CC&R Corner, June 2009

For Rent
by Will Bullington, CC&R Compliance Officer, LSPOA
With a bad housing market and our country in financial chaos, we are seeing a large influx in rentals in our community. Many of these rentals have been “below the surface” but with the price dropping, many people that don’t normally live in an area like Lake Shastina can afford to live here. Since last summer I have been dealing with complaints about rental properties: loud music, parties, garbage blowing all over the neighborhood, too many cars parked all over the lot, and the coup d’ grace was two assaults with deadly weapons.

Home owners that live here want to know, “what are you doing about it?” Most of the problems we and the local police are dealing with are young people that have roommates, sharing the cost of the housing. We are required by the CC&Rs to know that you are renting your property, to whom, and you are required to give the renters a copy of the CC&Rs (even on a disk). The Association has authority to discipline tenants and to evict them. The legal costs of doing this are the responsibility of the owner.

Our sub-division is zoned and designated by the CC&Rs as “single family residential.” This means you are not supposed to rent out a home to two, three, four tenants. That’s what brings us two, three, and then four vehicles and double that when they have friends over. That’s what brings us loud parties like a bad “girls gone wild meets animal house” movie. How bad can it get? How about renters going after golfers with a baseball bat, renters attacking a citizen with a sword, renters bashing a citizen’s face in with a rock, renters coming out after public works employees with a bat, and renters having so many parties, over so long a time, that the entire street came in and signed complaints.

This situation is a nationwide issue. So many homeowners associations are dealing with it that the Supreme Court has ruled in favor of a homeowners association that passed rental restriction rules. They ruled that a homeowners association can restrict how many rentals are allowed, what type, etc. Our current rules need to be enforced and that is just what our Board wants done. The situations described in this article occurred quickly over a very brief period of time. For a long time there was only an occasional problem with a renter, but this was almost always handled informally and quickly. The question of vacation rentals has come up also. This is where someone rents their home out for less than 30 days, usually for a weekend. Sometimes it is just a family and other times it is three or four golfing buddies. Very rare that there is any complaints and it makes a tidy sum of tax dollars for the County though a transient tax. It is interesting that the transient tax purpose is to offset the impact on road repair and emergency services to the community providing it. I guess we’ll have to ask the Board of Supervisors if they want to send some transient tax dollars to Lake Shastina.

The problem is being addressed. The bad guys are in jail, problem tenants are moving out, public works is repairing the roads, and we are enforcing our rules. We let our guard down and learned our lessons.