Appearance on "On the Commons"
It was fun talking with Shu Bartholomew Saturday afternoon on her radio program, , "On the Commons." That follows on the heels of speaking at the inaugural conference of Marjorie Murray's new organization,Center for California Homeowner Association Law, which I think is performing a great service to the CID owners in California. But all this generated the predictable round of outrage from the HOA abolitionists. Anybody who proposes any realistic reform to make life a little better in HOAs gets attacked by the same cadre of abolitionists, who claim to hate everything about HOA living but apparently choose to live in them anyway. I suggest that measures should be taken to make sure that HOAs remain solvent, and the usual folks vent their spleen. They want to de-fund all the HOAs so they collapse. But as I was explaining, that just leads to court-appointed receivers, court-ordered special assessments, and owners who have to pay up anyway. The question these "let them go belly-up" folks should be made to answer is this: "Which causes more unhappiness in a homeowners life: (a) being told to paint their door a different color; or (b) being ordered to pay $20,000 within 30 days, because their HOA has debts but no money?" If you really care about the millions of people who live in HOAs (versus just having an issue to self-righteously pontificate about), you want those owners to be protected against massive financial liability. That would mean supporting measures that keep these associations from becoming insolvent. Unlike the savings and loan crisis, where the billions of dollars in depositor losses were protected by federal depository insurance, CID owners are on their own.