Lawn violation? Me? Really?

So I have a lawn violation. I haven't worried too much about my HOA in a while, and I don't even live there any more (I have tenants in my old house, who are not keeping my front lawn immaculate).

I'll post some gory details later, but here's the short version of how it all went down:

HOA, to me: Yo, your lawn is ugly. Clean up your act.

Me, to HOA: If you say so.

Me, to tenants: Yo, my lawn is ugly. Mow it.

(one month passes)

HOA, to me: Yo, your lawn is still ugly. Pay us $25.

Me, to tenants: Yo, the HOA is still giving me static about the lawn. Please mow it. Also, I'll see if I can't get them to lay off.

Me, to HOA: Hey, do you have pictures? By the way, what's the standard for ugly? Who else's lawn is ugly?

(two weeks pass)

Me, to HOA: Hey, where are we at with this?

HOA to me: Yes, your lawn is still ugly. You still need to pay. No, we're not going to tell you our standard of ugly, or anything else.

Me to HOA: Uh, okay. Listen, I'm going to pay you, and then I'm going to file a claim in court because I don't think you can just shake people down without any evidence. Can you please provide some kind of evidence?

HOA to me, but by accident: TELL that HOAEater guy nothing until we talk to the attorney.

Me to HOA: Hey, I think you just wrote to me by accident. It's silly to log billable hours to an attorney over a $25 fine when you can just give me the evidence. But whatever, I'm still going to do the court thing, I don't care.

HOA to me: HOW DARE YOU!!! Look at how horrible your lawn is (pictures now enclosed showing my average looking lawn)! And guess what now we're going to put you in violation of all this other stuff like all the garbage on your driveway (not shown in photos) and your trash can being left out (shown in photos behind the A/C unit).

---end of act one---

That's the short story, at any rate. Off to small claims court! Too bad, I had such high hopes for my socialist Utopian HOA.

Alliance, booted!

Yay. My Home Owner's Association, 8 months after I left the board, 16 months after I first started wondering how the management comapny was stealing our money, finally booted the management company (Alliance).

They're now a self-managed HOA.

They're growing up so fast.

Sniffle.

Partial victory

I moved.

So I rapidly lost interest in my evil HOA.

I hear from the new Vice-Chancellor from time to time, and he tells me all sorts of things are planned for the HOA and Alliance.

Alliance tried to nail me with a couple lawn violations as soon as I moved away (I still own the property there). It didn't take much to convince the new HOA Board to either charge me the fine and see me in court, or drop the fine and pretend it didn't happen.

How petty.

Anyway, anyone want to buy a house in a lovely neighborhood?

:)

I'll probably tear down this blog (Gorbachev style!) in a couple more months, unless I see comments clamoring for its continued existance.

Our first foreclosure action

And so the decent into pure evil begins.

I got e-mail today to vote on pursuing foreclosure with our vampiric attorney's office. My response was:

HOA-originated foreclosures are a bad idea and will torpedo surrounding home values. We should sell the debt to a real collection agency and be done.

Also, this guy is not at the top of the list of debtors. I don't understand why foreclose on him and not the people who have over $1000.

Which resulted in the reply from El Presidente:

2 for sending to the attorney.
1 for selling the account to a collection agency.

No discussion. Just foreclose on the motherfucker.

I don't understand why this homeowner's association board exists if it's just going to rubber stamp every suggestion from the management company and the attorney.

It would be more efficient to dissolve the board completely and just give control directly with these parasites.

So, we'll see if this pops our HOA's foreclosure cherry. There have been plenty of bank foreclosures (looks like our neighborhood is one of those you read about in the paper with the subprime mortgages all over the place), but AFAIK, no HOA-originated foreclosures. I guess these real-estate-centric puppetmasters are starting to feel the crunch from the credit crisis and need to generate some income off our backs.

PS, why haven't I posted lately? Because I moved! I still own a house in my HOA, though (see credit crisis, above), and I'm renting it out. But because I'm not physically in the neighborhood anymore, my level of caring about the festering evil there has dropped off considerably.

I now live in a neighborhood with no HOA. And amazingly, my neighbors are out doing lawn work like every weekend. How does that happen without an HOA nagging them? I don't understand -- I thought adults couldn't be trusted to maintain their property?

El Presidente is a Good German

I'm ratcheting up my I-hate-you-all rhetoric in an effort to bully the other two board members off, so I can pack it with my anarchic sympathizers prior to the February election. Seems easier that way.

This latest was kicked off by a reiteration of my "end the lawn lottery" position, and how El Presidente doesn't seem to do anything other than respond to events and does not actually lead anything.

(If you don't know what a Good German is, read that link and the related articles to get a primer on modern theories of evil (which is naturally applicable to HOA's).)

On 10/12/07, El Presidente wrote:

> First off: The lawn violations issues that are most important to me.

This is a supreme waste of the powers inherent in controlling a $100k/year organization, in my humble opinion. There are far more interesting things the HOA Board could be pursuing.

> I also happen to get those letters just like everyone else. I follow the deed restrictions[...] I pay my fine if applicaple, just like every one else should.

This is what they call being a "good German" (albeit on a micro scale.)

> If you don't want the lawns to be an issue, then the deed restrictions need to be changed.

The deed restrictions are perfectly fine -- they are intended to keep people from having the Amazon rainforest in their front yard. They're not there to generate a revenue stream for the HOA or Alliance, which is how they're being used today.

> You cannot arbitrairly stop citations, just because you feel they are not nessecary.

I believe we can depend on actual residents and members of the organization to bring real violations to the board's attention. I trust the members to keep an eye on their economic and aesthetic interests. I trust Jennifer to keep an eye on Alliance's financial interests.

> She is following the deed restrictions that we have set in place.

With essentially no oversight in virtually all cases, yes, that's true.

> Secondly: I submit issues that are sent to my by Alliance between meetings.

You also, as president, set the agenda for the board. You have decided that four meetings a year is sufficient to get things done, which is amazingly negligent for a $100k+/year organization. You decided, overtly and through inaction, to hand over day-to-day operations to Alliance. You appear to be against open discussion, as you seem to prefer secret balloting on board issues (for reasons I don't understand), nor do you participate on the public mailing list.

Basically, El Presidente, I feel that you are a bystander on this board. You do not show the leadership demanded of the position of president, and merely react to events generated by either Alliance, the occasional homeowner, or me.

And yes, that last part is pretty harsh, and you may take it as a personal attack. I don't dislike you personally -- I don't really know you well enough to have an opinion about you. From what I've seen of you in your role as board president of a $100k/year non-profit, I'm not happy with your performance. FWIW, I haven't yet met an HOA board president who measured up, so try not to take it personally.

Since we last left our hero....

Sorry for the lack of updates, but really, they're all quite boring. First and foremost, the Case of the Chocolate House remains resolved. El Presidente, in a near panic, called an "emergency" meeting of the board to further the issue. Turns out, Mr. Applesauce got kind of pissed that his color was denied, while Mr. Chocolate gets no comeuppance. He called the management company and proclaimed that the ACC denied him because he's Mexican.

Hilarious, I know.

So, I went to this meeting, rehashed my color theory on the ACC. Not-the-treasurer wasn't liking this theory at all. I brought color samples from the hardware store of all the popular exterior paints, and argued that they're all sufficiently compatible. She wasn't buying that either. I suggested that the architectural control board then choose a set of colors to enforce, or back the hell off. She kind of liked the choosing from a list idea.

El Presidente's inspiring leadership through silence drove me to then reveal my Grand Plan for enforcing deed restrictions. I got them to agree that the deed restrictions were not in place to act as convenient weapons that neighbors can use to bludgeon each other with. They're there to prevent me from building a 1:2 scale replica of Godzilla breathing fire in my front lawn, or from painting my house in a swastika motif.

They bought that, so I dove into my propsal: The HOA should act to enforce covenants if and only if we get a petition from at least 5% of the households that such an enforcement is necessary to preserve property values and/or neighborhood quality. If some individual homeowner, like Mr. Applesauce, felt there was a covenant violation, they can pursue it in court on their own, since according to the deed restrictions, they all may be enforced by "any member."

Amazingly, they bought this too, and so I adjourned myself out of the meeting after El Presidente wrote it down to send off to the management company to send to Mr. Applesauce.

This seems perfectly reasonable to me. It would be basically impossible to get 31 homeowners (out of our 630 homes) to sign off on anything but the grossest of violations, and it's these massive violations that actually may decrease home values.

So, that was that. Mr. Applesauce is still pissed, but I've talked him off the racist ledge, and told him the truth -- when he applied, it was a very different board controlling things. Now that there's an anarchist on the board, it'll be a lot harder to get the board to pursue legal action.

Oh, and I moved again to lower assessments to $40/quarter. 2-to-1 against.

On to other issues I've toyed with over the last couple weeks:

The Lawn Lottery

So, in order to keep you abreast, here are the other issues that have popped up since then, over the last couple weeks.

Once a week, the management company representative drives through the neighborhood to note the street addresses of ugly lawns. I have no idea what criteria she uses to gauge offense, but she has admitted that her reports account for about 80% of the total lawn violation reports. Citing the new "five percent rule," I moved that we get the management company to knock this off.

El Presidente and Not-the-Treasurer disagree. They appear to want to enforce a 5% rule only sometimes, or maybe just this one time. Rather than trying to parse the logic, here's the quote from El Presidente:

I do not wish to stop the drive by's because there are a lot of people in the neighborhood who do not like to call to complain because they feel like they are "ratting" on their neighbors, but still want something done about the situation in a non-confrontational manner.

I thought I just convinced them that this is not the kind of thing the HoA should be involved in....

Lawn Lottery: Tested

Someone complained this week that the violation reports on his lawn are insane. He mowed on the 18th, and got a violation dated the 20th. He wants the board to waive the fine. I responded as you'd expect. It's been three days, not a peep out of the rest of the board. I should follow up on that, and reiterate my position against the lawn lottery.

My fame grows...

Apparently, this blog is being read by clutch of Internet people who hate HOAs as much as I do. This is the kind of issue that attracts a lot of kvetching, so it's to be expected. Here's a link that got sent to me today (which reminded me to post on my own damn blog): http://www.thehoaprimer.org/. It's a fine primer, though a little heavy on the hyperbole. But who isn't? :)

I suppose I could publish an e-mail address to attract more correspondence, but really, blogger.com has a perfectly wonderful commenting system. If you want to talk to or about me, do it there. The comments aren't moderated (except for spam of course).

Casa Chocolate -- resolved!

Dang, these people are so easy to push around.

Just about 24 hours after I submitted my analysis, this popped up from El Presidente:

After extensively reviewing the deed restrictions concerning housing color, there is no restriction on painting a house. Only that stairs, chimneys, gutters, and likewise attachments must be painted the same color as the house, or an approved color by the ACC.

This was sent to the board, the chair of the Architectural Control Committee (with a correct e-mail address this time, which apparently was a state secret until now), and strangely, the applesauce lady, but /not/ the owner of the chocolate house.

This of course undercuts the ACC's authority on basically anything, as this issue can be generalized to, "If mom (ACC) says no, go ask dad (HOA Board)," but without that pesky appeals process.

Since my goal is to destroy the HOA, this is a delightful outcome. I do wish there was more fighting, though. That would drive out the other board members faster.

BTW, who paints their chimneys? I have no idea where that caveat came from.