Resident Runs For HOA Board on Platform of "Doing The Bare Minimum," Wins

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Eric Lund
Aug 8, 2021 10:00 PM EDT

An HOA or Homeowner's Association can either be a minor inconvenience or it can be costly dictatorship, depending on who's on the board. People have to deal with nightmare HOAs where they get fined for having visible garbage bins.Some people defeated the Queen Karen of their own HOA. And others just looked forloopholes in the HOA's monthly fees. The bureaucracy never ends.

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  • 01
    Font - Posted by u/Born_Sandwich176 1 day ago O 2 2 e2 3 3 HOA board campaign to do nothing oc M Seeing this post ( https://www.reddit.com/r/MaliciousCompliance/com ments/osngrq/hoa compliance/ ) reminded me of my own experience on an HOA board. I lived in a small, 18-house, neighborhood that had a deed-restricted HOA. We had a minimal common area along the main entry street that needed maintenance and some drainage infrastructure that needed to be maintained. Not much work had to be done at all
    via Born_Sandwich176
  • 02
    Font - No one wanted to be on the board so I ran for the board with the slogan, "I will do nothing more than is legally required to fulfill the legal requirements of the HOA." This slogan was enough to get four more neighbors to run with the same slogan. We had the typical "committees," all with the same members and with the same idea - leave everyone alone, fulfill our legal obligations and move on. I was walking down the street one day and was accosted by a neighbor who said, "You don't deserv
    via Born_Sandwich176
  • 03
    Font - This really set her off so she started yelling at me about all the things I should be doing - planting a specific kind of flower, forcing her neighbors to do things unregulated by the HOA, etc. So, I invited her to run for president. I told her that she could submit a petition calling for a special election and I could guarantee that everyone on the board would sign it and probably vote for her to take on the job. This, of course, just infuriated her. So she started writing letters to the
    via Born_Sandwich176
  • 04
    Font - "Thank you for your letter to the HOA board. After careful consideration we have decided to ignore it." We then included instructions on how to call for a special election to have us kicked off the board and promised her the support of all board members if she chose to circulate the required petition. She sold her house and moved.
    via Born_Sandwich176
  • 05
    Font - Our board continued with the same philosophy for the 12 years I lived there - nothing more than legally required and leave everyone the hell alone. We would hold a homeowner's meeting once a year which was nothing more than a pot-luck dinner. We had to invite someone from the compliance company who worked for us to make sure we covered everything required for our annual meeting and reporting and we would always have an agenda item under new business: Does everyone promise to be a reasonab
    via Born_Sandwich176
  • 06
    Font - EDIT to answer a common question: - why not dissolve the HOA? An HOA was required for a "planned community" which was the type of community in which we lived. Planned communities are built under specific laws and regulations and one of the requirements is that they have an HOA. In order to disband, or form an HOA, you have to have unanimity of all property owners. Typically, the HOA is created by the builder so when people buy the house in a planned community, they're buying into the HOA;
    via Born_Sandwich176
  • 07
    Font - Assuming we could get the unanimity required to disband the HOA we would still have the problem that the HOA, as a legal corporation, owned common areas (property owned equally by all homeowners) and we had common infrastructure -- a drainage system. Someone would have had to have been able to take ownership of that property and the resulting liability -- pretty much an impossibility. That drainage system only benefitted the homeowners and it made sense that it be owned by the "community,
    via Born_Sandwich176
  • 08
    Font - adinfinitum225 · 1d This is why HOAS are only as good as their boards. It seems like everyone forgets that the board members are elected, so if the HOA sucks then people need to participate and change it.
    via Born_Sandwich176

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