I think this guy is full of crap. He talks about the “community,” but according to the information in the article he doesn’t even live there anymore and is renting his home to a tenant.
Full disclosure: In my experience, tenant-occupied homes are the source of at least 90% of the problems in an HOA. And in almost every case I’ve read about in media reports like this one, there seems to be one common issue: the homeowner rents the home to a tenant and doesn’t even inform the tenant about the HOA and its regulations.
That’s true, my wife and I currently have two residences both in HOAs, at one time we owned an office condo which also had an HOA and all three were PITAs.
The one potential area in this dispute I would question is the ability the Board to unilaterally change how the Board was elected, I would read the Covenants and Restrictions really closely to see if they grant the Board that type of power.
I personally have used this argument to stop the Board at one of our properties from changing the color of the building without a vote of the full ownership, once that happened the color change was voted down.
In general, most boards eventually end up in turmoil, they rock along just fine for years and suddenly a new neighbor decides to get on the board and the power goes to their head and the trouble begins.
IMO, HOA Boards have one role, maintain the property values in the community by taking care of the necessities.
In the HOA I was in, 90% of the homeowners voted to get rid of it. If the BOD liked you, you could do anything. If not, they’d create violations - one of mine was “leaving a shovel in the yard”! I told them I’d go to court and kick their butts because there was NOTHING in the CC&Rs or HOA rules against it - and I was digging a hole to plant a tree that day. They backed down, but that kind of crap is why the large majority of home-OWNERS voted to remove the HOA.
We held a vote and removed all the CC&Rs and HOA. Years later, the neighborhood looks much the same but without the need to go to monthly meetings to keep from being screwed.
One rule they tried to pass would have limited the number of cars we could own. Another tried to retroactively make it illegal to own horses - when many of us already did. Heck, the HOA lawyer regularly wrote to the BOD saying they were trying to do illegal things - so they fired her! When your own lawyer says you are trying to break state law....
HOAs can work in some places but they can also be taken over by petty tyrants who think they are above the law.