Haughville, Heaven, and the HOA

3.12

In the cold hell of Indiana December, on a crew led by my brother in law, we rushed to complete our overbooked holiday-light-hanging schedule (which someone above us both had approved). Between some near-miss slips on icy roofs, at some point, I had leaned into a white wall to stop my fall and left a little handprint, courtesy of the HOA-mandated black mulch. It must have been our lucky day, as some bigwig was driving by to lambast us for the mark and insist that having our sign in the yard was a violation of the neighbourhood rules. With the threat of fines, he eventually left us alone in the wretched weather to work out the rest of the job. While on the slightly more memorable side, this was far from an isolated incident as we worked the season through, and by the end of it, I had come to two conclusions: first, I had developed such a contempt for the attitude of the complainants that I resolved never to live in an HOA myself. Secondly, I swore to myself that I would not ever put myself in a job again where the primary purpose was vanity projects for the wealthy.

Fast-forward a few months and after the job run-around had resulted in one part-time arrangement needing supplement, I took a full-time post as a customer service rep that put me much more directly in the line of fire for these types of complaints. As I pondered through the droll hours of listening to people go on and on about how embarrassed they were to live in a neighborhood that had dandelions in eyeshot or how their petty neighbour had put notes on cars parked on the street for a one-night party event, and the demands (never polite requests) to levy fines and send nasty letters and get law enforcement involved, I quickly realized that there are really two kinds of neighbourhoods.

A Tale of Two Neighbourhoods

By virtue of the kind of money I make, our family lives in the most notorious neighbourhood in the city. Historically (and I believe presently), it’s the most diverse zip code in the metroplex - and that brings with it some of the tensions that come from different cultures rubbing elbows. There are often sirens going from all kinds of emergency services. At least one of the street names is in the news almost daily, and not for any good reason. I attended a worship gathering for a hopeful area church plant where the minister recounted an acquaintance saying something along the lines of, ‘The difference between my neighbourhood and yours is the difference between heaven and hell.’ Naturally, the acquaintance was living in some sort of gated community. It struck the minister wrong, and I was undecided at the time. I mean, who doesn’t love a crime-free area with low emergency vehicle traffic? There’s busted glass and spent shell casings on the bike trail through our streets, graffiti everywhere, potholes that could swallow your car whole, and fireworks going off a month before and after any firework-worthy holiday. It’s full of people with souped up cars blatting their mufflerless tailpipes down the road at all ungodly hours of the night and with the kind of trash dumping that gets the city involved with fines and court dates.

Contrast that with the folks who live in places where one windy day and one knocked down trash can is the worst crisis in the history of the neighbourhood, and suddenly an emerging sense of the rationale comes forward: if this is the worst problem we’ve ever had to deal with here, it must surely be a world-stopping crisis. The neighbour’s weeds are worth a whole phone call and demand for fines. An unauthorized fence (on a property a person actually owns, for God’s sake) must be sued over, not for crossing a property line, but for being done without approval from the draconian lizards whose sole satisfaction in life is holding and wielding this tiny little power in their tyrannical oligarchy over a subdivision. Somewhere we lost the balance between not caring at all and caring far too much.

Entitlement versus Responsibility

What we initially seemed to be dealing with in my analysis was entitlement mentality in the HOA and irresponsibility in Haughville; while I still reckon that’s true in some sense, I think it might be more fitting to cast it as an entitlement issue on both sides. In the HOA, people feel entitled to get involved in everybody else’s business without actually talking to them, and instead using the arm of the HOA to bully people into submission. In Haughville, people seem to feel more entitled to just do what they want without any regard for the consequences and second-order effects on their neighbours. I suppose you could also cast it as ‘overresponsibility’ and ‘underresponsibility’. Regardless, it falls pretty squarely in the category that Ecclesiastes would label ‘extremes’. It’s not actually that pleasant to live in either place when considered by those metrics. The calls from rich folk in 4-story houses often reveal a misery that appears worse than the occasional violence that breaks out just up my street.

Who is My Neighbour?

The middle-ground anonymity of suburbia doesn’t quite seem to be the solution. Growing up, I happened to know a handful of the households that bordered my backyard domain - I worked with one to help build his fence, another had a son who was friends with my youngest brother, and some way up the street was a friend I also went to school with (and whose pets I watched while their family was on vacation). The other next-door folks cheered for the rival football team - I don’t think I ever spoke to them; the caddy-corner backyard only ever came outside to smoke, so we generally avoided them; we did bake Christmas cookies for the widow across the alleyway once. I can’t ever remember anything approaching a dispute - we lost 3 mature trees and nobody ever assumed it was their right or business to get involved by complaining when we cut them down. The only person who ever told us to mow the lawn was dad, so we obeyed. I get that sentiment generally from people who aren’t control-freak enough to want to live in an HOA, but are generally content to just connect with the disparate people from work or church, and then retreat into home. If they engage directly with their neighbours, it may be over a complaint, or a polite over-the-fence visit, or occasionally even some sort of service, like assisting with driveway clearing after big winter storms. But, before long, it’s business as usual and we return to the comfortable anonymity. We can only connect with so many people before there’s just not time to invest in anyone else.

I think the Good Samaritan probably sets up the framework for both compassion and reason. If the neighbour God has put in your path is in need, care for him - if his lawn needs mowed, instead of reactively calling to complain, how about knocking on his door and offering to do it for free this once? An honest conversation might go a country mile to smooth relations, while an impersonal letter from the Grass Police will probably not cool things down much.

Heaven Hath No HOA

In visiting with two dear friends (so dear they were both in my wedding party), I have often been reminded that Jesus is not very likely to be found in a gated community. The one time that he was, he was reclining at table with Simon the Pharisee, when a woman entered and wept on his feet, drying her tears with her hair. Simon grumbled, If he knew what sort of woman this was, he would not let her touch him. Jesus said to him, Simon…suppose a man had two debtors, one who owed him five hundred denarii, the other fifty. When neither could pay, he cancelled both debts. Who do you suppose loved him more? Simon answered, The one with greater debt, I suppose. Jesus answered, You have judged rightly. Do you see this woman? When I entered, you gave me no water to wash my feet, but she has bathed them with her tears and dried them with her hair. You gave me no kiss, but she has not stopped kissing my feet. You did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with ointment. Therefore I tell you, her sins, though many, have been forgiven her - for this reason she has shown great love. But whomever is forgiven little loves little. Then he said to the woman, Your sins are forgiven…Your faith has saved you. Go in Peace. Jesus has a special eye on “those people,” who would surely not be found among the respectable folk in neighbourhoods with names. And yet, elsewhere he says, The harlots and tax collectors are barging into Heaven ahead of you lot! speaking to the respectable people of his own day. Whenever he interacts with the rich, as with the Rich Young Ruler, he ends generally with some sort of sorrow: It is easier indeed for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for the rich to enter the Kingdom of Heaven! And why is that? Is it the wealth itself? Barnabas could sell all and lay it at the feet of the apostles; Job could be charitable to every foreigner who passed by. My own anxieties over money actually seem to increase when it increases.

Parties and feasts in these HOAs seem to be thrown for friends from other respectable neighbourhoods, and rarely for the actual folks next door, who are more likely to write their own parking tickets to stick on the windshields of their neighbour’s guests (real complaint). By contrast, I can walk down that shattered-glass-and-bullet-casing littered bike path and get hailed over by Steven, whose little nippy dog is never on a leash, so that he can freely offer us a couple of ribs off his backyard grill. He always waves when we pass by, but we don’t know him as well as we’d like. Yet I find in him more charity and hospitality than I think I could drum up from a whole neighbourhood of the wealthy.

Jesus told us where we could find him, and it wasn’t in mansions: When I was hungry…thirsty…naked…sick…imprisoned, you cared for me - or you didn’t! Jesus is in line at the soup kitchen, the clothing closet; Jesus is in the mobile health clinic as a patient (and a healer); Jesus is behind the bars of the jailhouse. He is with the less fortunate, among the poor, and if we want to find him, then we might do well to do what my two dear friends set out to do: live intentionally among the poor. One friend is a pastor. His congregants tend to come in to the church from outlying areas, because they moved away when the poor moved closer. But he chose to make a home in the neighbourhood as it actually is. One friend is studying to become a lawyer - a public defender, in fact, specifically to meet the needs of the poor who have no defense, and served several consecutive summers not among the other legacy law students whose homes have inground pools and vaulted ceilings, but as an inner city intern with the homeless, the orphans, the abused, neglected, and starving. He found Jesus there.

When we get to the Kingdom of Heaven, I wonder if there will be a gate. Revelation says there will be twelve of them. I think we will look through and be quite surprised at the sort of folk we find there.

And I suspect there will be dandelions.