Florida Homeowners Association Terror

There are some things that Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, has done right. (Right means that I agree with it. If you disagree with it, then it would be wrong, right?) I would not have known about these HOA updates if it weren’t for Deborah Goonan’s website, Independent American Communities.

To recap, in my neighborhood, we used to pay $50 per month for CDD fees and also $50 per month for HOA fees. As of January 2026, the HOA fees are $103 per month. There are 717 homes here.

I don’t know when we got a property management company in addition to our Homeowners Association. I probably don’t know this because, as I have mentioned, I have only attended one or two HOA meetings. When I moved here, we had an HOA with some members, including a president, with all members being residents of the neighborhood. That was it. And that was all.

As I previously recounted, I am in this neighborhood because it was what I could afford at the time (I cannot afford it presently, but have yet to get to the thicks of this story to explain.). Although I liked the communities Panther Trace and MiraBay, neither of those are what I imagined for my life. I didn’t have dreams of suburbia and Homeowners Associations.

In the thicks of fighting my Homeowners Association last year, I began to disassociate from my home. The ideas I had about improving it, and the things I had already done to make it my own, no longer became sources of joy. My home, in fact, was no longer my home. It was a just a house. Then I remembered, that was how I felt when I moved in.

My mother recently told me about this woman who went to jail over her Homeowners Association’s complaint of a brown patch in her yard. I understood all of the steps that led there before reading these articles as this is a mirror of my own story. Check it out; and also read the follow up story about others in the neighborhood.

Maybe I am not the best neighbor. Sometimes, I leave my trash bins out too long. Sometimes, when I am doing yard work, I leave my tools and things right where I was using them. Sometimes, I cut my grass at 8 or 9 in the morning. Sometimes, I play thumping music. But more than that, I have only been to one HOA meeting in my entirety of living here. And I don’t even remember which year that was.

Even before I was an adult, I lived in an HOA neighborhood (right, Mom and Dad?). What I remember is that they organized fun events for us. We had phenomenal block parties and we knew each others’ names and where all the kids belonged.

When I moved into my new house, Florida’s minimum wage was $7.25 per hour. Of course if I had been making that, I would never have been able to rent or buy a home in Hillsborough County. I would have had to live in Polk, Hernando, or the Dominican Republic—all of which I did consider at some point!

I want to make it clear from the inception of this blog o’ mine that, of course, I contacted an attorney for a consultation about my “HOA situation”. This is what I was told nearly verbatim: