It's Your Neighbors, Stupid.

Who, not what, is a Homeowners Association?

                 The blogosphere is alive with stories about the transgressions of homeowners associations. Foreclosures. Enforcement of arcane architectural guidelines. Lawsuits by associations for minor rule violations. Owners suing their associations for failing to enforce the rules. “Nazi” boards. Libertarian owners. Just surf the web for awhile and you will see numerous all-caps diatribes against what is perceived as a corporate enemy—the homeowners association. But the truth is that the association serves the owners—not the other way around—in ways that many people do not think about.

Disaster!

No Reserves. No Insurance.  
What’s Left if a Natural Disaster Destroys a Community Association?


By 

Tyler P. Berding and Steven S. Weil

       We have recently seen horrific earthquake disasters in New Zealand and Japan. There has been widespread loss of life and destruction of infrastructure and buildings. California has a history of devastating earthquakes as well—the San Francisco, San Fernando, Northridge, and Loma Prieta earthquakes, among others. Heavy rains have created landslides, mudslides and shoreline erosion all over California, damaging homes and property, some of it in community associations. Wildfires in the past decade have destroyed hundreds of homes. Rising sea levels are threatening to flood low-lying developments, including many common interest developments. 

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Meeting--Or, Why is a Homeowner's Association like Wisconsin?

By Steven S. Weil

The Wisconsin Democrats employed a clever technique (denying a quorum) to prevent their legislature from adopting an anti-labor law. The Wisconsin Republicans responded with their own smart bag of tricks; they re framed the law to eliminate the quorum requirement and got it passed without the Democrats participating. Can this sort of politicking be used in the context of homeowner association votes? You bet.

Landslides: Nuisance or Construction Defect?

Sorting Out Liability and Damages

As I write this, northern California is experiencing the second straight week of rain in an otherwise very wet year.  Continuous rain soaks the ground and loosens unstable hillsides. Landslides can stay hidden for years until very wet weather suddenly breaks them loose. Also, slides can move very slowly, over long periods of time, gradually damaging the properties around them.

            In either case, earth movement can cause serious damage to buildings and other improvements on or adjacent to the unstable land. Mudslides, rockslides, and landslides are all versions of the same phenomenon—water plus gravity equals damage.

            We’ve seen slides gradually pull down the surrounding properties so slowly that trees growing on the hill have curved trunks. This is called soil creep and can last for years or decades. We’ve also represented clients whose homes were damaged in just a moment as a large landslide, hidden beneath the surface of the earth for centuries, comes down, bringing a large portion of the hillside with it.

            Property developers are required to obtain the advice of soil engineers when grading is done in a landslide-prone area, and most engineers are very good at detecting the presence of hidden slides. Aerial photo mapping, boring, or just reviewing the history of the area under development can do this. But regardless of the engineer or developer’s efforts, slides can still occur.

Is the Florida Legislature About to End Condo Dispute Arbitration?

(Editor's note: Florida has state licensing of condominium managers and arbitration of owner and board disputes. New proposed legislation would dismantle this system. This article recently appeared in the Fort Lauderdale Sun Sentinel)

By Daniel Vasquez 

A new Florida bill seeks to deregulate condominium community association managers and dismantle the state's arbitration system for settling owner and board disputes out of court.

What would that mean? Community association managers and companies, which often manage the finances and day-to-day operations of communities, would no longer be required to be licensed by the state or report crime convictions to state officials, critics say. In other words, virtually anyone - regardless of qualifications or criminal background - could become a manager in charge of what could be millions of dollars worth of property and assets.

Why Members Don't Care About Their Community Association

Many community association members are apathetic about association affairs because they don’t see their association as significant to their lives—that nothing the association does or doesn’t do will have a serious effect on them. This attitude often arises from the perception that a sale of their interest will pass any association problems on to someone else.

A community association is not the board of directors. It’s not management. It’s not legal counsel.  A community association is the sum of its members—nothing more, nothing less. The ultimate fate of a community association is always in the hands of the owners. An association is dependent upon its members in numerous ways. Funding is the most obvious example. Without member assessments an association will cease to function—those assessments are usually the sole source of cash flow to pay operational expenses, staff salaries, and to accumulate reserves for future maintenance and repair.

City in a Salt Pond

Future Salt Pond Residents Left Holding the (Sand) Bag

As an attorney who has defended Redwood Shores homeowners and who has represented homeowner associations battling over responsibility for flood protection and the resulting damages when that protection fails, I have watched Cargill’s proposed new city-in-a-salt-pond moving forward in Redwood City’s approval process with growing alarm.

Proponents of this development contend that it will be good for the economy, touting the potential shopping and new restaurants from Burlingame to Palo Alto. But from my experience, future salt pond residents will instead be left with massive, unrecoverable costs. This is particularly true given Cargill’s plan to build a levee that will not only have to be maintained, but raised significantly even to meet their optimistic estimate of sea level rise. All of this at homeowners’ expense after Cargill has taken its profits and left town.