Miscellaneous HOA Items – 08/18/26

So, I’ve been taking a Laissez-Faire approach to living in Hampton Lakes for the last few years and it was going pretty good. I wasn’t getting upset about anything except the Chicago Bears. If I read the stuff on our Facebook groups I would not respond in most cases, or just give a like to it. The talk about pot holes and the gates are hot topics, but I just sat back and relaxed. What I would have said wouldn’t make much difference anyway, so why get all hot and bothered? Then I got a notice from the HOA to clean my roof in 5 days or face the consequences!

Roof Cleaning

Five days to clean the roof, a roof that I did not think was dirty, let alone moldy. I emailed Vania and got her to agree to send out whoever said it was dirty and to have them knock on my door so they could show me what they’re talking about. That’s what she agreed to, but a couple of days go by and I send another email and she said “they said it was dirty and they can see it from the road”. So I didn’t get to talk to anyone who deemed my roof was dirty. Bunch of chickens! Now I don’t mind having to clean my roof, but there are a lot of homes with the filthiest roofs imaginable! Just go west of Hampton Blvd on East Hampton Circle and some of the homes there have crazy dirty roofs. Black mold! Again, I don’t mind cleaning our roof if its dirty, but at least order the dirtiest ones to be cleaned first. In the pics below, the one on the left is my house from the street. The one on the right is from the sidewalk in front of the house. Come on. The one on the right is 10 times dirtier. And I don’t think mine is even dirty to begin with. Anyway, got it cleaned and now back to Laissez-Faire! But wait, a pot hole starts forming in front of my house!

Pot Holes

So, I write another email to Vania about the pothole that’s getting bigger and bigger after every rainstorm. I started hearing the cars’ tires smash into it especially when that section of road is filled with water so drivers can’t see it. Vania informed me that I just missed the July pothole repair schedule, but that she’ll try to get fixed anyway. And she did! It was filled in in a couple of days. But guess what? There are more forming as I type this post! Also, the pothole was just filled in and tamped down. There was no cutting to make straight edges and filled in with a big roller pressing it down. This one will eventually fall apart too. Here’s the before and after pics below. When they put the final coat on top of all these hastily filled potholes, will the final coat be structurally sound or will it give in to all these underlying potholes? That section of East Hampton Circle between Mistflower and Palmetto Prairie looks fantastic and its been almost two years. Wouldn’t it be nice if the developer redid all the first layers like that, then put the final coat on top! Yes, it would, but don’t hold your breath. Too expensive.

The Gates

Then there are the gates. OMG, the gates! My brother lives in a gated community up in Venice. Never a problem with the gates. The community is finished, so they are never wide open. But they work all the time. My wife’s sister lives in another gated community in Venice and we never had a problem there, but those are manned gates. Its really expensive to have manned gates, so that’s not an option that I would see getting passed here. If anybody says lets get rid of the gates and make it an open community, that would be absurd to me. If that does happen, then you better make sure the streets are turned over to the county because I don’t want to have to pay to repair them. Let the county use tax money to repair them. And then, their repair schedule might be worse than the developer repair schedule. So the way I see it is we are going to have gates, but maybe with a different gate company.

Watering the Lawns and the Condition of the Landscaping

So many people water their lawns outside the schedule of what the HOA tells us to do. Watering at 2 or 3 in the afternoon is crazy. By that time the winds are usually picking up and the mist blows everywhere but on their lawn! Some people water so much the water runs down the street into the sewers. Some people water their sidewalks so much that black mold grows on the sidewalk and the curbs. You’re supposed to water the lawn, not the sidewalks and the streets. Adjust your sprinklers for crying out loud. Some people water their lawns so much its like a swamp between houses (my neighbor0. And then there’s a lot of lawns that look so terrible, no amount of water is going to fix them. Are people told to fix their landscaping? Fix their grass and remove dead trees? I don’t know if the HOA ever tells anybody to do these things because I see nothing getting done. Maybe a few, but I think they do it on their own.

Oil Stained Driveways

I was walking around the hood and stopped to talk to somebody I knew. As we were standing on the sidewalk, I looked at the driveway of the house we were in front of and it was covered with oil stains from an oil leaking car. I told the guy I was talking to that if a realtor was going to show me this house, I wouldn’t even go in. And maybe even if he was showing me the house next door, I wouldn’t bother because that oil-stained driveway is telling me something about that neighbor. I think oil-stained driveways are the worst and not only bring down the value of that house, but the neighboring house as well. Do we have a rule about oil stained driveways? If not, we should.

Garage Doors Open

We have a rule about keeping your garage doors closed when you’re not doing garage work. But there are a few people that open their garage doors in the morning and keep them open all day long and then close them at night. I, for the life of me, can’t figure out why you would do this. Do they believe this is somehow an energy efficient move? That the garage won’t bake like an oven and thereby cause their AC to run less in the house and save a few pennies? After watching videos of people with alligators and snakes in their garage, you can forget that! Plus, there’s wasps, flies, bees, lizards, armadillos, skunks, racoons and whatever else Florida has to offer! Plus, the neighborhood just looks better.

So I wouldn’t have said or complained about any of this, you know Laissez-Faire, but then I got that notice to clean my roof! The HOA gets on my back to do something that I don’t think needed to be done while all these other violations go on for years and years. When we take over, what kind of rule followers and enforcers are we going to be? We can’t let things slide on certain things and then expect everyone to be happy when the hammer comes down. I wasn’t! I’d like to see some of these things being fixed. Those really dirty roofs cleaned, garage doors closed, watering when and where you’re supposed to, nice lawns everywhere, dead stuff removed, streets paved with no potholes and gates working like they are supposed to, etc, etc.

Have a nice day! I’m going back in Laissez-Faire mode! See you around town!