Once in a while being able to write here means more than addressing some far off concern among well-heeled elites. Sometimes it’s a real pleasure, sometimes it’s personal. Because all politics is local, or so they say, and this tale is abut as local and about as political as it gets. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, and anyone on a courageous journey in between, let us speak softly of tyranny, of dictatorship, of authoritarianism writ small, and local nightmares. Yes indeed, I’m talking about about the dreaded local homeowners association. And I have a very good example of HOA overreach—and a stunning lack of sensitivity—in just a second.
It happens that I have a dear friend who is being threatened, fined, and traumatized by her local homeowners association—specifically, a certain board member who likes to troll through her otherwise idyllic neighborhood on an electric golf cart looking for violations. When you hear the details, well, it’s not the greatest injustice faced by humankind. But it is way more likely you will someday encounter this kind of local BS than anything happening in Washington:
Homeowners' associations were supposedly created by Real Estate God to fundraise for and oversee neighborhood maintenance ... But it often seems that their true purpose in life is to drive homeowners insane. And if you somehow end up on the board's bad side by, say, planting an unauthorized flower, it's likely that your HOA will fine you, lien you, and threaten you with foreclosure
In this case, someone (we’ll call him Mr. Nosy) has appointed himself harasser in chief to a 50-something-year-old permanently disabled brain cancer survivor. Where any decent human being would see a disabled former civil servant, maybe the HOA or their nosy agent sees a vulnerable cash cow who cannot fight back without being evicted and rendered homeless. And if you think this can’t happen to you, think again ...
What is a homeowners association, you ask? HOAs often create themselves out of whole cloth, usually in neighborhoods where there was no previous HOA, where they pass rules making it compulsory to pay them fees so they can enforce whatever rules they dream up. Some are helpful. Others go on to boss everyone around, dictating what folks can do on their own property down to the most bizarre and arbitrary detail. It’s interesting here to note that some members of the board I’m writing about today are said to be staunch conservatives who, presumably, deeply believe in limited government. Except when they’re given a sliver of power, at which point Big Government is just swell.
There’s no doubt that HOAs make sense, sometimes. That’s particularly true in condos or communities with shared living spaces and walls. Some residents are unreasonable, some are batshit, a few will resort to threats over insignificant, helpful suggestions, and a small number of those might actually carry through on those threats. But neighbors got along fine for decades without an HOA in this sleepy suburban piece of Austin, Texas. Then a few years ago, a handful of people got together and cooked up an organization with compulsory membership including dues of $50 a month. One of the more bizarre rules they enacted was neighbors are no longer allowed to own an RV, or at least park it in their own driveway, garage, or behind their own home.
Often times the most ruthless HOAs are ginned up not by longtime homeowners, but by investors that come into a neighborhood with dollar signs in their eyes. The intertoobz are rife with disturbing stories of corruption. It’s easy to find examples of HOA board members granting themselves an exception to the rules they impose on others. When they want to paint their investment property or rent it out, that’s fine, but you’re not allowed to. They usually have a slick pitch about increasing property values, and fail to mention the higher property taxes the city will quickly reassess on every homeowner if they are successful.
Now to the case in point: It shouldn’t matter what kind of lifestyle your neighbor lives, as long as they don’t hurt anyone or break any laws. But let me tell you a little bit about the amazing roots and admirable character of the lady getting hassled by this particular HOA. She is deeply, genuinely motivated by an overpowering desire to help people. After college she volunteered full time to man a crisis hotline for battered spouses, abused children, and the clinically depressed, often in the dead of night. Over a period of years it’s a statistical certainty that she saved at least dozens of lives and improved countless more. She then became a parole officer, compelled to help those less fortunate being railroaded by a system rigged against the poor and the brown. During this time she singlehandedly raised a child, who is now a junior at MIT on an engineering scholarship.
To say that she does not deserve this hassle—that she has led a responsible life giving back to this country and her community at every turn—is a feeble understatement. But that life took a tragic detour two years ago when she suffered a full-blown seizure out of the blue. The grim diagnosis came back after the first MRI: Glioblastoma, a.k.a brain cancer. It was an aggressive set of tumors and she was given only three to six months to live. But occasionally, some people beat those dismal odds.
Two years of hell followed including four surgeries, several life-threatening trips to the ER, long hospital stays, massive corticosteroid doses including one round of induced diabetes leading to ketoacidosis, specialized chemo, and radiation. She emerged in terrible shape, wheelchair bound, barely able to feed herself, her left side paralyzed for life.
But she survived and she beat it, so far! Then, through sheer grit and determination, over the course of the last year she lost 100 pounds, trained for hours every day as hard as any professional athlete, and with the help of a cane is now able to walk for short distances under tight supervision. She may yet recover even more mobility. One day I hope to share more of what she has gone through to get where she is and, trust me, tears may flow when you see it.
Maybe in the world of Trumpism, this lady is a loser, Mitt Romney might call her a burden, part of that 47 percent who leeches off of others. But my fellow Kossacks, I tell you this woman is world-class winner in every way and especially in the most important one: She’s been nothing but a pure blessing to anyone and everyone who has ever known her. You would be proud to call her your friend. I know I am.
The neighborly thing to do for anyone in that condition, should they not be able to wrestle their empty trash can past the garage door one cold, rainy winter morning, would be to knock and politely ask if there was anything you could do to help. You would think people would consider it a privilege to help such a wonderful person. Instead, Mr. Nosy fined her. She calmly explained her circumstances, and all that apparently did was mark her for extra scrutiny.
She has been fined twice since for the same thing. Between meds and copays and durable medical equipment upkeep, this homeowner can barely make ends meet on her social security disability of barely over $1000 per month. That is her sole income.
This is inexcusable. Anyone who made it through kindergarten should know better.
We could have listed the name of the HOA, along with its public phone number and email address. For that matter, I would have been happy to put Nosy’s pic right at the top of this post. But you know who intervened? You know who showed empathy and asked me not to? The brain cancer patient who’s being hassled, that’s who. That’s how classy and kind this lady is.
Looking at the bigger picture, this is what government can do when it gets out of control. And there are few safeguards against these clowns if and when they get a little overzealous. When angry wingnuts rail about the government, they might be thinking of a certain president they wish hadn’t won re-election, but fueling much of that resentment are things like the DMV, the county tax assessor, and the occasional rogue homeowners association.
So, let’s hear your local HOA stories, good or bad—and any tactics we can use to legally fight them.