Preventing Your HOA or Condo Volunteers from Causing Trouble for Your Community
This week, we’ll be talking about videos that depict alleged racial altercations at neighborhood pools.
Of recent, one Summerville, S.C. community was in the news because one of the white residents was allegedly captured on camera in June, assaulting some African-American teens at the community pool, calling them punks and asking them to vacate the premises.
An African-American residing at the Glenridge Homeowners Association Winston-Salem, N.C., uploaded a video in June, where a white man was demanding to see her Id before allowing her to access the pool facilities at her HOA; according to her, the request for ID was not extended to the white residents. The owner was reportedly taken out of the pool committee by the HOA who also apologized to the residents, promising to do better.
These days, a lot of HOAs and condos are being dragged into different controversial issues, especially as it relates to the treatment of guests at facilities. The Washington Post also stated that about six of those videos making waves online about alleged racial incidents, happened at different neighborhood pools in places like Winston-Salem, N.C, Calif, Indianapolis, Pasadena.
Here are two out of seven tips, that can help you avoid landing in the news for the wrong reasons:
- Rid volunteers of enforcement powers.
Although it will cost more money if you want to hire professionals to enforce all your HOA rules for your guest, the eventual reward is actually worth it. According to Barbara a regional manager at Holland, FirstService Residential and CPM, in Las Vegas, “Some of my clients have wristbands; in others you have a card that scans to let you in the facility.”
She also stated that “With one of my clients, we tried to have volunteer members to do it. But we ended up having to discontinue that, and this association decided to spend extra money to have a security company handle this issue. Homeowners were getting too much flack; some people can get pretty crazy. Security officers in uniform presented a little more of a formal process.”
- Ensure that there’s a well-enforced anti-discrimination policy.
This was the advice from James P. Arrigo, who represented and counseled condominium associations and HOAs of about 6 to 1,600 units for at least 14 years and is also one of the attorneys at Rathje & Woodward located at Wheaton, Ill, had to say.
This is particularly important considering the new rules governing Housing and Urban Development across the U.S on how associations are supposed to act in situations when neighbors violate fair housing laws. According to Lisa Magill, a counsel at the law firm of Kaye, Bender & Rembaum located at Pompano Beach, Fla., “Now that we have HUD regulations on neighbor-to-neighbor discrimination, the housing provider could be charged with discrimination for allowing neighbor-to-neighbor discrimination.”