Why do HOAs bully owners and expect to win?

In my HOA, there was a public dispute between the HOA board and an owner, a lawyer. It ended up in court. The owner won in litigation.

So now my HOA has a judgment against it. This could have been avoided; the owner-lawyer is a well-known lawyer in the community, with a fancy law degree and decades of practicing law. He's the A-list among lawyers. He won a judgment that is several times higher than what he had demanded before.

Surely the HOA could have seen this coming; each time the owner-lawyer had fought with the HOA before, he had won and forced the HOA to change its ways, although things never went to court before.

So what's the mentality of HOAs who pick battles that they won't win? They levy fines, call hearings and place liens, even when their legal position is shaky, and even when their adversary is a lot angrier and a lot sharper than the HOA's lawyer.

Thanks.

I'd like to know who started the recent skirmish. It's true some boards get into trouble because they don't like to be challenged (we are the board and and therefore we are), but cooperation works both ways. Does this owner not realize the publicity these battles get can also make him look bad? Who's to say someone doesn't look at this story and think this is yet another too big for britches attorney loading over everyone else because HE went to law school and makes buckets of money,knows everyone worth knowing in town, etc., etc?I

As Melissa likes to say there is no us and them in a HOA (or maybe that was Pink Floyd?).
HOAs are made up of people and none of them are perfect. Some are more hardheaded than others and there may be brilliant people who are masters at getting people to cooperate. The .trick is to find the good ones and try to keep the others from causing too much of a ruckus. Everyone has to understand they didn't just buy a house, they bought into a neighborhood and it takes everyone working together to make it work Both sides have to be willing to listen instead of running off at the mouth and perhaps count to 10 or 100 before saying or doing something awful because some refused to keep his/her ego in check and focus on solving the problem

Great points as well. Thanks.

In this case, the owner won, and won big. The HOA has its own attorney. And the HOA has plenty of big shots in it. I’m not one of them, unfortunately.

From experience, it not the HOA Board, it is the attorneys representing them, that are the problem.

Paul

Seems you need a "better" BOD. Work on that.

In some cases, they offer and the board doesn't like them and refuses their offer.

Certainly that happens. In such cases, then, the challenger needs to decide whether the issue is worth the effort. if it isn't, then maybe the challenger should reconsider. If the person who believes he is right about an important issue isn't willing to put in the effort, why should anyone else take him seriously?

The lawsuit often is an attempt to bully the board into doing things your way, and the homeowners all pay the price, literally. Unless the board is doing something so badly wrong that their errors will cost the HOA more money than they'll spend in litigation, then the lawsuit will make the HOA worse, not better. And the victor in the lawsuit should not be surprised if nobody throws a parade in his honor.

Why do you think I advise people when they hire a lawyer to be wary of one that says "I will do whatever you tell me to do"? That lawyer is feeding the board's own fallacy. Once believed it's hard to get out.

Again you are dealing with a group of people. Each one has an opinion on which way to go. You have a lawyer they hired because it's their profession to do the job. Little do the understand the situation or the options.

Not hating on lawyers. It's just anyone who has dealt with a few have learned why the profession gets it's reputation. Lawyers hated dealing with me because I understood their job. If I felt one was leading me, I'd halt the reigns and say "Wooh". You can't expect everyone to be like that. Especially if you believe you hired the best in the business to represent you.

Pride and stubbornness, much of the time. It's not just limited to HOAs, either -- I've seen the same type of behavior in the business world, and this from professionals who really ought to know better.

Indeed. As I said earlier, people are people and that’s what HOAs are made of. There is only you and me in a HOA, and bad board members don’t fall out of the sky. Some are like this at the start because this is a way for them to get power or the appearance of the same. Others don’t know what they don’t know and don’t seem to want to find out, so they make up stuff as they go along, then get mad when you ask questions and they can’t answer them. The others are too intimidated to speak up – some of them wound up on the board because the one or two people who often dominate board meetings needed a body to make quorum and they can get away with anything if that body sits there quietly and ok to whatever’s being proposed, no matter how ridiculous it sounds. It’s also easy for one or two board members to dominate everyone else and God help you if those two (or one) is a megalomaniac and refuses to listen (just like our President.)

And because HOA board members come from homeowners, we also have the owners (you know who they are) who think concepts like cooperation are for suckers. They’re not interested in finding a way to resolve the problem, they’d rather say and do whatever they say and do, no matter what it does to the community in the end. It doesn’t matter if the owner is a big time attorney or a ditch digger. How many times have people come to this board with their mind already made up and then get mad when you ask a few questions that reveal they’re really full of ….horse dooky?

This is why you can’t be afraid to speak truth to power and hold yourself and your neighbors responsible. You have bad boards because people let them get away with uncouth behavior – you may not be able to get rid of them by yourself, which is why you need to rally together your neighbors. Maybe this owner would have saved some time and money if he’d done that instead of sue the pants off the association. Yes, he won and might have deserved it, but how will the neighbors react when they found how much this will cost them? Hopefully, they won’t be inclined to do anything worse than sack the board for being too stubborn for their own good.

And that is why I’m a believer in Board education, which shouldn’t stop after you’ve read the documents. If you don’t have a clue about how things work, that’s ok, but it’s your responsibility to go and find out. Keep an open mind and remember just because you don’t like something doesn’t mean it’s not reality. Change the stuff you can change and find a way to live with the stuff you can’t. Above all, try to be the type of neighbor you want living next door or across the street from you. “Do under others as you would have them do unto you” is a start, as opposed to “do unto others before they have a chance to do unto you.”

Breach of fiduciary duty.

Yes, the board singled out the owner and harassed the owner and did all sorts of nasty things to the owner.

The owner responded by going after the board.

The owner won.

There is criminal behavior involved it sounds like. However, it being incorporated it was probably hard to "Pick straws" who did the jail time. So the Judge decided it best to give punitive damages to punish all. Too bad it also included the homeowners who probably had no clue this was going on.

Once again, you provide no facts. Without a description, you could be talking about any type of behavior. To me, it's just not informative. And thus, your question on why HOAs pursue claims that they lose seems way too nebulous to me and possibly others.

If you said that the board members took turns parking in the harassed owners driveway every hour on the hour during the night and honked their horns - That would be a fact that I could understand.

But when you say bully and then harassed and then nasty and then singled out - that could be absolutely anything. And saying that the facts (whatever they were) were good enough for a judge doesn't clarify.

As always, I'm interested in the severity of the issues. I guess I'm just wasting my time asking.

It would not give it away to me and I doubt most on this site. Maybe some that were into doing research but then that is not really giving it away. Sometimes the judges get it wrong, like in the Brock Turner caser.

The court filing should be public but it doesn’t come up in Google yet, at least not in the first few pages of search results. So I’m not willing to post more. Better to share too little than too much.

1 - contractual fact
2 - HOA violated contract through inaction
3 - if fined for not getting approval, OK - if fined for planting a plant NOT SPECIFICALLY restricted, BAD

but

the HOA's hands were 'unclean' in that it ALSO breached the contract

I’m with Sam and NpS – we don’t need to know the name or location of the HOA, but what’s wrong with you describing the situation as NpS did in his example? Or are YOU the homeowner in question?

You said this person is a well know lawyer in the community with a fancy law degree, blah, blah, blah – are you implying that just because he has the credentials and knows people, he’s automatically right and everyone else is wrong? Sorry, but no, that ain’t true – and as an attorney yourself, you KNOW there are angels and devils on both sides of the issue, and sometimes a person can be both at the same time. I’ve never liked overly broad statements like “HOAs bully homeowners because all the board members care about is power” – that’s the same as saying “all homeowners are just lazy and don’t give a damn about the community.”

These stories you see online or in the newspaper or on TV news about the Godawful HOA board stomping on the "wee liddle homeowner" tend to skim the surface at best. I realize there are disputes where even Ray Charles could see that the situation would have been resolved if people were more willing to listen to each other and not be so bull-headed, but some people are just bullies who love to gloat because they can (for example, I work with lawyers and I’ve seen quite a few behave like this).

In earnest: I think the problem is assuming the board's interest is the law, truth and justice. Too many times now I have observed that, instead, HOA directors' interest is ego validation. Ego validation is normally expensive and requires years of hard work, good choices, and honest conduct. But when a HOA Board has a HOA attorney at its disposal, the cost of ego validation can be passed along to the membership. These dopes can feel elevated because they have an attorney working for them, and they are paying damn little for the attorney. Furthermore when said HOA attorney sees (1) the deep pockets and (2) board members willing to throw away money on validating their egos, said HOA attorney will be happy to do his or her lawyerly duty of defending his or her client to the max (as required by the Rules of Professional Conduct), even if it's legally a bad move.

Some of the best advice I had from a HOA member dealing with a board like Paul describes: It's wrong to assume one can make one's self understood with rogue Boards. With a rogue Board, do not aim for 'being understood.' When communicating with a rogue Board, do not appeal to reason.

NpS, it looks to me like your bamboo case is Tucciarone v. Hamlet on Olde Oyster Bay Homeowners' Association, New York. It was begun around 2013. (Do be aware that New York weirdly names its trial courts "Supreme Courts.") Seen the 2013 trial court opinion at http://hoapulse.com/court-case-search-results/item/12907-tucciarone-v-hamlet-on-olde-oyster-bay-homeowners-association-inc . See the 2017 appeals court decision at https://www.leagle.com/decision/innyco20171025556. So the HOA Board did appeal the 2013 court decision. The 2017 appeals court agreed with the HOA Board and granted the HOA Board summary judgment. The homeowners lost. No punitive damages were awarded. The appeals court opinion smacked the plaintiffs hard, asserting for one that, "the plaintiffs failed to raise a triable issue of fact. The plaintiffs failed to show that the HOA acted in bad faith or that its actions were taken for any purpose other than to address the bamboo infestation that was admittedly caused by the plaintiffs... "

I was curious about this because it seems like courts never order volunteer HOA members to pay punitive damages in the typical covenants lawsuit. I think Fair Housing lawsuits do order HOAs to pay punitive damages, but even then, I doubt any one member of a board is ordered to pay.

I too am curious about this lawsuit Paul describes above, where he says punitive damages were awarded. But I will respect his desire for privacy and shrug off the curiosity. We're all anonymous here.

Thanks Augustin.

I did model my composite case after Tucciarone. The bamboo thing was irresistible. And it did come from Paul's state. So it applied NY law which I thought was appropriate given the question asked.

I was aware of NY's odd naming system for its courts. And I knew that the trial court decision was reversed.

But Paul's original post on his fact-less case seemed to justify the legitimacy of the outcome based on a lack of appeal from the HOA. So in my composite case, I created a set of facts where the BOD decided not to pursue an appeal. My goal was to have a set of facts that we could talk about. And I am still hoping that someone is interested in talking about these facts as I presented them.

Re the appellate reversal in Tucciarone, the court said that the Business Judgment Rule applies if in good faith and in furtherance of a legitimate interest of the association. And re personal liability of the directors, the court said that they are safe because there were no tortious acts outside their responsibility as BOD members.

Now if Paul's BOD acted outside of their roles as BOD members, I can see the possibility of punitive damages. But that distinction between acting as individuals or as BOD members might be significant to the ruling. And without any facts, we're left hanging in the wind.

As we can plainly see, any court decision is fact dependent, and the outcome might have been quite different if the facts were significantly different. And that is why I, like a broken record sometimes, find fault when an OP demands that we accept conclusions without any underlying facts. Words like "bully" and "harassed" are highly subjective. I would prefer to discuss the underlying facts.

I am fine with Paul's desire for anonymity. I am not fine with fact-less discussions. So as I said, let's talk about the facts that I presented instead. It is an interesting topic if we can move past the sideshow.

I have nothing to contribute but want you to know that i'm following this discussion, which is intent. I also also like Augistine's notes about "ego validation" which I see a lot of on the board here in my HOA.

Jeez, Paul! (re: NpS "railing.")

Paul. I have nothing against you personally. I have gone to great lengths in this and other threads to explain my perspective when bold generalizations are made without any supporting facts. I don't do that to fight with you or anyone else. I do that in an attempt to engage you in a discussion about how you would apply your thinking to a particular set of facts. I want to know what you think, but not as a whitewash that BODs have good habits or bad habits. None are perfect. They make good decisions and bad decisions. But at the core, the BOD is making it's own interpretation of what the relevant facts are.

In this particular case, the words "bully" and "harassed" were used. To me those words do not inform. I've seen many disputes where both sides said that they were being "bullied" and "harassed" by the other. How can that be that both side are in the right? Yet I've seen those feelings expressed by both sides frequently. Everyone chooses his or her own facts. Without facts, it's just a lot of venting IMO.

In my last post, I once again said that I would like to have a discussion based on a set of facts and I didn't want to engage in the sideshow. Yet here I am once again drawn into the sideshow. Why? Because I am still trying to engage in a worthwhile conversation about how people would deal with certain set of issues. That to me is a worthwhile experience -- even when I disagree with another person's point of view.

So far in this thread, there have been a lot of posts, but only a small few like Augustin who opened up the conversation so we could all learn from each other. I am still looking to discuss a set of facts. There is something to be learned by all of us from these differences in perspectives - me included.

Like NpS, I would like to see some hard facts. I agree that so far this discussion has mostly been broad generalizations, plus some loaded language and deflection, which doesn't inform us. Many of us on this site are, or have been, board members, and we participate so that we can continue to learn and make better decisions in the future. But so far I haven't learned anything that I can put to use - just a mental note to check Google at some time in the future to see if there is something more informative about this particular case.

(Most successful board members already employ some version of the serenity prayer or mindfulness - it's part of that thick skin we need to survive the job.)