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THINK TWICE AND THEN DON’T DO! |
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Name of Author withheld to Prevent Retaliation August 5, 2009
Anyone
considering buying into a community controlled by an HOA needs to understand the
“Gestapo” tactics that exist in these communities today. It’s
really not as difficult for “control freaks” to gain and maintain control as
you may think. Mostly it’s the
result of apathy on the part of the homeowners.
Many Florida communities are populated by elderly citizens that just want
to live out their retirement years in peace; therefore, they don’t want to be
involved in controversy. This
lack of involvement by the residents allows the self-serving little groups of
like-minded individuals to form cliques and gain control by manipulation and
intimidation of elderly residents that just want to live out their lives in
peace. Seven
years ago as a new widow I made the mistake of buying into a development that
was still under construction. It
appeared to be a widow’s dream. Pay
a small fee and have someone take care of all your outside maintenance.
And so the long nightmare began. Over
the past seven years I have encountered a level of evilness that I’ve never
before seen in a residential community -- much of that evilness perpetrated by a
woman that always professed to be “God fearing.” She gained the support of
many residents by promising to hold the builder accountable for drainage
problems and other problems. She
was very persuasive. She developed
a group of supporters that was almost cult-like in nature.
Some of her male supporters were willing to threaten and intimidate the
elderly at her behest and I soon became a target of that.
Early on, I had asked the builder not to allow a fence to be constructed
on the community easement that would obstruct my access to my own backyard.
This led to threats from two of that woman’s male supporters.
One of her supporters sent out an e-mail stating he would run me out of
the neighborhood at her request. The
other one sent me an e-mail containing such crude statements as, “If you had a
brain, immigration would arrest you for smuggling fesses.” (I assume he meant
feces?) And she herself stated to me that she would build her #*&$ fence
anywhere she chose and other residents could, too.
After months of persistence and with a great deal of opposition from the association and no help at all from the property manager I finally convinced the builder to intervene and my fence problem was resolved. Over
the past seven years I have tried to deal with such issues as unethical property
managers, board members totally disregarding our governing documents and Florida
statutes, serious discrepancies in the accounting, incompetent contractors,
difficulty accessing association documents, malicious lies designed to discredit
me, lack of action by DBPR when large amounts of money was missing from our
reserve account. And
these problems continue to this day with no end in sight.
The new BOD is just as controlling and self-serving as the previous one
and the new property manager is even more arrogant than the ones before him. A wise
person learns from someone else’s bad experiences.
Please don’t be deceived by the false promises of managed communities.
Claims that Covenants and Restrictions lead to a more attractive
community and increased property values are a farce.
Board members have enormous power over how your money is spent and which
covenants are enforced. HOAs
take the neighborliness out of neighborhoods. |