OP/ED: More Apartments Coming To FBISD (School Over-crowding An Issue)

Developers Use Home Owner Associations (HOAs) to Hide behind The Mantra of “Protecting Property Values” While They Streamline The Utter Destruction of Property and Community.

How is this crime perpetrated? Easily, it is a game of homeowner diversion and ego stroking, with developer control of the political process and community spending. In the end, communities are “finished off” (ambiguity intended) with a flood of apartments that are built on Tax Investment Redevelopment Zones (TIRZs). The apartments in these zones pay little to no taxes to the schools that they quickly overwhelm. As a result, homeowners “sell-out” and sprawl on to the developer’s next new development, leaving depressed property values, bankrupt schools, confused social systems, and opportunistic political structures behind. All of this happens while people are told by their HOAs that they must spend millions of dollars planting flowers, and on wasteful overblown amenities in order to “compete” with new developments. Homeowners would be wiser to demand authentic communities and sustainable development.

Developers’ HOA control of communities and their misuse of “property value” will no doubt continue until El Paso is a suburb of Houston and everything in between looks like Alief, or until people wake up to what does and does not represent real property value, and sustainable development.

School zoning is the number one factor in establishing property value. High quality and well funded classrooms create property value. People buy into a community for the schools, even if they do not have children, because schools create property value, period! Any community that is zoned for Clements High School could pull up all the grass in their front yards and jack up cars under their trees… still their property values would remain high, because the schools have a reputation that drives the real estate market. In other words, we can all appreciate nice landscaping, but let’s not confuse the over spending on HOA vendor-led ideas about landscaping and amenities, while real property values are being eroded by too many low tax paying apartments overwhelming our public schools. School zoning is the location and the location in the famous “location, location, and location” advice for establishing property value. Neighbors, who respect and support each other, are another vital component of real property value.

Clearly, HOAs do not create a dynamic of neighborliness when they harass people with violation notices that send defensive neighbors out photographing each other’s violations that seem worse than their own. This HOA technique purposely creates suspicion, isolates people, and destroys quality of life, as well as the healthy development of real community. In this way, it is easier to manipulate people to move to the developer’s next new community, when homeowners are not rooted authentically to a real community. Developers benefit when people chase after the developer’s superficial vision of value.

In the end, these industry-driven values and practices will guarantee the destruction of any community. Landscaping and overblown debt creating amenities are a smoke screen that seems to be intended to convince and control homeowners just long enough for the developer to plant an over abundance of apartments, divest himself of his developments, and move on to his next project…

Be a part of an authentic community. Fight to stop the developer driven flood of apartments that will overwhelm and destroy our public schools and our community. Don’t “sell-out.” Claim your community and your authentic values.

Attend the “stop the flood of apartments rally” on April 5th at 5:30 pm on the steps of Sugar Land’s City Hall during the City Council meeting. Demand that our city council not sell-out Sugar Land to developers’ unsustainable ideas and values.

http://www.stopimperialsugarmillapartments.com/