Neighbor against neighbor: "When she and her husband, Glenn, decided to buy a house in Willamette Landing, a planned development in South Corvallis, the statues went up on the porch and in the yard before the furniture was even unloaded.
'I wasn't going to move anywhere without my statues,' Wolf said.
Now those statues have become the focal point of a long-simmering dispute that has pitted the Wolfs against their homeowners' association board, stirred up ill will among the neighbors and prompted an effort to recall three of the five board members."
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Thanks to Beth for the link to this story about a home with five statues on the lawn ranging from 6 inches to 3 feet. The folks thought they were OK bringing these in, but the BOD doesn't like them. And they are off to HOA Conflict Land. As Mr. Wolf aptly put it, ""There's a sociological thing that happens when people are put in charge," Glenn Wolf said. "But when it's a homeowners' association, they're really not answerable to anybody. There's no one you can complain to except them."
And that about sums it up.
5 comments:
Combine this Lord of the Flies dysfunctional governance culture with the community assn industry bar and you've got the perfect formula for frivolous litigation.
Amen, to Fred Pilot! Harassment, fear, bullying, fining and forced foreclosure, lying are their greatest tools. Many of these groups and their cronies create so much conflict and fear, because THEY ARE SO PARANOID. They knoe they are wrong, but they got the power for now.
Towns, special districts, cities and counties also have considerable power and like HOAs, they can abuse it. But I believe there's a big difference in the governance cultures (and culture is king in my book) between local governments and HOAs that gets completely missed in the discussion.
The traditional local governments know they must operate under constitutional restraints on their exercise of power and have professional staff who also are aware of these restraints and are in a position to regularly advise governing councils and boards of supervisors of them in their deliberations. Neither of these circumstances exist in private government by nonprofit corporation,the form employed by HOAs.
Thank you for the comment above Mr. Pilot. I would expect you have some thought on the HOA's turning themselves into towns and "involuntarily incorporating," their neighbors (of course these newly incorporated neighbors have no rights to anything within tyhe community) using the same annexation loopholes some towns are using.
Apparently the newspaper reporter did not avail himself of the facts of this case as posted on the official website at www.wloa.org
Its not about the statues; its about a homeowner trying to get back at the neighbor who filed a complaint by trying to remove board members. The Board of Directors never asked the Wolfs to remove their statues & BOD considers the matter of the statues resolved and closed as of last July; the Wolfs just refuse to consider the matter resolved and closed.
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