Suburban Road to Blight: Residents in HOA Rebellion

I have talked many times here about how important HOA's are to quality of life in suburban settings. I have also reiterated the fact that HOA's in Utah loose their teeth over time and suburban neighborhoods that were "THE PLACE" to live become uncool and out of style as HOA rules are relaxed and then become perpetually uneneforceable.

Well it looks like another community is in a tizzy over HOA problems. This morning's Standard Examiner reports that Clinton residents are fighting the prospect of having to create an HOA to maintain "common" land in thier community. In this case a park strip area. Here is a synopsis of the situation from the Standard:

Ivory Homes maintained Lexington Estate’s park strip for about three years, ending last spring, when the last home in the subdivision was sold. At that time, the company sent a letter informing the residents that an HOA must be formed and the park strip would be the HOA’s responsibility from then on. Today, the Lexington Estates HOA board still has not been formed and some residents are looking for a way out. Rasband is one of those residents. A former HOA board member in California, Rasband says there’s no need for an HOA in his neighborhood. There is no park, no tennis court, no pool. The HOA’s only responsibility would be maintaining that park strip, Rasband said, which hardly requires a governing body.

This Rasband guy they interviewed doesn't know what an HOA is for. I wonder what his neighborhood in California looked like. HOA's are supposed to enforce CC&R's...not just mow grass. These residents want to have thier cake and eat it too. They don't want to pay for an HOA yet they want to live in a "new" orderly neighborhood.

There's more:

(Ivory) says through the sale process that everybody who purchased was told or signed papers dealing with (the HOA),” Cluff said. “Some of the home owners say they didn’t know, but sometimes you go in to sign for a house, you’ve got a hundred papers to sign and you don’t always read it all.”

So in other words, the residents wanted to live in "the new" neighborhood so badly they didn't bother to read the paperwork they signed that obligated them to form an HOA when the development was completed.

Little do these residents realize that an HOA is likely all that's keeping their neighborhood from becoming a junk-car-dead-grass-aluminum-foil-in-the-window atrocity in 10 years. I would like to see how nice their park strip looks this August after nobody maintains it.

Ivory Homes says it best:

“(Lexington residents’) concern is ‘I don’t like the HOA and I wish this park strip didn’t exist.’ Well, it does, it did and it has for four years and you bought into it, so let’s move on to maintaining it, shall we?”

Here Here!