HOAS are Big Business
Submitted as a Commentary to the Arizona Capitol Times
Apr 24, 2001
I feel the committee had failed to effectively to
meet items (1) and (3) relating to protecting the rights of homeowners and
investigating the practices of management companies, respectively. As for item
(3), the committee never called any of the management companies to answer for
the charges made against them by the homeowners and therefore, could not come
to any unbiased conclusion.
Pat Haruff, HOA committee member and homeowner representative, writes, “The most frustrating part of the legislative process is that ‘Joe Citizen’ is really NOT a ‘part’ of the process … In the final analysis the ONLY persons who have ready access and plenty of contact with YOUR representative are the Lobbyists for the many Special Interests.”
To place these issues in proper context let me say
that the intrinsic legal structure of the HOA is defective and that the
problems with HOAs are not the grumbling of a “disgruntled minority”. It’s a
nationwide problem and Arizona had an opportunity to do the right thing and
failed. Shu Bartholomew, host and producer of On The Commons, uses the
slogan “You are now leaving the American Zone” to call attention to the
private government nature of these nonprofit corporations, with their denials
of the civil liberties that Americans
are entitled to. There have been
Supreme Court cases in other states that decided that certain acts by HOAs are
“an unconstitutional delegation of government powers”. Yet, homeowners are
still being held to a so-called private contract arrangement between HOA and
the homeowner that is arguably voidable for 2 reasons: it denies homeowners
their civil liberties and there has not been a true “meeting of the minds” with
a full disclosure of what living in an HOA really means.
What the legislators and the public are not
being told by the special interest management firms, lead by the leading trade
group, CAI, that, as Ms Bartholomew states, “Property values and the quality
of their lives are subject to the whims of their neighbors and the honesty or
lack thereof of management”. As Rick
Happ from North Carolina Property Rights says, “Even a well directed HOA is
"one election away" from tyranny … The HOA problem is a national
problem that needs to be addressed on a Federal level.”
“Why”, I ask, “have the Arizona legislators failed to see these basic
violations of the American way of government and fair-play?” Because HOAs are big business! CAI,
the special interest lobbying trade group, vigorously attacked homeowners
seeking to call attention to these problems in the HOA committee, in the
legislature and in the media. And the legislators sat silent and wouldn’t even
remove this impediment to the redress of grievances from the HOA committee.
Cities and towns get infrastructure paid for by developers rather than having
to raise taxes to pay for expansion, creating these private governments that
denial civil liberties. This is the extent that special interests have spread
their myths about HOAs, permitting
government officials at all levels to look the other way.
HOAs are big
business
George K. Staropoli, Pres.
Citizens Against private Government HOAs
http://pvtgov.org