An HOA Board Approved A Plant List Without Reading It Carefully, And One Neighbor Found A Way To Take Full Advantage
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Bureaucracy works best when the people approving requests understand what they are stamping.
This HOA required residents to submit every planned yard plant for official review, backed by the threat of removal.
That gave one irritated homeowner the perfect opportunity to test whether the board actually read applications carefully.
The Latin names did all the work.
All flora must be HOA approved
I used to live in a suburban neighborhood.
The houses cost a tiny bit more than the next neighborhood, so the people on the board/neighborhood volunteers thought they were better than everybody.
They did things like adding a gate, which nobody wanted, to keep out the nonexistent burglars.
Apparently, the board didn’t look too closely at the neighbor’s list.
If you wanted to plant anything in your yard, you needed approval. Write it up, submit it, wait for the stamp.
They could make you tear your landscaping out if you didn’t.
One resident didn’t like this, and submitted a form with all the plants they requested to cultivate. It was a long list of the specific names (the Latin names) of a bunch of weeds and invasive species.
It was approved.
That’s funny! I hope they didn’t really plant all of the weeds though.
Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.
I’m not sure why anyone would want an HOA either.
This is interesting!
You can’t have it both ways, but leave it to an HOA to try.
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If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about neighborhood kids who built a master forest fort, only to find it looted by the bigger kids on the block.
Here’s the perspective of someone from Australia.
The resident submitted a long botanical list filled with weeds and invasive species, disguising an obvious landscaping nightmare behind formal Latin names.
The HOA approved every plant, proving that its restrictive review process involved considerably more authority than attention.
They demanded botanical oversight and accidentally greenlit ecological chaos.
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