"Behind all the exhortations to be safe is the idea that safety is impossible. The whole philosophy. . .involves a kind of perpetual anxiety."
- Katie Roiphe

What to Do About HOA Abuse

• First, do not bother contacting any lawyer for help. They are bound by oath to support the law, which is the problem. You will be bled dry financially to be made to conform and adapt to The Way Things Are (TWTA). They're almost certainly part of the corrupt racket. Wherever there's corruption you'll find lawyers.

• Do contact elected representatives or attend their public appearances to bring the seriousness and ubiquity of this state of affairs to their attention, but have low expectations if they receive campaign money from the real estate industry. Beware of phony, empty reform sloganeering. Have specifics about what you expect them to do rather than just presenting the attitude that "this is a problem which somebody has to do something about".

  For example, truth in labelling, while not really changing anything, would have HOAs renamed to reflect their real nature. This would at least be honest. The NBA is a voluntary association which benefits the basketball teams, owners, and players. If this stopped being the case one (or more) of them could drop out. HOAs are nothing like this.

• Do reach out to local media, but, again, have low expectations. Mainline newspapers and TV stations receive gobs of advertising revenue related to real estate. So there's a perpetual conflict of interest in their coverage of it.
  Click on the quote at right to get to one of the few TV reports anywhere in the country I know of.

  If there's a shooting they're covering that might plausibly be HOA-related, and these happen all the time, contact the reporter and ask if this is so and why such a relevant and important fact is not being reported. The perpetual lack of coverage leads people naturally to think there's no problem, rather than that it's just been buried out of sight.

  Mainline local media tend to act as agents for the Chamber of Commerce, and want to make their area sound wonderful and peachy, except for the rare, few, aberrant bad actors. In other words, any persistent structural problem is presented, or, rather, not presented, to make it seem there's only an isolated, occasional, individual problem, which nobody can really do anything about.

• Similarly, contact any local "crisis center" (or the like), again mainly to bring awareness and call their attention to the widespread nature of this problem.

  But, again, beware: adaptation and conformity is a critical part of the self-help advice model, which is essentially what they're going to offer. Substantive, structural social change is irrelevant to their goals and techniques -- any lip service to the contrary aside.

  You must succeed within the institutions and according to the rules that already exist. To do well is to fit in, and to fit in is to fortify those structures into which you are being fit. In other words, what they want is for you to be a good sport. From this it follows that any intervention must be done at the level of the individual experiencing the difficulty rather than at the level causing it.

• Become an activist. If the above seems pessimistic, remember that if these people and the institutions they're a part of found HOA abuse and the HOA Syndrome any concern you'd already have been hearing plenty about it for some time from many directions. As part of the status quo, they profit from things not changing, so you largely have to go around them. It's not like any of the above people, even if they show some sympathy for your situation, are going to confront anyone, get in their face, and tell them what they're doing is wrong.
  The following is by no means exhaustive of the possibilities:

  

  • Print out copies of the HOA Syndrome fact sheet and post it on public bulletin boards, at libraries, colleges and universities, coffee shops... wherever you can think of. [This particular version is designed to make 2 copies on an 8½"x11" sheet with ½" borders on all four sides, at 150 DPI.]

  • Even maybe go door to door in your surrounding neigborhoods and distribute copies. Be careful, though: places like mobile home parks, which are similar to and pretty much the template for home owner's concentration camps set up by blood-sucking, parasitic property "management" types may try and run you off or threaten trespassing charges if they see you, so you may have to do it hit-and-run style at odd hours and/or under the cover of darkness. The same goes for places like the entrances to grocery stores, where you might be lucky to hand out half a dozen copies before someone

    

  • Put together a short program on the subject and become a public speaker -- at libraries, civic groups, various clubs and other organizations... again, wherever you can find an audience. Many such groups are desperate for speakers at their periodic meetings.

  • Contact any national non-profits you know or hear of that you think may even remotely be interested in some aspect of this situation. You never know where you might find and ear.

    An obvious example here would be what I call SIC, the Suicide Industrial Complex. There are many non-profits that purport to be concerned about this issue, but there's zero research on how HOAs cause ("puts one at risk for") suicide.

    If 21% of the population (70 million divided by 330 million) is confined in HOAs, and there are ~100 suicides per day, how many of these happen in HOAs? There are no numbers because it's not on their radar screens. But HOAs are more prevlent west of the Mississippi, because that's where more of the population growth has been since HOAs were invented about a century ago (think of places like Phoenix, LA, Denver, etc.), and suicide is also higher in the western states, often by the significant and appreciable amounts that have had this mentioned in the news periodically for as long as I can remember -- always with the notion that there's an air of mystery surrounding why this is so. It would seem a simple demographic problem to look at such states county by county and see if there's a correspondence with the prevalence of HOAs and the number of people in them. I know where I'd place my bets. People are killing themselves to escape this organized crime tyranny.

    My considered guesstimate of what causes the 100 suicides a day looks like this:
    30-35 : IRS
    25-30 : HOAs
    15-20 divorce (in the most general sense)

    [These are by no means exclusive: even though I don't think he was ever a suicide, I knew one guy whose wife left him after he received one letter from the IRS.]

    The numbers above leave something like 15-30% for the other causes, like the familiar ones usually promoted (scripted), such as depression, bullying for being different (or just because some people are mean), excessive drinking, etc.

• Finally, whatever you do, don't buy any property in an HOA!!
  Discourage others from doing so whenever you get the chance. I've never encountered such horrible people as I have since making the mistake of buying a place in one. I didn't even know such people existed. It's like being dropped into the middle of a David Lynch movie nightmare.