But on its face it seems suicidal to cause the home owners to go bankrupt and leave your properties. Unless of course you'd like to tear down the development and build a big fat datacenter on it (the only building that is going on these days) which would net a profit. As grifts go it would kind of amazingly evil you get as much money as you can out of making your homeowners broke followed by selling the land out of foreclosure to build a data center on it and making a profit on that too.
States need to step in and pass laws against this. Georgia recently passed laws to prohibit what HOAs can do and how much they can charge. It also made them register with the state and remain in good standing to be able to collect dues at all. Other states need to follow suit.
It's a 51% attack in real life.
Apparently the developer owns half the homes and has voting power.
This isn't the homeowners' faults. This is beyond predatory.
This shit needs to be illegal, and the company doing this needs to pay.
This should flip to the HOA being used by residents to control builders and landlords. Builders would stop using HOAs if they could not control them, just like it used to be when houses were built just fine without HOAs.
Voting for billionaire conspiracies is more important to a lot of people than voting for themselves.
Freddie and Fannie won't even underwrite loans if the HOA dues are that high. That takes 70% of home buyers out of the market.
With no buyers and no ability to pay the HOA dues, homes go into foreclosure and the HOA gets to take possession of the homes.
This is beyond evil and states need to outlaw this behavior.
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The HOA is meeting Monday night to raise the dues.
The concern from homeowners is that liens will be put on their homes, and they could face bankruptcy or foreclosure.
READ MORE: Magnolia Cove homeowners face massive jump in monthly HOA dues “It’s ridiculous,” said Diana Brokaw, a homeowner.
Brokaw still can’t believe she and the other 22 homeowners in Magnolia Cove are facing a sixfold increase in HOA fees by the first of the year.
“Who has $90,000 extra a year to pay for fees that you’re just told are going to happen,” she said.
Brokaw isn’t alone. Down the street, Jill Menson and her husband bought their home believing it would be their last. She said the homeowner’s fee five years ago was $158, but it shot up to more than $1,200 this summer with a $10,000 assessment. Now the couple is facing fees of $2,500 a month.
“We are going to be forced out with nowhere to go, because no one is going to get a dime for their houses even if we put them on the market,” Menson said.
According to an email from the Magnolia Cove HOA Board of Directors, “The increase is mainly driven by the Association’s legal and collection costs from owner accounts that haven’t been paid. Owners who stay current help bring those costs down over time.”
The North Carolina Attorney General told Channel 9 that there are no statutes that limit how much an HOA can charge in fees, but boards must comply with their governing documents. The homeowners say the developer, who owns the majority of the houses, controls the HOA.
“It’s not right,” Menson said. “Nobody is helping us. We’re not getting any help from the government agencies. No one is helping us.”
Those homeowners said the meeting Monday night will be held over Zoom, and they can’t ask questions of the board. The HOA said homeowners could submit questions ahead of time. The deadline was Friday.
On Monday, the HOA voted to raise fees from $1,250 to $2,500.
Many people ask Action 9 attorney Jason Stoogenke about their rights when it comes to HOAs.
It can be hard to win a fight with your board.
Stoogenke said if you have an issue:
Try to get the support of your neighbors. Strength in numbers. Try meeting with the board as a group, not by yourself. You may have to wait for elections and vote in new board members The initial copy of this story stated that HOA fees were originally proposed to rise to $7,500 a month. The HOA voted to raise fees to $2,500 a month during Monday night’s meeting, after this story first aired.
It is not easy to buy a house in the US that is not controlled by an HOA. A lot of houses are in an HOA and you really have to go out of your way to avoid it. If you're looking in a suburb, exurb, it's 100% going to be an HOA. It's by design:
HOAs are tightly connected to racial segregation, racially restrictive housing, and redlining. Read up on those and it will make you sick to your stomach.
Controlling what homeowners can do to the exterior of their houses has been the main theme of many HOAs. Combined with this, racist policies and architectural uniformity were historically intertwined. They were both done for the same reason: protecting property values.
Are you angry yet?
Some HOAs do OK and are kind of like a collective: They form their own street cleaning, street light installation and electricity bills, snow plow, garbage pickup, lawn mowing all for a deeply discounted monthly fee of sometimes just a few $10s a month.
It's not that hard in the USA. If you don't like driving or have some pseudomoral dilemma over that, I don't know what to tell you. It's hardly a downside.
https://www.terravistarealty.com/search/NC/Sherrills-Ford/45...
The homes in this neighborhood are fairly average single-family homes, ~$400k, roughly the median home price in the US now. There's no shared roof or walls that would be the HOAs responsibility. There's no community pool. Does not appear to be gated. Only expense as far as I can tell is the periodically repaving street, salting, perhaps some gardening -- $2500/mo, even $1250/mo is not supported by those expenses.
Who is the developer? What is their financial situation? Did they take on debt to finance development when rates were near 0% when this development was built ~2020, now that debt has come due but rates are > 5%, and they cannot pay, so they figure they can up the HOA to drop the property prices, evict the homeowners, then drop the HOA again and resell the houses for a profit to shore up their balance sheet?
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