[NA] Homeowners Assn violations end result jail time

Our HOA wanted to jack up monthly assessment by 50% this year. Fortunately, close friend in CAP is a retired HOA lawyer. He provided the names of 3 lawyers that handle issues like this. Got 20 (out of 140 owners) on board and the new agreement was 15% this year, another 15% next year, then we'll talk again.

Don't disparage Civil Air Patrol - comes in really handy at times!
 
She was jailed for contempt of court. What a dumbass. When the judge tells you "do this" or face jail time, and you don't comply (also you don't appear at your next court date), guess what?

The phrase FAFO comes to mind.
 
One of the reasons why we sold the condo when we didn't need to. Assessment here, your renters are doing this there, wait another assessment to repaint... we just painted three years ago... new roofs.. and the list goes on. And it just so happens...

Then the managing company upped their fees... No thanks... we're done.

When I lived there I would go to the board meetings... it sounded like this, so I stopped

 
I’m “supposed” to attend an HOA meeting this Saturday at 10:00 AM. Sounds more like a good time to go flying to me…
 
Moved out of that nightmare several years ago, never to return. Admittedly a well run HOA (if there is such a thing) can help maintain property values but most times it's folks with money wanting power to go with it that make the rest of the community miserable ...
 
I've never lived in an HOA but given the horror stories I've seen if I ever choose to move an HOA will be an absolute deal breaker.
I understand the desire to maintain property values but to me a home is a place to make my own and live in first and foremost not an investment. The idea that someone else gets to tell me how to manage/decorate/arrange my own property or what vehicles I can park there or any of that make it not mine anymore... it lowers the value of it to me.
 
cowman said:
The idea that someone else gets to tell me how to manage/decorate/arrange my own property or what vehicles I can park there or any of that make it not mine anymore... it lowers the value of it to me.
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Or tell you which days your landscapers can work, which mailbox you can own, how your home must be illuminated at night time, whether you can park a car in your driveway for more than 1 week, deadline for when you have to rake your fall leaves, when you're allowed to burn those leaves, ... Just to name ones off the top of my ****ing head.

Best thing that happened to me is when the pres of our HOA lost control of his truck on ice on our neighborhood street and ended up in my front yard. Needed to use his winch on my tree to get himself out of the situation. Ever since I bailed him out of that without a complaint about his excessive speed, bad driving and tire tracks on the yard -- the nastygrams magically stopped arriving.
 
ArrowFlyer86 said:
I'd rather hurl myself off a bridge than spend my Saturday morning with my HOA.
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I thought the expression was, "I'd rather stab myself in the eye with an icepick...a red-hot one"
Although yours is quite acceptable too.
 
Not sure I’d want to deal with an HOA. I don’t like to many rules, yes I keep the place tidy.
 
Just moved into a new house in an area with a very strict HOA. Second day in the house, got a letter complaining that the grass was too brown.

Previous owners had moved out four months earlier. "Smart" Automatic sprinklers had been dependent on the home network to run their schedule...and the network had gone with the old occupants. So no sprinklers for four months, hence the grass gets brown.

Ron Wanttaja
 
wanttaja said:
Just moved into a new house in an area with a very strict HOA. Second day in the house, got a letter complaining that the grass was too brown.

Previous owners had moved out four months earlier. "Smart" Automatic sprinklers had been dependent on the home network to run their schedule...and the network had gone with the old occupants. So no sprinklers for four months, hence the grass gets brown.

Ron Wanttaja
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Well, looks like prison time for you!

Really though, the incindiary headlines for this matter do not do much to engender trust with this type of reporting. They all stress that a woman got sent to jail for minor HOA violations but in reality, as @kyleb mentioned, it was for repeated failures to appear in court when summoned.

I hope you are able to extract some sanity though - my HOA is quite lenient and wouldn't care about such a transgression.
 
wanttaja said:
Just moved into a new house in an area with a very strict HOA. Second day in the house, got a letter complaining that the grass was too brown.

Previous owners had moved out four months earlier. "Smart" Automatic sprinklers had been dependent on the home network to run their schedule...and the network had gone with the old occupants. So no sprinklers for four months, hence the grass gets brown.

Ron Wanttaja
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that's not a strict HOA. That's an HOA run by idiots.
 
Neal Boortz repeatedly said an HOA board should be selected at random each year and taken out and shot.

Our 1 experience with a mandatory HOA included being dinged for an oil stain in the driveway, complaints that the flowers we replaced because the old ones dies were the wrong color (same flower, just a different color!) and sternly worded passive aggressive letters in the HOA news letter for things with one person was doing. (So don;'t just go talk to Fred, spam everybody).

To their credit, when it turned out that the original developer had seriously screwed up the street drainage, they didi have the finds on had to deal with it without a special assessment. So kudos for that.

We've never looked back.
John
 
I moved to a Condo Complex with a HOA. Never have had a problem and all the HOA Board Members are pretty nice people.

I'm happy with the whole operation.
 
When we moved in to the current house, there were some CC&R's deeded with the property, but no HOA to enforce them. So, effectively, no CC&R's.
 
Baked Potato said:
Well, looks like prison time for you!
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"Bailiff, whack his pee-pee!"

Ironic since I was the president of the HOA in our old neighborhood....

Though I get why an HOA is an advantage in our new neighborhood. It is a *very* tony neighborhood...brick arches at the entry, old-style street lamps, external lights on all the homes, etc. (Barrington Heights, for those familiar with Portland). No yard/garage sales, architectural committee to approve changes/repaints, etc. I'm surprised they even let the likes of me move in.

Three houses down is a literal mansion. with eight-car garage, multiple tennis courts, swimming pools, etc. It's been owned by a string of NBA players. Even though the mansion is smack in the middle of the HOA area, it's not a member of it and is not subject to the covenants. You see, the mansion was built by the original developer for his own home, and he made sure no one could tell him what to do....

Ron Wanttaja
 
Really, I have few complaints about our HOA. The primary complaint I have is that they launched a campaign to renew and extend them a year or so before they were due to expire - and succeeded, for an additional sixty years. I'd been planning to put up my modest, fairly unobtrusive but not invisible ham radio antenna. So now I'm working toward "invisible". Other than that we've never had a problem, even when we installed the new roof. Covenants required wood, which everyone had figured out by then was a really bad idea. They wanted to review and approve (or not) any "alternate" roofing material. Screw that; we installed a nice looking steel roof and never heard a peep about it. The board president is a nice guy; he said we'll need to submit our fence replacement plans for approval, which they will summarily grant. Again... when you're going to pay for it, I'll ask your opinion. As long as you're not doing things that make the place look bad, they seem to pretty much stay out of everyone's hair.
 
Funny story when I was living the HOA nightmare.

My neighbor had a tree that was ugly and he wanted it gone but unless it was declared dead by the HOA it wasn't allowed to be taken down, but it was allowed to be trimmed. Over the course of several months by careful & constant trimming it became smaller & smaller until, Alas! ... it disappeared! :lol:
 
I've lived in 3 neighborhoods with HOA's. My current one has an HOA. Properly managed, HOA's are great. They watch for zoning issues, work with the county on surrounding issues, and work with homeowners to uphold the value of homes in the neighborhood.

BUT. As in politics, you get the leaders you deserve. If you let the lowest common denominator bozo or the neighborhood Karens take over the HOA because you didn't step up or convince your capable neighbors to step up, the results won't be what you want.

I am very lucky in my current HOA that the same reasonable guy has been HOA president for all 20 years we've been here. He does a good job of working behind the scenes to make sure the trains run on time. Seems to work pretty well. We're in an upscale <older> neighborhood with neighbors who value large lots and some amount of peace and quiet.

The worst neighborhoods for HOA's are starter home neighborhoods. Everyone signs the covenants and bylaws, but some new homeowners bite off more than they can chew and lack the knowhow or the financial means to maintain a home. Then you have a problem (or multiple problem homes).
 
Crazy stuff, is shooting varmints and using the outside facilities prohibited? Maybe Alaska is my only hope?
 
My mom used to live in a neighborhood with an HOA. She had her front door repainted the same color as it was, a shiny dark blue. A neighbor complained to the HOA because she did not like the color.

I noticed the neighbor's door was red. I complained to the HOA that a red door meant it was a house of prostitution.

The red door became shiny blue a few days later...
 
We have an HOA, but it’s primarily to maintain the runways and taxiways - there are no common areas, no clubhouse or any of that jazz. Dues are only $1300 a year.

There are rules about minimum home and maximum hangar size, and aesthetics. When we first moved here, we had the house repainted, and got a letter from the HOA because we were supposed to have gotten approval, and they wouldn’t have approved that color. Honest error on my part - I hadn’t done a deep dive on the CC&Rs and no one had told us. Not having lived in an HOA before, I had no idea.

So the architectural committee chair gets with me, says to just go ahead and fill out the rewuest for approval, and they’ll almost certainly retroactively approve it. I fill out the form, hand it to him, and never heard back. A couple months or so later, he comes by and says bad news and good news. The bad news is they denied the color. The good news is that because they failed to act within 30 days, it’s automatically approved. They did ask us to consider voluntarily repainting to an approved color at our earliest convenience.

Seven years later and it just hasn’t seemed to be convenient yet.
 
I live in an area that has an HOA. I am the head of the Architectural Control Committee. It is the best job to have. One of the duties is to advise the Board on any proposed changes to the covenants. I was told, several decades ago, that if we changed the covenants in any way we would need to bring them into compliance with state law and that one of the provisions in the covenants (not specified which one) that we love would now be considered illegal. So, for the 29 years we've lived here they have not changed. The only thing that we've considered is eliminating the dock, but we maintain that instead as the county has made it clear that while we can maintain the existing one, if we remove it, it is gone and we will NOT get a permit to replace it. The roads were re-surfaced 22 years ago and since then we've created a fund for replacing them when the time comes. It won't be cheap, that's for certain. We'll probably be gone by then. By and large, the HOA is pretty benign here.
 
I lived for 40 years in a neighborhood that was built out in the country in the 70s, then the city grew up around us. No HOA, but for a long time, it was pretty nice. Lately, we have more and more rentals, one house inherited by the orignal owners distant relative who cannot afford to keep it up at all, and two houses with multiple cars parked on the street every night, while cars being "repaired" sit in the driveway. One has been being repaired for 4 years.

Point being, some control is probably a positive, but since HOAs have such a bad rep, no one wants to take the first steps towards any type of covenant.
 
Chris Mixon said:
I lived for 40 years in a neighborhood that was built out in the country in the 70s, then the city grew up around us. No HOA, but for a long time, it was pretty nice. Lately, we have more and more rentals, one house inherited by the orignal owners distant relative who cannot afford to keep it up at all, and two houses with multiple cars parked on the street every night, while cars being "repaired" sit in the driveway. One has been being repaired for 4 years.
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Many cities have ordinances against unlicensed/unrepaired vehicles sitting in the yard. My father had an old truck that he bought and worked on. Most times it was in the garage but when it was left in the driveway for too long at a time "Mr. Clean" (what the neighborhood called him) would knock on the door and start with the harassment ...
 
So...what's the "problem"? Don't answer that I'm being rhetorical.

As someone too acquainted with the insufferable accusation I injure my family by housing "under-buying" proxy, I reject the coded implication that the "loss" of sterility not having an HOA engenders (in the eyes of the sterile), equals lack of personal safety. That's a classist myth, and one I'm personally sick and tired of hearing. The temerity of the upper middle class makes me want to burn the ish outta something (proverbially, of course ;)).

Social animus aside, minimizing housing capital/carriage costs is a feature, not a bug, in my "pseudo-FIRE" retirement plan. W2 has long ago stopped being a workable plan... it's a fool's errand anymore. And since defrauding pension plans, extorting the working poor by financializing every aspect of their artifacts of living, or being a corporate welfare queen weren't my life's calling, minimizing large line items in my ledger is my only remaining COA to retirement shangri-la. So just from a utilitarian pov, HOAs run counter to that vein.

And this is the IBTL-friendly version, you don't really want to know how I really feel about HOAs. :fingerwag:
 
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