It's homeowners associations. They frighten me. If I became rich, I would have to build a house in the middle of nowhere, or commission a tall ship to be built for me to live in and sail up and down the coast, or buy a train that would belong exclusively to me and run up and down and up and down tracks that I would lay down, because I can never live in a place with a homeowners association.
You know what they do? Do you know? They force you to meet all of your neighbors. If you move into one of those neighborhoods, you have to belong to the homeowners association. You have to. Otherwise you are not allowed to move into their neighborhood. And oh, they are so frightening, these homeowners associations. They make you pay for their community swimming pools even if you never swim in the community swimming pool and never want to and don't feel that it is your job to fund their children's right to pee in a public pool. They have like boards of directors drawn from a pool of volunteers within the neighborhood, and you know what that means? It means that the most power-hungry people within your community (note that I didn't say the sanest. They can be any degree of sane. It's just the most power-hungry.) are the ones with the Power Over You And Your Family.
With their Power, they can send you nasty notes if you don't mow your lawn on time, and then they can start fining you. Money. They can make you pay them money for not cutting your grass in a timely fashion. Seriously. I didn't even make that up. And I know that if I were Rich, I could afford to a) hire someone to mow my lawn and b) pay whatever fine they might levy upon me for tardy cutting of my grass, but still. It's none of your damn business how long my grass is. I feel.
I'm not really sure why I felt the need to express this. But there it is.
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I agree entirely with your points about the mowing of lawns and the funding of pool-peeing. However, there exists at least one homeowners' association that is fairly hands-off, this being the only one with which I've ever had direct contact: the one in Lakeside, where my parents' big pink (later yellow) house was. They charged something like $200 a year, and in return they maintained the beautiful brick wall along one side of our backyard (since it somehow counted as public property despite being located entirely on ours), and they would host a Halloween party and put flyers in your mailbox about safe trick-or-treating, and that was about it. My parents were okay but not great about lawn maintenance, and as far as I know there was no community swimming pool, just the lake.
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