Friday, March 21, 2008

Legislative report: Get tough on condo, homeowner associations -- South Florida Sun-Sentinel.com

Legislative report: Get tough on condo, homeowner associations -- South Florida Sun-Sentinel.com: "A newly released, bipartisan legislative report could lead to extensive changes in state laws protecting the millions of owners in Florida condo and homeowner association communities."
--------------
A bipartisan consensus that Florida needs to "get tough" on condo and homeowner associations? But...but...but...how can this be true? Haven't we been assured by the industry that there are no problems here except for a few malcontents?

Check out this sentence: "The nine-member committee wrote its report after hearing "horror stories" from unit owners in five cities between January and early this month."

My guess is that when denial and denunciation have finally proved futile, the industry will jump on board and act like they have been interested all along in reform.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

"My guess is that when denial and denunciation have finally proved futile, the industry will jump on board and act like they have been interested all along in reform."

Perhaps. More likely, the community assn industry will warn that toughening regulation of HOAs will lead to a flight of HOA directors who, after all, are already overtaxed volunteers struggling to meet existing requirements that in turn will threaten the viability HOAs as a whole. More regulation designed to make HOA regimes more transparent and accountable will be the proverbial straw on the camel's back, the argument will go.

This objection will reveal the fundamental flaw in private local government by HOA: the lack of a true governance culture based on access, accountability and rule of law. After all, they're just well intentioned volunteers trying to serve their neighbors, the industry will contend.

The problem is as you noted in your 1994 book "Privatopia: Homeowner Assocations and the Rise of Residential Private Government," the functions of HOAs are governmental in nature; they are not the local garden or tennis club. They have real governmental powers (property taxation, regulation of land use) combined with enforcement powers with teeth to make their policies stick.

My observations do not apply to condos, which shouldn't be regulated as HOAs at all but rather as closely held, publicly traded real estate investment securities.

Evan McKenzie said...

The trend seems to be toward more and more detailed process regulations that cover all CIDs. At the rate we are going, soon the state will be specifying the type size on HOA election ballots.