Heart of the City by Steenz for June 15, 2012

[Reposting from the end of the day yesterday, because I expect few, if any, people saw it.]Re: The HOA discussion@Everyone – I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that none of you have ever run for, let alone served on, an HOA board.I have. I didn’t like the way my HOA was being run, so I and some like-minded friends ran for the HOA board and were elected. The woman who was president was upset by the number of cars speeding through the neighborhood (we had some moderaly steep slopes and some teenagers and adults liked to see how fast they could go down them), so she worked with the city to get some speed bumps / speed humps installed. Her thanks? Her house was vandalized. We had an older couple come to us complaining that a fence in the neighborhood was “ugly”. We pointed out to them that A) the fence met city code as far as height and setback from the street, B) “ugly” was in the eye of the beholder and not something easily defined, and C) the house in question was outside our HOA. They went away angry that we didn’t do anything. We had a few people complain about how we were running things. We encouraged them to run for the HOA board, and even promised we’d vote for them. Funny thing – they never did. They wanted to complain, and they wanted us to do what they thought was best, but they didn’t want to do the work themselves.Yes, America is a democracy. (More precisely, a democratic republic.) That means if you don’t like how things are being run but don’t vote or take any other action to change things, you lose a lot of your moral authority to complain. As a friend of mine says, “democracy means having to live with things which really piss you off.”Incidentally, when I served on my HOA board, I had a full-time job and was involved in several other activities, so don’t bother telling me that you’re too busy to serve or that only retired people have the time. (Nobody the HOA board I served on was retired.)