'Now everyone absolutely hates her': Neighborhood Karen finally gets her wish and becomes HOA president, doesn't last six months

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    Building
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    Font - Now YOU get to be HOA president! (Two-Parent Malicious Compliance) LOC [Long but worth it] About 25 years ago, my parents built their dream house. Although the house is now in the middle of a large metroplex, when they built it was in the fringes of countryside, with rapid development over two decades. When they bought the lot, they were the first to purchase from the developer. The developer sold to three original neighbors (my parents +2 others), all at
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    Font - the end of the caul-de-sac in a row. The other streets in this plat became a large subdivision with a fancy name that would come to bear a lot of prestige. But that meant being part of an HOA. They didn't want that. The developer wouldn't sell them the land without an HOA. "If you aren't part of the community, you'll need to form your own HOA and get it approved." So my dad, with a beatific grin, said he would be the HOA president of our single suburban street. He and the two neighbors dr
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    Font - name a successor, instead of having the street vote on one. Absent a majority rejection, the successor would be the President. (Essentially trying to avoid terms/campaigning, while still offering folks a way to dispute the HOA President - important for later). So in the winter of 1994, my father very seriously took the thick black CD binder full of laminated and hole punched instructions and pages on how to be a good HOA president - and put that binder in the very back of a cabinet and fo
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    Font - colors of front doors, or any other ridiculous standards HOAS enforce. As it was a quiet caul- de-sac, no one did anything more egregious than the occasional reckless teenager. Then a new family built the house across from us. It consisted of 2 children, a husband, and a SAHM we'll call Gladys (Kravitz, for the Bewitched fans). Now Gladys was a real busybody. She would stand at the front windows of her house to watch/patrol which cars were using the caul-de- sac to turn around, when house
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    Font - (there were 6 in a blended family), the other neighbor's cars (they were collectors, not even repairing cars), and other ridiculously petty things. She didn't have a job, so Safety Patrol became her Whole Identity. She would always hurry over to gossip whenever my mom was taking out the trashcans to the curb. Sadly, my dad contracted a neuromuscular disease in 2005. It got bad quickly, and he was confined to a wheelchair. I learned to drive for
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    Font - my hardship license in a handicap van, and we had more than the usual number of cars due to round-the-clock caregivers in the later years. Gladys decided it was time to “offer help" to my poor mother who was slaving absurd hours just to keep creditors at bay. Gladys very sweetly approached, expressed her sympathies for our struggles, pointed out the number of cars in our driveway, and generously - so generously! - offered to take over the President of the HOA duties, if my father would na
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    Font - After being hounded the sixth or seventh time, (and Gladys hinting that if my mom was struggling so much, maybe she could send my dad to hospice and move houses to something 'more suited.' In fact, Gladys' best friend was looking for a house and would love to live across the street and buy our house...) my mom fOg snapped. She basically told Gladys to stop asking, and that her husband was dying, and it
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    Font - was incredibly insensitive and rude to offer to kick us out of the neighborhood and take over just because she wanted clout to annoy the neighbors about letting kids play basketball after 6pm. Gladys responded nastily that my dad would have to name a successor because when he died ("soon"), the HOA presidency would revert back for election. Okay then Gladys! You're absolutely right! My dad should name someone the HOA president as his successor after his 16-year reign. Malicious compliance
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    Font - After my dad died, my mom found out she was named as the next HOA president in my dad's will. Dad never said anything about it while he was alive, but his humor was always understated. Gladys was APOPOLEPTIC. She tried to overturn the successor claim and 'run against' my mom, but nobody else on the street contested the choice. No one (all new neighbors after 20 years) even knew we had a special single-street HOA. And for another 9 years my mom did absolutely NOTHING as HOA president.
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    Font - My mom had to sell the home in 2019 very unwillingly (as it was the house my parents built together). But with the development of the city, property taxes had risen too high and priced her out. I took a week off work to fly out & help her pack, and while packing up the house we found my Dad's OG 1994 HOA binder, bylaws and all. And of course, Mom had to name an HOA successor... So this time she DID comply (the malicious part was more against everyone else).
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    Font - Very ceremoniously (lol not), my mom finally named Gladys the presidents of the HOA and gave her "The Binder" (which apparently has long since been digitized, and something Gladys had been reading for fun in preparation of this moment). Apparently Gladys went rabid with the power (as her kids had gone off to college) and promptly charged everyone on the street $100 a month towards "neighborhood incidentals" (supposedly
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    Font - for "mowing the strip" that people just mowed themselves) and a "highly encouraged" neighborhood BBQ one Saturday a month to "address the neighborhood concerns." She also outlawed basketball hoops in driveways, dictated no cars could be parked on the street or in driveways but only in garages, things like 'landscaping & holiday decor approval' and other inane, absurd power trips. My mom kept her NextDoor app open and watched Gladys go down in flames. Three separate households
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    Font - moved and dropped long hate-filled call-out posts about Gladys making their lives a misery until they couldn't stand it anymore. That's 3 of 12 houses, btw. Yeah. Gladys wrecked the single- street HOA with a quarter loss. Gladys got everything she wanted: my dad to name an HOA successor; my mom to name an HOA successor; for us to move away; and for her to finally be HOA President. And now everyone absolutely hates her, and no one will pay her $100 or go to her BBQs, and before my mom
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    Font - finally deleted the street from her NextDoor, it seems that the rest of the street had voted to hold an election for a new HOA president. Her tenure lasted six months. Gladys doesn't understand why people talk so fondly about my parents as the most ideal HOA presidents, since they "never did a thing." My mom is two years into her new home, and does not miss the neighborhood anymore, at all.
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    Font - EDIT: Okay so everyone is super mad at my mom for ruining many lives like Syndrome from the Incredibles. Let me explain how the 'handoff' slash nomination went. "Holy crap secretgarden! The moving truck is coming in 1 hour and we STILL haven't cleaned out all the shelves in this study! What do we do?" "Just start throwing sh in boxes mom. And here's a trashbag for old cords and papers." "Oh my word, your father's old HOA binder." "Toss it." "No! We can't. I think
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    Font - this is supposed to be kept by the city or something!" "Mom! We don't have time! We can mail it to the city or something." "Hon, run it over to Gladys." "Mom, are you SURE?!" "She's always been bugging me about it! She can KEEP it! Now run!" I then literally tear downstairs, race across the street, ring the doorbell, shove the binder into Gladys' hands with a "mymomsaysthisisyoursnowbye" and raced back to find out the christmas decorations were still in
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    Font - a forgotten cabinet and need to be thrown into a trashbag. Literally 0 premeditation and 100% aggravated meltdowns about moving. I cannot stress how much my mom did not want to move. I took out a lot of the emotional parts originally in the draft as not necessary/limiting word count. My dad built her that house. The first night in the new house she, as a 58 year old woman, cried until 4am begging to go home. She loved our neighborhood, our street, and our house. She did NOT try to ruin he
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    Font - that point anyway (they'd all been priced out/moved too except Gladys). The end line is kind of a throwaway saying my mom is doing much better now, and she doesn't miss Gladys at all. I do feel bad for all those folks driven out by Gladys' dumb rules, but I'm also going to say the high property taxes probably didn't help. If I ever won the lottery the first thing I would do would be buy our house back, put it in trust, and let my mom live there for the rest of her life. Anyway, to the com
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    Font - jesuschin I still don't understand why you would give her the HOA and make your neighbors lives miserable for those six months 874 ↓ Reply Share pagman007 Yeah surely the malicious compliance is to go round the rest of the neighbours and find one who will do fu all Reply Share 367 ●●●
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    Font - virgilreality Your mom's last act as president should have been to permanently disband the HOA. 175 Reply Share
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    Font - BRANDY danielcs78 It's not that your parents "never did a thing". They lived and let live and that usually means a lot to people. Reply Share 111
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    Font - caitsith01 Any time I read about HOAS, they sounds like the WORST idea possible. I cannot imagine anything worse than having the lowest common denominator of my neighbours decide what I can and can't do with my home. It also strikes me as fundamentally inconsistent with America's libertarian tendencies - surely if it's your private property, your neighbours have no right to tell you what to do with it? 32 ↓ Reply Share ●●●
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    Font - OD Disastrous_Bee_4127 Mom hated her neighbors. 21 Reply Share iwantasecretgarden OP In the end, we actually didn't know any of the neighbors! So many original buyers had been priced out, it was just us and Gladys left on the street. I think my mom felt a little badly about the fallout...we could not have predicted the scale of Gladys' insanity. 463 Reply Share ●●●
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    Font - originalchaosinabox Gladys doesn't understand why people talk so fondly about my parents as the most ideal HOA presidents, since they "never did a thing." Like that episode of Futurama with the God entity: "When you're doing it right, people will think you're doing nothing at all." 5 Reply Share harrywwc just like in I.T. :) 2 Reply Share ●●●

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