Daily Herald - In Eagle Mountain, the “ugly underbelly” of homeowners associations: "But the deterioration of this neighborhood, as bad as it is, is not what really worries the handful of owners who remain here. What keeps them up at night can be summarized in one word: snow. The gritty reality of global recession has thudded into the laps of a dozen homeowners in Eagle Mountain, exposing what city manager John Hendrickson called “the ugly underbelly” of homeowners associations. Except for a handful of owners, Silver Lake Village has been reduced to a ghost town. The real problem here is, who is in charge? The short answer is no one, not a soul. Who owns this privately owned community? Who takes care of property? Who will plow the roads? Snow will come. That knowledge recently prompted resident Erin Carbajal to go to the City Council. Because Silver Lake Village is privately owned, the city does not plow the streets."
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Here is a great example of a failed HOA where the city and the residents are waking up to some very unpleasant truths. As I have been saying forever, there will be plenty more stories like this in the years to come.
Thanks to Fred Pilot for the link.
2 comments:
It's more than a mere example of a single failed HOA. This case is emblematic of the failure of private local government.
Now for the $64,000,000 question.
What happens to the housing market in this country when buyers wake up and realize what a failure private local government really is?
Perhaps it is time for city managers like John Hendrickson, named in this article, to understand their part in these disasters from their insisting that all new subdivisions have homeowner associations. I won't be holding my breath!
When buyers finally understand that when they are buying real property under the control of an HOA, they are buying a financial and legal time bomb, they will then decide to avoid HOA housing altogher. When this finally happens on a mass scale, perhaps then we will see some real change in urban land use policies that mandate HOAs.
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