I hate my HOA board so much. They take in ~$200k/month + special assessments sometimes and are still always broke. They outsource everything to a management company that never calls you back. They laid off one of the maintenance/groundskeeper guys so now we’re down to one and nothing ever gets swept.
They cut down our nice privacy bush that knocked down road noise and replaced it with a bunch of drought-resistant sticks. Meanwhile the inner-circle people in the center of the compound still have water features and lush landscaping. But you can’t see that from the road so I guess it’s ok. If they ever cut down the trees that give me shade and privacy I’m going to shoot someone.
I bet they’re giving out shady sweetheart contracts to family and friends. Of course i’m too lazy to actually go to the board meetings. But someone needs to get in there and fight for me.
Sometimes the association gets a big bump by foreclosing on a home. My HOA did that in Vegas and got a $100k bump in it’s fund. It kept the HOA fat for a long time and paid for a lot of roof repairs without any special assessments.
Yeah another thing my HOA did - the management company changed our account numbers for some reason - so my auto-bill checks weren’t getting credited to me. Apparently they were too lazy to just lookup my freaking last name. I’m sure they notified us about the account number change in the pages of boilerplate they send with our bill every month.
I found out about this when I got a big scary letter about a lien on my property if I didn’t pay. I was like 2 months behind. Scary to think they’re salivating over that. And of course I still couldn’t talk to a live human about it. I had to play message tag and eventually got it sorted out. Fuckers.
Also, the reserve fund isn’t really an “emergency” fund. The reserve is based on a reserve study that figures out the future maintenance costs of what the HOA owns. In my case, in my HOA, we have a couple of private streets that will need to be repaved or maintained in 10 years, storm ponds that will need to be maintained in a few years, etc. Here’s some stuff from one of our older HOA reserve studies:
You generally adjust your dues to maintain a healthy reserve to cover these costs. The special assessments are when you find yourself in a situation where a sinkhole suddenly opens up on one of the HOA owned streets, or your building is about to collapse.
I mean what’s going to happen? I vent, they tell me nothing can be done about any of it. Meeting over. I’d have to get seriously involved in the thing, build a coalition, etc. to actually have any say.
FIght for yourself. Join the board. I’ve been on my HOA board for 10 years, and I hate when people bitch about stuff but don’t even bother to come to a meeting.
Same boat. We have 51 homes in our association. We’ve done better than you and had almost 20 people show up once for an important meeting. But the board knocked on doors in the neighborhood to guilt people into coming. We were ratifying a rate increase and wanted input from the residents.
We do throw a community BBQ every year that gets most of the folks out to meet their neighbors, but nobody wants to get involved in the board. They just want to bitch about it when they think we aren’t doing anything.
We’re pretty handsoff though, and don’t generally get involved in too much, and have pretty much stopped doing any kind of inspections for upkeep of community standards. We seem to have a pretty good group of owners now that are mostly taking care of their properties.
It’s unclear if anything would change. I can’t get my privacy bush back, I’m sure they legitimately don’t have the money for another groundskeeper - whether or not they’ve squandered it is another story. It would probably take years for me to stop being the noob and understand how everything works. It’s just not worth the time and effort investment. Also I plan to sell within a year anyway.
I did vote in the board elections for outsiders. Hopefully they get in there and fix things. We have 380 units btw. Lots of people running for board.
I lived in two places with HOAs which was all the evidence I needed to never buy a condo. I’ve rented from and been neighbors to some really great people who tried to be active with the board and to do things correctly. I’m talking about people who were professional, skilled, honest, and smart, and they all eventually gave up and moved out. What I’ve noticed is that the sociopaths eventually win with their ability to relentlessly bring the never-ending bullshit. They’re like grizzly bears that you keep shooting yet they keep coming, only the extreme personality disorder version of that.
