The housing shortage is finding new solutions everywhere, but not all of them are as sane as you might think. Hat tip SM!
A Placer County homeowners association is mandating that its residents keep their garage doors open throughout the day during the workweek.
The policy, according to a notice taped to residents’ doors, states that people who live in Auburn Greens face “an immediate hearing notice and subjected to a $200 fine” if they do not comply. The notice states the policy was enacted in October.
According to board member Norma Brewer, the policy was put in place after it was discovered that a resident was allowing people to live in his or her garage. She would not comment beyond that.
“That’s an issue that they should address differently, I feel,” said Fred Waidtlow, who owns one of the units in the community.
Waidtlow cleaned out his garage Thursday and moved personal belongings inside his unit as he voiced frustration with the policy.
“If we have to have this open from 8 in the morning to 4 in the afternoon, anybody can help themselves and steal you blind. And they do it in this Auburn Greens complex,” he said.
Others echoed that sentiment.
“This will just be an open door policy and saying, ‘Welcome, take what you want,'” said neighbor Shally Ia, who plans to keep her garage door closed.
Auburn Greens’ on-site management closed its window as KCRA 3 pulled into the parking lot and subsequently posted a sign saying the office was closed. A phone call to the office was not returned.
Read full article here
Akin to strip searches to deter shoplifting. Whatever happened to snoopy neighbors? Maybe institute a bounty system?
Actually this is beyond easy. Count the cars. They aren’t in the garage and there are more of them.
This is “tell a friend” strategy, intended to strike fear into whomever thinks they can get away with living in a garage. Counting cars is time-consuming and not nearly as efficient as striking fear in hearts. If you can brand images into your opponents minds without you being there, you’re running the war, not them.
Legally, if landlords have their ducks in a row on the lease agreement–and many leases state the garage area is for parking a car, with no storage allowed–this strategy is completely legal, the tenants claims of losing property is irrelevant, and even legally damning. Furthermore, I hope it starts a precedent amongst landlords, since a landlord who is improving, or even just maintaining her/his property is wasting time and money if the landlord next door is willfully maintaining an illegal immigrant hootenanny in the garage spaces. Too often it’s not people “looking for a better life,” rather it’s people sitting around getting drunk, and selling drugs.
When folks are reduced to living in a pile in garages, they are desperate for cash flow. That’s when you see the kids on bikes at all hours of the day or night entering and leaving the garage to pick up their “product” for distribution in the neighborhood. When these “residents’ occupy a neighborhood, their stake in the neighborhood is about zero. They’ll do what they believe they need to do to survive, and that usually means breaking the law, and deconstructing the community to do it.
I always say they can lay around, get drunk, and sell petty drugs in their country of origin, why do we need to import this manifest of devolution into our neighborhoods? Many, many immigrants represent what’s best in American values, but too many, often times undocumented, are riding the coat-tails of what many average Americans assume is almost all immigrants.
I know via repeated personal experience that this is not the case by a long shot. It only takes a few people on an entire block to wreck the block. From a quiet sanctuary to a wretched melodrama that never ends, and costs taxpayers plenty.
There’s a guy across the hill from me that never closes his garage. All I see is a wall of clutter and junk. Looks horrible. Definite hit to property values from this.