When your gut just curls up and the electrical shock runs both ways through your body? Or you cry over some stupid scene in a movie simply because a child gets hurt? Yeah, the world is a very different place when you realize how astonishing it is that any child manages to live to adulthood, and you’re responsible for at least one of them doing just that.
Ah. A Ryan home.
1 Like
We have one where we currently live, and my wife had one at her old house. I think it’s a good idea if the “A” for “association” means an actual association of neighbors. In my wife’s case they contracted it out to some company which simply sent out fines for not mowing the lawn etc.
In our current neighborhood it’s gone dormant and doesn’t really have teeth. When one neighbor took on 6 housemates and their cars, and their visiting friends’ cars, were parked up and down the street, someone finally went over there and personally spoke to them, which is probably how these disagreements ought to be handled.
Other things in the covenant are seldom if ever enforced, although that said, I feel certain that someday when I’m the offender, the full wrath of the HOA will come down on me.
Oh, is this the part where we get to share our HOA horror stories? I’ll play.
Back in sunny Columbia, MD, I moved into a lovely luxury townhouse community with a nice racial cross-section. One of the neighbors, an African-American lady, was very popular and everyone in our section of the community had given her keys to their houses so she could water their plants when they left town or feed the cats, etc.
Soon, she the horror installed a skylight on gasp the wrong side of the roof. It was, truly, outrageous but not only that, now in the outrage over this abomination we learned that she had never paid her HOA fees.
It got to smackdown time and the HOA decided to sue her for the fees, to which her sleazy boyfriend lawyer would respond by filing motion after motion against our HOA - free to her and expensive for us to pay for a lawyer to give the necessary response.
Now the community became openly racist. She was called the N-word. Anytime I sat with a group of neighbors the conversation turned to what a piece of trash this lady was. I was very happy to move away - not from her as her little sky window had done nothing to hurt me, and the fees we were paying prior to the lawsuit tit for tat were just fine, but from the foul, petty neighbors who had to fixate on her transgressions and how, of course, it had to do with her race.
I was gonna ask “how did you guess?” but of course, it was a pretty safe bet.
1 Like
The head is just a bystander in strangulation. It’s the neck that makes is possible.
I have very mixed feelings about this. In the one hand, they have very strict housing codes in Germany, and when I lived there I loved how the neighborhoods visually coordinated, and the housing was very high quality. I would love it if neighborhoods here in the US were so visually unified and well built. In the other hand I dry my clothes on the line, and the very notion that my neighbors might mess that up for me makes me crazy. On a related note, I was reading an article about drying clothes on the line some years ago (maybe here, who knows,) and a very angry woman went on an extended rant about how you couldn’t line dry clothes in Mn. I am here to report that in fact you can easily line-dry clothes in MN. year round. Furnace rooms are great.
2 Likes
They seem to have cut every damn corner they could with mine…
Pecksniff wasn’t a giveaway?
why people buy a house with an HOA attached in the first place
My first house, I didn’t really know what I was getting into, and in big cities there aren’t that many non-HOA options. The second time, the first HOA hadn’t really been that much of a problem, so it didn’t seem like a bad idea. It turned bad. At this point, I just have legal insurance that covers a lawyer if an HOA takes legal action against me.
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
