Here's a pleasant little sentence. I bought a house. Responsible, mature, adult. Except in modern suburbia, the house is the least important part. Because bolted onto the dirt is a mandatory, uncancelable neighborhood government, nobody will call it government. The homeowners association. You bought a plot of dirt and the association came with a deed. Attached to the soil like a fungal infection. It was there before you and it stays after you sell. Two hundred and thirty-five years ago, the sharpest minds we had ratified the Bill of Rights. Ten Amendments designed to protect human beings from tyrannical bullshit. Then you move into an HOA and the whole document becomes decorative parchment. First Amendment, free speech. My Victorian shutters were cited because guidelines strictly permit colonial. Second Amendment, my rifle's constitutionally protected. My pressure washer gets cited for an unauthorized discharge. Third Amendment, no quartering soldiers. Well this is one they haven't figured out yet, but give Terry another budget cycle. Fourth Amendment, protection against unreasonable searches. Terry patrols the neighborhood in a golf cart, taking pictures of my garbage cans because one lid is not emotionally committed to being flat. Fifth through eighth, no jury, no due process, and excessive daily fines because of pine needles fell out of my own tree. And the place is called Happy Valley Pines, more like Havana with a pool. Ninth and tenth, all remaining rights belong to the HOA and whoever shows up to the budget meeting. Ten amendments for the entire country, zero in my own front yard. Now let's talk about the money. Because tyranny with automatic billing is a business model. Every month you receive an invoice called an assessment. Assessment. That's a beautiful word. And as AI would say, it's doing a lot of work. They don't call it rent because you're supposed to own the place. They don't call it a tax because the association insists it's not a government. No, it's merely a private corporation with a board, bylaws, compulsory payments, liens, and the power to take your property. And the assessment does not attach to you. It doesn't even attach to the house. It attaches to the dirt. Now some of that money makes sense. A pool, a clubhouse nobody uses, two miles of road the city would never accept, but pool chemicals do not explain how three people on a committee got jurisdiction over the color of my shutter. Apparently my front porch is now critical infrastructure. You could burn the house to the ground tonight, and tomorrow morning the dirt still owes money. Ask Altadina. The Eden fire took 52 of the 272 homes in Babina in January of last year. That July, the association billed everyone a special assessment to repair the common areas. $23,614 per lot, including the lots where the house no longer existed, announced July 29th and it was due September 1st. 34 days. Miss it and you got late fees, 12% annual interest, a possible lien on the property. House or no house. One man paid his with $29,000 insurance check meant to clean the smoke damage out of his house. The smoke stayed in the house, and the money went to the common areas. And this March, 14 months after the fire, the association went to court against a homeowner whose house had burned down. They asked a judge to foreclose on an empty lot. The house is gone, burned down, and the lot is still there, and the lot is what they bill. And all of it can begin with a $50 fine on shutters. A balance crosses some number buried in a collection policy that you never read, and the association can record a lien on your house. And in 21 states, part of that lien gets paid before your mortgage does. Your bank put up the money for the house. Terry puts up a fine for unauthorized shade of beige. Terry gets paid first. Then a sheriff shows up, sells your life's investment over a balance to start with a paint swatch. And who's holding that position? Whoever wanted the job. Petty middle managers, local power trippers, clipboard hall monitors who finally found a hallway without a principal. Wanting the job should be the first disqualifying condition. The one who used to call police over a football in the yard is now a compliance officer. We gave that same person a foreclosure stick to chase us around as adults, and every one of us signed the papers. There is a document sitting on HUD's own website right now as I'm recording this. The FHA Underwriting Manual 1938. It's free. Go look. Paragraph 937 tells the appraiser to check whether incompatible racial and social groups are nearby and predict whether the location is likely to be invaded by them. Invaded. Their word, not mine. Federal government documents apparently arrive with the punchlines already written. Then comes this sentence. And that paragraph is called Quality of Neighboring Development. It's mostly about flimsy construction in obsolete dwellings, bad lumber, outdated buildings, and tucked neatly into the middle, black people. One line. And here's the recommended federal menu. A. Allocate areas for specific uses. B. Require 10 feet between buildings. Setbacks. C. No re-subdividing lots. D. No more than one dwelling per lot. That's single family zoning. Control the design of every building by requiring approval from a qualified committee. Well, there's your architectural review board. The federal government and the person who rejects your shutters. Prohibit nuisances. Stables, pig pins, temporary dwellings, and high fences. The fence rule. So far it sounds like every planning meeting you've ever regretted attending. And then comes G. Prohibition of the occupancy of properties except by the race for which they are intended. Zoning, setbacks, lot design, design review, fences, race. One tidy checklist. And finally H. Appropriate provisions for enforcement. Terry. Because no system of private control is complete until somebody gets permission to enforce it. Eight bullets, every one of them a private agreement between private parties, a private contract. Two of the most useful words in the English language when you need to launder a public injustice. Nothing unconstitutional happening here, folks. Just a couple of neighbors entering into a friendly little arrangement about setbacks, fences, architectural harmony, and who's permitted to live on the street. And the manual says these covenants should run for at least 25 to 30 years. So you could raise a child, pay off half the mortgage, and replace the roof before the racism came up for renewal. Then 1948. The Supreme Court said judges could not enforce them because judicial enforcement was state action. Nobody made anyone remove the words. Well, that's progress in America. We leave the poison in the document and take away the delivery driver. Then the Fair Housing Act of 1968 outlawed housing discrimination. The machinery remained, the paper, the private enforcement, the neighborhood corporation. Only the list of forbidden things needed to change. The old covenants controlled who was allowed into the neighborhood. The modern association controls what happens after you're trapped inside it. Different prohibited list, same private government. Ten minutes of foreclosure, court filings, and FHA underwriting manuals, and my normal voice like a man reading a weather report. None of it sounded like a sheriff. It ends with the sheriff. Six thousand dollars, but six thousand dollars a door. Aaron Davis paid $130,000 for a condo in Baltimore. It sold at foreclosure auction for $10,000, and the buyer was the association that foreclosed on it. I don't know how many people showed up, but there was only one bid. Legally, that is an auction, and it's not one bad board. The Colorado Sun went through $3,000 of these. In Denver, $6,000 of association debt took a house that resold for $325,000. The lowest sale price they found anywhere in the state was $5,000. A lawyer who defends associations explained it to them. The association doesn't want to be a property owner. Of course it doesn't. It just wants the equity. And none of this runs itself. About 70% of these associations hire a management company. Then the company drives around the neighborhood looking for violations. The company sends the notice, the company processes the collection, the company handles the transfer when you sell, violation inspection fee, collection processing fee, the referral arrangement with the collection attorney, transfer fee at closing. Every one of these is a line of revenue. So the people paid to look for problems make more money when they find them, and you're paying for it. Who was sitting at that closing table thinking, you know what I missed from childhood? The hall monitor. The closing table becomes a citizenship ceremony nobody warns you about. You sign until your hand hurts. Deed, mortgage, title insurance, and then a stack of private covenants nobody actually reads. Well, congratulations. Now please rise for the oath. Raise your right hand. I do solemnly swear to defend the approved mailbox designs against all enemies foreign and hunter green. There is a reason Texas has a law about this. Her name is Renona Blevins, an 82-year-old widow. She owed $814. She walked down to the office carrying an $800 check. They didn't refuse it because she was $14 short. They refused it because a foreclosure had already begun. The check was no longer the point. The house was. A human being looked at that check, looked at that woman, and kept filing the paperwork that took her house. There's a hand on every lever, and somehow nobody is ever operating the machine. Texas named a law after the Winona Blevins Residential Property Owners Protection Act, written by John Corona, a Republican from Dallas, founder of one of the largest HOA management companies in the country. Democrats co-authored it, it passed. They took the name of the woman the system crushed and put it on the bill. Because no politician wants to vote for the orderly foreclosure of Homeowners Act. Well I'm gonna go see if there's a way out. Now it's midnight, the shutters have been corrected, the lawyers have been paid, the widow's been removed, and the final question is can you ever escape? In Inwood Forest Village, Texas, the association stopped filing the paperwork and the state dissolved it. The covenant stayed on the deed. And in Texas, the owners of 60% of the dirt can bring a new one back to life. The dirt gets the vote. Every one of these places calls itself a community, a community that looks after itself, right up until it comes after you. Monica Viela bought a house in Denver in 2005, $164,000. Her marriage ended, her husband kept paying the mortgage, she stayed in the house with the kids. What she could not keep up with was the fines. Weeds in the yard, a garbage can left at the curb, the fines stacked, then late fees, then interest, $20,000. In January of 2022, a house worth more than $300,000 sold at an auction for $23,524. She found out in March when the stranger came up the driveway with the paperwork. And that wasn't her homeowners association, that was a metro district, an elected board that levies taxes for the streetlights but also enforces the covenants. Same fines, same liens, same auction. So can you end one? Yeah, I guess, on paper. And Minnesota it takes 80% of the owners and 80% of the banks that hold the mortgages. Yeah, you heard that right. The banks. They don't even live there. They've never even seen your mailbox. But that's the exit. So there are three ways out. Sell, move, or try to change the laws in your state. Colorado did the third one. They changed the laws. In 2022, they barred associations from foreclosing over fines alone. And in 2024 they went back and did it again for Metro Districts. The board shall not foreclose. Those are the words. That's the law now. Two and a half years after they took her house, it doesn't reach backwards. She's still in court. And read what they didn't change. The fines are still legal. The fees on the fines are still legal. And the lien is still legal. They did not take the machine apart. They just put a rule at the last step. Read the next subsection. The district can still send the fines to the county treasurer collected the same way as taxes. They closed one door and the money found the tax bill. And it just has to happen again in every state that hasn't bothered. That's your legislature, not mine, not the industry's yours. Just know, the association's lawyer will attend that hearing whether you do or not. So here's my advice. Before you buy, find the covenant and the county recorder's website and paste them into a search bar. Ask one simple question. What happens if I stop paying? Then read that section yourself. Not your realtor's summary. Take the 10 minutes. I know it takes 10 minutes because I finally read mine last week. After eleven years in the house. Because when the deed says you own the house, but the rules say you have an account, you don't have a home, you have a subscription with a roof. And when the subscription fee goes up, Carrie can get the key. Good night.