Some people choose to enter into Homeowners associations and some are entered by default. Regardless, it is rare to hear anything good about them. From impossible regulations to ridiculous complaints and fees, these folks have had enough with their HOA! Residents share what experiences led them to sue their HOA. This content has been edited for clarity.
No Trespassing
“A friend of mine inherited a house next to an HOA subdivision from her uncle. He had never joined the HOA. The problem was this lovely little hump-back bridge separating her house and the HOA subdivision from ‘the rest of the world.’ The HOA just assumed that any property on ‘this side’ of the bridge belonged in the HOA.
Her lot was around three acres with the house set back from the road and a stone wall around the place. The driveway went straight back, then circled around a huge round flower bed to the detached garage. Her uncle had put fruit trees and a grape trellis in the front yard. The notices started shortly after she moved in. They didn’t like the stone wall, her car being visible in the driveway, the fruit trees in the front yard, and a host of other things. I used to get phone calls once a week that started with,
‘You are not going to believe this!’
For nearly a year and a half, she would respond to each letter politely explaining that her property predated the HOA and she was not a member. She finally created a ‘fill in the blank’ letter with spaces for their complaint and the date. The last straw was the threat about her elderly female rottweiler, Lady. Lady was a retired breeder and very gentle unless you were threatening her owner.
The HOA only allows dogs up to 30 pounds and specifically states ‘no Rottweilers or Pit Bulls.’ In this letter, they specified their intention to seize the dog on a specific date if she didn’t get rid of it. She immediately got an attorney. He was involved in animal rescue, so he loved this one. He wrote a letter to the HOA, she put up ‘No Trespassing’ signs, including one on her driveway gate.
On the day they had threatened to take the dog, a van showed up. It was the Humane Society, not the usual county dog catcher. There were two men, one opened the gate and they drove in. They were polite and confused because she was not going to let them take her dog. She photographed them and their van.
She ended up suing the HOA for harassment and emotional duress. Her attorney requested proof that the property was in the HOA – which could not be provided. She joked to me that after attorney fees, the lawsuit paid her electric bill and bought her dog food for a year.”
President Of The HOA
“After years of hearing stories of problems with HOA, my wife and I were both solidly in agreement that we would never purchase a home in one. When we finally did find a house and purchased it, we knew for a fact we were not in an HOA. However, just behind us, we learned there was an ‘HOA.’
About a week after we moved in, there was a knock on the door. It was one of the neighbors behind us, announcing that she was President of the HOA, and welcoming us to the neighborhood.
She seemed civil enough, but we asked, ‘What HOA?’
‘Oh, we’re behind you. The home behind yours is where the HOA starts,’ she said.
‘Okay, that’s nice, nice to meet you,’ we replied.
We were hopeful. We were shocked, even. Someone associated with the management of an HOA that wasn’t a complete busybody psychopath!
How wrong we were. We had a couple of trees in our yard on the property line, so we took responsibility for taking care of them. We had an arborist trim some limbs that could have fallen and injured someone. The fallen limbs were neatly stacked in a green space by the road out of everyone’s way. When the President of the HOA saw it, she shrieked at my wife about removing it because the space belonged to the HOA.
The next spring, the hedge that is planted outside of our fenceline wasn’t maintained very well and pushed over two sections of our wooden fence. I emailed the HOA President and explained that their hedge had damaged our fence.
‘It’s not our hedge!’ she responded.
‘Um, it’s growing in your green space,’ I replied.
‘That’s not our green space!’ she said.
‘Then why the [censored] did you decide to screech at my wife last summer when we had the wood stacked there?’ I replied.
Silence.
I contacted the county and ended up speaking to about seven different departments in order to figure out who actually owned that strip of land. It turns out no one actually owned the green space. The roads division also found there wasn’t an HOA registered in our county at all.
So I did what any red-blooded American would do. I got 36 envelopes. 36 stamps. And printed off 36 copies of a letter with my findings from the county that there was not now, nor ever had been for the recorded history of the subdivision, any HOA, neighborhood association, or any similar organization. And that they, collectively, had paid in excess of $100,000 in dues over that time to a non-existent entity, plus any fines the non-existent HOA had decided to levy.
The neighbors, in turn, did exactly what any red-blooded American would do. They sued her for every penny they’d paid over the last ten years and won.”
70-Year-Old Bullies
“We are young first-time homeowners and we moved into an upper-middle-class neighborhood with an HOA. When we met our real estate agent, she assured us this HOA was basically inactive and only existed to do lawn maintenance and landscaping in the common space. She also told us that water was included as listed on the online Zillow and Trulia listing, which ended up not being true.
We ended up buying the house and not two weeks after closing, we noticed the ‘lawn care’ leaves a lot to be desired. The yard is a quarter of an acre and they only mowed a small portion. No weeding or edging was done at all. We also noticed that they sprayed pesticides and herbicides and put up a sign requesting they not spray, which was ignored.
We made requests in writing and email to the HOA saying only a portion of the yard was being done and our requests for no spraying were ignored. That letter was ignored, so I withheld HOA fees since that was their main job. I then started getting harassing letters from the HOA about our fees and the backyard fence being not in compliance with some arbitrary rule they made up. After that incident, they changed owners of the HOA to a new company with a one-star rating on Google and Yelp.
The new company started harassing us immediately about parking my Jeep in front of my house on the street. Street parking is allowed and plenty of other neighbors do it without being harassed. I counted five other rules neighbors were breaking without being bothered by the HOA. The only difference between us and the rest of the neighborhood is we are by far the youngest couple. My guess is they don’t like us and are guilty of some sort of targeted age discrimination.
In addition to the problems I’ve already named, the HOA won’t let us join the Facebook group, we aren’t invited to meetings, and they made a new rule saying if people don’t pay the HOA dues and fines then they can garnish wages and take your house.
I’ve had enough! I want to sue them. I have the names and addresses of everyone involved that I want to take to court. I am very emotionally distressed by everything and so is my wife. This is interrupting our ability to feel comfortable having children and feel stable in our home. Instead, we feel financially threatened and intimidated by the threats to steal our home.
The harassment by 70-year-olds with nothing better to do with their lives has to stop. We will be suing for nonpunitive damages and legal fees.”
Goodbye Karen
“I’ve been in my HOA for around 15 (mostly) drama-free years until a few years ago when the HOA changed management companies. The new one decided that they were going to be more proactive in the enforcement of violations. Not that things were going downhill, they were not. Everyone’s home has basically doubled in value over the last few years as they are well-maintained, nice, newer homes in a desirable area. The new PMC (property management company) got the board to adopt new rules and regulations and new bylaws.
The board has essentially been controlled by one old lady for about ten years. I’ll call her Karen. Karen has never liked me and about six other families in the neighborhood and we suspected all along that she would use the new rules to target those she didn’t like, which is exactly what happened.
Sometime later that year, we started getting violation notices via email for dumb stuff. One was for a package left on the porch, one was for a bag of mulch left out. No fines yet but that came soon enough. With no warning, we got an email stating that we had been fined for having ‘mismatched paint.’ We were also fined for having Christmas lights in the summer. There have never been Christmas lights on our house (this was likely an address mixup). We complained on the HOA’s website but were banned immediately.
We spoke to a lawyer who specializes in HOA law. He reviewed our DCCR and all other documents and gave us this advice to appeal the fines. The board was gobsmacked at our gall to question their omnipotence and our non-participation in their ‘appeal.’ They upheld the fines as expected which made our lawyer very happy.
We noted several broken rules and laws performed by our HOA. Our fantastic attorney wrote a devastating but absolutely beautiful complaint (it was pure poetry and I should have it framed). It was served on the board and PMC. I don’t know what went on behind the scenes, but I imagine it was pure panic once they spoke to a lawyer who told them they were totally in the wrong.
A few weeks later we heard that ‘Karen’ and a couple of other board members had decided that they were just too busy to continue serving on the board and sadly had to step down. The HOA lawyer asked to settle. We asked for refunds of all fees, a term limit for Karen, and coverage of our legal fees.
We could have gone further but at this point, the bad board members had fled the scene so we would just be inconveniencing people who had been on our side all along.”
Restraining Order
“We had an HOA board that was horrible. They spent money on things that weren’t necessary and tried to give away our new playground equipment. You name it. They even made a rule that during our open meetings, if you said anything bad about a board member, you could be kicked out of the meeting.
I had a very large tree on the property line of my backyard. It was leaning toward my house and we live in Florida where there are hurricanes. I sent the board a certified letter asking them if they would be willing to go half with me (50 percent of the tree was in our park and the board was responsible for the other half on my property). I explained I didn’t want the tree taken down, just trimmed so it would not fall on my house if it went down. I was turned down and I figured I’d just let it go and take care of it myself.
I managed to get my hands on a letter sent out to the board members by our president that said, ‘I don’t like her so we aren’t going to approve taking care of that tree.’
I was thinking, ‘What is this? First grade?’
I hired a lawyer and gave him all the paperwork on the tree as well as all the other dumb stuff they had done to harass me over the years. They were pulled into court and by that time, I also had copies of other letters they had sent out telling how they were going to treat me so I would move out. I didn’t have to say a word. My lawyer gave the papers to the judge and he fined them about 16,000 dollars each. That fine had to come out of their own pockets as well as pay my legal cost as my lawyer set it up so I was suing the members as individual people and not as board members. We did that so the neighbors wouldn’t be paying the fines.
I’m really not sure how all that worked, I just knew what the outcome was. The board was disbanded, a new board was voted in (which I became a member of), and all the problems stopped. Our HOA was run fairly and we kept fees down to a very small amount. We also made sure no meetings of the board would be held unless the whole neighborhood would be allowed to attend. It made for a nice place to live.
Meanwhile, the former officers of the board had restraining orders against them where they weren’t allowed within so many feet of me. By the end of the year, they had all moved away. It would have been a great movie. At least it had a happy ending. I used the money I got to take care of that tree and turned over what was left to the new board for improvements on the park that ran through the subdivision.”
Leave Me Alone
“A close friend of mine sued the HOA. A couple of years before, they had bought an old house, deliberately in a neighborhood that had no HOA. Several years later, a new development went in at the end of the neighborhood that had an HOA and they tried to incorporate the previous houses in the neighborhood as well. Some of his neighbors joined, but my friend had no intention or desire and refused, as was his right.
They started acting as though he was in the HOA anyway and kept sending him letters and notices of violations: his shed was too close to the property line, his door was the wrong color, and his mailbox was not uniform and standard. He ignored them at first until they started showing up and knocking on his door. He told them to leave and never return. They ignored him and kept coming back to pound on his door and leave harshly worded letters.
Long story short, he sued them for harassment and won. I don’t remember how much he won, it wasn’t a large amount since he hadn’t lost much money from the harassment even though he had to take off work a few times because of them. But luckily, the lawsuit served its purpose and they finally left him alone. I guess having to pay out anything, including lawyers fees for both sides, got through to the HOA that he wasn’t going to comply and didn’t have to.”
Direct TV
“I bought into a brand new development outside Chicago with 400 half-million dollar homes. I signed all of the paperwork I had to including the HOA paperwork. It was made very, very clear in that paperwork that the HOA would not tolerate outdoor TV antennas and would not tolerate direct broadcast dishes.
The next day, I had a local tech install a TV antenna with an eight-foot boom on it. He wasn’t there 30 minutes before someone showed up and tried to order him off the roof, stating that antennas weren’t allowed and I signed the paperwork. I politely told him the antenna wasn’t going anywhere and to kindly leave my property. He got loud, I got louder, he got profane, and I called the police. He took off and assured me I’d be hearing from the HOA’s attorney and to expect some huge fines and yes, the antenna would be coming down.
Tuesday, the HOA attorney called me and ordered me to get rid of the antenna and the DirecTV dish in 48 hours. I asked him if he was admitted to practice law in federal courts and he said no. I asked if he was familiar with OTARD and SHVA and he didn’t know what they were. I told him to review antenna law because he was about to look really, really foolish. He asked if I was an attorney and I told him, no, but I am a career broadcast engineer.
He called back a couple of hours later and told me CC&Rs trumped federal law. I asked him for his address. When he asked why I told him I needed to know where to send the lawsuit I’d soon be filing with the FCC for free because the FCC prosecutes these cases at no cost to the complaining party. Next, I asked for his email and told him I’d be sending him three pages of FCC rulings throwing out CC&Rs that he needed to look at before he made the next move.
The next day, he called and said, ‘You certainly know your communications law. I guess you’re right and I’m wrong.’
When I left that house 11 years later, both the dish and the antenna were still up.”
Third Times The Charm
“When my sister bought her house, she was the third person to buy in the new neighborhood. They signed the papers and started making payments before the HOA was established, so the HOA was not mentioned in the paperwork.
Over the next few years, my sister and her husband erected a basketball goal, added a covered patio, an inground pool, and a large storage/workshop. They had bought one of the two lots on the very tail end of the cul-de-sac, so their lot was huge. They still had way more backyard space than most people. They took very good care of their home and yard, the shop was painted to match the house, and the basketball goal was kept in tip-top shape.
When the HOA entered the neighborhood, my sister declined to join it. They decided to ignore her letter of refusal and started sending her violation letters for the shop, the basketball goal, the patio, the paint scheme, and even the dogs they had. My sister returned all letters with a copy of the refusal to join letter, along with a copy of the registered mail receipt showing they received it. They started fining her. She kept doing what she was doing and pulled in an attorney friend who was more than happy to take over.
The HOA finally took her to court. Her lawyer countersued, presented all the paperwork to the judge, and the judge not only found it in my sister’s favor, but the HOA had to pay all of her attorney fees and had to reimburse her for all the postage fees she paid responding to their letters. She always sent them registered mail. The judge was incensed by the matter, especially when he saw her original letter declining their request that she join the HOA.
After going to court and losing, the HOA kept trying to fine her! She sent them copies of the original ruling, and they again ended up in front of a judge. That judge ruled the same as the first one. The third time in court, the judge yelled at the president of the HOA, and the attorneys, and told them if they didn’t leave my sister alone, he’d cite them for harassment. My sister’s attorney said if they continued, she could sue the HOA president, all of the officers, along with the attorneys both professionally and personally for harassment.
The HOA left her alone after that. She has had to run off some of the HOA snoops she’s caught peeking over her privacy fence trying to see what’s in the backyard and ended up slapping a restraining order on them. The HOA had to reimburse her for that, too.
For the life of me, I don’t understand why people would spend their hard-earned money on a home and a lot they don’t have control over. No way would I ever live in an HOA-controlled community.”
Sweet Victory
“I owned a home in a neighborhood under an HOA. My neighbors and HOA members went door to door soliciting votes to ban rentals in the neighborhood. They got the required 2/3 votes needed to change the CC&Rs (covenants, conditions, and restrictions) but failed to mail out any notification to me. I had agreed to let my tenant out of his lease one month early since I was planning on selling and he already had purchased a new home.
The HOA President posted on the neighborhood Facebook page that everyone had received the proposed amendments which wasn’t true. When I was four days from the closing my house, they announced the new restrictions on the Facebook page. As a result, the buyer backed out as it was an investor that would not be able to rent for the home for at least 24 months. I felt like I had good case based on the fact that I would have kept the tenant until the end of the lease if I had received notice of the upcoming CC&R changes.
I filed a case in small claims court and the HOA’s insurer settled for the full amount of one months rent. I posted a picture of the settlement check on the Facebook page with a note to the HOA President, ‘Up yours with a red hot poker!’
Needless to say it didn’t stay up long, but the victory was very sweet indeed.”
Don’t Make Me Sue You
“I threatened to sue and successfully made the HOA leave me alone. The ‘offense’ was my child’s playset being visible from the street and they wanted it taken down or lowered. Well, duh! I was on a corner lot.
The fact is, I have an only child, and the only person that wanted a playset was my wife. We weren’t swimming in income and I wasn’t going to buy her a new playhouse to rot while our kid played video games and watched wrestling. The nearest aged neighbor he knew was four years old while he was eight. So I bought a used set that wasn’t in the greatest shape but covered the bases.
I ignored the first letter from the HOA, but upon receiving the second letter (and the escalated threat), I interviewed a few neighbors who also had playsets visible from the street. The only difference was theirs being newer and nicer.
None of those neighbors had received any notice from the HOA.
See, the HOA didn’t object to the height, but rather the condition and the charter didn’t cover that. I responded that the board had better leave me alone, or penalize everyone with playsets taller than their fence. If they didn’t, I would lawyer up and sue for harassment and discrimination. I didn’t hear a word from them after that.
I LOATHE an HOA.”
