Most HOAs are run by reasonable people who want to keep the neighborhood looking good and the property values up. Before buying a home with an HOA check it out to see if they are reasonable or not. Talk to your future neighbors and find out as much as you can about the HOA before you make an offer. Chances are you won’t have a problem. I was on my HOA board many times, and was president of a large HOA two terms in a row. If I can run an HOA, anybody can.
Yep. Read it.
I understand more.
When looking for a house in a major southern city, or rather the suburbs thereof, we saw over 50 houses, exactly zero of which were not in a mandatory HOA. We were looking for a newer home, built after 1995.
This was 20+ years ago. And as I understand it, it’s gotten even more difficult now to find a house that is not in an HOA in the suburbs of Charlotte and Atlanta.
I know a few people who ran into similar problems and decided to buy a lot and build a house instead of buying a new one already built. I’ve built two houses myself, and it’s a lot of work, time, and money, but you end up with a brand new house exactly as you want it, usually without an HOA.
You’re getting into “Don’t like the Win-Tel monopoly, build your own Linux system!” territory here.
You could buy a tract home for $175k-225k. No builder would touch a budget of $200k for one off project. And it would take a year, which would cause my relocation package to expire and have to move twice. And all the lots available are either on very busy arterial roads or on private dirt or gravel roads. The latter have no mail delivery, and the homeowners need to pave and maintain the road. Which is an HOA through the back door. And problems with insurance because the fire hydrants are a quarter mile away.
People keep explaining that this is caused by the municipalities outsourcing their functions to developers and the developers then monetizing that. Other people keep ignoring this structural issue and pretending that the free market will solve this.
I was just joking about the home owners association. I was saying there’s nothing amiss
That’s what I’m wondering about.
The OP says, “The day before the residents were going to vote the President out the rules were changed so that it took 50% of the residents to call a meeting, and 90% of the residents to establish a quorum!” but I’d bet most HOA bylaws have rules about changing the rules, like X% of residents at a meeting voting for the changes, with residents notified of the meeting and its purpose N days in advance.
The neighborhood HOAs are usually established by the neighborhood’s developer (it’s not like anyone has the power to start one later on), so I’d assume the initial HOA bylaws are pretty much cookie-cutter sorts of documents.
So my first question, reading the OP, was exactly how the HOA board could unilaterally change those sorts of rules. I didn’t see an answer in my quick skim of the article, which was rather long.
I think it’s a state law here in Maryland that purchasers have to receive the HOA bylaws at least a week before closing in order to have time to review them. That isn’t much time when you’re all but committed to buying the house, but it’s at least an opportunity to back out if you don’t like the rules.
As HOA treasurer, I keep an eye out for the For Sale signs, contact the realtor, and let them know I’ll give them a copy of the bylaws to pass along to the buyer as soon as they’ve got a contract on a house.
Have you tried contacting any members of the board to have them send you a copy of the rules?
As someone who sits on several boards, I can see how that would be possible. The HOA board consists of 3 people. It appears, as is often the case, that this board has the power to vote changes to the by-laws through majority vote. So, the president got one of the other two board members on his side, wrote a revision to the by-laws, and took a vote. 2/3 of the board voted to change the by-laws. Voila!
Something like this could be done in the space of an hour or two, as long as you were able to contact other board members and are allowed (as most by-laws these days permit, unless they are truly out of date and need revision) to conduct business via digital technology such as Zoom or email.
That’s just a theory, of course, and I’m not saying I approve. In a member organization like an HOA, I think better by-laws would require a certain percentage of the members, not just the board, to accept proposed revisions to the by-laws. But that seems not to be the case here.
Really? That’s the mind-boggling part. To change the bylaws of our HOA, we’d need a certain percentage of the membership to show up at the meeting, and we’d need 75% of those who showed up to vote for the change. We haven’t changed the bylaws in decades because it’s too damn much trouble. We’d need one hell of a good reason to even consider it.
Well OK then.
I think the article is about a five-minute read. I think your question is answered within, and my conjecture is that @CairoCarol has it right.
We had an HOA when we lived in Anchorage. We had never owned a home before that and were unacquainted with HOAs. Luckily, it was a good one almost to the end of our 11 years there. No pettiness or other nonsense. They were true guardians of the development and knew that they were answerable to the residents, not the other way around. They had a 10-year financial plan for major repairs. Near the end, we got a taste of what happens when assholes take over. A woman got herself elected president and tried to make unilateral changes to things without a vote by the membership. She got her ass handed to her in pretty short order.
On the other hand, I had an employee who was on the HOA for her housing area. She liked to tell me how she would poke around people’s properties looking for “violations” and then cite them for petty bullshit. I finally told her that I thought she was being mean and petty and that I was glad I didn’t live in her 'hood. At least it put an end to the stories.
The exact parameters of your HOA’s by-laws - rules that apparently make it nearly impossible to amend the bylaws because the hassle is so great - sound pretty awful.
But I’d agree with the principle behind them, which is that the membership needs to vote on the passage of amendments, not just existing board members.
ETA: my experience with by-law writing and amending is that the initial by-laws of many not-for-profit organizations draw heavily on boilerplate/bylaws from other organizations. Depending on how detail-oriented and committed the by-law developers were, a lot of crap can slide into original by-laws. So it doesn’t surprise me a whole lot that both the HOA in the OP and @RTFirefly’s HOA may be flawed.
I was president of a fairly large HOA for two terms (4 years) and we never had an issue with the bylaws. There were issues raised by members having to do with our dues and rules enforcement, but nothing to do with bylaws.
Our biggest challenge was getting enough members to show up for the annual membership meeting, either in person or on the phone, for a quorum so we could have the meeting. It usually meant getting proxies for members would couldn’t make the meeting. We always managed to get a quorum even if it meant twisting a few arms. The members apparently trusted the board enough not to bother coming to the meeting without being prodded.
Up here, the government regulates stratas (which I guess are the HOA equivalent, though as far as I know they only cover condos). Operating a strata - Province of British Columbia has some of the many, many rules for this province, but basically you can’t get away with gaming the system as described in the OP’s case.
I never really understood Robert’s Rules of Order when I lived in the US. Since I’ve been in Canada, I’ve had so much experience with them that I could practically recite the book. Just one of those little cultural differences that people don’t think about much.
For some reason, the clubs at my high school and college were obsessed with Robert’s Rules of Order, though I haven’t thought about it since then.
My suspicion is they have all moved to their final gated community. The document I had in 2009 was dated 1968 or sometime like that. It had the names of the board, but no additional contact information. At the time the neighborhood was empty lots being sold to have houses built on them. The rules involved the size of houses, brick colors, and construction materials that could be used when building.
Unfortunately when I looked for it a few years ago the document was not with any of my other closing materials, which makes me think that maybe I just imagined the whole thing. Unless it got misfiled someplace and turns up, it will not be passed on if I ever sell this house.
It may differ from state-to-state but it was my understanding that when you buy a property not only are HOA rules required to be provided (if the property is part of one) but you have a document that you sign at closing that explicitly says you have gotten those rules and have read them and understand them and by buying the property agree to them.
Such rules should not remotely be a secret. They should be handed over to any property owner upon request (these days just email a PDF of them…easily done).
It’s always happened at closing for me.
Yep, that is the kind of thing I remember signing, but I couldn’t find that either. It must all have been kept, by purpose or accident, by the title company, or someone else, because none of it is with my closing documents, which otherwise are all in one folder.
The problem is that there is nobody to get rules from. No meetings, dues, newsletter, or anything. Probably the only reason I got a copy (if I actually did) was because I bought the house from its first occupant who’d lived here nearly 40 years.
This got me curious, so I looked at the state registration of HOAs, and there is nothing that seems appropriate on the active or expired list. The expired list only goes back to 2014, and I expect mine would have expired in 1974 or so.