My grandparents lived in a old folks community with a zealous hoa. My grandmother had to go to the hospital, cause of her many health problems. My grand father would go with her. This happened once when I was visiting. There was a knock on the door at about 10am. Two elderly women with clipboards immediately jump into a speech about how the trash cans hadn’t be brought in. I explained the situation. One of them said she was in the hospital the previous week but still managed to bring in her trash can and handed me what looked like a ticket for $50. Fuck. That. Shit.
I was putting on new siding… very obviously too, had ladders up and everything. But there was just plywood up one morning on part of my house, facing the street. I got a knock on the door at 7: 30 AM, a code enforcement officer (in uniform, looking vaguely like a cop) was visibly upset and acting like I’d taken a dump on the front sidewalk or something. Told me if I didn’t have the siding up by the end of the day I’d start getting fined every day.
Everyone has HOA horror stories, but ours must be an anomaly. Our dues are just over $100 a year. The money is spent to maintain a nice park/playground, an annual Easter Egg hunt, and prizes for best Halloween decorated houses.
So long as your house looks okay, the yard is maintained, and nobody parks an RV/Boat on the street over a week, they pretty much let us alone. We did a major renovation/repair about 10 years ago and we had an approval only hours after we emailed them. Almost painless.
(edited for spelling)
My HOA had a coup where half the board resigned on the spot, same day, and the three board members that were left handed management of our neighborhood over to some mega HOA corporation based out of LA. Before the handoff was complete, the chairman of the board fired everyone that worked for the HOA, including our incredibly talented accountant who due to his experience kept our finances so tip top that we had a surplus of money and have never had our monthly dues raised in almost 15 years.
When we, the residents, demanded an explanation, the chairman refused by quoting an article from our HOA charter which gives the board the explicit right to manage the community however they see fit and without needed approval from the residents. He basically told us “I don’t owe any of you an explanation, so suck it.”
Now we are trying to overturn his decision to essentially give our neighborhood over to some shitty HOA management group that treats its residents horribly like a shitty landlord would a tenant. Oh, and the management group that we were given to is run by a man who’s only formal education is a degree in Opera. And the accountant who has been assigned to manage my neighborhoods finances, does not have a degree in finance or business. She has a degree in ballet.
It is my opinion that our board was bribed into selling us to that management firm. Our community hired a lawyer and we are in the process of reversing what our board has done. If successful, we are going to rehire everyone they terminated and change the bylaws to prevent anyone from ever being able to do this again.
So yeah… Thats my worst story and it’s still going on right now.
They wanted me to switch the color of the lightbulbs I used outside.
Nah, I don’t need someone who is that picky to have ANY power over my property.
At that point, it’s no better than renting.
EDIT: they were the wrong hue of white.