Homeownerssued by HOA over a pickup truck they park in their driveway
There are two sides to every story, right? I mean, this sounds batshit insane to me, but I’m not a homeowner. I’ve never lived under the iron rule of a HOA. Maybe visible pickup trucks actually lower property values or detract from the loveliness of a community>
Surely there has to be a good reason for this regulation.
Would anyone like to defend the HOA’s position?
Seems indefensible to me. I see pickup trucks driven by wealthy people quite often. Those trucks have never been used for any real hauling. They look showroom new parked in front of their owner’s McMansions.
Unless this guy drives a dirty, beat up work truck. I can’t imagine any snooty HOA objecting.
update just looked at the article. Thats a nice truck. Sport wheels. Its not a real work truck. HOA is full of it. imho
So if the HOA “owns” the driveways, who is responsible for snow shoveling? Clearly the owner should be held accountable for the poor job he’s done keeping his driveway clear of snow, ice and other hazards.
In reading the HOA documents, including the Bylaws, it looks like a bunch of busy bodies want to control people’s live a bit too far. If enough owners mount a challenge maybe they can start a long process to change the Board and maybe the Bylaws. But I doubt it, because the ByLaws looked stacked to maintain the PTB.
How can a HOA own the driveways? How would that even work? Homes are built on house lots. Pouring the driveway is a building expense incurred by the home buyer. Homeowners have to maintain driveways. Patch cracks, blow off leaves, shovel snow. A driveway is a part of the home.
This story makes no sense. It does confirm that under no circumstances would I ever buy property ruled by a HOA.
HOAs, in my opinion, are something that were originally good things, that have, in large part, become overbearing bad things. It’s good to have a hyperlocal authority to keep a neighborhood from becoming a dump (literally and figuratively), but when they start moaning about stuff like the presence of pickup trucks, it has gotten absurd.
Trucks, even pickup trucks, were certainly in the past seen as something driven by tradesmen rather than upper-middle-class gentility. They are forbidden on Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive, on its many boulevards, and cannot be parked on the street in most residential districts.
Can that justification be viewed as outdated? Yes, but it’s not so outrageous that it’s essentially arbitrary (as might be banning all cars with even-numbered license plates). The group with responsibility for setting aesthetic regulations for the development considered the matter and put in place a rule. The homeowners chose to purchase in a development governed by such regulations, probably precisely because their property values would be protected from other types of aesthetic assaults. They signed a contract saying they agreed to be bound by such rules, and probably signed a form saying they had read and understood them.
The HOA owns and maintains the driveway because their HOA agreement says they do. The HOA clears snow and leaves and patches cracks.
Your driveway is part of your home and you may have paid to have it poured but not everyone lives at your house.
An HOA is just another level of local government. Every now and then they fly off the handle at a homeowner, but the same is true of cities and counties sometimes too. To pick up (ahem) on the driveway theme, here’s an example out of the very same city of Syracuse.
Note the one big difference, though: When the HOA doesn’t like what’s going on in your driveway, it sues you in court. By contrast, the City simply rips out your driveway and presents you with a bill.
(my bold)
:eek:
That’s a bit servants’-entrance-mentality isn’t it? What do the tradies do when they’re going to someone’s house to do a bit of work? Throw a tarp over their truck so as not to offend the street’s delicate sensibilities?
I can only speak to Illinois. For some reason, all pickups, whether they’re those little mini-jobs, or lifted crew-cab monsters, have TRUCK license plates. This designates them as trucks and are not regular passenger vehicles whether used as such or not. Trucks are not allowed on LSD, Boulevards, or to be parked on residential streets. So it’s not that they’re pickups, per se, but their TRUCK plates that cause the restrictions. Seems to me, change their license plate designation, and the weirdness goes away. I have no idea why they are classified that way.
So have at it with your large van/SUV - heck, there’s even a huge cupcake/food truck (pardon - van) that parks around my neighborhood with no problems - but put a pickup bed on it and forget about it.
Oh joy! HOA-owner lawsuits! I was in property management for seven years and this brings back some fond memories.
My $.02 worth. Indefense of the HOA I’d bet that this all started with a neighbor’s complaint. As association managers we were never on the lookout to stir shit up. The HOAs we represented generally didn’t have time to be out on the grounds looking for trivial things. Of course I am only basing this on experience, but so many of the petty problems were started by owner complaints. In fact, when the reporter for the Syracuse news rag cruised the relatively small complex they noted a truck parked in some other resident’s driveway and that owner isn’t facing an injunction.
Second, ownership of the driveway doesn’t enter into it. It all hangs on the interpretation of “private passenger automobile” and whether that refers to pick-ups.
And lastly, judging by the photo of the vehicle in question, it appears to me that the defendant might not even be able to get that truck into his garage.
What the hell is a “pleasure automobile”? Is it some arcane legal definition? Because otherwise I have a hard time believing that there aren’t a whole lot of other non-compliant cars, if all you can park in the driveway are convertibles and sports cars and the like.
I’m not seeing how some boring utilitarian sedan, which I’m sure is parked in someone’s driveway in that community, is any more of a “pleasure automobile” than a pickup truck.
Truck plates have more to do with the taxes raised then the actual vehicle. Here in Colorado, even my Ford Econoline van has to have truck plates, or a lot of passenger seats. My cousin’s Aero Star minivan would need truck plates if she did not have tree rows of seats.
I also will not ever live in an area that has a HOA. Stories like this are way too common. Some folks need to get a life. If they are going to get upset about the neighbors pickup being parked in the driveway, they have way too much time on their hands.
Last place we lived in FL had an HOA that was full of petty bureaucrats and assholes. There was a committee that regularly walked the neighborhood (all 1 street of it) and issued “tickets” if your property didn’t meet their approval. We were not permitted to park in the street - it would prevent firetrucks from getting thru - and we couldn’t park on a non-paved surface. Heaven help you if your driveway was too short for your vehicles. Any vehicle that was obviously used for work had to either park in the garage or have the work logos, etc, covered while it was in the driveway.
Bear in mind, this was a working-class neighborhood, not a country club.
Our neighbor across the street worked for a company that repaired industrial cranes. He was on-call, so he had to have his work truck at home. Unfortunately, it had a roof rack that made it too tall for their garage, so they had to buy plain white magnetic sign panels to put over the company name when he was at home. No matter that the racks and ladders on top made it obvious that it was a work vehicle - it apparently affected property values if we could read “Joe’s Crane Repair” from the street.
I hated that neighborhood and I was sooooooooo glad when we left. The neighbors with the work truck moved shortly after we did. Never again…
I’m not a big fan of HOAs, but my parents are under one in a townhouse now and its near perfect for my father. Who doesn’t want to look at his neighbors crap - including their cars parked in their driveway (they have a no cars in the driveway regularly for more than X days rule - my sister can visit and park hers in the driveway for a week, we can all come over for Christmas and park - but if I were to leave my husband and move in with my parents, my car wouldn’t fit in their garage because they already have a full garage, and I’d have to find somewhere to park - probably the shopping center nearby - and walk). Who thinks garage doors should be closed (an HOA regulation, unless you are using your garage, the door is closed). Who doesn’t want neighbors with random rosebushes and poor taste in landscaping (the HOA plants - you get to do pots).
If my father could pick uniform patio furniture for everyone, he would. Fortunately, the neighbors he can see from his window have ok taste in patio furniture.
HOA managers can sometimes be batshit mental. I once received a call and letter from the HOA because the grass in our front lawn was dead. In February. :smack:
So my response was, “It’s FEBRUARY, you git! EVERYTHING IS DEAD.”
No further complaints came. The lawn came back to life in April, as normal.
We got a notice from our property manager at our previous house warning of us an impending fine for watering our lawn in violation of the watering restrictions in place. I checked the irrigation controller which was programmed correctly, told them we were not in violation and asked why they thought we were. Apparently someone in the neighborhood was driving around at 2am and throught our grass looked wet on one of our “no watering” days. What a load of horseshit.
Lived in a HOA for about five years, got a lot of notifications that my car was too old to be allowed to park in my driveway. No cars past 10 were to be in view. (13 year old 1979 Chevy Impala, pretty much restored to new.) Found out it was my next door neighbor making complaints… he didn’t like it too much when I reported his vintage Studebaker. They ended up writing in “classic/vintage” rules at their next pow-wow, but the way they wrote it managed to legitimize the Impala, too.
I’ve had similar fights in years since regarding apartment complexes and antennae/satellite dishes. It amazes me that, 15 years after the FCC substantially clarified that apartment dwellers may install such in their exclusive areas, and that restrictions were mostly not legit. I went to bat for neighbors at my last complex dozens of times, and at my current complex, I’m in a months-long dispute about whether I can have a small VHF/UHF pair of rabbit ears sitting on my inside windowsill.
Your “dead” lawn wouldn’t bother me at all. There are some varieties of grass (zoysia comes to mind) that go brown in winter and don’t green up until well into spring. I can imagine the HOA going into a massive dither over that.
The restrictions on “poor taste in landscaping” alone would rule out an HOA neighborhood for me. I take great pride in my over-the-top plantings. 
Though, oddly enough, I’ve never heard of that “no pickups” rule being enforced on any of those streets/boulevards/drives - I lived in Chicago for 15 years and even after we moved out we’ve driven our pickup through the city many times.