HOAs can't keep Old Glory down if governor OKs restrictions | Houston & Texas News | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle.
I'd say the other bills are more important than a law guaranteeing the right to a 20 foot flagpole. For example, I think the priority of payments issue looms a bit larger than getting one's flag into the stratosphere. People are losing their homes in foreclosure because of attorney fees and property manager charges, even after paying enough to satisfy all the HOA's assessment charges. Thanks to Shu and others for sending me this link.
4 comments:
"I'd say the other bills are more important than a law guaranteeing the right to a 20 foot flagpole."
Don't you realize that the right-wing cares more about the American flag than it does about individual American home owners?
Texas is being hailed as model for the rest of the country to emulate.
"Where the Jobs Are" instapundit.com/122191/
"Free Market, Not Government Policies, Drives Energy Boom" instapundit.com/122080/
"Jobs: What Texas and California Can Teach Us" instapundit.com/121402/
But "you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs" (Walter Duranty. "Russians Hungry, But Not Starving". The New York Times. March 31, 1933).
To Walter Duranty's conservative and libertarian heirs, who themselves are eager to keep their audiences ignorant about the abuses of individuals for the sake of the collective good, those eggs are people like U.S. Army Captain Michael Clauer, 81-year old widow Wenonah Blevins, 77-year old Jim Brumbelow, small-businessman Andrew Clements, etc.
More love for Texas from the political right.
instapundit.com/122747/ (June 19, 2011 at 9:26 PM)
Here’s a statistic worth pondering: 45 percent of net U.S. job creation in the last two years comes from Texas.
Yes, Texas: the state that is the poster child for right-wingery, the state with no state income tax whose population is growing at about 1000 per day (see a connection?) while bankrupt behemoths like California are bleeding jobs and people.
There are a handful of other places in the U.S. where job creation is rife. One of them is Washington, D.C. where an exploding government bureaucracy has also led to the creation of many jobs.
Many public-sector, i.e., tax-payer-funded jobs, that is. The jobs in Texas are overwhelmingly private-sector, i.e., wealth-creating jobs.
instapundit.com/122857/ (June 21, 2011 @ 10:18 AM)
Three of the nation’s ten best public high schools are in Texas — the no-income tax, right-to-work state that blue model defenders like to characterize as America at its worst. Florida, another no-income tax, right-to-work state long misgoverned by the evil and rapacious Bush dynasty, has two of the top ten schools.
Like Walter Duranty's Pulitzer Prize winning reporting from the Soviet Union in the 1930s, these conservative and libertarian pundits keep their readers ignorant about the loss of individual private property rights and the communisty threat to home ownership, in the state they hold up as a model for the way things should be.
If John Carona was a Democrat instead of a Republican, his house-stealing business empire would be receiving at least some scrutiny from the disciples of Ayn Rand.
It's also worth pointing out that in Texas, 10% of foreclosures are by HOAs, and not the mortgage lenders.
www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128078864
Not So Neighborly Associations Foreclosing On Homes
NPR "All Things Considered"
June 29, 2010
...
And in 33 states, an HOA does not need to go before a judge to collect on the liens.
It's called nonjudicial foreclosure, and in practice it means a house can be sold on the courthouse steps with no judge or arbitrator involved. In Texas the process period is a mere 27 days — the shortest of any state.
…
Kahne says that as the economy has gone under, HOA management companies and lawyers have been making millions off homeowners through this foreclosure process.
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With the recession, foreclosure filings for delinquent HOA assessments in Texas have increased from about 1 percent of all home foreclosures to more than 10 percent currently, according to the industry.
…
Over the past 20 years, HOAs have exploded across Texas. While there are 1,100 municipalities, there are now 30,000 HOAs. And these associations have far more power to take away a citizen's home than any city or county in Texas.
...
"Don't you realize that the right-wing cares more about the American flag than it does about individual American home owners?"
Case in point, John Stossel's July 4, 2003 "Give Me A Break" column is somewhat critical of HOAs, but only because a homeowner was not allowed to put up a flag pole and ended up paying $150,000 in legal fees.
And as a disciple of Ayn Rand, he couldn't refrain from repeating The Big Lie About HOAs being voluntary, popular, and raising property values:
Fifty million Americans live in them, and while most are happy, the enforcement of association rules is turning some neighborhoods into battle zones. Some rules are picky....Planned communities can set these rules because they're private, and many homeowners love the rules because they like the way the regulations make their communities look nice and uniform. They say this raises property values.
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