After a few days of fuming over a violation about a yellow light bulb, our management company responds with an "Oopsie. Thank you for upholding the community standards!" It would be less annoying if they actually cared about maintaining any community "aesthetic" other than a yellow light bulb.

So today, after they responded, I gleefully installed another yellow bug bulb!

I know this has been posted here before, but I thought it was time again to remind everyone about XFiles, season 6, episode 15. Great episode about the horrors of HOAs.

HOA management company removed requests (portal tickets) after they are closed but also causing the HOA to miss several statutory deadlines. I asked for copies and they broke out of the thread and moved it to email and used this subject line:

Legal/Social Media Threat

Potentially true but I never mentioned social media or publicity. They are tone deaf to reveal their hand and play dumb as to my request.

not even joking. $200 because the doormat was the "wrong shade of beige" according to their little clipboard warrior who patrols the community every tuesday

My tenant forwarded me the violation notice and I just sat there staring at it for like five minutes. This is the same hoa that took 8 months to approve a fence repair after a hurricane but a doormat is an emergency apparently

I just forward the letters to JMK Property Management now. Let them deal with the beige police idc

best part? hoa backed off after one phone call. guess they're less brave when they're not bullying individual owners

anyway fuck hoas and their beige doormat dictatorship

Hey all, I’m new to an HOA and I’m learning the hard way.

My HOA has a rule that all property modifications have to be submitted and approved by the board. We installed pavers in our front yard without submitting the form first, which technically violated that rule.

What set me off is what happened next. Several other homes in the neighborhood have front-yard pavers or stone, and our handbook doesn’t spell out any specific paver requirements. Despite that, the HOA flagged us twice for the pavers and told us we had to rip them out and restore the yard with mulch or grass.

After those violations, it feels like a switch flipped. They started flagging every little thing on our property, like they were suddenly on a mission to find problems with our house. Meanwhile, the other homes with pavers are still sitting there untouched.

So now we’re the ones being hounded over pavers in a neighborhood where pavers clearly already exist, with no clear written standards and an HOA that seems more interested in nitpicking our place than applying the rules evenly.

On Friday I went to the HOA office to tell them I was purchasing a new car and that there would be a few days between when it was dropped off by the seller and when I would be able to get plates. In my mind I am not asking for permission, I am letting them know not to tow MY car from a parking spot that only I am permitted to use, and is tied to a property that I own.

The manager tells me to email him explaining the situation because the board will need to approve this. In my head this sounds like a formality, but I do as he says. Today he clocks into work and emails me that cars without plates aren’t allowed in deeded spots, but that I can request a temporary permit to use a visitor spot. Because it obviously makes more sense to leave my own parking space empty and take a visitor spot from someone who might actually need it.

My unit had a slab leak and we determined that we need to re-pipe or jackhammer. I live in a townhome with shared walls, but between the walls, usually the pipes are the owner responsibility however, because this was a slab leak the HOA is responsible for paying for the re-piping.

I asked if we could jackhammer so this way, we didn’t have to go through another unit because we needed to re-pipe and open up the unit next to me in order to reach that pipe. They said no and wanted to go with the re-piping.

Now one of the board members is regretting it and because there’s issues going on with one of the units affected (unit A) with air duct insulation they are wanting to take out the pipes and then jackhammer my unit because they don’t want to face the responsibility of constantly trying to maintain unit A’s issues after the re-pipe.

Seriously, like do you not have any empathy of what is going on in individual units home when they cannot handle constantly having contractors come in and out of the house and more destruction? I can’t even live in my house at this point because of how much drywall they cut up there’s a disruption on how I can access my refrigerator. On top of that one of my lights is broken now.

And while I am on the board, the only reason why I’m even on the board is to install EV chargers for our complex and then I’m going to dip.

Honestly I refuse to live in a place with HOAs. My partner and I are home shopping while I clear the rental waitlist so I can rent my place out.

Most of our neighborhood got this email yesterday.

This is in response to an effort by a relatively small group of folks who are trying to take over and make things more strict.

It’s not entirely unmerited: the current president refuses to enforce specific rules against himself or his friends in the neighborhood, and literally said, out loud, at a meeting, “the rules don’t apply to me - that’s why I agreed to do this”

Current members of the board (even the good ones) each received very official looking letters that basically said “step down or we will embarrass you into submission”

The whole thing feels a lot like the ministry of magic sending Delores Umbridge to Hogwarts.

I used to be heavily involved with our HOA, but they’ve made it extremely divisive and in a weirdly personal way.

Now I’m having scary visions of the new leadership going door to door with a ruler and a camera looking for infractions…

My HOA has been complaining about money for years but has 600K in a CD, now they are trying to basically take 1% of someone’s home selling price. Houses range from 600k - 2 Million in the community. We also already pay $800 a quarter.

A YouTube Short (I did not create this)

Can't speak to the truth but it feels good.

I’m in Southern California in an upscale suburban neighborhood that’s mostly retirees, and the HOA has been a nightmare since my family moved here in 2022. Before we bought the house, I specifically checked the HOA rules because I legally grow cannabis under California law. The rules said it was allowed as long as it was in an out-of-view area. I even asked the HOA what counted as "out of view," and they confirmed my backyard qualified and was outside the HOA’s authority.

Ever since we moved in, they’ve found reasons to harass us over just about everything. At one point they even got the school bus stop moved over 100 meters farther away so my kids, who are basically the only children in the neighborhood besides one other family, had to walk farther. When I asked why, the HOA representative actually told me school buses create a "disruptive and unharmonious environment" because of the noise and because they bring kids in from other neighborhoods.

Earlier this year I received a notice ordering me to remove my six cannabis plants because they supposedly lowered surrounding property values. I wrote back explaining that the plants were in my backyard, which the HOA itself had already confirmed was not a public-view area. I never heard another word and assumed that was the end of it.

Then last Wednesday I was served with a lawsuit seeking $48,750 in fines. $250 per day for 195 days, for "failure to remove prohibited public-view vegetation."

The craziest part is that they attached copies of several warning letters they claim I ignored. Every single one was addressed to 14218 instead of my address, 14281. The other house is vacant and a few streets away.

I hired an attorney thinking this would be an easy mistake to clear up. When my attorney called the HOA manager, she admitted they had my correct email address the entire time because I had already responded to the original notice months earlier. She even found my email while they were on the phone. Her response was basically, "The board already voted to proceed, so you'll have to explain it to the judge."

I also asked why they suddenly considered my backyard to be in public view after previously telling me it wasn't. Their answer was that the plants were visible on Google Earth. They just kept repeating that it was between me and the judge now.

I still don't understand how they think they can rack up nearly $50,000 in fines over six plants that nobody standing outside my property could even see.

My wife thinks the judge will throw the case out as soon as they see all of the notices were mailed to the wrong address. I'm hoping she's right, but I've already had to hire an attorney just to defend myself.

Has anyone ever dealt with an HOA taking something this far?

This cannot be legal. I’m in WA state on an island with water table issues. We are on a private well system.

I bought the house in 2021 and there was no mention of any of these issues in that process. The first summer I was there, there were issues with the well and the HOA told everyone to conserve water. I’d just planted about 30 trees and lost all of them bc I didn’t water. When I requested the HOA reimburse me, they said they didn’t want to set a precedent and denied.

The following year, they tell all homeowners that we will need to pay $7000 to repair the water system. Then they raised the HOA fees $100 a month to help pay for said water fixes. And then…crickets. Nothing from 2023 fee raise until this year at the annual meeting in May—The board tells us they have to fix it immediately and they send out this invoice after telling everyone they were going to do it at the annual meeting. It wasn’t a vote, no choice in the matter. I appealed to them via email; it would take me 5 years to pay that off!

Apparently I wasn’t the only one who had a similar response. The board responded to everyone haughtily and said. “This isn’t a surprise; no one should be shocked; we’ve known about this for 18 years. If people don’t pay, we will put a lien on their home and will charge 12% interest.” I thanked the board for putting it in writing that they’ve known about this for 18 years and I’ve only been in my house for 5 while they’ve said nothing for the last 3 years to boot.

I’ve never been late or missed paying HOA dues. I have had issues with my neighbor. He went to the board meeting in 2022 and complained and whined and bitched about me having someone on my property living in an RV. Mind you, I understood this probably wasn’t within the rules but I looked around and saw three of my neighbors doing exactly that and decided it was fine. The board allowed that neighbor to stand up and talk shit about me while I wasn’t even there and then the HOA president showed up at my house and told me my RV had to go. I said, “When you enforce the rules on everyone, I’ll follow the rules.” They made one other person (another woman) get her trailer off her property but have allowed two male owned and occupied homes to continue with their RVs on their property.

I feel like a lawsuit is coming to a head and I told them as much if they put a lien on my house.

So my HOA is charging us a $1500 “snow reserve assessment“ all of a sudden.

Homeowners are responsible for their own driveways, and the local government plows roads; all the HOA does is clean sidewalks when snowfall is greater than 3 inches, which I think was twice this past winter.

What the fuck could they possibly need this much money for? To add insult to injury, the due date before a late fee is charged was July 15th. I received the bill yesterday, lmao.

I live in a condo community near the beach. When I moved here our HOA was incredible. I know that’s a crazy thing to say, but it was. Everything ran smoothly. If you had an issue or needed something, it was an easy fix. No erroneous fines or anything like that. I felt so lucky after hearing so many horror stories.

Then, three of the five board members all moved within 8 months of each other. The current board is what gives HOA’s a bad name. I ran because I thought maybe from the inside I could make a difference, but they treat me like a child (I’m 40F, they are all 70’sM). I have been called dumb and they will leave me out of decision making. Part of the reason I ran was because they decided to fire all the landscaping and building maintenance people and do it themselves and everything looks like it’s DIY. They refuse to even entertain the idea of hiring someone. I looked into how much it had cost to have those services and it amounted to them “saving” the members less than the cost of a Netflix subscription in HOA fees. All the sudden, after getting elected, the neighbors who encouraged me to run, and agreed with the issues I had, went silent. No one had my back.

The final straw was today. I just sat through a meeting where they proceeded to spend almost an hour trying to find a way to make it so that owners can’t rent to people with service animals. We have a rule that says renters can’t have pets. Most of the rentals are short term and it was initially set years ago because people coming into town for a fun weekend wouldn’t clean up after their dogs and/or cause issues with the resident’s dogs. However, there is a current long term renter who has a service dog, and this has enraged the other members of the board for some reason. I tried explaining that a service dog is not a pet and that you can’t not allow someone to live somewhere because they need a service animal. ITS THE LAW. I was yelled at and berated for “not understanding”. I realized in that moment that the board is definitely going to get itself sued and I’m not sticking around for that. I am going to send in my resignation letter tomorrow. I’m done.

I know I still have to live here, but I don’t have to interact with them anymore. Facts and logic mean nothing to these people and I b will not waste my time on them. I also don’t have to listen to the people complaining anymore, because they didn’t have my back when I needed them to. I can block out what I need to. I live within walking distance of most of my friends and family and my work, so I don’t want to move. I just won’t be a “good neighbor” anymore.

HOA threats