Last year I hastily drove home trying to get there before a 4 pm scheduled Zoom meeting with a client. I got to the entrance of the gated community in which I live with about 10 minutes to spare, only to find a car parked sideways blocking entrance and exit of vehicles. A sheepish guard pointed me to park at the curbside, which by now had about five other cars parked there.

As I was running late, I didn’t ask questions. I parked and hightailed it to my house, lugging my heavy laptop bag. I was determined to come back after the Zoom meeting to find out what was going on, as by this time I noticed that there was a stationary car on the inside entrance, followed by a mover’s truck filled with household goods.

I came back after an hour to find that the entire road leading up to our gate filled with parked cars and extremely angry residents. Parents who were inside couldn’t drive out to go and pick their children from school. It was a veritable hot mess. The short story was this. The tenants of house X were moving out and the management office had given instructions that they were not to be let out as there were outstanding service charge dues. According to the tenants, they had been dutifully paying service charge to their landlord who clearly had not been remitting the same to the management company. According to the frustrated mutterings of other residents – who were in some parts livid at this inconvenience and in some parts sympathetic – the landlord had fallen out with the management company, collectively owned by the house owners, from the inception and had refused to participate in the management of the community.

The belligerent chap allegedly owned a good six houses in the community, which is nothing to be sniffed at. This scenario, I have no doubt, is replicated in the hundreds of gated communities and apartment blocks that have now become conventional in our urban housing settings. Developers put up houses or apartments and transfer the master title to a management company which then sub leases the units to individual buyers. The developer then transfers ownership of the company to the house owners who are then left to look after the common areas, security, garbage collection and the ordinary humdrum of urban living.

But how do you make shareholders liable to pay the common area costs? How do you penalize recalcitrant home owners who don’t agree with a plan to tarmac the road, upgrade the gate, build ablution blocks for the guards or to use an outsourced garbage collection service? What about if shareholders are unhappy about how the management company is being run?

In the United States, gated communities and apartment living have been a common way of urban dwelling for many years. In many municipalities, local governments are very happy to yield up powers to what are called home owner associations (HOAs) as they take over functions that should ideally be undertaken by the municipalities such as building and maintaining internal roads and building and maintaining green spaces in previously undeveloped tracts of land. HOAs broadly create legally binding rules around architectural styles, pet size and numbers, home occupancy limits, home maintenance standards, noise complaint policies and a whole host of rules and regulations on what living in that common area entails.

Different states have developed laws to support the quasi-local governmental authority that the HOAs adopt, to the extent that levying fees and penalties for non-compliance is a fairly standard power. In some states, failure to pay those fees and penalties can lead the HOA to foreclose on a homeowner’s house just like a mortgage lender and sell the property to recover outstanding fees. More on that next week as these powers therefore raise a whole kettle of fish around governance on the boards of the HOAs.

Meanwhile, how did my neighborhood Mexican stand-off end? Police were called, then told not to come, then told to come and a visibly irritated officer showed up and told the tenants where they could go for couples therapy with the management company. At about 7 p.m., the gates were opened, the tenant moved her car from the entrance while their hungry and very angry movers drove the furniture laden truck out to the new house. Next week: how could all of this drama have been avoided?

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Twitter: @carolmusyoka

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