The Ethics of HOAs

I’ve commented from time to time about Homeowner’s Associations (HOAs), and how little I care for them from a libertarian (note: not Libertarian; there’s a difference) standpoint, but I’ve never written about the ethics of the situation. The concept is simple enough: when a neighborhood or subdivision is built, the first owner of each property (most often the real estate developer who built all of the houses in the first place) signs an agreement that stipulates how each house and yard will appear from the outside. Alternately, all of the people who live in a specified area may decide to write and sign such an agreement at some later point. The idea is that if every house in the Association is well-maintained, has good landscaping, is freshly painted, and so on, the neighborhood looks nicer and more prosperous, which has the overall effect of raising the property values. On the surface, this would appear to be in the best interest of all of the homeowners involved. Unfortunately, like so many other ideas, this one often gets ruined by people…

The problem with these agreements is that while some people love the idea of a uniform neighborhood, and relish all of the houses being painted, decorated and landscaped alike, other people hate the idea because it stifles creativity, costs them a lot of money, or gives one of their neighbors the power to tell them what they can or can’t do on their own property. It’s easy to get most people to agree that having random junk strewn around the property looks bad; it’s also easy to get most people to agree that requiring every house in the subdivision to look exactly like every other house is unreasonable, or that requiring people to spend large sums of money during an economic crisis is a bad idea. Where this becomes truly problematic is when the residents disagree on how much money constitutes a “large” sum, or how much uniformity of detail is unreasonable – and when some of them decide to settle the issue with high explosives, of course…

A story that popped up on the local television news website in St. Petersburg, Florida, tells about one HOA president who sent out a warning letter to the members about mailboxes. It would appear that this particular HOA had a provision in their contract requiring everyone to have those large, brick mailboxes, and a number of people in the neighborhood had been refusing to comply with this requirement. The president of the HOA warned everyone that “appropriate action” would be taken against anyone who did not shell out the money and upgrade to an approved mailbox. Unfortunately, it would seem that someone in the HOA took the letter as a threat, or perhaps a personal attack, and retaliated by blowing up the HOA president’s own brick mailbox…

Now, for the record, I don’t approve of violence or vandalism as a means of resolving this sort of difference. But if you read the comments left by other viewers at the end of the online story, there’s about a 12-to-1 ratio of people who apparently support the unknown bomber’s actions. So I suppose we really need to ask: does the fact that you signed a contract agreeing to submit to specified authorities regarding what type of mailbox (or landscaping, or paint, or whatever) you can have on your house mean that you have an ethical responsibility (as well as a contractual one) to comply with that agreement? Does it matter if the requirement is beyond your means? What if compliance will cost more than you can afford, force you to attempt to sell the house, or if you can’t, declare bankruptcy? Is your answer different if you need to live in that location for some reason (e.g. work, school, family, other obligation) and can’t avoid the HOA agreement and its attendant expenses?

By the same token, is it reasonable to allow one (or a few) homeowners to lower the property value of the entire subdivision because their property looks like a crack house and they are too cheap and/or lazy to keep it properly maintained? Do they have an ethical responsibility to their neighbors to keep their house looking reasonably well cared for, even though it is their property? It seems obvious that no one should have the right to protest civil or contractual issues using high explosives, but do the residents have the right to protest them at all? Or should they abide by the contract they signed of their own free will when they bought the place?

It’s worth thinking about…

It’s Not The Kids…

I’ve commented before in this space about the way some people insist on taking small children to inappropriate venues for meals – a rant topic that actually takes in a lot of ground. In fairness, not many small children are going to be able to handle sitting quietly for the hours it will take for a fine dining restaurant to cycle their parents through a dinner seating; even for very well-behaved young people, two or three hours with absolutely nothing to do is a challenge, and by young people I include everyone under the age of forty. And, as previously noted, a restaurant doesn’t have to have white linen and $50-a-plate food to be inappropriate for kids – even our local bagel joint back in Redondo Beach offered very little for the under-twenty crowd to do. But what about the case of venues specifically intended for small children?

You might expect such a place – such as the familiar kid-oriented pizza chain called “Chuck E. Cheese” – to be completely bomb-proof, possibly literally. I mean, if you’ve gone to the trouble and expense of making a venue kid-proof, including furnishings that can’t easily be damaged by kicking, screaming, pulling, twisting, food fights, toilet-training accidents or random vomiting, there’s not much that can go wrong with the place, right? You can still have Health Code violations in the kitchen, breakdowns in the heating and cooling systems or random muggings in the parking lot, but the place itself should be free from behavior-related mishaps, right?

Unfortunately, this proves not to be the case. According to a story in the Wall Street Journal as reported on MSNBC there has been a definite increase in bad behavior occurring at the Chuck E. Cheese locations nationwide. Only, in all of the cases reported, the real problem seems to be the parents, not the kids…

Now, I don’t mean to suggest that there’s anything wrong with what this article refers to as the “mama bear” instinct. The sources quoted are quite correct in calling this an evolutionary development, and it’s probably true that none of us would be here if our parents didn’t have this instinct to one degree or another. I’m also not going to devote any space to wondering what all of this says about the decline of our society, or how much lower than this we can really get and still be called a civilization. I’m not sure what’s worse, an adult who would actually get physical with a six-year-old (however obnoxious) or a parent who would leave a six-year-old alone in a public place and allow the kid to be as obnoxious as they like in the first place. My interest is business, and my question is what you, as a business owner, are supposed to do about the situation…

Clearly, just letting it happen won’t do; you’ll be sued by all of the participants in the brawl, anyone else in the place who feels their kids were “traumatized” by seeing the brawl go down (or thinks they can get money for doing so, at least), and anyone who was inconvenienced by the police cars, ambulances, emergency rescue vehicles, or platoons of lawyers who will descend upon your establishment afterwards. Armed security, as attempted by one of the restaurant locations in the online story, doesn’t seem to be a good idea, either; you’ll end up with snide remarks about drawn pistols and bad movies…

By the same token, hiring unarmed security (or even a bouncer) for a kid’s pizza restaurant doesn’t seem like an appropriate response, and you could hardly expect your regular employees to intervene in the sort of altercation being reported in the news. You could require deposits, or raise prices enough to both cover the cost of extra personnel to maintain order and also compensate for refusing service to certain (troublemaking) customers, but you’d better include enough money to cover the lawsuits for discrimination against people on the basis of race, religion, or being the sort of idiot who starts fights over seating order in a kid’s pizza joint…

Why does he tell us about this, I hear some of you asking. Certainly, you’d never do anything as daft as opening a kid’s pizza place. The problem is, if the sense of entitlement (to do anything you please, whenever and wherever you want) and lack of regard for other people (including their property) that we’re seeing these days both continue to rise, sooner or later these same problems are going to affect your business, too…

Take Your Gun to Work Revisited

A while back I wrote a post in this space about a couple of employees of a supermarket who were able to defend their store and their personnel because they had taken advantage of a local ordinance and had, in fact, brought their guns to work that day. It's an incedent that drew attention because of its novelty more than anything else -- it's that rare case where the weapons-carry laws worked exactly as intended, and allowed law-abiding citizens to defend themselves with a level of force that was actually appropriate to the circumstances. All too often, the right to carry a weapon simply results in the sort of accidental shootings, property damage, or inapropriate uses of force so beloved of gun control advocates. And yet, the single most difficult part of this debate does not concern either of these issues...

In Florida, the issue of bringing your gun to work has raised an entirely new controversy, as some employees of companies that prohibit weapons on the job have begun to insist on bringing their guns to work and locking the weapons in the trunk of their cars during the work day. The gun owners involved claim that since they have carry permits, and can carry a gun all the way to and from work, they should be allowed to just leave these weapons in their cars during the day, so they can be armed for the trip to and from home. The company parking lot is still private property, and the company should still be able to ban guns there, but the employees are claiming that this would require them to leave their guns at home (since they'd have no way to secure them outside of the company's property) and therefore violates their Second Amendment right to carry a gun...

Even worse, in my opinion, is the implications for people who don't drive to work. Suppose they ride the bus, or walk to work. These people have no car to secure their guns in while on the job. Should they therefore have the right to bring their guns inside and carry them in the office? And if not, aren't they also being required to leave their guns at home? More to the point, perhaps, if we don't allow these people to bring their guns to work and secure them inside the building, aren't we discriminating against those who are too poor to operate a car and those who are ecologically minded enough not to want to?

What's really disturbing about this issue, at least from where I'm sitting, is the impact on private property rights. The Second Amendment to the Constitution does not address the rights of private property owners explicitly; it merely restricts the ability of the government to control gun ownership. But if the right to bear arms supercedes the rights of property owners to prohibit people from bringing guns onto their property, then by extension gun owners should be able to bring their guns anywhere they want to (e.g. schools, churches, hospitals, crowded shopping centers, airports...). It's clearly not what the Framers had in mind when they mentioned a "Well-regulated militia," but it's just as clearly what lies at the end of this particular slippery slope...

So my question is, if you were the company's owner, if it was your office or your factory, what would you do? Would you allow people to leave their guns in their cars? If so, how would you deal with someone who is being fired being escorted out of the building by Security and right up to where they've stashed their gun? On the other hand, if you prohibit people from bringing their guns to work, and one of them is killed on the way home in a situation he could have survived if he'd had his gun with him, can you be sued for wrongful death? What about a situation like the one in my earlier post? If your employees aren't able to shoot their way out of an armed confrontation and some of them die, what happens then? Especially if state or county law would have permitted them to carry a gun anywhere other than your property?

It's worth thinking about...