Shared By Deborah Goonan, Independent American Communities
This week’s HOA “crime” is an owner having the audacity to plant flowers under a small tree in the front yard of her condo home.
In a condo association, you don’t own the land that the home occupies, even if that home is a townhouse or detached single family structure. You don’t even own your driveway, front entry or back deck or porch, in most cases. You own a “box of air” from the drywall inward, utility supply lines that serve only your unit, and the unit’s attached contents such as plumbing fixtures and cabinets.
The Association owns “your” front and back yard. You have limited rights to use it, and no rights to improve it.
HOA attorneys will explain this to you and your condo association board. And, of course, the rules are the rules and they must be enforced! If the Association allows flowers today, tomorrow you may decide to put an old, moth-eaten sofa out in the yard, or an old commode turned into a planter.
Chalk this one up as “no good deed goes unpunished.”
Lyons: Condo lawyer mum on flower spat
Published: Saturday, November 14, 2015 at 6:25 p.m.
Last Modified: Saturday, November 14, 2015 at 6:25 p.m.
Driving down Rum Cay Circle, I could see that condo homes all look very much alike.
The small front yards are not spectacularly landscaped, but they are neat and uniform. Order is the theme. Each home has exactly one tree out front, usually a smallish, well-pruned one cut to the same cone-shape as the others.
But wait. What’s that I see?
There’s a problem in front of Janet Morgan’s home. See her tree?
It’s fine, actually. The tree itself is OK.
But look beneath it.
Better call the condo board!
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Lyons: Condo lawyer mum on flower spat
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