HOAs, foreclosures and property rights
Your Sunday editorial, “Super liens: What about property rights?” really missed the mark. It was easy for you to make the same mistake the courts are making because that’s how the big money players have set the stage. The banks, the debt collection companies and the vulture investors have framed the issue in the courts to focus on super-priority details so they can completely obfuscate how they have been victimizing both the homeowners and the HOAs.
Your editorial opined: “But the bank sued, arguing convincingly that the HOA has no right to confiscate its asset.” The bank’s asset? Really? What about the homeowner? The house isn’t the bank’s asset. It belongs to the homeowner, who is the equitable title holder, until there is a legal foreclosure.
It might surprise you that many of these houses that went to HOA foreclosure sales were houses that the banks couldn’t foreclose on because they couldn’t meet the standard of Nevada’s 2011 robo-signing law designed to prevent foreclosure fraud caused by banks recording false affidavits about who actually owned the debt.
It might also surprise you to know that the property rights of the homeowners who lost their houses to HOA foreclosures were violated when their homes were taken without due process.
It might also surprise you to know that the debt collectors are often the same companies that manage the HOAs and have set up a self-serving system whereby the HOA board decides to foreclose without notifying the homeowner or giving him a chance to have an open hearing. Then, once the HOA sale is going to happen and the bank and the homeowner haven’t been told when, the debt collection company sells it and keeps all the excess proceeds after giving the HOA the legal minimum of nine months back dues.
Lot of property rights violated before you even get to the banks, I’d say.
Nona Tobin
Henderson
What a pain
Thanks to letter writers Richard Martin and Rae Packer Darrow for their messages about lawmakers who create problems for pain patients with their ongoing harassment. These hysterical lawmakers make the difficult lives of pain patients even more miserable, forcing them to crawl through one legal knothole after another to obtain their medication.
Why is all this persecution heaped up law-abiding patients who live with ongoing pain? Just so a few addicts can’t get safe, legal drugs? This forces addicts to pay exorbitant prices to the street corner vendor, enriching the illegal operator. Meanwhile the addict receives dangerous, substandard medication.
And where do you suppose addicts get the money to pay the street vendor for this questionable medication? By adding to the crime statistics, would be my guess.
I submit it would be smarter and more humane to let addicts obtain the drugs via a physician. The cost would be reasonable, so they wouldn’t resort to knocking old ladies over the head and stealing their Social Security money. Or worse.
The upside would be that the illegal vendors would be out of business. And the pain patient could live in peace.
Aileen Murphy Zsenyuk
Las Vegas
Political bias
As a conservative who will vote for Joe Heck, I have to write in response to the Wednesday editorial about Uber.
While we can debate the good and bad of ride-sharing services, the idea that politicians should take heed because people are voting with their smartphones is nonsense.
Probably the most ridiculous political ad I’ve seen in Nevada politics this year is one that excoriates Catherine Cortez-Masto for shutting Uber down. At the time, Uber was doing business against the state’s wishes and she did exactly what she was supposed to do as attorney general. She helped shut them down until the state gave them the license to do business here, which they now are doing legally.
If you like Uber and Lyft, that’s fine. But to slam a politician for doing her job correctly just provides one more piece of ammunition for those of us who believe conservatives and liberals are drifting further and further apart. When a politician actually does something correctly, you don’t need your bias against her party to spill into your editorials. Unfortunately, it did this time.
David Kober
Las Vegas
