Completion of Preparatory Work on Gated Communities Legislation Anticipated by 2019/20 - Jamaica Information Service: "The proposed Act aims to address issues associated with town houses and gated communities that are not currently covered by legislation.
They include non-payment of maintenance fees, dispute resolution, violation of by-laws and other communal living arrangements.
Noting that the Act could, arguably, represent the last major piece of legislation required to streamline the entire real estate sector into “good order”, Dr. Chang said the consultations were timely.
This, he pointed out, against the background that “we are going to see more and more town houses, gated communities and expanded apartment complexes; so we need the appropriate legislation to ensure that properties are properly maintained and developed”."
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In Jamaica, as in so many other places, common interest housing is the way the housing market is going.
3 comments:
Evan, with all due respect, I and a growing number of colleagues across the country do not buy into this doomsday mindset — that all new housing will be a common interest development governed by a mandatory association.
The backlash is underway in the U.S., and the world is watching. Financially and physically, mature common interest schemes are crumbling under the weight of their own dysfunction.
Just like the coal industry and passenger transit by locomotive trains, just like cable TV and printed newspapers, the association-governance model is becoming obsolete — a costly, inefficient anachronism in its time.
The “private government” is more likely to continue in countries where the government is already nondemocratic, communistic, or dictatorial.
Well is there any doubt the legislation is all negative for homeowners? Look at the ONLY topics mentioned:
"They include non-payment of maintenance fees, dispute resolution, violation of by-laws and other communal living arrangements."
So you're going to see i) the priority of payment scam and forecloseable statutory liens; ii) involuntary alternative dispute resolution; and iii) private "fining" at a minimum. Considering the input came only from "stakeholders" rather than the homeowners it isn't hard to predict the chaos that will ensue for homeowners currently living in one of these places or future purchasers.
Deborah, I don't have a "doomsday mindset." I'm just stating facts. I do agree with you that CID housing has a lot of problems as things are currently set up. I've been saying for years that CIDs are fragile and that a lot of them were going to fail unless some changes are made. The over-reliance on owner resources and the lack of any kind of meaningtul oversight are causing big problems.
But that all happens downstream, to owners far removed from the original development and sales stage.
None of the problems at the end of the condo life cycle affect the start of the life cycle. None of that discourages the informal supply side partnership of developers and municipalities from bringing them into existence. And it isn't just in the US. They are spreading all over the world, and fast.
As for the demand side, I don't see any evidence of a consumer backlash, if that's what you are saying. I've been hearing people predict that for decades and it hasn't happened yet. People buying homes don't even know what HOAs are, or if they do, they don't care. Home buyers make their decisions based on mortgage interest rates, prices, features and amenities, locations, school district decisions, and neighborhood demographics.
The only remaining factor is possible state and federal regulation. So far there are very few states that have shown any interest in meaningful regulation (you just wrote a good piece on the political power of developers, and then there are the realtors, and both of them are dwarfed by the power of the insurance and lending industries). The federal government's housing policy since 1935 has been mainly to promote private single-family and multi-family housing construction and private home ownership. There are many other forces driving condo and hoa construction--sprawl, environmental issues, technological changes in materials, aging of the population, transportation technology, etc.-- and if anything those forces are intensifying. For example, the housing shortage in California will lead to higher density construction, probably mandated by state government. That will require common ownership arrangements. So I don't see any doomsday. I do see continued spread of CID housing, and I also see intensifying problems in CID governance, especially in condominiums, and especially in condo conversions, and most especially if they are occupied by people of moderate means. Both these things are happening, and there is no contradiction.
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