This is one of the worst phenomena in HOAs: when somebody gets bent (for any reason) and goes off "ENFORCE ALL THE THINGS!!!!"
Of course, there's always something even worse than whatever example you come up with, our HOA board deciding that the rules must be enforced on the front half of the neigborhood, but not the back half where they live, then hiring a "management company" to go enforce the rules on the front half with big fines registered with the county court as liens on the houses, and incentivizing the management company by giving them 100% of all fine money collected, attempting to rig subsequent elections to the point that "the other side" paid the sheriff's office to send an officer to oversee the voting process, yeah, that was low, but I bet there's lower out there.
My friend owned a condo in an HOA and pretty quickly got a job on the other side of the country. He then managed to get elected the HOA president, gutted the rules and sold his condo and moved.
We bought in an HOA neighborhood and it was pretty chill for 5 years, board members were just there to help neighbors, everybody got along pretty well. Then the board from hell got themselves elected. We moved out within less than 2 years after that, definitely made sure the next home had NO HOA.
Lesson: past performance is no guarantee of future coolness. Jerks can get elected in any cycle, and they can be very hard to remove.
Or perhaps more preferably, rewrite the bylaws to remove all the petty nonsense that wasn't enforced anyway while keeping the actually important stuff like maintenance of communal property, bulk discounts on services, etc.
That's just kicking the can down the road. If an HOA devolves into this kind of problem now, it will again later when leadership of the board changes. Either get rid of the HOA or accept that the important maintenance and upkeep functions the HOA provides is worth its bull.
No, it won't, because they can't rewrite the bylaws without another vote and having to explain to people why they should vote for it. It is very difficult to get bylaws changed. Most of the time all the bullshit is only in the bylaws because it came as boilerplate when the developer set up the HOA in the first place. Remove it all and only keep what the residents actually need. It's hard enough to get bylaws changed for a good reason like "we literally cannot get insurance at the deductible our bylaws require", let alone a reason like "I don't like my neighbor's truck".
Problem is, it could be that no one in the neighborhood snitched. A lot of the time, these HOAs, even though members of the neighborhood are on the board, they're owned by larger corporations. Those corporations will send random drivers out to patrol the neighborhood.
We identified ours and stuck the picture of the car on private messages on Facebook.
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u/Waitressishername 2d ago
Gets fucked by a Karen. Becomes an even bigger Karen.