The Self-Appointed HOA

So the first thing I had to do this morning, instantly upon rolling out of the sack after the dogs informed me that dawn was cracking, was to run out into the alley and post signs on the thick, lush cat’s-claw vines that overhang my back wall.

Over the (many!) years, they’ve piled themselves to a height of about 12 feet, effectively blocking the view from the alley into my yard. This is what allows me to skinny-dip in my pool. Although the fence is six feet high, it’s six feet from the level of the alley’s grade; from inside the yard, which is built up above grade to alleviate flooding, it’s five feet high, revealing all to passers-by. You have to get a variance to lay another couple courses of cinderblocks. Although some people have done so (and many have just raised their walls illegally) — it’s a hassle, and I can’t afford to have someone come in and do a proper job of building up the wall. But the vines, which do not violate city code, serve conveniently to keep curious eyeballs out of my backyard.

Meanwhile…

Of late a group of neighbors has taken on the function of a de facto homeowner’s association. They are unelected, and they’re a private club — they post their doings on Facebook, but they refuse to allow everyone in the neighborhood to join their closed page. They won’t let me in, for example, because I expressed my displeasure with folks who allow their large dogs to run loose — illegally — in the neighborhood park. One guy took issue, since he feels he has a God-given right to let his dogs run around loose, and people who don’t want to be bitten or to have their leashed dogs put at risk should stay out of the park.

Whatever business they’re up to gets reported on this Facebook page. I find out about it because a friend passes it along to me.

And they get up to all sorts of stuff. Among the “stuff”: having the City install speed bumps and roundabouts on the ’hood’s main north-south feeder street. Now it’s true that drivers who used to flow smoothly and happily on Conduit of Blight Blvd, the large main drag to the west of us, have diverted themselves onto Feeder Street NS because of the years-long train construction project that has made Conduit of Blight nonnavigable. And yes, it’s true that people who use our neighborhood streets as cut-throughs don’t give a damn about us, our kids, or our pets and drive like they were at the Indianapolis 500. And it’s true that all the junk now littering the formerly quiet Feeder Street NS does slow these outsiders down.

However, our self-appointed HOA seems to have no concept of “unintended consequences.” Among these:

• Speed humps cause truck drivers to gear down and then gear back up, adding to the noise pollution and especially creating a racket for people who live near them.

• Speed humps cause vehicles to go thump-THUMP every time a driver crosses over one, adding still more to the noise pollution — imagine having one of those outside your bedroom window!

• People have already learned that you don’t have to slow down to get over these things. Habitually offending drivers now just cruise right over them, without even bothering to cut their speed.

• Speed humps cause physical pain to people who suffer chronic conditions such as arthritis, back pain, and abdominal pain — every whack as your car bumps over one of the things feels like a stab.

• Roundabouts do not cause people to slow down. When people don’t slow down to a crawl, they find their cars climbing on the sidewalks and the neighbors’ lawns, or running over the (expensive taxpayer-funded) landscaping in the middle of the things.

• This phenomenon makes it unsafe to walk on the sidewalks near said roundabouts. So people walking to the park from neighboring homes detour across the lawns of the upscale houses facing the park, so as to avoid the risk of being hit while on a sidewalk bordering a roundabout.

• The junk with which they’ve littered Feeder St. NS has clogged traffic in such a way that for half the morning and half the afternoon, it literally is impossible to cross that road on foot. So if you live west of the park, you can NOT get to the park for your morning walk!

• As a result of the well-intended but poorly thought-out obstructions, many people who know the neighborhood now avoid Feeder Street NS by driving around it on formerly sleepy and private local lanes. I never drive on Feeder St. NS anymore, and I’ve noticed that I have plenty of company on the neighborhood back streets, now much busier than they ever were before.

• And also as a result, at least one neighbor on a roundabout has his house up for sale (good luck with that!). This likely is the same neighbor who stated in public that the things are unsafe and that he never agreed to a roundabout in his front yard.

These folks are not city planners, they don’t have good sense, and because they’ve set themselves up as a closed club, they’re not getting all their “constituency’s” approval or even any opposing input for their little schemes. They’re not elected. They’re just a bunch of well-meaning folks who see themselves as stepping up to the plate.

We did have a neighborhood association that was low-key but functioned well. It was headed by another self-appointee, whom we’ll call Thom, who did an excellent job at letting neighbors know what was going on down at City Hall and at facilitating communication among the neighbors, the local police, and the city leadership.

Unfortunately, his wife had designs on political office. They raised funds and saved cash to finance her run on a city council seat…and shortly before that election, what should happen but the Republicans gerrymandered the city council districts. They ran a line straight through the middle of our neighborhood, putting the four or five blocks west of Feeder Street NW into a low-SES district that is largely minority, largely lower-income, and largely neglected. Mrs. Thom had right-wing leanings, and as you can imagine, her vocal dislike of the firefighter’s union (and the set of opinions that comes with that knee-jerk stance) did not stand her in good stead with the working-class voters who make up the vast majority of our new political district. She lost magnificently.

So they moved eastward, into a more affluent and politically conservative district, and we lost Thom, the guy who actually had good sense and who was doing a fine job as volunteer neighborhood association capo.

Into the vacuum stepped the present coterie of naive do-gooders.

For their latest project, they’re calling on the neighbors (read “their friends,” since not all the neighbors are privy to their plans) to turn out this morning with garden shears and power tools to tidy up a couple of the ’hood’s chronically messy alleyways:

All Hands On Deck for the first annual Neighborhood Alley Clean-up! Let’s make this a successful and enjoyable community event. With the influx of opportunistic crime [they were shocked, shocked I tell you, when one of their band belatedly noticed the prostitutes who have worked Conduit of Blight Blvd for years, having spotted one of them servicing a client in an alley 😀 ] we are working the first two alleys just north of Feeder Street East-West and Conduit of Blight.

We will meet at [an address about a block from the Funny Farm]. The event is scheduled for Saturday, March 14, 2015 between 7:30 and noon. We need neighborhood participation! Please bring gloves. Supplies contributed by the City of Phoenix.

All alleys, exterior and interior, are to be cleared of debris, view obstructing shrubs and weeds. We can continue this effort by working together to report blight and maintain the alley-ways behind our homes.

“View-obstructing shrubs and weeds,” eh? And whaddaya bet these worthies will figure 12-foot-high cat’s-claw vines come under the heading of “view-obstructing”? Especially since that’s exactly what their purpose is.

So this morning I went out there and tied signs reading PLEASE DO NOT TRIM VINES! to the plantings along 95 feet of the back lot line. And I’m not kidding. If they vandalize my plants, I am taking them to court. Depending on how much it will cost to buy a city permit and have a contractor raise the height of that back wall (which is longer than just that 95 feet…), I will take them either to small claims court or into a civil court to get them to pay for restoring my privacy.

I appreciate their concerns about upgrading and maintaining the property values in the ’hood. And the alleys, especially at this time of year when the weeds start to grow, surely do get junky and cluttered. BUT…the city has a neighborhood slum abatement office. City code requires homeowners to keep the alleys behind their property free of trash, weeds, and obstructive volunteer shrubs and trees.  It’s not the place of some self-appointed band of busy-bodies to take it upon themselves to come along and cut down whatever they please. All it takes is one phone call to the slum abatement folks, and the city will send an officer to inspect the alley and issue warnings or citations to people who need to clean up their acts.

Y’know, if I wanted to live in an HOA, I’d have bought a newer house in a suburb that’s a LONG way from the meth gangs to the north of us and the city’s main conduit of blight of the west of us. One of the several reasons I live in this neighborhood is that I don’t want to live in a regimented, look-alike HOA development. None of these people are elected, nor do they seem to care whether everyone who lives here has any voice about their Great Ideas. And I for one wish they’d get a clue.