In article , "Julia Green"
wrote:

"Vox Humana" wrote in message
You said:
"Each little neighborhood in M.V. has its own little HOA and there
are a ton of little neighborhoods in M.V."

I see some areas where I live like that. There is an area with several
neighborhoods and each has a HOA. This is not the rule however. What is
more common here is for a mixture of neighborhoods. Some have HOAs and
some
don't.


Oh, right. Montgomery Village is a very large planned community (sort of
like the nearby Columbia, MD, the granddaddy of planned communities) and so
planning and control is their thing. HOAs are a given for every
neighborhood in M.V.

As it turns out, Montgomery Village has far fewer actual Homeowner
Associations than Vox has invented for the area, & virtually nothing she's
posted in this thread about Montgomery has much of truth to it. Some may
really not know what a HOA is & seriously but wrongly believed a Home
Corporation is the same thing; but I think Vox knows better -- having
posted a link to 800 alleged HOAs in Virginia, Washington D.C., & Maryland
(most of which weren't even HOAs), claiming these far-ranging condo,
townhouse, & corporate-run apartments & houses (many of them rentals) were
all local to Montomery Village HOAs -- well, had she made that "error" as
just one more of her persistant & amazing errors of fact by "mere"
mistake, she would have apologized for having unintentionally misled (as
Tom halfheartedly & backhandedly apologized for not knowing what he was
talking about); but for Vox it seems to have been a conscious lie
reinforced by further lying, including the inference that Montgomery
Village per se has a "ton" of little neighborhoods all run by HOAs. Unless
she means even one condo easily weighs more than a ton, then she's just
lying, though from a liar's point of view saying "tons of" is so
non-specific she can make up anything at random thereafter, & pretend it's
not EXACTLY a lie.

Here's the truth, taken from the Montogmery Village Homes Corp, an
umbrella organization of incorporated housing districts, few of which are
run by HOAs per se. Legally these are mostly Homes Corporations though
frequently misnomered Homeowners Associations, & though on "lists of
hundreds" across multi-counties & multi-cities or multi-states these are
included alongside actual HOAs, they are vastly different as legal
entities. Even including them, one gets dozens rather than hundreds of
incorporated residential entites in a given region, far fewer than Vox
says, & in Montogery Village per se, it turns out that these incorporated
neighborhoods are primary townhouses often associated with high-density
low-quality housing, are widely regarded as pretty ****-poor places to
live unless you're too old to go outside, young & newly married with a kid
& can't afford better, or simply don't have the stamina or good taste to
find a better place to live.

To pump up Vox's dream-vision of a world ruled by hundreds of HOAs all
over town, she has included Condominium Associations few of which are
incoporated as "neighborhoods" but only as business entitites; she
includes combination rental & buyer housing projects & townhouses which
are incorporated as BUSINESSES not as neighborhoods & are more accurately
called Home Corporations, not Homeowner Associations, because they're
rarely run by the owners (& renters) but are run by the developers or by
a big company that specializes in orchestrating garbage pick-up &
enforcing covenants for the developers rather than for the inhabitants of
the apartment houses & homes. Many homeowners & renters don't even know
they live within a Home Corporation area, the Corporation impinges on
property rights much less noticeably than do HOAs, as there are no HOA
activists to harrass & terrorize whoever has a basketball hoop or too tall
of a hedge or for being Malaysian instead of white. Home Corporations do
get unreasonable at times but not generally over race & religion, more on
the same bases that landlords are mostly assholes or they wouldn't even
WANT control of other peoples' living spaces.

The number of neighborhoods actually incorporated to be governed by
Homeowners Associations per se are relatively few, & a huge number of
those date to the late 1950s & early 1960s in look-alike tickytacky
housing projects aimed at selling to families that qualified for GI
homeloans, in outlying areas at the time completely open to cheap new
development, & those which were established to be HOA run were indeed
invariably white only. Older neighborhoods that weren't built explicitly
to be HOA operated CANNOT be & never are retroactively incorporated to be
run by HOAs, but many have instead Neighborhood Associations that are not
incorporated & are not legally self-governing entities & usually don't
harrass each other in any manner unless you run a crackhouse. A volunteer
in a Neighborhood Association would likely come by once or twice a month
to mow that arthritic old black woman's lawn since she cannot afford to
hire it done, whereas a HOA wouldn't let her live there in the first
place, & if she didn't get out of her sickbed & mow the lawn, they'd
categorize her as a miscreant & threaten & fine her until she has a heart
attack & they're finally free of her.

In the Home Corporations that are more common than HOAs in Montgomery
Village, there are covenants that address care of the house & yard, as
defined on the deed itself rather than by any charter or continuously
changing HOA stormtrooper list of commandments. This means a disgruntled
neighbor can report their dislike of an unmowed lawn to the Corporate
headquarters, not to a HOA, & the business corporation may correct the
matter if they deem it serious enough. Deed covenants cannot have
enforcible restrictions on race, age, or religion the way incorporated
HOAs can. Maryland legislation permits Home Corporations to police, fine &
enforce the changeless deed covenants, but they are not empowered to be
menaces to the homeowners the way HOAs so easily turn into menaces toward
each other & especially against minorities.

So when speaking of the racist institution of HOAs one cannot include
Condominium Associations that are not self-governing corporations,
Neighborhood Associations which are not corporations at any level, & Homes
Corporations. Vox has included them in order to muddle the issue & pump up
the numbers & cite restrictions on Home Corporations which must adhere to
Fair Housing in ways HOAs do not.

An incorporated neighborhood created as a legally semi-independent
self-governed housing project, & run by an actual Homeowners Association,
is a product of racist agendas always preserving the option (whether or
not activated) of keeping out "inappropriate" races or religions or age
ranges. This cannot be done by Homes Corporations unless the developer (or
corporate holder) breaks the law to do so, nor by Neighborhood
Associations which are volunteers in a normal & usually much healthier
ordinary neighborhood.

Nor is any genuinely attractive city neighborhood with Victorians apt ever
to be incorporated & HOA run, because the nicer urban neighborhoods were
not often built all at one time as housing projects. HOA-run gated
communities only rarely predate the Civil Rights era which is what induced
the white racist movement in the first place, at a time when the spaces
outside of cities were changing from farms & woodlands to sprawling
suburbs because every GI was governmentally assisted in buying a home.
This government-sponsored suburban explosion happened simultaneously with
the Civil Rights movement. The end result was whites abandoning the inner
city, but even black GIs found they could not buy houses in the 'burbs
due to a combination of redlining & HOA filtering mechanisms & so on, thus
inner city neighborhoods in larger cities became black neighborhoods, &
incorporated housing projects in the hinterlands developed from the
ground-up as all-white. Older self-segregated white communities could
sustain their infamy through covenants & did not require incorporation,
but as those covenants by stages became decreasingly enforcible under law,
the incorporated HOAs arose to take their place so that honkies could
still discriminate with abandon. This was also the beginning of the "two
car family" (make that "two car white family") because when whites
self-segregated to the suburbs they actually left the better neighborhods
to the minorities, & whites were virtual exiles in shitland & without two
cars whoever stayed home (usually the mom) was a prisoner for half of each
day.

Some of the 1950s HOA neighborhoods are today extremely deteriorated,
incorporation has been abandoned, & one finds that the old racist
neighborhoods are today owned by a high percentage immigrants who can't as
yet afford better housing. But even when those neighborhoods were brand
new, they weren't much to boast of, unless you were a Bob Dobbs
worshipper.

Here is an absolute number: INCLUDING Home Corporations, limited equity
coops, & Condo Associations along with actual HOA neighborhoods, there are
a total of 230,000 of these TOTAL in the continental United States,
according to the Community Association Lawletter, Summer 2002. The
Lawletter notes that it is because of these incorporated enclaves that
increasing numbers of neighbor battles are ending up in courts -- HOAs
increase rather than decrease neighbor wars that require civil court &
criminal proceedings to sort out. But note the 230,000 numer includes
single-building condo associations & townhouses, rentals as well as
owner-based corporations, & other kinds of legal neighborhood entitites.
The far fewer number of actual neighborhoods of single family dwellings I
could not find, & the smaller still percentage of those which are
incorporated to be self-governed by HOAs rather than from outside the
neighborhood by developer corporations also not available. The ones that
have racist privileges under law are the Coops (which are actually very
few in number & some regions have none at all) & the incorporated
self-governing HOAs. The other categories do not have racist options or
privileges permitted under law.

-paghat the ratgirl

--
"Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher.
"Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature.
-from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers"
See the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl: http://www.paghat.com/