If you live in a community with a homeowners or property owners association (HOA/POA), you may have had an opportunity to read (poor you!) your “Declaration of Covenants, Conditions, and Restrictions”. This document runs with the deed to your home and is a legally binding contract between you and your neighbors which mandates a sort of self-government, which places some restrictions on your real property rights.
Huh?
Right, what it means is there are things you can and can’t do that your normal local government usually doesn’t have much to say about.
Things like:
- how big and what color your mailbox is
- whether you can have a birdbath in your yard
- how long your holiday decorations can be displayed after the holiday (quick hint: if it’s opening day of baseball season, the wreaths and blow-up Santa need to be taken down)
You get the picture.
In exchange for you suppressing your need to display your hand-made, 9-foot, carved black bear totem from Pennsylvania Amish country in your yard (though it IS quite charming), you have the comfort of knowing that your neighbor must suppress her equally sincere desire to festoon her yard with her eclectic collection of Lord of the Ring garden figures™.
On a more serious note, there are usually architectural standards regarding the building and construction of new buildings, additions, and adjacent structures that you might rely upon to be sure that anything built in your neighborhood after you’ve already invested your time and money in your home, will generally conform with the guidelines set out in the declaration. And there’s often an architectural review committee (ARC), made up of some number of neighbors, that is charged with reviewing anything subject to the architectural standards outlined in the declaration. Such as new building construction.
So what does this have to do with living in the Overlook development in Clipper Mill?
Since the first houses in this community were built in 2008, there have been three owners/developers of the property. Not because the initial idea wasn’t a good one, but because 2008-09 was not a good time for the economy (see, global financial crisis, “GFC”, Great Recession), and selling half-million dollar + homes in an urban live-work neighborhood in the middle of Baltimore just wasn’t as “money good” as initial investors had projected.
After the original developer lost the development to BB&T Bank through foreclosure in 2009, everything was stalled for a while, and then the bank decided to try to restart the project and sell the remaining planned homes beginning in late 2010.
At that time, 11 homes of an initial planned 30 Phase 1 duplex houses had been completed and sold. BB&T slowly began to sell the remaining 19, some of which were all or substantially completed already, some of which didn’t even have foundations. The bank never committed to what would become of the eight Phase 2 homes on a separate street near the entrance to the development, though there was a PUD (planned unit development) and site plan on file with the city that indicated the duplex homes would be an average of 1894 square feet, and be 37 feet apart from one another.
For reasons unknown, BB&T decided to sell the remaining eight Phase 2 lots to the builder, Steve Davies/ESW LLC, toward the end of 2012. Mr. Davies had acted as the construction manager for the original developer, and continued to do so for BB&T. He also lives in the neighborhood.
The architectural review guidelines of the Overlook Clipper Mill HOA call for submission for review and approval by the architectural review committee (ARC) whenever an owner wants to build a new structure on their lot (or install a deck; or new landscaping; or storm doors; or house numbers on the house or in their yard, etc.).
That submission requires a schematic and detailed drawing for any proposed structure as well as information on floor plans, materials, color schemes and a proposed construction time table.
The ARC is comprised of three people, (usually members of the community), who have 30 days to review the submission, and can suggest plan revisions or choose to approve or deny the proposal.
Mr. Davies, as a builder with years of experience in the community, submitted his plans for ARC review on the very same day that he purchased the lots from BB&T. The new plans were for larger, taller houses than any currently built or approved in the development.
Here are copies of some of those "schematic and detailed drawings" [click on pics to zoom]:
His plans were approved, the same morning of his purchase of the lots from BB&T, by two of the three members of the ARC, and submitted for recording purposes to the property management company for the HOA.
The two members who voted to approve the plans were both employees or agents of BB&T (the seller of the lots to Mr. Davies), who had their positions on the committee by virtue of the fact that BB&T held a majority of the votes in the HOA when the committee was constituted during the previous year, before a majority of the houses were sold to actual residents. Three days later, at the annual HOA board, a new HOA board was elected, at which time BB&T ended its involvement with the HOA and the architectural review committee.
The one member of the ARC who did not vote to approve “the plans” was the only member of the committee who is an actual resident of the community. In fact, that member was not asked to review or vote on the plans, but was copied on the email directing that the property management company retain the plans and “approval by the ARC” on file.
Not surprisingly, when residents of the community heard about this process, many wanted to know what could be done to correct what was viewed as a flawed process by which the new plans were approved.
More to come…
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