Sam and Maria Farran. Photo courtesy The Washington Post
Homeowners associations can get into big trouble by picking the wrong fight with the wrong homeowner.
Want to infringe on someone’s First Amendment rights? Think you can bully someone into taking down a political sign because they disagree with your politics? HOA boards need to be careful who they pick on.
Check out this story in the Washington Post.
It tells how an HOA board in the Olde Belhaven community in Washington D.C., picked a fight with Sam and Maria Farran over an Obama for President sign they put in their yard in 2008.
The sign was four inches taller than the maximum limit allowed by the association’s rules. One HOA board member, Don Hughes, took a hardline stance against the couple. He wrote a letter threatening to ask the HOA board to put a lien on their townhome unless they complied.
But Sam and Maria Farra refused to take it down. They argued their right to display the sign was protected by the Constitution. The board initiated fines in the hundreds of dollars. The couple sued, calling the fines vindictive.
Now, more than four years later, the HOA is being forced to pay Sam and Maria Farra’s legal costs as well as their own. The tab is $400,000 and the legal battle has ruined the HOA’s finances.
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HOA bites homeowners, homeowners bite back, HOA loses….
The case was not a case about “Obama” but rather about the absurdity of blindly following “rules” under the pretext that they had anything to do with property values or that “property values” were a sufficient rationale for imposing such control over property belonging to the homeowners.
Expect a lot more HOA boards and management companies to lose on this and other issues. In fact, here is another one you might find interesting. In the recent Texas case involving “The Landing” condominiums, the condo corporation and vendors were hit with a damages claim of $1,356,880 in favor of the victim homeowners and an additional $616,678 in attorney fees that the condo corporation will have to pay the victim homeowners. The case was in El Lago, Texas (Harris County) and decided Friday February 8, 2013. Even better – the board members are likely to be held personally financially responsible before this is all over.
GOOD!!!!!HOA’s can be total bullies and deserve a slap down.
I’m always cautious when reading articles like the linked story in the Washington Post because they may miss key facts. However, based on that article the HOA board not only decided to fight it out over political signs but shortly thereafter chose to reject a request from the some homeowners for a home improvement project. Both issues resulted in lawsuits, both of which were lost by the HOA, and the latter cost the most.
As a former HOA board member, I see a couple of lessons here. First, in Colorado by law HOAs can’t restrict political signs during the period around an election – if that had been the law in Virginia the first dispute would not have happened. The second is that before pursuing an expensive lawsuit the HOA should be virtually certain of the merit of their case (otherwise you’re rolling dice with HOA funds) and because there is never a 100% guaranteed lawsuit, the HOA must be willing at all times to settle the case for a reasonable compromise.
Again, we only have the article to go on and it may be missing key facts. But reading that it does appear that the homeowners were more combative, and probably therefore more of a challenge to deal with, than your average homeowner. Those are the situations that test HOA management, because that is when it is especially important to follow the laws and your own rules to the letter.
From the article it appears the courts found that the fines imposed were not permitted by the covenants and that the denial of the home improvement project was at a secret meeting and was based on an arbitrary standard. Folks, these are really basic rules an HOA has to follow. If the article is correct, competent legal advisors should have warned the HOA to settle at the earliest opportunity. Even if there was some “grey area” in the covenants regarding fine-setting, the safest solution for the community would have been to resolve the immediate issue with a compromise and to try to revise the covenants (easier to do in a small community like this one) to make the authority clear. And for project approvals it is absolutely critical that there be written, approved design standards applied consistently.
But, we don’t know from the article if the HOA’s lawyers did offer such advise and were rejected by the HOA management. This may have been the case – the HOA is quoted as saying they rejected settlement hearings. There is also the interesting fact that annual assessments increased by a factor of more than 5, from $650 to $3500, just to cover the ongoing legal fees, yet apparently the majority of the homeowners took the side of the HOA board and paid the assessments instead of pushing the board to settle. This suggests a level of animosity in that community toward those homeowners that is hard to imagine. Unfortunately, that animosity has caused large financial damage to the community – which is once again why it is best to resolve these situations early in the process and to be as certain as possible that the lawsuit will win before starting the process.
The headline is stupid and misleading. This had nothing to do with Obama. It was about a bullying, abusive group of people trying to infinge on this couple’s rights. I wish all HOAs would meet the same fate. HOAs should be outlawed.
Good!! HOAs are nothing more than folks who wish to control others and make them conform to certain wishes. “Whoa, dude, your wife wears a bikini in the back yard. I’m a Christian, and that is wrong. Cover her up or I will sue you!” Meanwhile, back at he ranch, The Lone Ranger and Tonto were looking at picture from other HOA womenz, trying their best not to slobber….
In my non-HOA neighborhood, it looks like a bunch of hillbilly no accounts have taken over. In one city block, I counted 76 cars, pickups, trailers and yes…even a 16 wheeler parked on the street today.
With all these adult kits come back home to live off mommy and daddy, everybody looses.
You do make a good point, Ed D. And that is people have forgotten their manners, and what it means to live in a neighborhood. And that’s what HOAs were originally about. But so many of them have become micromanaging nuisances that have stepped well beyond their original purpose. But I do hear you.
I have a neighbor whose house is actually quite beautiful on the inside, but an absolute disaster on the outside .. much of it the result of projects started, but only half finished, half patched, half stained, etc. It’s like a shanty. Even the Christmas tree still lays in the front yard.
Don’t get me wrong, I love my neighbors … they’re a young family with a new business just trying to get ahead, and both time and money are limited for them. But they seem completely oblivious to the fact that the state of their home drags down surrounding property values by tens of thousands of dollars.
HOAs, and to some extent code enforcement (back when it was funded, well staffed and efficient) … were designed exactly for this. If you have to sell your house, is it fair that you lose $20,000 because your neighbor is a pig? Is it really to much to ask for people to keep their properties up, and show some pride?
People around here especially argue for private property rights. But is it private, when your disaster is in FULL PUBLIC VIEW?
Not at all.
Good for the Homeowners! I REALLY hope the Woodmoor “Improvement” Association is listening and takes heed. Mr. and Mrs. Hitler are one of the chief reasons I moved outghta there….
Craig – you are right. The paper didn’t get the whole story. The board consulted a top HOA lawyer who gave them “free” advice that they didn’t need to have a meeting to pass a fines resolution. All the Farrans requested was a meeting to have a vote on the fines as required by the covenants. No lawsuit threatened, just a vote. Board refused, went bat crazy and never stopped. They picked nominating committee and made sure only their supporters got elected. Homeowners who questioned expenditures were shouted down as”friends of the Farrans”. Think it’s easy to be yelled at? I could go on and on. Farrans were serious and knew their rights. Judge at trial said board reminded her of George Orwells Animal Farm. That’s the short story. The long one is even crazier.