So, I bought my house about 6 years ago in a suburb outside of Charlotte, North Carolina. It is a decent neighborhood with mostly newer construction. We have an HOA, but before you grown, this one is actually not terrible. The dues are reasonable. They maintain the common areas. The pool is clean, and the board members are mostly normal people who just want to keep the neighborhood looking good.
I’ve had zero issues with the HOA in all the years I’ve lived here. That is important for later. The reason I bought this particular house was the backyard. It is not huge, but it backs up to a tree line and has this privacy that’s hard to find in a subdivision. Normally, no houses directly behind me, just a green buffer of trees, and then eventually the next street over. On one side is my neighbor, who I will call my good neighbor because he’s been great since day one.
On the other side is where the problem lives. The house next to mine sat empty for about a year after the previous owners moved out. And then it sold and in move the guy I’m going to call Ronald. Ronald and his wife showed up with a moving truck and what I can only describe as big energy. Within the first week, Ronald introduced himself to pretty much everyone on the street and made sure that we all knew three things.
He worked in commercial real estate. He had connections with the city and he had just been elected to the HOA board. That last one surprised me because typically you have to live in the neighborhood for a while before you get on the board, but apparently there was an open seat and nobody else wanted it. So Ronald slit right in. Fine, whatever. I did not think too much of it. For the first year or so, Ronald was just annoying but manageable.
He had opinions about everything. He would walk around the neighborhood on weekend mornings doing rounds and commenting on people’s yards, their paint colors, whether their trash cans were visible from the street. He would bring up these observations at HOA meetings like they were emergencies. Most of the board tolerated him because he was willing to do the work nobody else wanted to do, like organizing the neighborhood yard sale and dealing with the landscaping company. The first real problem started when Ronald decided to renovate his house.
Not a small renovation either. He basically gutted the back half and started rebuilding it. He added a second story addition over his garage and expanded the kitchen and construction crews were there for months. noise at 7:00 a.m. every Saturday, trucks blocking the sidewalk, dust everywhere. I dealt with it because renovations end, and I’m not the kind of guy who picks fights over temporary inconvenience. Then the renovation wrapped up, or so I thought. Last spring, I took time off work to visit my parents out in Arizona, and my dad had a knee replacement, and my mom needed help around the house.
