Democracy or Chaos? : The Power of Homeowner Associations

“Wha’ did he do now?”

“He bought an American car.”

“Herb, some of us might be happier in an unplanned community.”

--radio commercial for the Mercury Sable

It was poisoned goldfish in Palos Verdes, untrimmed bushes in the city of Orange, a basketball hoop in Newport Beach and dog droppings in Pomona. Catalysts for suburban catastrophe, each and every one.

That doesn’t mean that reason wasn’t tried, you understand. It just didn’t prevail. Principles, dangerous precedents and personal integrity were at stake. Not to mention the very authority of homeowners’ associations.

And such power, as residents of planned communities have come to know, is not easily trifled with. In neighborhoods throughout the country, homeowners’ associations are evolving into quasi-governmental bodies with the authority, and the inclination, to decide such matters as what color you can paint your home, what kind of vehicle you can park in front of it and how often you must mow the lawn. (Often).

Strict Rules

Not surprisingly, such strict rules often lead to disputes, few of them the stuff of great legal precedents. But when it comes to maintaining neighborly decorum, it seems, homeowner associations aren’t reluctant to break new ground.

In Orange County, one association recently responded to a persistent noise problem by voting to ban spouses from fighting after 11 p.m. (The group’s attorney later persuaded them to rescind it.) Another, in Irvine, doesn’t allow pets to “whine or cry for long periods of time.” And in College Park, Md., one association at a high-rise condominium allows only 22 pounds of pet (singular or plural) per unit.

The Case of the Newport Beach Basketball Hoop finally ended after an eight-year legal battle, tens of thousands of dollars in attorney’s fees and finally, an out-of-court settlement. Today, the homeowner said, the family hoop remains firmly affixed above the garage door, still catching an ocean breeze and the wrath of many of her neighbors. She added that her son and daughter, now in college, have gone on to become captains of their respective basketball teams.

‘Hard and Bad Feelings’

“But there’s been such a lot of hard and bad feelings that if we have the chance, we will move,” she said. “It was just absolutely absurd. We hope we never have to go through anything like that again.”

That, of course, depends on one’s definition of absurd and to what lengths somebody is willing to commute to live a life unfettered by a homeowners’ association. For a new home in Southern California, at least, real estate agents, consultants, builders, property managers and house hunters alike say it could mean quite a trek--perhaps over unpaved roads where jack rabbits still scamper under the beams of your headlights.

The Community Assns. Institute in Alexandria, Va., said there are about 130,000 homeowners’ associations nationwide--mostly in California, New York and Florida--which means the habits of about 12% of the U.S. population are more closely monitored by their neighbors than by the law.

And some of those neighbors have found plenty to complain about.

Long after the demise of his goldfish, which allegedly expired when pesticide sprayed by the homeowners’ association’s gardener wafted through an open window, the bereaved Palos Verdes man recently decided against filing a court appeal. That was after a Los Angeles judge ordered him to pay about $58,000 in attorneys fees, court costs and the homeowner dues he had withheld in protest. His condominium is in foreclosure.

Court Citation

The dog owner in Pomona was finally forced to rein in her pet after a contempt-of-court citation. But that was only after attorneys for the two sides got some laughs, at their clients’ expense, about a mistakenly worded legal brief.

“It read like we were seeking an injunction against the dog relieving himself,” said the attorney for the homeowners’ association. “In the demurrer, the opposing attorney said that the dog couldn’t help himself. We agreed.”

And in the city of Orange, four years after next-door neighbors went to court over bushes that partially blocked a panoramic view, a court-appointed arbitrator ordered the shrubs trimmed in the exact manner suggested before the lawsuit.

The defendant, unfortunately, never lived to see the settlement. He died last year of leukemia, a disease his physician said may have been caused by the poisonous oil, gasoline and charcoal mixture that his neighbor allegedly poured over the offending shrubs.

Needless to say, the travails of life lived under the scrutiny of one’s neighbors rarely reach such extremes. Ask among residents of the nation’s planned communities, where membership in the homeowners’ association is a condition of home ownership, and they will tell you that most people respect their so-called CC&Rs--the; covenants, conditions and restrictions that tell homeowners both what is expected of them and what will not be tolerated.

It is these weighty documents, the seeds from which countless lawsuits have already sprung, that should be studied by prospective homeowners before they move in and certainly before they do anything that may offend the aesthetics of their neighbors.

Like it or not, point out the converts to homeowner association living, such attention to detail comes with the increasingly crowded territory of suburbia. How else to ensure that your neighbor won’t disembowel his ’76 Plymouth in his driveway, or that the guy down the street takes down his Christmas lights, or that one resident’s built-on sun porch doesn’t block another’s view?

In California, where the state Department of Real Estate estimates that there are about 17,000 homeowners’ associations, all of them nonprofit corporations, the passage of Proposition 13 has meant that residents pay their association to maintain the common areas, such as green belts, that the city or county may have stopped caring about.

Homeowner association dues, which, depending on the community, can range anywhere from two to four figures a month, may also go toward maintaining such amenities as swimming pools, tennis courts, private beaches and security.

And perhaps most importantly, homeowners say, the associations help protect the value of their homes--for most people, the biggest single investment of their lives.

“A homeowners’ association is a corporation, a business,” said attorney Richard Fiore, whose Newport Beach law firm specializes in homeowners’ association cases. “And any business is going to have its breakdowns. But the vast majority of people like their homeowners’ association.”

Added his law partner, Dan Nordberg: “And this is one of the best examples of participatory democracy around.”

Dr. Steven Grant, president of Irvine’s Turtle Rock Crest Homeowners’ Assn., where the 250 members have paid from about $300,000 to $2 million for their homes, said he has weathered the front lines of participatory democracy for two years. Now he’s had enough.

“When you live in a community where the residents have money, usually they do what they want to do,” he said. “Everybody wants to do what they want. But whose right is more right?

“I don’t think I’ve gotten anything out of it,” Grant said of his tenure as board president. “I didn’t know I would be handling so many disputes. I’m a positive person and I like to handle things in a positive way. I like having people happy.”

But several people apparently are unhappy in Turtle Rock Crest, a development built two years ago. The homeowners’ association is entangled in two lawsuits, which Grant said has meant that the association’s Board of Directors has met once or twice each week for the last six months. And homeowner association board members, all of them elected from among the ranks of homeowners, are unpaid.

At Corona del Mar’s Spyglass Ridge Homeowners’ Assn., where squabbles over blocked ocean views and architectural changes recently sparked a recall election of the board members, about 20% of the 40 homeowners are suing each other or the association.

“When the lawyers got on the board, we got the lawsuits,” said homeowner Lee Swofford, a retired airline pilot. “There is never any reason, with only 40 homes, to have lawsuits. But we have them.”

Added Grant of Turtle Rock Crest: “The problem is from individuals who sometimes stray from the norm. It’s like life, you take a good proportion of the people and there are no problems. It’s only the bad apples.”

Spoiled fruit is only part of the frequent nomenclature of homeowners’ associations, which also includes such shibboleths as free spirits, squeaky wheels, nonconformists and the unneighborly. There are degrees, to be sure, and certainly not every irate homeowner ends up telling it to the judge.

But of those that do, said Orange County Superior Court Judge Gary Taylor, a veteran of such cases, “(Their tales) are always very interesting.

“It becomes a high profile mess,” he said. “Everybody knows about who did what or who said what. Whoever loses ends up looking foolish many times. There should be a mechanism within the homeowners’ associations for mandatory arbitration. It would be cheaper, faster and less high profile. That way everybody saves some of their honor and they are not as embarrassed when it is over.”

But Taylor was smiling when he said most of that, even laughing in places. He does not have a homeowners’ association where he lives.

Gene Chaput, management supervisor at Young and Rubicam in San Francisco, said that his advertising agency was targeting Californians with a sense of humor when it invented Herb, the resident iconoclast at Vista del Condo who just bought a Mercury Sable. The message implicit in the Sable commercials, including one where Herb faces his neighbors at the Homeowners’ Assn. Tribunal, is that we can laugh at ourselves, or at least we should laugh at ourselves.

“We wanted to talk to Californians like a neighbor,” Chaput said. “We wanted to have some fun. We are wacky. We are crazy. We really don’t have to take ourselves seriously. This (commercial) is an exaggerated example of what is happening in California. My cousin and her husband, they put a brass plate on their front door and the homeowners’ association made them take it down.”

Chaput said the brass plate wasn’t the inspiration for Herb’s “nonconforming door knocker,” but there is no shortage of other real-life stimuli for a full-blown parody of homeowner association living. Among the Southern California biggies: architectural changes, RVs, views, trees and dog droppings.

“We get tons of calls over dog droppings,” said Melinda Masson, owner and CEO of Merit Property Management, which manages 110 homeowners’ associations in Southern California. “But unless we’ve seen the owner and the dog together at the time it happens, how are you going to match something with a particular dog?”

And even then, you think it’s easy?

In Irvine’s Woodbridge Village, which boasts the nation’s second-largest homeowners’ association behind Reston, Va., volunteer park patroller John Silk, 62, puts such matters in the hands and on the conscience of the community’s dog owners.

“I get more opposition from men,” he said. “Women are apologetic. They’re almost ready to pick up that mess with their hands.”

Kelly McDermott, vice president of Market Profiles, a Costa Mesa firm that formulates buyer profiles for housing developers, said that all the market research in the world can’t unearth personality quirks laid bare in some planned communities.

“Some of the most sane and rational people I know, highly educated, very successful people, become emotionally out of control over the trimming of trees in the common area,” McDermott said. “And then there are people who love trees, who think trees are sacred and should be allowed to grow freely. They too, become emotionally unhinged over tree trimming.”

(So far at least, a 1979 decision by the 2nd District Court of Appeal in Los Angeles appears to be the final word in California on the sovereign rights of trees to resist human attempts at trimming. The tree, a pine in Pacific Palisades, lost and submitted stoically to trimming.)

In an attempt to understand what a homeowner might really be thinking about when he rails against the confines of planned community life, psychologist Sue Cooper was recently called before a seminar of property managers and homeowner association board members in Anaheim.

“A lot of it is displaced anger, aggression, hostility,” she said. “I don’t think it’s the dog poop or the pool not being lighted. It’s more like, ‘This is the last open forum where I’m going to get my needs met. I can’t control traffic, my boss or my staff, but this is my sanctuary and I’m going to have it my way.’ It could be the most inane issue.”

Sadly, some planned community residents note, homeowners’ associations can become so efficient at meting out punishment for the neighbors’ pecadilloes that traditional methods of problem solving are given short shrift.

“What happened to the age-old thing of coming over with a bottle of wine, or beer, or a cake and saying, ‘Hey, I’m your neighbor and I’d like to get to know you and I have a problem with your tree?’ ” asked Masson of Merit Property Management.

And even if you’re suspicious, as Masson recalled she initially was when her former neighbor in Laguna Niguel tried the nice approach, she said it is worth a try.

Masson’s neighbor, it turned out, was upset about one of her carefully trimmed and symmetrically placed trees that prevented him from seeing Saddleback Mountain when he was in his back yard spa. But, they worked it out, planting a new, less dense tree and splitting the costs.

“The bottom line,” Masson said, “is that he probably just wanted to see me sunbathing.”