Her HOA Never Gave Her A Heads Up Before Construction Started — Now She’s Furious
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Imagine living in an HOA neighborhood, and the HOA informs you that they’re going to be doing some renovations on the neighborhood throughout the year.
But here’s the thing. The construction crew is not going to be working all year. There will be phases to the project. You just don’t know when each phase is going to start.
Would you be perfectly fine with construction starting and stopping whenever, or would you want a heads-up before each phase of the renovation project?
In this story, one homeowner really wants a heads-up. She got that for the first phase but not the second phase.
Keep reading to see what you think she should do.
HOA repairing houses and not giving (real) notice of when extremely loud construction will happen – is this legal?
I live in NJ and am renting a house that is owned by our landlord but is in an HOA.
The HOA has decided to do some renovations to all of the houses in the area.
In August, we received a notice that this would be happening, as well as a “projected timeline” that said that the repairs would be ongoing starting from then and potentially up to a year or so.
The project has several phases, and each phase only takes ~1-2 weeks for each house, but they do each phase for all of the houses and then circle back for the next, such that, for the vast majority of this time, our house (or any individual house) is not undergoing active construction.
The construction was very loud and disruptive.
We were given an initial start date for the first phase, which was about six weeks ago.
That was mostly accurate, and so I was able to make arrangements for the work.
The construction is extremely disruptive: it’s extremely loud banging on the front of the building, near the windows, that literally shakes the whole house.
I had to take down all the pictures/wall decor in that area; move my car out of the garage and find and use street parking for the duration; arrange for my cat to be kept elsewhere, as after Day 1 it was clear that she was traumatized by the huge amount of noise; and arrange to work elsewhere (I sometimes work from home and 100% could not do that during this).
But, this time, she didn’t have time to plan ahead.
This morning, apparently Phase 2 has started on our building.
I woke up to the same enormous racket.
I don’t have arrangements in place for the above and don’t know what I’m going to do.
And, frankly, I’m mad. I feel that we should have been given notice for this kind of enormous disruption.
The HOA’s letter is a bit vague.
Technically, the HOA did give us that letter that said that work would be ongoing during this whole year.
But this seems like a spirit/letter of the law thing.
Surely they can’t just block out an arbitrarily long amount of time, not use 99% of it for work, and then do it whenever they feel like it without any more specific notice?
She’s not sure what she can legally do.
I have written to them before asking for more specific timelines as well as more specific information (eg before phase 1 I asked if the windows would be removed such that the house was open to the air, because it was still cold outside and I wanted to know if the house temperature would be affected).
And they have shrugged me off with no answers.
Do I have a legal leg to stand on here? Can I tell them that they need to give me an actual timeline and report them to someone if not?
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That sounds so awful! They really should’ve given the homeowners a heads-up.
Let’s see how Reddit responded.
Here’s a suggestion.
Another person shares their perspective.
But this person thinks she should be upset at the landlord.
Another person thinks the landlord is the problem.
The landlord probably got a heads-up and forgot to tell her or didn’t think it was important.
She’s upset at the wrong person.
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