Your tax dollars going to help fund people who get in trouble with their HOA? Banning farmland sales to foreign adversaries? I knew about Scottsbluff, but did you know CO hosted POW's too?
Your tax dollars going to help fund people who get in trouble with their HOA?
According to the Sun article linked first below, quoting:
"At least 13 homeowners received more than $20,000 to settle their HOA debt under the Colorado Emergency Mortgage Assistance Program [part of the federally-funded COVID relief Colorado got]. One received nearly $60,000, including about $41,000 to cover attorneys fees."
This totals out to about $2.3 million.
As you'll note in this article (and in previous efforts published in the Sun along the same lines), HOA debt can be one mechanism by which homeowners lose their homes. HOA's are empowered to foreclose on homes and sell them at auction if they're not paid.
Programs like the one here in Colorado (and, according to the Sun, in many other states) are the first time that homeowners assistance funds have been used to pay off HOA debt. In the past it's mainly been to help pay the mortgage.
These programs are also qualified, again quoting the Sun article,
"To qualify for the assistance a homeowner must have an income equal to or less than 100% of their area median income and have experienced a COVID-related impact to their finances, including job loss, reduction in income or increased health care costs. The aid is capped at $40,000 per household, though Cowart said exceptions can be made — like in the case of the homeowner or homeowners who received nearly $60,000 to cover their HOA debt. In that situation, Cowart said the exception stopped an imminent foreclosure sale in Denver’s Green Valley Ranch neighborhood, where a high number of homes have been foreclosed on by an HOA."
Now let's talk some context left out of the Sun's article--left out in my view because what we're about with this topic is bolstering the agenda of the Sun, the homeowner advocacy group that gave them the data, and the Democrats whose policy agenda in the coming term may include some changes to HOA law.**
Toward that end, I linked an op-ed by Mr. Rosen second below that offers some counterpoint. It's an older one written in response to the Sun's first efforts in this regard, but the points are still relevant.
Besides putting some actual numbers out there to help dampen the urgent tone of the Sun's "journalism" (see the attached screenshot),
it mentions one particular case where someone got in trouble with their HOA. Quoting the op ed:
"One such was an Aurora man who racked up $8,649 in unpaid dues, interest and legal fees after he replaced a stolen debit card and “inadvertently” stopped automatic dues payments. When his house was sold at auction for a fraction of its market value he lost hundreds of thousands in equity. That’s unfortunate but he has only himself to blame. How could he have not noticed from his monthly debit card statement that he wasn’t paying his dues? As the current president of an HOA board of a condominium building in which I’ve lived for twenty years, I have no doubt his board made him well aware of his unpaid dues. Foreclosure is a last resort and can take years."
I have no doubt that there are cases of people falling on hard times due to COVID and letting the HOA dues be the thing they drop to prioritize other bills. For those people, I think it's okay to use federal assistance funds to get them out of a crack. To me this is equivalent to not being able to pay your mortgage and using the funds for that.
But, I wonder how many of the "at least 13 homeowners" who used the $2.3 million total taxpayer dollars are closer to cases such as the one Mr. Rosen mentions. Cases where it's more grey than black and white. Cases where the crack their butt ended up in was at least in part their own making.
It can't have been zero. People make all kinds of poor choices and that includes people who are in low income neighborhoods and where there are lots of other HOA foreclosures. Should we taxpayers help foot the bill for those that mess up for months, need a lawyer, and then lose their house because of it?
I am not here to defend HOA's. But I am here to say that when you buy a house in a covenant controlled community, you are buying into an HOA and you agree to pay for it and abide by its rules. If not, don't buy there.
If you owe the money and because of COVID can't pay it, that's not enough for you to lose your house. If you owe the money and perhaps some dumb decision on top of COVID made you lose it, I'm sorry, but you shouldn't be asking me to take money from my family for an avoidable problem.
**See the "related" comment attached to this post.
https://coloradosun.com/2024/01/08/colorado-hoa-debt-aid-program/
https://pagetwo.completecolorado.com/2023/09/18/rosen-liberal-media-bias-on-display-over-hoa-foreclosures/
Related
A peek behind the curtain at how the Sun gets its article ideas?
Check out the bit I took a screenshot of from the Sun article I reference in the post above. Reading it brings to mind a couple things.
1. Obviously left-leaning advocacy groups have found a friendly audience in the Sun.
2. One wonders what kinds of stories get pitched to the Sun and ignored. I would love to see the trash files over there
Banning farmland sales to foreign adversaries?
I saw the AgDaily article linked first below recently and thought I would share. It details how, via executive order, the Missouri Governor recently banned any country listed as a foreign adversary** from buying farmland within 10 miles of any military facility in the state. State statute apparently already limits foreign Ag land ownership.
I'm inclined to like the idea of limiting/banning Ag land ownership by foreign adversaries, but I would like to see this remain a mostly legislative decision.
To wit, since I know there've been no Colorado Executive Orders on the matter (Polis would need to have concern for Ag first), I went to check whether or not Colorado has any similar laws. About all I could find was an attempt to pass a law last Assembly session (see the second link below) by Douglas County Rep Bradley. It would prohibited the sale of Ag land to any person or entity (or government) associated with China, Russia, or any other country listed as a state sponsor of terrorism.
If you're thinking the Democrat-controlled legislature immediately killed it ... you're right. It was killed in committee. See the bill history in the link.
Note too that Federal law requires foreign investors to report to the USDA when they gain control of Ag land, but there's no restriction otherwise.
The reason I wrote above that I would prefer this mostly be a legislative action is because it's something of a balancing act, a sticky wicket in my view.
We don't want foreign investors from hostile countries buying up our land. We want to be very careful in having any foreigner who doesn't live here buying it either unless we can carefully monitor and make sure they would be as good of stewards as any other domestic operator.
I also agree with some authors I've read on the topic who see keeping Ag land in American hands as a national (and food) security issue.
But, we should tread carefully when we start to pinch down on property rights. For example, according to the third link below, a great deal of foreign ownership of Ag land here in the states is for renewable energy. If a farmer could get some spare revenue by letting a foreign company put in wind turbines, following all local regulations of course, is that a bad thing? The land still has some Ag use after all.
I'd also point you to the attached screenshot, a lengthy quote from the fourth link below. While it's legitimate (in my view at least) to see a national security threat from foreign Ag land purchase, we shouldn't let that distract us from larger concerns about farming and helping domestic farmers.
I'd love to have someone with more intimate knowledge of farming or ranching speak up in the comments below. Please share your thoughts for the benefit of the whole.
**According to the article, quoting, "Nations currently classified as foreign adversaries include China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and Venezuela."
https://www.agdaily.com/news/missouri-governor-bans-farmland-purchases-foreign-adversaries/
https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/hb23-1152
https://www.agriculture.com/foreign-buyers-of-ag-land-show-interest-in-its-potential-to-generate-renewable-energy-8417865
https://www.csis.org/analysis/foreign-purchases-us-agricultural-land-facts-figures-and-assessment-real-threats
Colorado's own POW camp
It's that time of the week again. The last post til Sunday and thus something not about (current) politics.
I'm not sure if you were aware (I wasn't until a recent trip to a museum in Greeley at any rate), but the Greeley, CO area was host to a group of German POW's during WWII.
Apparently they weren't the only ones. In the first link below, you'll see a history of POW's in Colorado which lists camps outside Greeley, the Springs, and Trinidad. The second link below gives the location info on how to find the markers that memorialize the camp near Greeley.
From what I've read (and not just for the POW's in Colorado--I've heard similar about POW's in other states like NE near Scottsbluff), the prisoners were pretty easy to manage and many were actually pretty content with where they were and what they did (farm work). Escape attempts and violence were exceptionally rare (probably not surprising given the reality of being in the middle of the US--what would you gain by violence or trying to run?).
I thought it an interesting look at just how very different a world war is to the ones we have fought lately: not that any one or the other is easier, worse, or that any generation is tougher, just marveling at how much total commitment by a country is needed for global conflict. How even the interior of our country was touched in a way that it's not today.
Funny to think how these things were less than an hour's drive.
That's it til Sunday. Have a good rest of the day and see you then!
https://history.fcgov.com/wwii/worrall
https://poudreheritage.org/locations/wwii-pow-camp-202/