Imagine owning your own home, and there are trees in your backyard that have been there for a long, long time. They’ve stood the test of time and handled intense storms like it was nothing.

What would you do if you came home one day and saw a crew cutting down one of these trees?

In this story, this exact scenario actually happened. The issue is that the homeowner lives in an HOA, and the HOA claims the tree they cut down is partly on the common area of the neighborhood not just in the homeowner’s backyard.

Still, they gave no warning and didn’t even consider how the homeowner would feel about the tree.

Angry. Angry is how he feels. I would too!

But the real question is what he can do about it. He’s mad at the HOA but not sure where to go from here.

Let’s read the whole story.

HOA cut my tree down and refuses to acknowledge it

I have the worst HOA you can imagine. I live in SW Florida, and it’s run by a crazy boomer who makes it her life purpose to tick people off.

She has spent the last five years suing other homeowners to regain a foot of common area that runs across the back yards of a number of homes, for no apparent reason.

She has also repeatedly refused my help with the landscaping, which I have offered for free as a landscape designer.

They made a landscaping decision OP didn’t like.

In October, I came home from work to find three men in my backyard removing the central tree in a row of native hardwoods. These three trees have survived every major hurricane for the last 20 years here, and we’ve had some pretty bad ones.

I was obviously irate.

Since then, our HOA has basically ignored us and given us the run around on why they removed it and why they didn’t notify us.

He’s furious.

They said the tree was on common area but it was clearly straddling my yard as well, which I thought was illegal to remove without my permission.

I’m so angry now that I can’t even drive in and out of the street without becoming furious about this whole thing.

The worst part is that if I sue them, my neighbors would have to pay the assessment, which I hate to do.

HOAs in Florida are the worst.

Wow! That’s awful! Why remove a perfectly good tree?

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about an apartment tenant who is being called petty for blocking her parking space with trash cans.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

Here’s a suggestion to talk to a lawyer.

This person asks an important question.

There are a couple suggestions.

And one final recommendation…

It’s not as easy to simply decide to cut down a tree as the HOA might’ve thought. It’s possible they could face big fines for cutting down the tree.

Instead of trying to avoid bothering his neighbors, this homeowner might want to use this issue as the perfect opportunity to rally the neighbors, remove the horrible HOA leader and possibly literally make them pay for cutting down the tree.

HOAs are awful, but when they enter your own backyard and change the landscaping, that’s unforgivable.