In the sprawling, 55-and-older community of two-story condos, Salmi, who uses a walker, found a ground-floor unit condo for $35,000. The 71-year-old with shoulder-length gray hair and a sunny disposition still loves the 615-square-foot, one-bedroom unit in the Sheffield O building.
Author Archives: Beanie
GEORGIA – Neighbor dispute escalates
FORSYTH HERALD: Neighbor dispute escalates
June 22, 2015
FORSYTH COUNTY, Ga. — A man wanted to document harassing communications from his neighbor on Upland Court June 6.
The man told officers he was approached by a neighbor who received a letter about covenant violations from the homeowners’ association (HOA) board. He told her he didn’t know anything about it, although he was on the HOA. He said the woman left upset and disappointed.
The next day, the man said he received a message on Facebook from the woman’s husband asking him what he said to his wife and mentioning he would find out sooner or later. He said the husband went on to call him names and curse at him. The man didn’t respond. Read more:
FLORIDA – Condo reform does not help all owners
Orlando Sentinel: Condo reform does not help all owners
By Mary Shanklin
June 19, 2015
Gov. Rick Scott this week signed a law aimed at protecting the rights of condo owners when developers are trying to convert complexes into rental properties.The legislation is designed to restrict buyouts that enable companies that own the bulk of the units in a condo complex to force remaining owners to sell to them. The new law calls for bulk-ownership investors to compensate individual owners for the amount paid in most instances.
INDIANA – Are We Winning? Hunter’s Run Decision Says We Are!
NEIGHBORS AT WAR: Are We Winning? Hunter’s Run Decision Says We Are!
By Ward Lucas
June 17, 2015
I never thought I’d see this day. But doesn’t it seem to you like more and more Homeowners Associations are losing big court cases involving fines, judgments and legal fees?
There’ve been several in a row where the feds came down hard on HOAs that overtly or passively discriminated against families with children or handicapped members.
The latest is an Indiana family that moved from their home and rented it out without asking HOA permission. The Indiana Court of Appeals ruled that the fines and the lien the Hunter’s Run HOA filed on the family were illegal. More than that, the lien was invalid and a slander against the homeowner’s property title making the home unsaleable. Now the Hunter’s Run HOA will have to pay thousands and thousands of dollars to this family to make them whole. Read more:
FLORIDA – Century Village investor to elderly owners: I’m buying your condo
CCFJ.net: Century Village investor to elderly owners: I’m buying your condo
Article Courtesy of The Palm Beach Post
By Tony Doris
Published June 16, 2015
WEST PALM BEACH — Nancy Salmi moved to Century Village in suburban West Palm from California’s high desert in 2004, to be near her son and grandchildren, who live in Wellington.
But now she lives under a cloud. An investor has snapped up most of the building and wants to force the other owners out.
“I am in the process of taking steps to dissolve the Association of Sheffield O whereby all of the apartments that I do not own would be forced to sell to me at the Palm Beach County Appraisers value,” Donald T. Kelly, wrote to Sal-mi on March 2.
Whether he can do so is not clear, said Dave Israel, president of United Civic Organization, the coordinating authority for Century Village’s 309 property owners associations. What is clear, Israel says: The entire community is in a panic over whether what happens at Sheffield O could topple other buildings like dominoes.
“These are elderly people, and they’re scared to death,” he said.
Kelly has not revealed his plans for Sheffield O or other buildings where he has been accumulating condos for the past four years. The Palm Beach Gardens resident said that on the advice of his lawyer, he would not talk. The word in the community at various times has been that he might turn the building into an assisted-living facility or a rehab center or just rent out the condos. Residents say he already rents some units to people directed there by a nonprofit that helps the homeless transition into housing.
According to Israel, Florida law allows investors who own 80 percent of a building’s condos to force the remaining 20 percent to sell. By his count, Kelly owns 15 units of the building’s 26 condos, some under the name of trusts he controls and has the power of attorney over two others.
“That gives you control of 17,” Israel said. “The magic number to dissolve a condominium association to buy out the rest under the current statute is 80 percent, “which would require him to own 21 condos.
Kelly already is president of the Sheffield O Condominium Association.
“Clearly he controls the building,” Israel said. Read more:
FLORIDA – Is this the condo from hell?
CCFJ.NET: Is this the condo from hell?
Article and Video Courtesy of Channel 10 News Miami
By Bob Norman
June 20, 2015
The dream of living on the ocean is alive and well in Hollywood Beach.
“It was my dream to live on the beach in beautiful Florida,” said Yelena Kazakova, who owns a unit in the Aquarius condo there. “The sun, the ocean, just every day you wake up and you see this beauty and it lifts up your spirit.”
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“There has been nothing but chaos,” said Kazakova’s neighbor, Paul Mangiamele, a part-time resident who happens to own the Bennigan’s restaurant chain. “Chaos in the sense of construction projects that never seem to finish. We can’t use the pool. We can’t use the lobby. We can’t use the west pool. We can’t use the fitness center.”
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INTERNATIONAL – Israel conference on residential private government
The Privatopia Papers: Israel conference on residential private government
By Evan McKenzie
June 17, 2015
Professor McKenzie attended a conference on private communities and presented a paper “Rethinking Residential Private Government in the United States: Recent Trends in Practices and Policy” –http://gazit-globe.idc.ac.il/en/announcements/international-conference-private-communities-and-urban-governance-theoretical-and-c
Professor McKenzie noted:
Professor McKenzie noted:
Insolvency of condominium associations is a significant problem in other nations–it isn’t just a US problem. And owners are ultimately liable for the debts of their associations in other nations, not just the US. Most US condo and HOA owners don’t know they are potentially on the hook for their associations debts, by the way. In Spain, everybody has to rotate as a BOD member, like it or not. Read story:
NEVADA – How Las Vegas HOA fraud costs are calculated could boost prison terms
Las Vegas Review-Journal: How Las Vegas HOA fraud costs are calculated could boost prison terms
By Jeff German
June 15, 2015
In court papers, Justice Department lawyers calculate nearly $15 million in actual losses — mostly at the Vistana HOA, where the mastermind, former construction company boss Leon Benzer, and co-conspirators stole more than $12.5 million from a construction-defect settlement.
Benzer also had gained control or was about to take over a half-dozen other HOA boards that eventually obtained more than $45.5 million in construction-defect settlements.
Park Avenue won a $12.5 million construction-defect settlement, Chateau Versailles, $8.8 million; Mission Ridge, $8.5 million; Chateau Nouveau, $8.2 million; Jasmine, $5.6 million; and Mission Pointe, $1.9 million; according to prosecutors.
Benzer, who pleaded guilty and is to be sentenced Aug. 6, recruited straw buyers at the condominium developments and rigged elections to place them on the HOA boards so they could steer the lucrative construction repair work his way, prosecutors alleged. He also put community management companies and lawyers in place to watch the boards.
Benzer intended to “vacuum up every dollar of these settlements,” but before he could grab the money, FBI agents and Las Vegas police broke up the scheme with raids across the valley in September 2008, prosecutors wrote.
“The United States will establish at sentencing that although the HOA takeover conspiracy succeeded in full at only one HOA — Vistana — its tentacles reached throughout the Las Vegas Valley into many different HOAs,” prosecutors said. Read more:
TENNESSEE – Homeowners’ association threatens to sue residents over wheelchair ramp
Consumer Affairs: Homeowners’ association threatens to sue residents over wheelchair ramp
Because learning from someone else’s mistake is just too easy
By Jennifer Abel
June 10, 2015
Last month, a homeowners’ association in Franklin, Tennessee paid $156,000 to settle (with no admission of wrongdoing) a lawsuit brought by former residents who said that the HOA discriminated against them and violated the Fair Housing Act, when it refused to let them build a therapeutic sunroom where their two children with Down syndrome could play and receive in-home physical therapy.And this week, another HOA in nearby Brentwood is threatening to sue a couple unless they remove a wheelchair ramp necessary for the husband to enter his own home.
WSMV reports that, after Michael Broadnax suffered a stroke last summer, his wife Charlotte put a small ramp in front of their house so her husband could have his rehabilitation therapy at home. But their HOA, the Woodlands of Copperstone, sent them a letter dated June 1 and demanding the ramp be removed within 14 days.
“The association demands that within 14 days of the date of this letter, you remove the wheelchair ramp and restore the exterior of your home,” the letter said, or else “the association [will] come onto your property and remove the ramp and charge you with the work.” Furthermore, “If you force the association to sue you, it will seek a court order” and then charge the Broadnaxes for attorney’s fees.
Charlotte Broadnax says that she installed the ramp around Thanksgiving. “The nursing home said they were sending my husband home and I needed a ramp put up.” So she hired a legal contractor to install the ramp, whch passed the nursing home’s inspection, and she also says that neither her neighbors nor anybody else ever complained to her about the ramp — until she received the certified letter threatening legal action if she didn’t remove it within two weeks. Read more:
NATIONAL – How the rise of gated spaces like swimming pools can quietly perpetuate racial tension
The Washington Post: How the rise of gated spaces like swimming pools can quietly perpetuate racial tension
By Emily Badger
June 8, 2015
In the video — a clip that, by Monday morning, had been viewed more than 4 million times — the white officer in McKinney, Tex., pushes a black teenage girl onto the ground, unholstering his weapon as her frantic friends try to approach. The girls in the chaotic scene are all wearing bathing suits. The setting, on a Friday evening in suburban Dallas, was a community swimming pool.
As Yoni Appelbaum points out over at The Atlantic, this context is particularly freighted: For decades, swimming pools in America have been sites of racial exclusion. Many of the fights to desegregate communities and public resources in the 1950s were waged over access to swimming pools. And the way they’re used to this day still reflects a sweeping trend — more subtle in its exclusion but no less pervasive — that arose from that era. Read more:
Minnesota – Kicking Kids Around
Neighbors at War: Kicking Kids Around
Ward Lucas June 13, 2015
guest blog by Dave Russell
How to ‘legally’ discriminate against children in HOAs…… It’s pretty simple, and it only takes one word!
A Fair Housing case was just settled in Minnetonka, Minnesota. Six families in the Greenbrier Village Homeowners Association won a settlement agreement in a federal lawsuit. The feds say the HOA was violating the law when it banned children from playing in the grass.
The Greenbrier Village Homeowners’ Association and Gassen Company had to establish new nondiscrimination policies, pay a $10,000 fine to the federal government and $100,000 to six families for their illegal discrimination
How to legally discriminate? Just use one tricky word
Shortly after the Minnetonka settlement, HOA lawyers started sending notices to every HOA in the land warning about discriminatory rules and policies relating to children and families. Read more:
HOA Reform Coalition 