Imagine living in an HOA neighborhood that his its own private park. If the park was fenced and gated, would you be willing to unlock the gate for someone you didn’t know, or would you refuse?

In this story, one teenage girl is in this situation, and she refuses to open the gate; however, she feels bad about it. She’s not sure if she made the right decision.

I think she did the right thing. Keep reading to see if you agree.

AITA for not letting a random lady into my neighborhood park?

So I(18F), my boyfriend, and my sister went to my neighborhood park the other day near my house.

The park was just renovated a couple of months ago and a fence with a locked gate was put up to prevent homeless people, and people from the apartment complex across the street from getting in.

There are also cameras in the park. (The kids in the apartment complex ripped a children’s seesaw from the groud right after it was renovated before the fence was put up. And homeless people kept sleeping on the benches and park tables)

The HOA provides key cards to all of the residents of the neighborhood after you registered for them and paid for them.

The issue happened when a stranger approached her.

Anyways, as we we’re leaving the park to walk back to my place an unfamiliar lady pulls up in a car outside the gate and asks to be let in and claims to have left or misplaced her key card. But then she immediately contradicts herself and asks how to get the key cards.

I explain that I’m not entirely sure as my parents were the ones to receive the cards but that I knew that you had to go through the HOA to receive them.

She then asks if I could let her in to let her child play.

I apologize and tell her that I don’t want to risk getting in trouble with the HOA as I don’t know their policies on people without keywords being let in unsupervised(you can have up to 2 guests per keycard).

OP didn’t back down.

She pushes a little and I reiterate what I had already told her.

She then relents and gets back into her car.

The three of us(my sister, Boyfriend, and I) then leave the park and close the gate behind us.

The lady probably doesn’t live there.

This is when I get a little skeptical.

The lady hesitates and watches us leave before I see her leave the parking lot and then turns out of the neighborhood entirely and towards the apartment complex.

But still I can’t help but feel a little bit bad so AITA?

She has no reason to feel bad. People like that lady are exactly the reason why the HOA installed gates and keycards. The lady can take her child to a public park to play.

Let’s see how Reddit responded.

This person reassures her that she did the right thing.

Another person is on her side.

This person explains why the park is for HOA members only.

Another person says it’s no big deal.

She did the right thing. If she had let the lady in, she would’ve broken the HOA rules.

She trusted her gut that the lady probably doesn’t live there. If she’s wrong and the lady does live there, she can look into getting a keycard of her own.