Michael Clauer is a captain in the Army Reserve who commanded over 100 soldiers in Iraq. But while he was fighting for his country, a different kind of battle was brewing on the home front. Last September, Michael returned to Frisco, Texas, to find that his homeowners’ association had foreclosed on his $300,000 house—and sold it for $3,500. This is story illustrates the type of legal quagmire that can get out of hand while soldiers are serving abroad and their families are dealing with the stress of their deployment. And fixing the mess isn’t easy.
***Seeking to avoid hearing about the situation in Iraq, May stopped watching the news. She rarely answered the door, and Michael says he couldn’t tell her when he went “outside the wire”—off-base. May also stopped opening the mail. “I guess she was scared that she would hear bad news,” says Michael. That was why she missed multiple notices from the Heritage Lakes Homeowners Association informing her that the family owed $800 in dues—and then subsequent notices stating that the HOA was preparing to foreclose on the debt and seize the home.
In Texas, homeowners’ associations can foreclose on homes without a court order, no matter the size of the debt. In May 2008, the HOA sold the Clauers’ home for a pittance—$3,500—although its appraisal value was $300,000, according to court documents. The buyer then resold the house to a third person. (Select Management Co., the company that manages Heritage Lakes, declined to comment for this story.)
It wasn’t until June 2009 that May realized what had happened. Around that time, the new owner started demanding rent from the Clauers. She told Michael, who was still in Iraq. “At first I didn’t believe it,” he says. “I didn’t understand how someone can take your house and not give you anything for it.” When Texas Gov. Rick Perry visited Iraq in July, Michael says he told him about the problem. According to Michael, Perry called May and put lawyers in touch with the Clauers’ attorney, but couldn’t do much to alleviate the situation. (Perry’s office didn’t respond to calls seeking comment.) In August 2009, the new owner sent the couple an eviction notice, according to court records filed in the case. In Iraq, “the stress level was finally starting to come down,” says Michael, and he was “starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.” He adds, “Then all of a sudden I get hit with this, and I’m trying to get out of there and get home and see what I can do to fight this.”
There are so many things shocking about this, but what struck me the most was the nonchalance of Rick Perry. You would think any politician would realize the golden opportunity to look like the hero here- particularly intervening in the favor of an Army Reservist and resident of your state.
But then again, empathy is overrated in the GOP.
dmsilev
Homeowner associations are, in general, evil. Even for an HOA, this is nasty above and beyond the call of duty.
dms
Walker
According to the article, the HOA claimed no one was on active deployment. This is clearly fraud. Though seeing how the home was resold once the HOA sold it, I have no idea how that will get resolved.
Jamie
Remember the Bonus Army
http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/bonusarmy.htm
Bullsmith
Selling the house for 3500 bucks to an anonymous person who then flipped it for, presumedly, a large profit sure reeks. Someone’s ripping off both the family and the homeowner’s association it looks like. But hey, financial fraud is the new American Way!
Maxwel
“But then again, empathy is overrated in the GOP.”
Indeed. But then again, the guy who got a $300 thousand dollar house for $3,500 may share hot showers with the Gov’nor.
ChicagoPat
Texas- The GOP’s dream for America.
Brandon
I thought Texans were supposed to be pro property rights and anti-tax? In any event, I believe that there is a Federal law that bars foreclosure on soldiers while they are deployed overseas.
MattF
It’s entirely believable. In fact, if someone told me that it just so happened to happen that “Select Management Co.” contributed to Perry’s campaigns, I’d believe that too.
Punchy
This. Is fucked. Up.
Since HOAs can decide y2y just what the dues are, and apparently you MUST pay every cent or lose your house, just what is the incentive to not shake down homeowners with some ridiculous HOA fees? After all, if they can sell your $300K house for not paying $800, why couldn’t they raise dues to $2K and pocket most of this scratch? Is their no limit to what they can make you pay? Can they just dream up a number?
Litlebritdifrnt
I could be wrong but I think any lawyer with experience handling cases which invoke the Soldier’s and Sailor’s Civil Relief Act would be all over this in a heartbeat. This guy could end up owning the HOA if you know what I mean.
Chat Noir
@dmsilev: And nuts. We live in a condo association that is filled with some crazy old people and a couple of drunks (including the association president).
This story is awful. I’ve lost faith in humankind in this country. The meanness and incivility makes me want the ninja kitties (as described in the America Speaks Out silliness) to take over.
Tonybrown74
When has the GOP ever REALLY cared about the Troops??
Seriously!
I’m just fucking disgusted …
Comrade Javamanphil
Why does motherjones and John Cole hate capitalism? Freemarket bitches! (If the first purchaser of the home is not a member of the HOA that foreclosed, I’ll eat a bug.)
David
Also in Texas, when you don’t pay rent and are legally evicted, the landlord can come into your apartment and just take your belongings (except for kitchenware or clothing) in lieu of the rent in arrears and for the remaining value of the lease.
Rex
GOP empathy is reserved for unborn fetuses and human vegetables. Oh yeah, and corporations.
kay
@Litlebritdifrnt:
I don’t get it either. Soldiers and Sailors was expanded in 2002.
We use it for everything. I have a form. I have no qualms about trying it.
Judges (here, anyway) are incredibly deferential. It’s like the magic words that stop everything.
I don’t know what happens if they initiate process (as happened here) without someone raising it, though. It never should have gotten that far.
Judges here won’t go forward without a Soldiers and Sailors waiver, and a personal appearance from the servicemember or counsel to enter the waiver.
It’s a powerful thing, and I am madly in love with it.
Rosalita
I agree this is awful in every way, but it’s pretty irresponsible to just stop opening your mail. Maybe she could have gotten a lawyer before it all went to hell. I cringe every time I get something in the mail from my association because it’s usually something unpleasant, but I read it.
ThatPirateGuy
How the heck does a politician not jump all over this?
Brandon
@Bullsmith: Preserving the free-grifter economy and its freedoms is what that soldier was fighting for. I am surprised that the soldier doesn’t recognize that.
Smudgemo
Well, of course “Support the Troops” doesn’t count when there is money to be made. And $296k, that’s a lot of profit…
merrinc
@Rosalita:
People suffering from severe depression don’t always behave rationally or responsibly. (BTDT) There’s no need to blame the victim here.
Emma
Rosalita: Usually I would agree with you but I’m sure as heck not going to try to figure out what’s going on in the head of a woman whose husband is deployed, who doesn’t know where he is, or when he’s coming back, because he can’t tell her for security reasons. Just from his descriptions, it sounds like severe depression if nothing else.
And as far as HOAs — when we were looking for our house, we had several options, in much better condition, than the one we ended up buying. They had HOAs, though, and when we checked into them –wow. No. Never. EVER.
Lolis
I live in Texas and I am surprised Perry even followed up at all. That small and obviously half-hearted effort was more than I expected from him.
merrinc
It’s not exactly a newsflash that Perry is useless as is, it sounds like from the article, the congresscritter representing the district. It would be nice if they would at least pretend to care about this issue but hey, it’s just how things work in this fine capitalist society of ours.
I despise HOAs. A few years ago, this area went through an extended drought. The city/county placed all sorts of restrictions on water use – no car washing in the driveway, no lawn watering, etc. A local homeowner was fined by his HOA for having dead grass. You know I’m not making this up.
Boxer
You would think HOAs could just sue for unpaid dues instead of foreclosing. If I owe an HOA $5,000 and don’t pay, why should they get to take my six-figure home instead of just suing me for $5,000?
Also jumping on the HOA hate bandwagon. I find it a bit ironic that they exist to increase property value, and yet I can never imagine paying money for a house in an HOA area.
WereBear
Yes; for a normally functioning adult human being.
But I am extremely sympathetic, because I’ve been in situations where the stress is so incredible that routine tasks everyone else takes for granted are simply impossible to do.
If you’ve never felt such stress; good for you.
Perhaps she had a relative or trusted friend she coulda/shoulda/woulda have turned over such a task to; and we need, as a society, to recognize that it’s okay to be overwhelmed.
Having your husband, who, after all, didn’t sign up for what he was thrust into, overseas facing death every freakin’ minute; I think that qualifies.
HH
I agree about that the Service Members Civil Relief Act should be utilized in this family’s case. I’m a lawyer, and I can’t obtain a Default Judgment if the defendant is active military because of this law (our judges in my part of Texas are very particular about it). I love this law; I don’t want to obtain a Judgment against a person serving in the military. The Department of Defense has a website where I can look up (potential) defendants and see whether they are active duty, and I use it a lot. I don’t have experience with foreclosures so perhaps the procedures are different, but it’s horrible if at some point in the process a court official doesn’t require an affidavit from the homeowners’ association that the homeowner wasn’t active military.
Brandon
Also too, if the Hair doesn’t believe that the state can or has the powers to intervene in the property transaction, then fine. However, that should not stop him from sending in the AG or state police to investigate this $3500 transaction that has more than a whiff of fraud about it. Another avenue for the family would be to have a neighbor sue the HOA for fraud because of this transaction (would it be the equivalent of a shareholder lawsuit?), they wouldn’t have standing to do it themselves. I am sure discovery in that case would be a lot of fun.
Anne Laurie
@Bullsmith:
From what I know of HOAs, odds are the “anonymous person” is a HOA board member’s spouse, sibling, offspring, or business partner.
Crashman
@Emma: I’ve been a renter all my life. Would love to buy someday, but not just yet. What, exactly, is a HOA and why are they so evil?
I mean, I can see why they’re evil in this particular case, but in general, what would make you want to stay away from one?
Mike Kay
keep this in mind, when he runs for president next year. yes, a year from today, the freaks will all be descending to Iowa and NH for the holiday cookouts.
Palin will be there, also, too. While she won’t run, she can’t resist hiking her skirt and teasing the suckers.
Michael
I’m thinking that the stress of combat would cause him to go visit the next HOA meeting with his 2nd amendment guaranteed semi-automatic rifle, followed by a quick stop in to the HOA lawyers’ office.
I’d vote to acquit, and commend him for performing a valuable community service.
All kidding aside, this is the sort of shit that white conservative Texans invite by wanting to live behind gates and away from the spics and ni55ers.
bkny
wonder how many of those homeowners assn members will be flying the redwhite&blue this weekend…
but then, they prolly have rules against unauthorized house/lawn decorations.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
The troops have never been anything but a prop to the GOP.
jwb
@dmsilev: Especially since HOAs are so gung-ho about proclaiming support for the troops and all.
Brandon
@WereBear: Not openning your mail is an example of reclusive behavior that is a symptom of depression and anxiety disorders. It is interesting to me that people don’t have a lot of sympathy when signs of mental disorder are obvious and medical intervention is likely needed. If she could open the mail because she was sick from some other form of disease, most people would not criticize the sick individual who lacked the capacity to manage their affairs.
Pococurante
Off-topic, just discovered this blog. Good stuff. Arab Palestinian news rarely makes it into US media. Here is her AP aggregate.
She’s done a Cole – started off as a vociferous critic of her government but over the years of covering the occupied lands became disillusioned with Hamas.
Update:
@Michael: I’m a Texan. And you’re right. I used to live in The Woodlands. There’s a reason I moved my family out of town onto a small farm.
Never overestimate the GOP crazy here. Not possible
Josie
@Crashman: HOA stands for home owners’ association and they are indeed evil, at least in Texas. They make rules about everything to do with cosmetic and structural decisions on your property. They have the power to sue, to take your property if you default and to screw up your sale of property if you owe them money. I served as secretary to the board in my last neighborhood and learned about the powers of these associations. I will never buy a house in such a neighborhood again. If you ever get ready to buy, research this information before signing onto anything.
jwb
@Bullsmith: Personally, I suspect that the HOA manager was behind this and probably received a nice kickback, because, yes, it’s idiotic to sell a $300000 house for $3500. In my experience the job of HOA manager seems to attract some evil SoBs.
Emma
Crashman: The ones I looked at could tell you pretty much how to run your life, from what color to paint your house (and I don’t mean in the “don’t use fluorescent purple” way) to where to put your kids’ play set (and I don’t mean “not in your front yard”); they could determine what kinds of pets you had, up to and including the size of your dog; and so on and so forth.
An acquaintance of mine was taken to court by her HOA because she had built a small extension to the back of the house which could not be seen from the street to use as a home gym for herself and her husband.
And, as a couple of commenters have said, it gives control freaks who don’t have power in real life to set themselves up as petty dictators.
No thanks.
Mr Furious
This soldier DESERVES to come back and be granted one free shooting spree. Jesus Fucking Christ. Add that HOA to the list of bodies for the “junk shot.”
WereBear
@Crashman: Home Owner Associations are like mini-zoning boards that rule over designated developments, much like Condo Associations. They decide what color to paint the dwelling, what lawn decorations and jiveass mailboxes are acceptable, and what plants may decorate the yard.
They are an open invitation for petty dictators to harass people. These natural authoritarians find it easiest to say no; so, whether you like it or not, you wind up with a beige house, a potted geranium, and grass cut within a millimeter of its life.
I would find it very difficult to accept that I’m paying a mortgage, and fees to such an association, all to make sure I am ruthlessly prevented from enjoying the outside of my home.
But they do appeal to some people, who want to make sure their neighbors cannot install a birdbath, fly an ethnic nationality flag, or have a cookout to which they were not invited.
Mr Furious
Unfortunately, when it comes to fucking Texas, nothing is unbelievable to me anymore. To paraphrase a comment in another thread, “Nuke that place from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.”
jwb
@Punchy: HOAs are owned and administered by the homeowners themselves (usually administered through an elected board and a paid manager and staff) so what generally prevents this sort of abuse is that the neighbors would have to be doing this to one another. An isolated case like this could slip through, especially if the HOA was large so that most of the neighborhood didn’t know who owned the house, the house itself was not being kept up, and neighbors had been complaining.
Rosalita
Agreed, my point was, if only she could have gotten some help she’d at least (maybe) still have her home.
That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal (JMN)
OT, but I need some advice. Eddie has a liver infection, which is why he hasn’t been eating. He needs to be on antibiotics. There are two choices.
The first is that the vet sends him home with a two week course that I need to give him. Understand what this will entail. It means that Eddie will spend the next three to four weeks living under the bed, only coming out to eat when I am away from home. (I hope he will come out to eat then.) I will see him twice a day, when I close the door to the bedroom, pull the mattress off the bed, pull the box spring off the bed, grab him, and then wrestle with him while I try to get the antibiotic into him. This is a process that generally requires one hand to keep his head from moving, one hand to help hold him in place since sitting on him isn’t always good enough, one hand to open his mouth, and one hand to operate the syringe to squirt it in; given that I live alone, there is a logistical problem with that procedure. The vet can put a tube up his nose that would make dosing easier, but that doesn’t sound to me like much of an improvement.
The other option is that she can give him one injection that will substitute for the whole two weeks. However, she says that it isn’t as good an antibiotic for liver problems. We wouldn’t know whether or not it’s working until I take him back in two weeks to be checked again. Since I’m not a vet, I have no way to evaluate how much less effective it is, though if he doesn’t hide under the bed and I see him eat, that’s probably a good sign.
I really don’t know how to choose. Neither sounds like a good choice.
daveNYC
Home Owners Association. Basically, Long Long Ago, in a Neighborhood Far Far Away… someone once was stuck living next to some people who let their house go to hell/didn’t mow the lawn/built car sculptures in the front yard. That behavior was pretty ugly, and as a bonus, killed property values.
The backlash to that was to form HOAs which then throw down more red tape as to what you can do with your house and yard (seriously, the rules are sick), and those rules are then enforced by the crazy retired people with OCD who hate everyone. Which means that if your lawn is 1/4 of an inch over the regulated 4″ maximum, then you’ll get a nasty letter or fine.
The boards of these HOAs are also made up of exactly the sort of people who should never have authority over anything other than their own bowels.
WereBear
Well, yes, as a general rule. I’m willing to bet money on the fact she had no problem opening her mail until her husband was sent away to possibly be killed.
I’m thinking that might trigger some depression and anxiety.
Corner Stone
HOA’s serve their purpose but like any nearly unregulated entity, sometimes the power is deeply abused. They are very powerful in TX.
It’s very difficult to reign in an out of control HOA.
sparky
well as i am a cold-hearted bastard, i ask you all here this question: if the woman was single and didn’t open her mail and was foreclosed upon, should the foreclosure also be put aside?
if not, then it would certainly appear to be advantageous for every single individual in the US to marry someone in the armed forces, as the foreclosure could be put off indefinitely, given our penchant for permanent war. and no, you should not infer that i am making an argument that the federal statute should be repealed, just pointing out that the problem in this post seems to turn on the woman’s mental health and a quirky TX law and has nothing to do with deployment as such. i do think the statute is a good idea inasmuch as otherwise military folks can get screwed over in all kinds of ways.
those nasty questions aside, it does appear that creditors’ rights have the upper hand in TX. maybe they should bring back debtors’ prison.
Crashman
Thanks for the education, everyone. These things sound absolutely horrible. As @WereBear says, I can’t imagine wanting to own a house that I can’t enjoy on my own terms. Might as well stay a renter. Are they particularly widespread?
NobodySpecial
@That’s Master of Accountancy to You, Pal (JMN):
I would say that depends entirely upon if you can get routine help with the home version. If you can’t, then you have to go with the injection and wait.
Good luck with whatever you decide.
And on topic: Homeowner’s Associations should be declared terrorist organizations. They can throw their ass in Gitmo and they can spend time organizing the cells exactly alike.
Corner Stone
The vast majority of HOA’s, at least in TX, do not have a “manager” or someone paid fulltime to do the HOA business. Most have a Board of elected, unpaid homeowners. The HOA then pays a management company to handle the business transactions. The Board meets on a regular basis to make determinations and then instructs the mgmt company on how to proceed.
That’s not to say kickbacks can’t happen, but it’s not like some individual is skimming cream off this position. If the neighborhood is decent sized then the Board is 5 or more members.
EEH
This illustrates so perfectly why I’ll never, ever buy a home where there’s a HOA in place. Yeah, my inner-city neighborhood may be a touch crappy at times, but I’ll never trade the freedom to do whatever I want with my property with living next door to petty tyrants who don’t like my bird-feeders or whatever.
Felonious Wench
@Crashman:
An HOA is a Homeowners Association. If you live in a neighborhood with one, you pay them fees, and it pays for things like landscaping, pools, playgrounds, the things a neighborhood shares in common.
However, in Texas, they have way too much power. They can foreclose on your house if you don’t pay your dues. And this happens enough times for it to be an issue in Houston. It’ll be all over the news and the papers. Perry won’t do jack, because he’s an asshole, but the Representatives and Senators will jump in. They love getting involved with emotionally-charged issues with soldiers, and they always do. Gets them points and good press. And few things in Texas piss us off more, liberal and conservative, than a soldier getting shafted while serving their country. It’s one of the things we all agree on. It’ll get fixed.
But, that won’t solve the bigger problem of the power of an HOA here. People have been pushing to change this law for years. For exactly this reason.
Oh, and fuck Rick Perry sideways with the rusty shotgun from 1934 my 92 year-old aunt keeps on her porch, and fuck the idiots in Texas who continue to vote for him.
That is all.
Emma
Rosalita: Agreed. The problem is, depression can make you do things you would absolutely not consider at any other time. And I think this poor woman qualifies.
WereBear
@That’s Master of Accountancy to You, Pal (JMN): Poor Eddie!
Can you split the difference by borrowing a dog kennel and keeping him in there to make dosing easier? How about a time release antibiotic to cut down on the dosing frequency? Some cats actually prefer a subcutaneous jab (Diabetic cats come and wait for their shot) to having a pill shoved down their throat or nasty tasting medicine: is that an option at home?
Can you roll him in a towel? Can you do the Momma cat grab on the back of the neck and pin him to the floor? (Cats grab the carpet in this instances, and immobilize themselves.)
It sound like your choices are mental torment, or risking not getting the liver infection under control; which would be MORE mental torment. Only you can evaluate these relative effects.
If you explain every time that this is to get him better, and you hate it too; they do understand. I hope Eddie does.
And if it were me, I’d heave a sigh the size of Newfoundland, and go with what is better for the cat; my needs aren’t the important ones here, if that’s the biggest crisis going on right now.
ET
I would be really surprised if there wasn’t something hinkey going on. Sure they may have followed the letter of the law but just means they were using the law to make a quick buck.
I am sure some GOP troll would say this is Capitalism.
As for me, this seems like legalized theft.
kommrade reproductive vigor
Look people, I wish you’d get it through your heads that Brave Patriots like Slick Rick Perry knows soldiers don’t want to be coddled.
Fight a war with inadequate equipment? No problem. Stop loss policies that keep them active through multiple tours of duty? They love it. Learning that everything back home is going to shit and there’s nothing they can do about it? Bring. It. On.
U.S. soldiers can handle anything and everything damn it!
EXCEPT the thought of serving with an openly gay soldier.
daveNYC
Yes.
1) The foreclosed on a $300k home for an $800 debt. That is overkill. A claim that size should just go through the normal civil court process.
2) The foreclosed $300k home was sold for $3500. There’s pretty obviously something dubious going on there, especially since it was immediately flipped for what most likely was a fat profit.
Corner Stone
@Emma:
And thank goodness for that. Because I guarantee you some people, even in the nice moderately pricey area where I live, would be letting their freak flags fly.
There’s a reason people choose to live in the burbs, in “master planned communities”. And when you buy a house in an HOA neighborhood you’re agreeing to a modicum of restrictions. If you don’t like that, then buy in an unincorporated area on a little acreage and go for it.
Or if you want the amenities but don’t like all the rules then get involved and get elected to the HOA Board. It’s not hard as usually most people couldn’t be bothered to even show up to a meeting.
*and all the “you” ‘s in here are the general you, not directed at anyone
ericblair
@daveNYC:
Yes, and in the South HOAs and their corresponding Covenants, Conditions, and Restrictions had the fun effect of making it extremely difficult for people with disturbingly high melanin content to buy homes in your exclusive neighborhood of racist bourgeoisie.
If the story is right (a big if, always) the price they sold the house for is so ridiculous it’s got to be a fraudulent non-arm’s-length transaction with somebody’s brother-in-law or something. The way warfighters get treated, especially by so-called patriots flying enormous flags over their ripoff auto dealer, payday loan store, or pawnshop, is a fucking disgrace.
jwb
@Corner Stone: Actually it’s not that difficult to reign in the HOA if your neighborhood is actually filled with decent people and you organize. You just have to make a concerted effort to vote out the board and fill it with decent people. We just did that in our HOA. The biggest problems with HOAs are that it is difficult to get good people to run for the board and harder still to get people to vote in the election. The result is often too much deference to the manager, a job, as I mentioned above, that tends to attract petty tyrants.
Rosalita
@That’s Master of Accountancy to You, Pal (JMN):
I’m sorry about Eddie. I have had similar problems and I am giving meds to one of my cats now, for a bladder infection. I use a pill gun-but that does entail getting a hold of him, which I can generally do, fortunately. We tried liquid but it wound up all over the house because he’d keep spitting it out.
Maybe the vet injection would be better even if it isn’t the strongest–only because the stress of you giving him meds and his being confined might not help him get better either?
Corner Stone
@EEH:
And I prefer to not live next to someone who’s going to non-maintain an eyesore. So that when I leave to go to work I’m frustrated by it, and when I come home I’m too pissed to go outside and play.
So, Free Market Solutions! We’re both getting what we want!
Corner Stone
@jwb:
I know. I was a member of a four+ year civil action against my HOA. They then held elections by court order and were soundly defeated.
The HOA is now run by a bunch of unpaid very good neighbors. I don’t always agree with them but they are transparent and accountable.
But without the court order there was nothing we could do. No state regulated oversight, no entity or statute we could use to force the issue.
Eric S.
I haven’t read the whole thread so if someone else said this I’m sorry…
The HOA sold a $300,000 home for $3,500. The house is then flipped. My first thought… who on the HOA board is friends / biz partners with the first buyer? Take a look to see who on the HOA board made a big bank deposit.
Corner Stone
@Corner Stone: So I don’t have any love for HOA’s. But I do believe they serve their purpose, even if a little over zealously at times.
With accountability, if someone doesn’t like getting that notice about their weeds, or getting turned down for a fence stain color, then get off your butt and get involved.
satby
@That’s Master of Accountancy to You, Pal (JMN): Third choice, have Eddie board at the vets and let them deal with the medicine, at least as long as you can afford.
jwb
@Corner Stone: The ones I’ve been involved with have all had paid managers (and a small staff). The HOA I currently belong to consists of about 1100 homes, I think, and the board has seven members. The biggest problems, I think, are that it’s hard to get good people to serve on the board, and the elections rarely attract over 50% of eligible voters.
WereBear
Also, regarding Eddie: would it be easier to take him to the vet more often than two weeks, and let them dose him?
Sly
@kay
They’re already pursuing that avenue:
I would like to know, however, what their lawyer means by “wrongly claiming”. Regardless of its contents, doesn’t the affidavit need a certificate from the DMDC in order to be admissible?
namekarB
Contrary to the majority opinion in this thread, not all HOAs are evil. I live in a California HOA with 6000+ homes (a retirement community). When a homeowner is in arrears, there are at least 3 notices sent out. In many cases, the HOA tries to work with the homeowner as each has unique circumstances. However, if the homeowner is non-responsive, then the HOA goes to small claims court and places a lien against the house. In every case (in my HOA) that a lien has been placed, it was a vacant home either owned by a real estate speculator who was upside down in their mortgage loan or owned by a bank.
As for the HOA, board of directors are elected from the members and do not receive any salary. The dues collected pays the salaries and benefits of staff, upkeep on common areas and maintenance of facilities. When one homeowner fails to pay dues, the end result is that the fixed costs of running the HOA are passed on to the other homeowners.
Xenos
@sparky: That is not a nasty question, although there is a very straightforward answer. It is called the Servicemembers’ Civil Relief Act (SCRA) . It is a federal law that allows a court to undo a foreclosure if certain extra notices are not given to an active-duty soldier or sailor who is deployed.
I have seen lawyers spend years trying to clear title where 20 year old foreclosures do not have a Servicemembers’ (formerly called a ‘Soldier and Sailor’s’) notice recorded correctly. Since these notices are a matter of public record you can have a bitch of a time trying to prove bona fide purchaser status. The properties can be uninsurable for title insurance purposes, which has people searching around decades later to beg the foreclosee for a quitclaim deed.
That HOA is in for a world of hurt. Serves them all right for being such lousy neighbors to the wife of a deployed soldier.
Corner Stone
@jwb: During my research for the action against our HOA it seemed the overwhelming number had an unpaid Board and a mgmt company. But it’s been a while and don’t remember what percentage we determined. Could’ve shifted in the last few years. We looked into hiring a full time manager but couldn’t see a way to make it cost efficient.
You’re right though. Good luck getting neighborhood involvement. People mow their grass, pay their dues and have no idea who or what their HOA is.
That’s life in the burbs I guess.
Tzal
I suspect that the Clauer’s will keep their home in the end. And the only question is to what degree the HOA is fucked.
I really feel bad for the attorney who signed the pleading that stated no one was on active duty.
Ash
OT: has anyone read Peggy Nooner’s latest drunk screed? Why hasn’t she just kept on walking right off a cliff yet?
WereBear
It can be a tough call on HOA’s; I’ve lived in towns with decent zoning and enforcement, and in that case HOA’s are overkill, and tend to appeal to people who like more restrictions, beige everything, and cookie cutter neighborhoods.
But in areas with little or no zoning, it can protect property values; depending. Perhaps other people’s experience has been positive; I’ve never bought in such a place, because my one step removed experiences have been, frankly, petty and horrible.
jwb
@Corner Stone: How was your old board holding onto control? fraudulent elections? You had screwy bylaws? We just got rid of our somewhat out-of-control board, and with our bylaws, which are by no means perfect, the only way the old board could have kept control would have been to miscount the ballots. Still, I will say that I don’t think our old board was out and out evil, they just tended to think that some people in the neighborhood should get preferential treatment and that they didn’t need to explain themselves. The new board does not always make the decisions I would, but like yours, I feel that they are trying to be open and transparent with the decision making. They’ve also put our evil manager on a much shorter leash.
Mike Kay
@Ash: can you summarize. some of us don’t want to vomit on our desks, this early in the day, by actually reading her swill.
Ash Can
Very off topic, in other, far happier news, the best headline from yesterday that the American press completely ignored (because, ya know, who cares about America’s foreign policy being razed and rebuilt from the ground up?):
Obama Admin issues far-reaching foreign policy statement that ditches the Bush Doctrine, calls out domestic terrorists, and generally announces that the US intends to be a better-behaved world citizen.
(h/t GOS)
And in the utterly-unscientific, off-the-top-of-my-head department, my guess this morning is that the weekend vacation here in Chicago is a working one for the Prez, because there are about triple the usual contingent of official helicopters along on this trip, and they’ve been making multiple trips between O’Hare and the South Side over the past couple of days. I saw one headed back toward O’Hare this morning, and I’m wondering if it was sent to pick someone up (or maybe drop someone off, since I haven’t seen it make a return trip yet).
fourlegsgood
I hate to tell you, but this happens all the time in Texas. Yes, it’s evil and scummy and so is Rick Perry.
debit
@That’s Master of Accountancy to You, Pal (JMN):
Try this: Sit on the floor on your knees. Put the cat between your legs with his back against your belly. When you open his mouth with one hand, and insert the syringe with the medicine with the other, instinct will tell him to back away, but he’ll be blocked by you.
You can also try the wrap method. Get a large towel or sheet, and wrap the cat up like a mummy, leaving his head free. Don’t leave wriggle room or he will get free. Insert meds, then quickly unwrap being mindful of claws and teeth.
I prefer the first method. It’s faster and less stressful, but it doesn’t always work. My sympathies. I’ve owned cats, dogs and horses. Out of all of them, the cats have always been the most difficult to treat, and I say this as someone who has tubed wormed horses (tube down the nose and into the stomach).
Also? Just put the box spring and mattress on the floor for the duration.
Sheila
This is what happens in a climate of extreme capitalism, when the bottom line is profits rather than universal brotherhood and sisterhood, creativity, stewardship of the earth, emotional and intellectual maturity, etc. Though I am a pacifist, I understand full well that those who join the armed services sacrifice a great deal and are doing what they think is right, and, truth is, what most Americans believe is right, and to treat them like this is unconscionable on every level.
fourlegsgood
@Xenos: Okay, THAT makes me feel better. I hope some lawyer hammers that HOA.
I would never, ever, ever buy a home in a neighborhood with a HOA. I don’t know anyone who’s had a good experience with one.
ThatPirateGuy
@sparky:
We are talking about an 800 dollar fine taking their 300,000 dollar house. I don’t care if she lived alone they shouldn’t be able to do that.
Erik Vanderhoff
Jesus fucking Christ wielding a rubber dildo! That is so fucked up. A Texas HOA can seize a property over association’s dues without so much as a fucking signature?
I don’t think I’ll ever be able to use “fuck” enough in discussing this article.
Lee
Here is a link to the thread on the community board for Frisco (where I live).
I stopped reading after getting too many posts excusing the HOA and “she got want she deserved”.
kay
@Xenos:
It’s worse, or better, depending on how you look at it.
The HOA’s lawyer filed a sworn statement that no one was on active duty.
He waived Soldiers and Sailors for them.
Uh, oh.
jwb
@Corner Stone: Unless the board does something stupid, like try to lease HOA land for a cell tower with bad terms and without properly notifying the members of the HOA of what is going on. That sort of overreach tends to get people’s attention, and of course makes everyone wonder who is getting paid off.
Get a grip
@ET: Sure they may have followed the letter of the law but just means they were using the law to make a quick buck.
How exactly did they make money? The house was sold for $3,500.00. Which is probably the amount of unpaid dues plus attorney’s fees. The transfer would be subject to the mortgage. There’s no money made there. HOA’s are nonprofits. The board members don’t get paid. They are obligated to collect assessments to maintain common areas (pool, clubhouse, sometimes roads, entire buildings in the case of condominium associations). If one person doesn’t pay, everyone else in the HOA has to eat it.
That said, this is sad and horrible story. It sounds like the poor woman was clinically depressed, and the husband off in Iraq had no idea what was going on. I don’t know how non-judicial foreclosure works, but I wonder if this would have happened if Texas required judicial foreclosures.
Corner Stone
@fourlegsgood:
I think in actual truth 99.9% of people who live in an HOA have either no interaction, or normal interaction that’s resolved as expected.
IMO, this is selective sample bias.
Captain Goto
On another note…
…If she stopped opening her mail as soon as hubby left for active duty, I’m surprised the utility companies haven’t shut off her water and electricity already. We’re not getting the whole story here.
And, yes, foreclosing on someone’s $300K house for missing an $800 fee, then selling same house for $35K is way fucked up. Someone is being a real asshole here.
jwb
@kay: Sounds like that HOA is in deep, deep shit.
Ash Can
@kay: Doesn’t this implicate the HOA lawyer for fraud?
Comrade Dread
Home owners associations basically are like zoning boards for communities run by people in the community.
Often, they attract the assholes in a given neighborhood who enjoy exercising power in particularly petty and stupid fashion.
Think about the worst government bureaucrat you’ve ever dealt with, then multiply that guy by 100 and you should have a good idea as to the kinds of people you’re dealing with.
This story doesn’t surprise me at all. It’s pretty much why my wife and I made sacrifices and spent the extra money to get a house and not a condo.
Corner Stone
@jwb: By a variety of ways. Mainly by having the mgmt company certify who could be allowed on the ballot. And by the Board itself act as the Nominating Committee.
Just a really fascinating example of someone with a little power doing anything he could to maintain it because it made him feel like a king.
No one could figure out why they’d want to stay at an unpaid job and fight like hell to keep it. Everyone suspected kickbacks or side deals negotiated through vendor contacts but there was never any evidence of this once the new Board was seated and started looking around.
debit
@Captain Goto: The utilities could have been set up on automatic bill pay.
Captain Goto
@kay: Waitaminnit–are you saying that Clauer *waived* his rights under Soldiers and Sailors?? Why in the hell would he have done *that*??
Captain Goto
@debit: Oh, right–nevermind.
Emma
Corner Stone: I would prefer not to live near jerks who fine a little old lady $1500 for painting her house “the wrong sort of white” (this actually was a case handled several years ago by an attorney friend of mine). Or who tell me “you can’t have an addition to your house that is not even visible from the street” (my friend) Or “you can’t put blue pansies on the flower beds, everyone elses are red.”
I understand the uses of HOAs. But, too often it seems there are people on power trips on them. I’d rather let the freak fly.
Brandon
@Tzal: Why should you feel bad for the attorney? He didn’t perform any due diligence to back up factual claims made in his pleading. Further, likely in his role as trustee, he approved the contract of sale of a $300k house for $3500. That’s should be a violation of his fiduciary duty as trustee. I wouldn’t be surprised if this guy was referred to the state bar for sanction.
Geeno
@sparky: Actually, I’m not sure what the law has to say regarding mental incompetence as a “defense” against foreclosure proceedings. She may get to stay in the home on conditions of supervision, etc.
Lee
First post got moderated. That never ends well.
So second try without embedded link…
Here:
http://www.frisco-online.com/forums/showthread.php?t=761622
is a link to the thread on the community board for Frisco (where I live).
I stopped reading after getting too many posts excusing the HOA and “she got want she deserved”.
Ash Can
Back to OT, that helicopter just made the return trip, accompanied by another. A busy weekend indeed.
David Hunt
The accounting firm I work for used to do the accounting for a HOA, but I’m glad to say that the behavior I’m reading about here shocks me. I’ll grant that the day-to-day control freak aspects are something that would not have impacted me and my work. I was, however responsible for, among other things, doing the annual billings for dues and keeping track of who actually paid. Even if someone simply stopped paying their dues (there were a few people who did just that), the most that was ever done was to slap a lien on them. What this effectively meant was that when/if they sold their house, the back dues would be deducted from the money they got from the sale. If they died their, it would eventually come out of what their heirs got for the property.
I’m glad that I never had to hear about the ability to foreclose on a home for such a relatively small amount. I can tell you that the specific case JC was referencing screams some type of fraud. Some needs to get sued at least and jailed would be a better remedy. Given that the jerk who bought the home for $3500 has already sold it to another buyer, it’s likely impossible to get the actual house back…assuming that the new owners are innocent in the matter. If Mr. 3500 sold the house to his brother for 50K to let him get a great deal on a house, maybe the Claur’s have a chance.
jwb
@fourlegsgood: Well, the HOA provides neighborhood parks (four of them), a pool and a community center. Since we haven’t been annexed by the city, we wouldn’t have any of those things without the HOA. And, aside from our somewhat overzealous manager (who apparently has nothing better to do than drive around the neighborhood to make sure the trashcans have been promptly put away) and the cell tower incident, the HOA here is a pretty low key affair. They’ve approved every modification we’ve proposed, including changing the color of the paint, adding fencing and changing to xeroscaping.
bemused
A little quibble with last line of post. Empathy is overrated for everybody outside the GOP. Inside the conservative world, empathy is their due & they throw tantrums if they don’t get it.
ruemara
I live with someone who is in the throes of chronic, severe, untreated depression. I can attest that, although the wife was irresponsible, her behaviour and it’s tragic consequences are entirely inline with heavy duty depression. This is a shit sandwich and this guy needs a legal team to be all over this. Heavy duty bullshit and I hope that HOA gets every horrible thing coming to them.
WereBear
Once again, I’m glad some people haven’t experienced the Whole Body Pressure Syndrome; but this is how it works.
At first, maintain, struggle to have a “normal” life. As pressure builds, some things go by the wayside. If she was avoiding the mail, she probably wasn’t avoiding the bills, per se. I’ve just thrown chunks of money at utilities in such situations, and inadvertently built up credit for when the payments are late or whatever.
I’m sure that at some point she so dreaded opening the mail that she missed the bill; then missed the notices about the bill; and nobody came by and said hey? That’s what a real HOA would do; this is obviously a long con in disguise.
This poor woman was doing what anyone under stress does. I’d be very surprised if someone around any of ya’ll aren’t doing it; a coworker struggling with someone’s illness, or an elderly person struggling with their own.
Under stress, we prioritize to get anything done at all. And I must repeat; this is not necessarily a mental illness, or at least not a spontaneous one. I would call mental illness if someone wasn’t able to cope with a normal life.
Trying to cope in a non normal situation is just human.
kay
@Ash Can:
No.
Some people include that assertion as boiler-plate. “Neither party is serving active duty…blah, blah”.
But you have to know. It’s not just words.
Had the women in the home seen that filing, she would then file Soldiers and Sailors and here, anyway, the whole thing would come to a screeching halt. I have had judges physically push away the pleading when Soldiers and Sailors is asserted, as if to not touch it. They’re really deferential to that defense here. It doesn’t mean the foreclosure doesn’t eventually happen, it just means there’s a good reason servicemembers have the protection. They’re not around to protect their rights. Hand’s off until they show up!
It just means he filed it without finding out. Or he knew and then it’s fraud, I guess.
Brandon
@ThatPirateGuy: It fascinates me to no end that folks who get in a snit about Kelo likely have no qualms about this. A much fairer resolution should have been a lien against the title.
Corner Stone
@Emma: In my experience of HOA dealings, these kinds of examples are never as cut and dried as they are stated. People take their home very personally, and get offended when told to pull weeds, or replace some fence boards.
One of my neighbors has a brick fence on the outside border of her property that runs along the street. It started to crack and HOA told her, please repair the fence and have the vendor you choose submit paperwork to us. She had some dayworkers repair it and it looked like shit. Just an abomination. Everytime I turned by her house I shook my head. The HOA told her to fix it and she claimed she had. So they went to court over it. But if this story was reported here it would be, “Nice lady gets sued even after she fixes her brick fence! Evil nazi HOA!”
But as I stated somewhere upthread, “Free Market Solutions! I get what I want and others live where they get what they want!”
Erik Vanderhoff
@sparky:
Over an $800 dollar debt? Yes, that foreclosure should be put aside, even if she’s a twenty-something welfare queen addicted to meth.
jwb
@Corner Stone: So you did have screwy bylaws that prevented open elections. I’m glad you were able to fight against that and open them up.
Comrade Javamanphil
@Emma:
Had a house in a non-HOA neighborhood. The owner of the house next door which was both uphill and upwind of us burned his trash once a week. Lovely burning plastic fumes blew right in my upstairs bedroom windows. He was an old Vermonter and this is what he had always done and nobody was going to tell him he couldn’t (and when you live in a town with no police, your recourse to convince him otherwise is minimal.) We moved to an HOA community (20 houses) which because of its sized, worked well. HOA is not the problem. People are. And yes, HOA boards tend to attract anal-retentive, control freaks with too much time on their hands but only because nobody sensible ever runs against them.
Mike in NC
“The troops” are just there for election year photo-ops, and very few HOAs are worth getting involved with. They’ll mostly worse than crabgrass.
Ash Can
@kay: Assuming, then, that he filed it without determining if it was true, does it simply nullify his filing?
jwb
@Emma: The really funny thing is that many of the most ardent supporters of HOAs have no trouble whatsoever yelling about the evils of zoning by cities.
jpe
@ DaveNYC: yes, there’s something dubious here, but I’d bet anything that it’s the reporting that’s dubious. The standard procedure in property law would be to compel a sale to recapture the lien or debt and then any gain in excess of the mortgage would go to the property owner.
They wouldn’t have sold the property for $3500, but sold it for $300k and then recouped their $3500.
kay
@Captain Goto:
Well, he didn’t. But that HOA lawyer includes boilerplate that says the homeowner is not active duty, and then swears to that.
But this homeowner was active duty.
And his wife didn’t see the papers, so didn’t have a chance to assert the right.
She’s still supposed to assert it, it would be a response, but why is the HOA lawyer signing things that he doesn’t know to be true?
Whomever looked at what he signed relied on his assertion that Soldiers and Sailors doesn’t apply, and it does.
MikeTheZ
I needed a laugh after this. Thanks you C&L!
http://crooksandliars.com/susie-madrak/ha-sarah-palins-neighbors-sought-out
Corner Stone
@WereBear:
Agreed. Our new HOA Board would’ve done something along those lines. They are all pretty decent people, even though by default they are also pure evil.
jwb
@David Hunt: Is that true? If the title wasn’t properly transferred and is not clean, then the title company would probably be liable to make the new buyers whole; but I don’t think the new buyers would in fact own the property since the title they possess would actually be invalid. But I’m not a lawyer, so maybe I missed something.
bemused
@MikeTheZ:
Sarah Palin = Soap Opera
jpe
Per the court records, the person that tried to evict the Clauers was one Jad I. Aboul-Jibin. Hope the wingnuts don’t get wind of that.
Ash Can
@MikeTheZ: O.M.G. That’s beautiful! What a great story.
I guess Sarah Palin was right about the greatness of small-town Americans. When they’re fucked with, they sure can fuck your shit up right back.
Corner Stone
@jwb: After 4+ years and uncounted hours and effort. We jumped through every hoop they put out there, at first in good faith then later as record that we had complied with everything they asked.
I can’t tell you how many hours I was away from my family dealing with this, or blockwalking for votes, strategy sessions, lawyer meetings, etc. I even used several vacation days to attend 14 hour mediation hearings at one point, which were a sham.
So I know why most people never feel like bothering and just express disgust. But I’m the kind of jerk who figures if you feel strongly enough to complain about it, then get in there and do something about it.
kay
@Ash Can:
Well, that’s what their current lawyer says, and Xenos says there’s a law for that, but we’ve never let it get that far, where we had to undo one, so I don’t know. It’s a shield,not a sword. Xenos is talking about the sword.
This is not esoteric or unknown, that servicemembers have a strong set of protections. Everyone knows this, particularly someone who deals with foreclosure. It applies to numerous situations.
You remember the stories where single parents who were deployed were losing custody of their kids while they were in Iraq? That was a big deal, and it was remedied immediately.
The only exception I can think of is child support, because that can be an emergency, and the child’s welfare trumps the soldier’s interest.
Ash Can
@jpe: Oh, he won’t be made the fall guy in all of this. Nope. Uh-uh. No way.
jpe
Looks like I’m wrong. Per court records (available online via Denton County site), they really did sell the property for 3k. That’s pretty effed up.
Bella Q
I do have some experience with foreclosure defense, but I am not licensed in TX. I would happily assist these folks if any TX attorney can get me in pro hoc vice as this should be a pretty clear winner for the Clauers.
Joseph Nobles
Speaking of a different degree of unbelievable – listen to Glenn Beck viciously mocking 11-year-old Malia Obama because of the “plug the hole” anecdote the President told in the press conference yesterday.
Let’s just call it Outrageous Friday.
Ash Can
@kay: I understand what you’re saying, but I don’t see why it couldn’t be undone. Otherwise, anyone could include any wacky claims in such filings, and they’d stand regardless of their demonstrable lack of truthful basis, simply because the paper they were written on was literally rubber-stamped. That’s a process that sets up way more problems than it resolves, to say the least.
Then again, IANAL, so I can’t even do any serious handicapping on the outcome of this. I’m just sitting back and watching to see how it all plays out.
patrick II
I was just reading the Wiki entry on the 2002 canceled television show “Firefly” — the Josh Whedon scifi/western. It says that the fox executives fought with Whedon about several aspects of the show, one of which was: “Fox was not happy that the show involved the “nobodies” who “get squished by policy” instead of the actual policy makers”.
Michael just has to get on the right side of that “nobody/somebody” divide.
Glenn Beck's Chalkboard
Something similar happened about 15 years ago to a widow in her 80s in Houston. She had, for reasons I’ve forgotten, fallen behind on her homeowners association dues for something like $150. The homeowner’s association foreclosed on her townhome, in which she and her late had lived for 30 years. Despite lots of local attention from the media and outrage, the association seized the home and sold it at auction for $5,000 — to the president of the homeowner’s association.
All perfectly legal.
jpe
After scanning Denton County records (which are easily accessible), it looks like I was wrong and the house really was sold for 3k.
That’s really effed up.
Keith
Guess Homestead only goes so far :(
twiffer
@Captain Goto: depends. i have nearly all my bills on autopay. direct deposit for the paycheck and mortgage, water, gas, phone, cable, cell, etc. all get paid without me thinking about it. the only people i forget to pay are the ones that i cannot autopay: like the guy who plows my driveway.
i barely ever open my mail. it’s either catalogs, junk, credit card apps or bills/statements that are paid and viewable online. why should i bother reading any of that?
kommrade reproductive vigor
The worst part about HOAs – The tulpas.
Get a grip
Oh, fer cryin out loud. There is a federal court case pending on this. Last year the Clauers sued the HOA and the buyers to have the sale set aside based on the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act. One of the defendants removed the case to federal court.
Ms. Clauers’ parents bought the $300,000.00 house with cash and later conveyed an interest to Ms. Clauer. The husband wasn’t even on the title. The Clauers were already delinquent in paying their assessments before he even got placed on active duty. This is according to their own pleadings.
Be nice if the reporters told us some of this, instead of just running with the one-sided “The evil HOA took this soldier’s house away!” story.
Still, non-judicial foreclosures suck. If the HOA had been required to go through the judicial process, Ms. C wouldn’t be able to claim lack of notice. And she would have been able to raise the issue that she was a dependent of an active duty member of the military.
jwb
@kommrade reproductive vigor: My all-time favorite episode!
Get a grip
@jpe: “Per the court records, the person that tried to evict the Clauers was one Jad I. Aboul-Jibin. Hope the wingnuts don’t get wind of that”
The wingnuts couldn’t be much worse than the liberals. Some fool commenter on the Mother Jones article called for the the HOA board members to be hunted down and shot. Some other fool helpfully printed the manager’s name and address.
Jackie
If you live in an unincorporated area a HOA is really the only way to insure that no one puts a factory or a pig farm next door. If you don’t get involved in local government be it a HOA or a city council the people willing to do the work may well be petty, corrupt tyrants.
Mr. Poppinfresh
As another soldier once said, “If I owned Texas and Hell, I would rent Texas and live in Hell.”
WereBear
@Glenn Beck’s Chalkboard: That kind of thing makes me not believe in ghosts.
Or every asshole on the planet would accumulate a platoon of harpies as they aged.
Someone like Dick Cheney would not have an untormented moment.
twiffer
on HOAs: they can have value, but are not for me. i don’t want my neighbors to be able to decide what i can do with my own home. the reason i own a house is so i don’t have to deal with that sort of shit. my lawn often gets a bit higher than i’d like. the beds out front are only half-mulched. you know why? both my wife and i work. i can spend what little free time i have doing yard work or playing with my kid and spending time with my family. screw mowing the lawn; i get to it eventually.
if anyone wanted to complain to me about it, i’d tell them the same thing. priorities are different for everyone and there are a vast number of things that are above yard work on my list.
even if an HOA is right for you, they still shouldn’t be able to foreclose on your house for dues. that’s ridiculous. hell, if you don’t pay taxes, you just get lien; how the fuck can HOA dues result in foreclosure?
BubbaDave
@That’s Master of Accountancy to You, Pal (JMN): I’d vote for the two-week shot and monitor Eddie’s eating habits carefully. My thinking:
1) Eddie’s quality of life matters.
2) Your quality of life matters (but less than Eddie’s, frankly, because you understand what’s going on and how long it will be going on. Besides, cats are better people than people)
3) If he’s not eating right after a couple of days, you’ll want to take him to the vet anyway. Cats who go without eating can get into a bad negative feedback loop and starve themselves to death. My Rajah didn’t get dead, but she spent a couple of weeks in the hospital and more weeks being fed through a tube at home. Not recommended.
Barry
@Bullsmith: (sorry if this has been pointed out before)
“Selling the house for 3500 bucks to an anonymous person who then flipped it for, presumedly, a large profit sure reeks. Someone’s ripping off both the family and the homeowner’s association it looks like. But hey, financial fraud is the new American Way! ”
IMHO, that was the homeowner’s association who did it. That way, they kept a couple of hundred thousand dollars, not $800.
EEH
@Corner Stone: Indeed. In my case, we wanted a Victorian house so we had to go to where they are located since they tend not to be in master-planned communities. Living close to my job is an added bonus, no long commutes in rush-hour traffic to contend with. I never was crazy about living in the ‘burbs growing up so I’m happy to live where I do. I will admit that our house is probably the best maintained on the block but the others aren’t eyesores, just not ‘burb pristine and that’s ok by me. No junker cars or sagging sofas on the porches, thank goodness!
trollhattan
In my experience HOAs, regardless of where they are and how much power they wield, attract the kind of folks who love nothing more than power over others and will strive to
micronano-manage their neighbors’ lives. Once the board is stocked with folks like this, watch out.It’s imperative they be limited legislatively, but in Texas I suspect that’s unlikely.
p.s. How is it the buyer-flipper is anonymous? Is this not public record in Texas, or were they hiding behind a corporation?
Origuy
I was president of our HOA for several years. I’ve gotten tired of trying to defend HOA board members on blogs. Several appear to have done that; namekarB said everything I would have. I would like to note that in California, you can’t foreclose on military personnel on active duty; I think you can file a lien so that the property can’t be sold without paying the back dues, but that’s as far as it goes.
People act like the dues are going into the director’s pockets. Unless there’s embezzlement, (and it does happen), they go to upkeep, insurance, management, etc. If someone isn’t paying their dues, everyone else has to pay more.
David Hunt
@jwb:
I’m not a lawyer either and it’s been more than ten years. As I remember it however, to buy (or build) a house in the HOA subdivision, you had to sign onto the HOA’s by-laws. One of the things that they could do was put the aforementioned lien on the property so that they’d get their back dues if the owner sold it. I fielded a few calls every month from title companies confirming whether members of the HOA were up-to-date on their dues related to a sale. That was the most extreme form of legal action that this particular HOA ever took. You could let the back dues accumulate for years (with late penalties). All you had to do was ignore the bills. They never did anthing like foreclose on someone. They simply made sure that current owner would eventally pay the back dues because any unpaid amounts would be deducted from any proceeds of the sale by the title company. Plus the guy had to be at least a year in arrears before they’d do this. Dues were only $300.00 and billed annually.
Corner Stone
@Origuy: You’re a heartless bully! And pure evil!
And you know who else was President of his HOA?
Mr. Moderate
The HOA people, the person who flipped the house and the current owner deserve a special place in hell. I hate HOA’s too but this takes screwing home owners to a new level. The Texas state law allowing HOA’s to foreclose on homes rather than simply have a lien placed against the property is egregious too.
However I’m disappointed in this turning into a screed against Republicans at the end. What is the governor supposed to do? I don’t find his reaction especially egregious. Beyond that it has nothing to do with Republicans. Get a grip.
Xenos
@kay:
Maybe I mischaracterized it, because it is not really a sword. It does leave the title in a mess, though, in a way that makes going to court to clear title an exercise fraught with all sorts of complications. When the party filing to clear title has to give notice to the previous owners that can give an opportunity for all sorts of defenses that would be a lot harder to bring forward as, say, a suit in equity.
The world of hurt amounts to some really painful discovery that could be pursued, tying up assets with a lis pendens while this sorts out, dragging the HOA through a few years of bad publicity, and so on. The sort of thing that really punishes the HOA even if they win.
Mike G
Texas is full of these nasty little laws that screw the little non-connected people. I was unpleasantly surprised by some fuck-you labor laws when I lived there. A snake-mean, corporatist, semi-feudalist state run for the benefit of the Bushes, Perots and other rent-seeking parasite crony shysters.
Bush’s deliberate hobbling and corruption of US government functions was no surprise to those of us who lived in Texas under his rule — to his ideological cohorts a government is not a responsibility to be administered with seriousness and focus but a seized personal prize to be looted and manipulated for the benefit of himself and his buddies.
Made me appreciate moving back to California where the dirty-fucking-hippie state government for all its faults can at least uphold some First World-standard protections for ordinary working people.
Wile E. Quixote
We need to name and shame this HOA. Get pictures of them, their houses and put them online for everyone to see. Accuse them of fucking over the troops, get their phone numbers, e-mail addresses, FaceBook pages, everything, and just harass the shit out of them until their lives are a living Hell and they kill themselves out of shame.
Fucking Texas, I was born there, but my parents escaped over to California in 1966 in a hot air balloon that my Dad designed and my Mom sewed out of confederate flags and Klan robes stolen from the clotheslines of their neighbors and I’m eternally grateful to them for it.*
*It was actually a 1965 Oldsmobile, but that’s not as interesting of a story.
Sly
@kay:
It’s also a possibility that the presiding judge could have admitted the affidavit as evidence without doing their due diligence, i.e. checking to see if they have the relevant certificate from the military. Unless I’m mistaken, it’s the court’s responsibility to make sure the proceedings are in compliance with the statute, not the litigants, when the service member (or their counsel) is not present in court. Courts just have litigants do it because its fairly trivial.
Which is what bugs me about this whole thing. Complying with SCRA is probably the easiest and cheapest thing you can do in a civil action. DMDC has a friggin’ web search enginefor it, the results of which are admissible as proof of compliance.
If I have the time later, I might dig around for some of the documents, because I’m really interested what was on that affidavit submitted by the HOA. It might not just be their lawyer who screwed up.
Origuy
We did foreclose on one homeowner while I was on the board. It was a woman who had sued the HOA and gotten on the board as part of the settlement. For a while we were self-managed; she was the secretary and handled all the paperwork while I was president. She was crazy, but I never realized how crazy until after got a manager and she got off the board. She moved away when she inherited some property, but kept the townhouse.
There’s a law in CA that the HOA must send out the next year’s budget by November 15 if they are going to raise dues. The budge was a couple of days late one year, but the dues weren’t going up anyway. She got it in her head that this meant that the HOA couldn’t collect dues at all. So she stopped paying them. It took over a year to foreclose; everything must be done just right or it will be reversed. After the foreclosure sale, there was money left over. Several attempts to deliver that to her, but she refused to accept it. I went into the unit with the manager and several other people. She’d never let anyone into her house and then I saw why. She was a hoarder; there was trash everywhere. This was stuff that had been accumulating for years.
The money had been in escrow for years before the lawyers said the HOA could use it.
Pococurante
@Get a grip: Of course I believe you. But link please.
Corner Stone
@Mike G:
Yeah. California. Where they pay the working person in company scrip.
JMonkey
This story really doesn’t need a military angle to leave me completely gobsmacked. In Texas, a HOA can foreclose on a house without a court order to pay an $800 debt? And they can sell it for 1% of its fair value?
That’s obscene.
Corner Stone
@Sly:
You shouldn’t really take much of anything kay says at face value. She’s rarely right.
Corner Stone
@Wile E. Quixote:
I don’t know. Were you conceived in the backseat?
Mister Colorful Analogy
@Wile E. Quixote:
You, sir, continue to post comments that are brimming with win. I will be sending this one to an ex-Texas acquaintance of mine; he’s a decent guy, but remnants of Texas remain.
ETA: Hmm. I seem to have found a bug with the double underscore trick for maintaining blank lines in a blockquote. Asterisks mess it up.
Xenos
@Sly: According to one of the posts up above, the service member in question was not in the chain of title. While you still would want them to file the Servicemembers’ paperwork and affidavit (he could have had a lease, for example, that might be a protected interest even if it is not in the chain of title), it seems to be a significant fact here regarding the bad faith alleged to the HOA. The $3,500 flip is pretty good indication of an improperly run sale, though.
Here in Mass. the statute at the state level waives the Servicemembers’ notice and affidavit for commercial real estate. But since all it takes is a lease to someone who sleeps in a rented office, who is covered by the act, to screw up the title, it is nearly always filed.
Lee
@Wile E. Quixote:
I have a post earlier up (it was moderated for some reason) that links to the local messageboard (I live in this town). I do not recommend reading the thread on this topic. A lot of the commentors were supporting the HOA.
The HOA is Heritage Lakes.
Catsy
Fuck HOAs.
Everything I have heard and read about them–from advocates like Corner Stone as well as their detractors–convinces me that I’ve been right to avoid living anywhere that requires you to join one. At their most benign, they’re a way of paying for the privilege of surrendering your right to do as you please with your own property in exchange for creating a mechanism that allows you to force your neighbors to conform to the same set of restrictions. Yeah, that sounds just awesome–sign me up.
Some people are entirely too concerned with what their neighbors are doing. Unless I’m blasting loud music in the middle of the night, leaving loose trash that gets onto your property, creating a noxious odor, or otherwise doing something that crosses from my property to yours, it’s none of your fucking business–and there are city ordinances for dealing with those nuisances. If you don’t like what I’m growing in my garden, my choice of lawn gnomes, or the fact that I had my car jacked up to work on it over the course of a few days, I’m not forcing you to invite me to your next barbecue.
And no, I’m not sympathetic to the “property values” argument either. If I buy a house, I’m buying it to live in, not to pad its value so that I can flip it later. I am really not concerned about whether it’s worth $200k or $210k twenty years from now. If you’re using yours as an investment, that’s great, it’s your right–but it’s your investment, not mine, and it is not my obligation to inflate the value of your property at my expense. People on that side of the argument like to call my attitude selfish, but as far as I’m concerned the selfishness is theirs for demanding that I spend my time and money making my property conform to their standards in order to inflate the value of their property.
kay
@Sly:
That’s interesting. And useful!
I didn’t know that, because I’m always on the other side: I get pleading where boilerplate says “not on active duty” and I respond with “yes, he is and he’s claiming Soldiers and Sailors”. My people are generally really young men, so I deal primarily with their parent(s), who are 1. here and 2. receiving the predatory lender letters at the servicemembers “home” address of record.
Pococurante
@Pococurante: Hello “Get a grip”? I’m still trying to understand how being upside down a few hundred dollars before one is deployed, assuming you are right and honest, led to this.
Real story pls…
Corner Stone
@Catsy: Well then I thank the good FSM that we will never be neighbors. That will work to both our advantages.
Because you sound like a Glibertarian here. Yeah, you can do what you want with your 8500sqft and fuck me in the ass if I don’t like it, right?
Bullshit. It’s a neighborhood and a community of a lot of people with a lot of different desires.
My house isn’t some damn castle that I have wrapped my identity into. It’s a piece of property where I sleep and live. Sell it tomorrow if it made sense to move on.
But your perspective is so childish and selfish as to not really be worth responding to. What are you, 12?
Pococurante
@Catsy: I like having acreage. It’s more work. But the only accountable person is myself. But then, I love my land and put a lot into it.
Lee
@Catsy:
But then there is Houston….
There is NO city zoning. So without HOAs in Houston your neighbor can set up an auto-repair shop in his garage and another neighbor can set up a pet crematorium in the backyard.
I live in an HOA and it is more of the benign type as the number of homes it covers is really low. We have homes with garden gnomes, deer statues, low water landscaping, etc. Halloween and Christmas people fill their yards with all sorts of stuff. I think the problems occur with the larger HOAs but I have no data to back that up.
We have a community pool/playground/cabana/fields that it maintains. We have lifeguards at the pool every weekend and week nights from Memorial Day to Labor Day. Once school is out we have lifeguards all day every day of the week.
It is pretty easy when planning on buying a home to check out the HOAs charter and the rules and regulations. As long as you are not the first to move in, drive around the neighborhood and check the front yards.
kay
@Corner Stone:
Figures you’re in a HOA. Are you on the rules committee?
“That kiddy pool is gone, tomorrow”.
RalfW
Empathy is not overrated in the GOP, its non-existent. Empathy precludes many of the standard policy planks of current, right-wing Republicanism.
Surly Duff
If the homeowner’s association was made up of fictional coyotes or were interested in eating his dog, then Perry would have shown them he meant business. But since they are not coyotes, he doesn’t really have anything to shoot and thus, doesn’t give a shit.
Corner Stone
@kay: No. But some of my best friends are HOA Board members!
Get a grip
@Xenos: “According to one of the posts up above, the service member in question was not in the chain of title”
Xenos, that’s right. The wife’s parents bought it for cash. Later they deeded it to themselve and the wife. So the three people on title were the wife and her parents.
But the HOA knew Michael Clauer was living there. It sent notices to addressed him and to his wife at the property address (according to the pleadings).
The deed is attached to the complaint as an exhibit and it contains the affidavit of the HOA’s attorney stating that to his knowledge none of the parties were in the active duty military, and he lists them specifically – the wife, her parents, and for some reason, the husband. I don’t know why he listed the husband, maybe because he was an occupant.
Sly
@kay:
I think the other thing that complicates matters (besides the fact that the servicemember isn’t on the title, as Get a grip and Xenos mentioned) is that the HOA in question is managed by a private firm. Which isn’t exactly odd, because it looks like the Heritage Lakes subdivision has a few hundred units and some common facilities.
Presumably they are the ones who handled the fee collections and foreclosure litigation, and I think its likely that the Clauer’s neighbors had no idea what was going on. So I don’t necessarily buy the notion that a unscrupulous neighbor got a good deal on a $300,000 house for his favorite second cousin, or flipped the house for a profit, because it doesn’t look like people who actually live in the community had anything to the collections/foreclosure process (which, according to a couple of sources on the story, are all done by mail). If there is any kind of fraud going on, its more likely that it would be with the management company.
Sly
My comment is in moderation hell, likely because of a bad link, so here’s the quick points.
The HOA is managed by a private firm, which isn’t really anything out of the ordinary considering that the subdivision has a few hundred units, a large clubhouse, and what looks like two common swimming pools (based on google maps). This company likely does all the fee collections and civil proceedings themselves, meaning that the Clauer’s neighbors could have been completely oblivious as to what was going on.
In other words, its entirely possible that the company submitted the affidavit based on who was on the title (the wife and her parents), not knowing that Michael Clauer was even part of the equation. At least thats what I would say if I was the HOA’s lawyer, in order to avoid liability. But if his name is on that affidavit, they’re kinda fucked.
Get a grip
@Pococurante: “Hello “Get a grip”? I’m still trying to understand how being upside down a few hundred dollars before one is deployed, assuming you are right and honest, led to this.”
Not to quibble, but they weren’t actually “upside down” in that this house that Mrs. Clauer’s parents bought was worth $300,000.00 and there was no mortgage. So there was a ton of equity. You’d think they could have a paid a “few hundred dollars” in assessments for the benefits of living in this gated community with all the amenities. Especially when they didn’t have to worry about making mortgage payments.
But anyway, it “led to this” because they weren’t paying their assessments and Texas law evidently allows the HOA to do what it did. It seems like the primary dispute is the effect Michael Clauer’s deployment has on the foreclosure. He wasn’t on the title to the house, but the Clauers’ complaint says that Ms. Clauer was entitled to the protection of the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act because she was his dependent.
Get a grip
Back to Rick Perry, I despise him, but really what could he have done without abusing his office? He can’t order the HOA to unsell the house.
Yes, he could push for legislation to prohibit non-judicial foreclosures in the future, but I don’t see how he could do anything to help the Clauers.
swellsman
@ Get a Grip —
Yes, as someone else pointed out, please link to the information you have.
I read this post and the first thing I thought was, “Wait. They didn’t have a mortgage on this house? You can’t just foreclose on HOA dues and sell a home w/out paying off the mortgage.”
So I scanned through the comments to see if anyone had raised this and/or had any information about this sale. Since it sound like you do, please provide a link.
I’m asking because, as a lawyer, I am pretty routinely sick of listening to legal stories getting reported in ways that sound as if the entire legal system is screwed up. I have spent many, many hours explaining to people that (i) no, our system is not perfect, but (ii) it is the best we have so far, and we are actually always trying to improve it, and (iii) most of the stories you read that make it sound as if some insane shit was allowed to happen are written that way because it makes the story better . . . . not because the stories are accurate.
If the husband wasn’t on the title and the affidavit said that “none of the owners are on active duty,” then the affidavit was correct. This may or may not fall within the Soldiers and Sailors Act, but it is relevant information.
And, by the way . . . I fucking hate HOA’s too, y’all. I do a lot of work representing home owners against their HOAs and in my experience most of you are right: they tend to attract really petty, vindictive people.
But if the house was purchased for cash by the wife’s parents, who then gave an interest in the property to her (but, apparently, not her husband), and the wife failed to open the necessary notices that were provided to her, and the HOA otherwise did what it is required to do under the law . . . .
Well, the situation still sucks, and like pretty much everyone here, I suspect someone figured out a way to legally steal this house. But that isn’t the same as saying ‘Texas’s legal system sucks and is heartless and ruthless and unfair.’ It is just a way of saying that someone found a way to game the system and the protections it has built into it to prevent this type of shit, and maybe – just maybe – Texas should go back and use this a reason to improve upon that system.
(And, just for the record, I am not a Texan, I tend not to like Texas — I’ve been there many more times than I would have liked — and I do think that being able to foreclose on a house without a judicial proceeding is a bad policy decision for the state to have made. But if Get A Grip’s information is correct, the story is not nearly as egregious as it has been made to appear.)
b-psycho
@Catsy: I co-sign this. Completely.
Lee
I believe the next time the Texas Legislature meets (which is once every two years) is planning on stopping the non-judicial foreclosures. A couple prominent state senators/reps have mentioned changing this.
But the housing industry is a very powerful lobby in Texas (they have completely paid off our state Supreme Court: Google “Cull and Cull v. Perry Homes”).
Honus
@Punchy: did you notice the part where she didn’t open the mail for several months? That’s a good way to let a house go to foreclosure over an $800 assessment. That said, I do think it’s legally problematic to foreclose on a service member. I know you can’t get a default judgment in Virginia, but then again, this is non-judicial foreclosure, which a number of states (not just texas, and I do hate texas) allow in this type of situation, but I still think most states forbid foreclosure on a service member for just this reason.
Get a grip
@swellsman: “Yes, as someone else pointed out, please link to the information you have.”
It’s on PACER, the federal courts website. I would link to it, but you have to have a subscription. But if you do, you can look it up – it’s all there. Copies of everything that has been filed in this case.
Re the no mortgage bit, I think I actually saw that in the original story. Mr. Clauer said something about how he was going to have get a mortgage on this house that had been free and clear. Of course the article didn’t tell you it’s not even his house. Or that the parents bought it. I got that from the Clauers’ complaint.
And, by the way . . . I fucking hate HOA’s too, y’all. I do a lot of work representing home owners against their HOAs and in my experience most of you are right: they tend to attract really petty, vindictive people.
I do a lot of work for HOAs, as you might have guessed. I have in fact run into some real control freaks on some boards. You do your best to steer those people in the right direction and get them to be reasonable. The majority of HOA directors that I deal with are decent people just trying to do the right thing.
Owner apathy is a big problem. Most people don’t give a crap what their HOA is doing, until something affects them. Their neighbor’s dog poops in their yard, they go nuts calling the manager and the board members demanding that the HOA make a federal case out of it.
I’ve seen directors who were ready to get off their boards but stayed on because no one in the community was interested in running for the board.
asiangrrlMN
The only HOA I know are the ones for the condos where everyone’s unit look exactly the same (or there are four and you get to choose). I hate that shit. My mom was thinking of moving into one, and looking at the plans, she had a choice of two kinds of plants that she could plant out front. She ultimately decided not to buy a condo there. I’m with Emma on letting the freak flags fly (within reasonable limits, of course).
Get a grip
I’ll link to PACER anyway, in case someone else wants to register and look this stuff up: http://www.pacer.gov/
Texas, of course, civil court. The Clauers are the plaintiffs.
Corner Stone
@b-psycho: Thank you.
Corner Stone
@Get a grip:
Exactly. The classic glibertarian nonsense. Freedom for all until it makes me uncomfortable! Then fuck all y’all!
“I can do whatever I like right the fuck next to you and your family but if you even THINK about doing something I don’t like I’m going to scream to the highest heaven!!”
Glibertarian assholes.
Corner Stone
@asiangrrlMN:
But in a community of 1000, or 2500 houses, who sets those limits? The lowest common denominator?
In other areas people can do as they wish. But why should I buy somewhere and have zero recourse against damages?
I don’t. And that’s the whole point here.
malraux
Is there any evidence that HOAs actually have an effect on property values? As near as I can tell, they have a pretty negative effect by substantially raising the “property tax” rate, ie they make the cost of owning a given property much much higher.
b-psycho
@Corner Stone: You act like the mere lack of conformity degrades you somehow. It doesn’t.
If you can’t stand to live among people who live different from you, then it’s you rejecting society, not them.
Lee
Yes. in Houston. They have a noticeable effect.
Corner Stone
@malraux: A little hard to prove a negative there. Compare the same size properties and houses with the same available amenities and ISD’s?
How would you go about quantifying the results?
Corner Stone
@b-psycho:
It doesn’t degrade me at all. But try selling your property when you immediate neighbor has a burning trash pile a couple feet the other side of your line.
And you’re just wrong, as usual. I accept living with and among people. That’s why I understand we all have different analysis of what’s acceptable.
But if I wanted to pay for something that was held hostage by the lowest understanding of what’s acceptable I would not be living where I am.
Corner Stone
@b-psycho:
Society is about accommodation. And shared agreement. Across a spectrum of things.
If you get to do just what you want, then what about me? I get to do just what I want right next to you? I get to walk outside naked and piss on the fenceline.
What a child you are.
WereBear
@Lee: And in Houston, according to a previous comment, there is no zoning. Which boggles my mind. Heck, even Florida has zoning, and it’s a state with downright contempt for its residents in most matters.
A previous post mentioned that Wasilla does not, either. Which explains how such Wild West outlooks lead to a lot of ugly properties, spite fences, and eventual Hatfield and McCoy type feuds. The very thing zoning is supposed to prevent, and by and large, does.
Corner Stone
@WereBear: Your edit. Confused I am.
WereBear
@Corner Stone: I jumped in and got rid of a couple paragraphs that I wasn’t wrapping up right.
Trying not to confuse, I am.
malraux
@Corner Stone: There’s no real proving a negative there. Either HOA properties experience a greater growth rate relative to similar non-HOA properties, or they don’t. Its pretty quantifiable.
@Lee: Not to be too obtuse, but houston is a pretty bad case to make. Houston is the case to make for why zero zoning laws are bad (and of course relative to no zoning, really bad zoning might be a good idea).
Corner Stone
@malraux:
This is just wrong.
What if Wal-Mart builds a 1500 job distribution center outside of city/HOA limits?
What if the ISD is exemplary in a certain area? Or a Randall’s pulls out? Or a thousand other factors that have ZERO to do with this “quantifiable” determination?
This is overly simplistic to say what you have said.
ETA – and this may be the silliest shit I’ve read recently. And that’s saying something at this joint.
Corner Stone
@WereBear: But it was those paragraphs I wanted to explicitly make fun of!
Too slow on the copy/paste, I am.
D-Chance.
Get a grip,
Our HOA has the same problems… everyone hates them, they’re busy bodies, but no one wants their job. When I first bought this shack (the subdivision is a lower income lake area with mostly empty lots or trailers), the first thing asked of me by a couple of neighbors was whether I’d like to run for the board. That they’d be so willing to ask a total stranger seemed to me to be a “let’s dump this crap position on the new guy” proposal.
It is a thankless job. Dues delinquencies are high. Most of the people move out to the country specifically because they DON’T want to have to follow codes that are enforced in the city regarding property care, dogs, noise, etc. But, when something happens to THEM, the first thing they expect is for the HOA to brandish magical pixie dust and solve their problems.
I’ve never attended one meeting in almost 4 years and have no clue who is on the board, but I can’t say I’m dissatisfied with them. We have a clean club house, pool with paid sitter and playground, secure dumpster area, secure docks for boating, the best roads of any lake subdivision on this side of the lake (including some swanky 6-figure areas whose roads are pothole havens). The board members are unpaid, yet I see a few of them in the middle of the night, voluntarily patrolling the streets (because it’s remote, we have very few sheriff patrols out here) and otherwise putting in a ton of hours for the betterment of the community.
Yes, some can go overboard. Some can be anal. Some can be out-and-out assholes. But, with very few exceptions, they act in the best interest of the neighborhood. From my personal experience, they are a valuable asset for any homeowner living outside an organized, zoned and codified town but still in a communal setting.
WereBear
@Corner Stone: Bwahahaha!
Which proves my point. They were weak and meandering and now only exist in your frustrated mind.
However, I have a funny outlook on such disputes, since I lived on Long Island, which was both enlightening and frustrating. The place has a lawn obsession… which is not reflected in the zoning, which only requires residents to cut down grasses when they are dead.
I know this because our house there had the Mutant Lawn From Hell. Someone stole the topsoil during building, so the lousy soil spawned only weeds. It killed two lawnmowers. We finally got a giant Weedwhacker, which at least kept the height down, but did not please aesthetically.
Some neighbors were not happy. But we did not have the money that would let us replace the lawn wholesale, and no one volunteered. So I began, one plant at a time, converting the front lawn into a cottage garden. I made my own compost and dug it up many many times.
By the time I had to leave it, it was really coming along. And so many of the neighbors came by to say they got great enjoyment from it, and from the bouquets I handed out, and they wish they had the guts.
Corner Stone
@WereBear:
Won this round, you have.
Catsy
@Corner Stone:
No, and if you actually bothered to read more than five words of what I wrote you’d know that.
Yes. And that fact is absolutely orthogonal to whether or not you have the right to dictate what I do with my property, as long as it does not intrude on yours.
I love it when internet douchebags feel compelled to respond to you in order to tell you that you’re not worth responding to.
My perspective is selfish? You’re the jackass who thinks he has a right to micro-manage my home and demand I expend money and time on things I don’t think are necessary in order to inflate your own property values. You want selfish, spend some time looking in the mirror.
Corner Stone
@Catsy:
You mean like keeping your property in order? And in code with the documents you signed up for?
Because that’s why I don’t live next to a glibertarian asshole like you.
“Oh, my property is MY PROPERTY and you have nothing to say about it!”
Shit.
Corner Stone
@Catsy: And if I want a tribute to Ronnie James Dio in my front yard, complete with burning Hellsmouth, then that’s my right as a property owner!!
b-psycho
@Corner Stone:
Like you are the fucking vanguard of civilization or something. You cede control to a bunch of stuck-up elitist busybodies because the thought of living among the unwashed masses makes you soil your sheets, fine, enjoy your cocoon. Just don’t expect anybody outside to believe you when you spew your moral superiority bullshit.
Corner Stone
@b-psycho:
Ohhhh, you have vanquished me and my elitist soul.
I bought a house in an area and location I liked. And agreed to certain terms when I did so.
If I wanted to be Mad Max like you then I would be gulching it somewhere with Ted Kachinsky.
Personally, I like living in society, with other people. We seem to get along just fine most days.
Anne Laurie
@That’s Master of Accountancy to You, Pal (JMN): Since that much stress wouldn’t be good for Eddie’s system, under your circumstances I’d vote for the one-shot-and-wait option.
If you decide on the do-it-yourself option, ask your vet to loan you a large enough wire crate that you can set it up as an “apartment” for Eddie — litter box in one corner, food/water dishes in the opposite corner, a nice soft bed & a toy or two. You can install it on top of Eddie’s favorite bed-for-hiding-under, if necessary. Also ask the nice vet about mixing the medicine with something fish-flavored to make it more palatable (I know they make flavorings for this now, just like they put fruit flavors in kids’ antibiotics, but I don’t know whether the drug you need can be mixed).
Get a grip
@Catsy:
Shit, Catsy, you hate HOA’s so much, don’t buy a house in a community with an HOA.
Many people like having some enforceable community standards, some people like having lots of really strict standards, some don’t want any standards. If you’re of the latter persuasion, look for a house with few or no deed restrictions, in a community with no amenities and no HOA.
No need to get all riled up about where other people choose to live.
Get a grip
@b-psycho: OK, so you won’t have a problem if your next-door neighbor breeds pit bulls and paints a confederate flag mural on his exterior wall. And that’s great. But you can understand that some people maybe don’t want to live next door to that.
b-psycho
@Get a grip: I’ve met people with that image who were good folk. I’ve met people who more fit the stereotypical image of The Good Neighbor that were total pricks. You assume too much.
Lee
That is the problem. At exactly what point does it begin to intrude on someone else’s property?
If they feed a bunch of wild cats and those cats decide to spray your house and lawn. Is that intrusion? Whose responsible? If they run a private rendering plant in their backyard does the smell constitute intrusion?
You leave it up to the local government to settle those issues. What if their actions are not against any local laws? In a rural area both of those issues might not be against the law.
HOAs are nothing but a layer of government even closer to the individual than the city government. Their laws are the in the HOA’s contract that you sign when you purchase property. The laws can be amended just as local laws can be amended. They are just corrupt and mismanaged as any local/city government.
If the other’s property is such that it reduces YOUR property value then it has objective financial intrusion. Just as every city and state has different laws, different HOAs have different rules. Just as you would not live is X state because you disagree with it’s laws, don’t live in X (or any) HOA if you don’t agree with its rules.
swellsman
@Get a Grip
–Thanks, yes, I am registered on PACER so I can check it out there. (I thought you were referring to a newspaper article or something.)
And oh, yeah . . . I too represent a coupla HOA’s. As I said before, they do tend to attract petty, vindictive people (Lord knows, that’s where most of my HOA litigation has come from), but they do serve a function and where — as with my own clients, naturally, they are reasonable stewards — they can be worthwhile.
Just didn’t want to make it seem like I was painting w/too broad a brush.
Corner Stone
@Lee: Let me tell you a story.
Let’s say someone I know, let’s call him “Dad”, owned 11 acres about an hour West of a metro area.
Dad added new construction of about 1500sqft to the existing house a couple years ago. The land has a nice pond adjacent and the house itself is done very tastefully with handicap accessible everything.
“Dad” wants to sell at some point, and the category of people interested in this property really like the land and house/location/etc but they walk on the front porch and see the neighbor’s trash pile plus cars on blocks plus chest high weeds plus other things.
And these buyers exercise their free right to pass on the property. Again and again. And we’re talking about someone who worked for thirty+ years as a railroad switchman, so it’s not like Trump was speculating here.
But if “Dad” had built a gate to close off one point of access for the garbagemeisters? They would be the first to go to court over it.
Derek
@Corner Stone:
Was this house in the middle of nowhere? It sounds like the middle of nowhere.
Corner Stone
@Derek: It was an hour West of the 4th largest Metro area in the US. About 20 minutes further West than Katy, TX. Or about 1 hour and 15 minutes on the HOV lane into downtown Houston, TX.
Get a grip
@b-psycho: Same here. I’m not making any judgment about the character of the hypothetical pit bull breeders here. My point is just that some people don’t want to live next door to that, is all. So they buy in a community with restrictions and have some assurance that their neighbors will not be breeding pit bulls, or flying the confederate flag.
Get a grip
@swellsman: I know what you mean.
malraux
@Corner Stone: Wait, the measure of preserving property values is quantifiable right? If HOAs preserve property values better than non-HOA property, then that difference has to be quantifiable. If its not, then HOAs don’t impact property values. Yes, in specific cases something might drive specific areas different from the over all pattern.
malraux
The significant objection I have with HOAs is that though they are effectively a governmental layer, they aren’t nearly as accountable as a government. You can’t make a first amendment legal claim against them, for example, as you could against a city ordinance. In addition, just because an HOA seems harmless at one point, they can very easily become busybodies with a few changes of personnel.
Corner Stone
@malraux: But property values aren’t dependent on any one thing. What if the Port of Houston laid off 5000 people? Would you say an HOA in Deer Park was less effective than a non-HOA in Katy?
Your argument is really one sided. Home values depend on so many factors.
This is a little crazy to me. To think the HOA control is the defining factor for an area valuation.
malraux
@Corner Stone: Umm, right, either HOA is one of those factors or it isn’t. Is there any evidence that it is one of those factors?
Corner Stone
@malraux: Is your other name matoko_chan? Because this is kind of a circular argument by you.
You claim an HOA has a negative effect on prices. So…how about you prove what you’re saying.
malraux
@Corner Stone: I never claimed that HOAs have an absolute negative effect, or at least never meant to imply such a claim. I did say that I was skeptical of claims that HOAs were good for property investment value because of the high ongoing costs. I wondered if anyone was aware of actual data thus my question “Is there any evidence that HOAs actually have an effect on property values?”
oh, and I’m not macto_chan or whoever.
Corner Stone
@malraux:
Corner Stone
@malraux: And I think my response was something along the lines of – how do you quantify that in absolute dollar terms?
You’d have to take the same subdivision, or one right beside it made of similar class construction, and study prices.
With HOA and without HOA.
It’s kind of a no answer question unless you can quantify how we should study that effect.
And the answer is, at least for me, I don’t know how to do that apples v apples. Or mitigate to make it actually useful.
Jrod, Slayer of Phoenix
I’m convinced! Because I don’t want to live next to someone who paints his house with swastikas, breeds pit-bulls, then cremates them in the backyard, with giant fans set up to send the stench directly over my property, the only other choice is to allow some busybodies to take a ruler to my grass everyday and check my new paint with a spectrometer to make sure I’m using the exact shade of beige allowed, and pay handsomely for the privilege.
Oh, and if the shade of beige isn’t exactly the one allowed, I should happily pay limitless fines every day until I repaint, and if I don’t, the HSA should rightly own my house. At least I don’t live next to Nazis!
I guess I’m just insanely lucky. There’s no HSA in my neighborhood, yet I haven’t had to deal with any neighbors setting up a roadkill rendering plant in their backyard, or replacing their front porch with a 50′ tall statue of Lemmy Killmister. Apparently this makes me fantastically lucky, since this sort of thing is nearly inevitable if one doesn’t have an HSA poking around.
Corner Stone
@Jrod, Slayer of Phoenix:
Welcome aboard friend!
malraux
@Corner Stone: That’s why a real study would be useful. One that does compare across multiple situations, adjusts for various biases, etc. Which is why I asked the question, because I was not aware of any such study and wondered if someone had. Now my gut instinct is that any gains in value of the property are eaten away by higher costs related to the association, but I have no idea if I’m right.
But I think its crazy to think that such a question is unanswerable. It clearly is theoretically knowable, at least to the extent that any statistically derived information is knowable.
Jrod, Slayer of Phoenix
@Corner Stone:
Not yet! Can you also guarantee that someone will use their tape measure to ensure that the garbage cans are in the exact right spot every day? Garbage cans in the wrong spot just make me so mad!
Alright, seriously though, I’m sure HSAs can be a force for good, but the idea that they should even be capable of foreclosing on a property is ridiculous, and inevitably leads to stories like the one posted here. Banks can only foreclose on property that they basically already own, so why should an unaccountable, non-governmental organization be able to take a property that they have no claim to?
Hell, when the gov’t makes your land through eminent domain they have to pay for it. Apparently this is not the case for HSAs.
Pococurante
Jayzus.
The girl owed $850.
That’s it. No XYZ hillbilly crap.
WTF is wrong with you people. Save us your “I like pretzels shoved up my a$$” rationales.
Corner Stone
@Jrod, Slayer of Phoenix:
Of course! Come on in! The water is fine!
We’ll be happy to take care of that issue for you if you’ll just sign here, here, here and initial here.
Thanks!
PQuincy
@ David Hunt, who wrote: “Given that the jerk who bought the home for $3500 has already sold it to another buyer, it’s likely impossible to get the actual house back…assuming that the new owners are innocent in the matter.”
IANAL, but I doubt you’re right on this. Assuming the current owner was not in collusion, they may have a very nice damages claim, but I doubt they’d keep the house.
1. The foreclosure/default appears to have been fraudulently obtained. If it is reversed under the Seamans’ and Sailors’ provisions, then the HOA never owned the house so as to be able to auction it. The $3500 dollar buyer could not buy it, nor sell it to the current owner.
2. However, if the current owner is not colluding, then s/he doubtless obtained title insurance. The title insurance company would be the first line for the damages this buyer suffered — and would no doubt turn around and sue the HOA for its malfeasance.
3. The HOA also probably carried liability insurance. That company, too, would have a strong interest in a settlement — and might either recompense Mr. Clauer in a settlement in which he dropped his claim for the house, or with the title insurance company and the ultimate buyer to give up their claims. Both the end buyer (assuming no collusion) and Mr. Clauer would be in a fairly favorable position to push strong claims, and would thus have a chance of getting adequate settlements — though of course, when dealing with any insurance company, check your pockets regularly before, during and after any transaction with them.
Fallsroad
@Corner Stone:
You make an excellent case for zoning laws and city/regional planning more generally. Yet people seem to despise civic bodies that may have zoning/planning power in favor of HOAs that, undeniably at times, can be far more despotic both in their structure and behavior.
Not saying you, specifically, just a general observation. The irrational and profound hatred of government in this country still surprises me once in a while.
Alex
In Texas, homeowners’ associations can foreclose on homes without a court order, matter the size of the debt.
How on earth did anyone pass such a law in the first place? Without a court order, or any form of due process whatsoever? In the UK you couldn’t collect on a £400 debt without getting a judgment in a small claims court.
Tomas Mendoza
And the question remains, what will come back from that?