Why HOAs?

People ask all the time, why do you live in an HOA neighborhood in Florida? Why not just build in a neighborhood without an HOA? The answer to that is- you guessed it- government rules and regulations. Now there is no law, rule, or regulation that says that a neighborhood must be controlled by an HOA, but there is an agency that has that practical effect.

You may or may not be aware that Florida used to be mostly swampland. In fact, it still would be if it weren’t for pretty robust laws and regulations on flood control. On top of that, Florida is built upon an underground lake known as the Florida Aquifer. The aquifer is just a large underground lake that fills the limestone that the entire state is built upon. When the level of water in the aquifer falls, we get sinkholes and the weight of the ground above collapses the now empty underground limestone caves. So Florida has a limited amount of freshwater.

Enter the South Florida Water Management District. (SFWMD- pronounced “swif mud”) This agency controls everything from who may drill a well to how much of the area of your development must contain flood control features like retention ponds, ditches, and even how much of your property can be covered in non permeable surfaces like concrete. They even control the vegetation that grows in those areas, and by control I mean that they tell property owners and developers to take care of it. (pdf alert) Is it a bit heavy handed? A little, but that is why we can build here, instead of Florida being a swamp.

This means that a percentage of each residential development must be grassy areas, landscaped, and dedicated to retention ponds. Those flood control features and permeable surfaces must be maintained at the expense of those who live in the developed area. For a neighborhood, that means mowing, fencing off, and caring for the vacant land. If that doesn’t happen, SFWMD can and will take legal action against the homeowners of the development.

In order to have a legal framework to enforce each homeowner taking care of this, instead of some skating by without contributing, developers create HOAs who then take care of these “common areas.” As long as the HOA is there, it also takes on more traditional HOA rules like neighborhood pools, maintaining property values through rules (called covenants), and other functions.

So you can disband the HOA, but as a homeowner, you are still liable for maintaining those features, but you now have no way as an individual to make your neighbors pay their fair share of those fees. That’s right- you can be stuck with paying it, unless you want to lose your house along with the crackhead who lives down the block and decided not to pay his share because he is a crackhead and doesn’t care.

That’s why more than 80% of Florida’s homes sold in the past few decades are in HOA communities, and most of the rest of them are doublewide trailers whose occupants live next door to or with a meth lab. There are some nice homes that are not in HOA areas, but they are really expensive.

So being stuck with an HOA, your only real course of action is to do your best to keep busybodies from passing rules that mandate certain paint colors, tell you what color your landscaping lights can be, or whether or not you can park a boat in your driveway.

That’s why I do what I can to ensure that those sorts of rules don’t get passed. The law in Florida says that an HOA can’t modify its covenants unless 2/3 of the property owners vote at a meeting to do so. You can’t exclude a property owner who doesn’t live there. You can’t have a secret meeting, and it isn’t 2/3 of those present at the meeting, it is 2/3 of all owners. Now an owner can give his proxy vote to another owner, but the proxy must state the particular covenant that is to be voted on AND the date of the meeting that the proxy is valid for. This is to prevent shenanigans and those with ill intent from changing things behind others’ backs. So I use that to my advantage. As long as I can get 1/3 of property owners to vote no on a covenant change, the rules stay as they are. A property owner can vote no by proxy, or by simply not coming to the meeting. I do what I can to make people see it my way and keep the rules the way that they are. I can look at the guy in the mirror just fine knowing that I kept a tyrant from ruling over the people who live in the neighborhood.

If you are a person who has a problem with those tactics, then how in the world will you ever have the stomach for a civil war? You don’t even have the stomach for parliamentary maneuvering, and you think you are going to survive civil unrest? Or did you think that the coming troubles are going to be a debating society where everyone obeys Roberts’ Rules of Order and plays fair?