HOA Blues

I’m always on the lookout for limited settings and small groups of characters to set up a conflict and let the drama play out. Recently, percolating through my brain have been some old ideas of a home owner’s association with dueling members or factions. What initially sparked this idea was a battle among my own neighbors several years ago.

I was still practicing law. I live in the suburbs of Washington, DC, in a neighborhood of single family homes tucked behind an urban-ish area of malls and office buildings. When I first moved in to this neighborhood, naively, I thought being part of a Home Owner’s Association (HOA) only meant that we would be sharing certain costs, like snow plowing and trash pick-up. WRONG!

Little did I know, there would be people in our association who actually cared that I wanted to paint my door red, that one house had a different mailbox than the rest o the houses in the neighborhood, and that someone installed a retractable awning on the back of their house (where nobody but the homeowners could see it—and only when it was unfurled!).
I began to worry that if I went one extra day before mowing my lawn that I would be cited for “Fescue above the allotted height.” I began to question things I never worried about before, like, whether the purple petunias I planted out front met HOA Landscaping Code. Perhaps I should have planted white flowers.”

Even with all of this craziness going on in my “new town meeting” kind of neighborhood—the new democracy – HOA, there was one conflict I didn’t see coming. Threads of naiveté still clung to me on the day my father joyfully gifted a basketball hoop to his then, five-year-old grandson. My Dad spent time during a weekend-long visit assembling the new portable basketball hoop. As he tinkered, my son dribbled a ball up and down the driveway. Once Dad completed the hoop, my son tried his first shot. Swish—nothing but net! He’s a natural.

I swear this is true, and it’s not just a bragging mother, but my 5-year-old was so good that his ball handling and shooting drew a crowd from the neighbors. He found his love. In fact, now he’s in eighth grade and plays on a travel team as well as a rising ninth-grade team coached by the High School basketball coach. During the last game, the coach played him 38 out of 40 minutes in the game.—He’s still got it!

Anyhow, back to the new hoop in my driveway. You can imagine how exciting this was. He spent every free moment practicing foul shots and orchestrating games of H-O-R-S-E with the neighborhood kids. That year’s Au Pair, hailing from Riga, Latvia, was very athletic, too. She would coach my son in the driveway. She even bought her own WNBA ball.

But then it happened. The HOA Architectural Review Board letter showed up in my mailbox, citing our hoop for violation of the bylaws. What?! I quickly pulled out the documents to find any mention of basketball hoops. And, yes, believe it or not, there were guidelines related to a hoop. Portable hoops like mine had to be put away inside when not in use. (Impossible, btw – it’s too tall to fit into our garage).

Over the following weeks and months, I spent hours I should have spent billing to clients, reviewing HOA bylaws, architectural review standards, and drafting an amendment for vote at our next HOA meeting. In the meantime, as we waited for the meeting, the HOA levied fines for the violation.

I recall coming home from work one day, venting to my Au Pair how I resented wasting my time drafting amendments to the bylaws preparing for defense of something as innocuous as a basketball hoop. Why did people care about this stuff? Did they have too much time on their hands?

“This is just un-American!” I said.

“Lisa,” My Au Pair stared me in the eye. “It’s un-Latvian!”

On the day of the big vote, the Au Pair helped organize the school-aged kids in the neighborhood to picket outside our HOA meeting. A group of children handed out leaflets that read, “I could play like M.J. if you don’t take our hoop away.”

I drafted the ballot with gradations of acceptance, and I’m glad I did. If I had relied on a plain, clear-cut yes or no vote on hoops in the driveway, we would have lost. The winning option carved out an exception to the basketball hoop restriction, allowing only houses with a pipe stem driveway to keep a hoop in the driveway. Ours is one of a few houses with a pipe stem driveway (which are really the only ones that could support a hoop in the first place. Most of the others are short hills up to a garage). We won!

This is my little memory of a HOA nightmare. I’m interested in hearing about disagreements or issues related to what I see as the new, true democracy—the evolution of town-meeting-run communities. If you have any conflicts that have played out in your own community, I want to know about it.I’m looking forward to your comments.