayed up.
We don’t have a HOA with this house and several homes have vomited their contents into their front yard. My favorite is the broken lawn mower in the front yard that they mow around, when they mow which is very seldom.
> Especially “airbnb” that FACILITATES AND ENABLES HUMAN TRAFFICKING. <
Yep. A good friend of mine retired, and decided to run an Airbnb for a little extra income. Well, that was a good idea until it wasn’t.
Maybe three months in my friend rented a guy a room for a week. Almost immediately the guy started running prostitutes out of the room. And he wouldn’t leave after the week, or pay any further rent.
Sorry, said the cops. This is a civil matter. You’ve got to file eviction papers, and then wait. This went on for two months! Finally my friend paid the guy to leave. He wouldn’t say how much. I think he was too embarrassed.
It’s not just Democrats, speaking from experience, even the most conservative people on HOA boards often turn into little tyrants when they get a little power.
My wife and I were involved in 3 HOAs at one time, each one turned into a disaster I’ve not seen any HOA over time that doesn’t turn into a disaster regardless of the politics of the Board.
Exactly.....sounds like this author may have not completely read, or, had his attorney read, the HOA docs, before he inked his deal.
The opposite problem can occur, too.
Older HOA docs probably don’t even cover short term rentals (a thing pretty much unheard of, decades ago.)
So, areas that were once primarily owned by single use owners, are now being turned into STR communities.
With no recourse available to long time owners.
Oh come on, don’t hold back. Tell us how you really feel. ;-D
Same problems with HOAs and Condo Associations in Florida.
Type A personalities retire, have nothing to do, and end up taking over the HOA or Condo Committee and becoming little dictators.
I don’t care how much the wife likes the house, buying a HOA/covenant controlled property means you’re putting a big chunk of your personal freedom in the hands of people you probably hate, and lawyers. Live free or die is a pretty good motto.
Calling BS on this one without specific examples. Sounds like someone watched too much “Breaking Bad” if STR’s are growing weed and cooking meth.
100% agreed!!!!
In this case, they caused a neighborhood to become a shithole.
Yes they can be jackasses that overreach and selectively enforce the C&Rs but at the same time they can keep a neighborhood from turning into a shithole.
The trick is to get the right people on the board.......and that certainly can be a neat trick to be sure.
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Much like governments in general.
50% are worthless and inept
40% are hostile and corrupt
10% might actually be of benefit
One faction -- I'll call them the Malcontents -- was a bunch of people who complained about the HOA fees (as I said before, these fees are less than $100 per year) and insisted that the HOA was being mismanaged. These tended to be younger residents who were the second or third generation of owners in the subdivision. They had two particular demands: (1) conduct an audit of the HOA's books, and (2) consider disbanding the HOA so they wouldn't be subject to all the silly rules they dislike (which are really inconsequential). Some of them even claimed they had no idea there was an HOA when they bought their homes.
The other faction -- I'll call them the Veterans -- included mostly original owners. They were totally fine with the HOA and had no complaints at all.
I am one of the newest residents in the HOA. This was my first HOA meeting, in fact. I helped defuse the contentious situation by siding with the Veterans. I pointed two things out to the Malcontents (which didn't win me friends among them but perhaps did convince many of them to either vote for the Veteran board members in the election or not vote at all):
1. An audit of the HOA's books and records would cost the equivalent of about 300% of the HOA's annual budget. So their HOA fees would triple just to cover the cost of the audit they were demanding.
2. Anyone who wasn't aware of the existence of the HOA when they bought their home was a moron or should consider suing their real estate agent and/or the prior owner -- because that information was required to be included in the seller's disclosure package under state law.
The "Veteran" faction of the HOA was re-elected by an overwhelming margin.
There are always ways to get people to leave. I had a frat bro who was a “strong arm” guy. He got paid to do things like that and apparently business was good. Bouncer at night, dirty deeds done dirt cheap by day. Died in his 40’s from rumored steroid-related issues. Pussycat of a guy.
After he was dead, the stories came out. I was glad I hadn’t heard them before he died.
A helpful suggestion: They LOVE airbnb in Florida. The governor of FL totally does not mind you housing and feeding illegal aliens, as long as you call them “refugees from Cuba and Venezuela.” Good luck!
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