The American Dream and HOAs
I knew better. I really did. But the mounting pressure to fulfill my duty as a hardworking United States citizen and promising child of Boomer parents got to me.
You move too much.
You need to create stability for your children and buy a home.
Stop paying someone else’s mortgage.
This is what they told me for years. It made sense because I had lived a lovely childhood due to my parents’ efforts. But my own adult life did not mirror theirs. I went straight from the comfort of the middle class back to the poverty from which they had escaped.
I have lived in a few different places in Tampa. I also bounced into and out of several homes in the SouthShore region of the County (Hillsborough County, Florida). And it was frustrating at times:
- My first landlord rented me the house without telling me that it was being foreclosed on and perhaps that was why my rent was so low. And one of my neighbors that I actually knew from many years ago in the City became a national sensation and went to prison for tax fraud.
- My second landlord was my first landlord. He tried to stay in the same price range which meant I moved into a previously roach infested house that I had to bleach in a place where my neighbor’s dog used my yard as a toilet and my other neighbor covered all of their windows with aluminum foil in order to maintain their drug operation.
- My third landlord was Invitation Homes. And they don’t give a damn about anything other than their pockets. So when they increased the rent by $400 a month, buying a house actually seemed practical. Plus multiple alligators had tried to eat my dog (and maybe my kids). I called the catchers on ‘em which resulted in my neighbor from across the pond running over screaming and crying about me being a gator-killer.
But let’s focus on my tenure at house I bleached and wanted to set on fire. During that time, a lot was going on in Tampa Bay. The housing market had crashed. Every third house in my neighborhood was empty from foreclosures and people who had just walked away from their newly worthless homes (I would take walks and look into the windows of these homes and see children’s items strewn across the floors. It was eerie.). Some of the empty homes were not just devoid of people—they were devoid of both interior and exterior walls because the builders had utilized Chinese drywall. And then there was a national expose on Homeowners Associations in Florida.
That HOA expose filled newspapers, news channels, and people’s consciousness, including my own. Yet here I am, uncomfortably sitting in a house that isn’t really mine, wishing I had taken heed of information embedded into my brain over a decade ago.