My HOA finally decided to quit griping and actually solve a problem

My HOA finally decided to quit griping and actually solve a problem

At the beginning of September, my HOA sent a nasty-gram to our neighborhood complaining about the fact that people were putting their trash out before the scheduled pick up days. A few days ago, they decided to quit their whining and at least attempt to solve the problem instead of just griping at the residents.

I live in a neighborhood that is made up of rows of attached townhouses that line both sides of a series of streets/small parking lots. We don’t have driveways and we barely have front yards, but there are a few grassy common areas. Such conditions create an issue with trash disposal for most people living here because there isn’t anyplace where trash can be stored until pick-up days. Trash is picked up twice a week, Monday and Thursday, but people often need to put their trash out before then which is against the HOA rules.

There are a lot of large families and households with four or greater people which means that the residents produce a lot of trash. Even my little family of three has several bags of trash between pick up times. Having trash disposal twice a week is a huge blessing, but sometimes it isn’t enough…especially when you don’t have anywhere convenient to put your trash in the interim. Of course, the HOA never considered the possibility that residents probably didn’t have anywhere else to put their trash and just assumed that we were a bunch of lazy bums who deserved to be chided.

We’ve gotten nasty-grams from the HOA about people putting their trash out early a few times a year since we’ve lived here. People aren’t trying to be nasty or disrespectful by putting their trash out. There simply isn’t anywhere for residents to keep their full trash bags. I suppose they could keep them in their house, but who wants to keep dirty, smelly trash in their house for 3 or 4 days? I certainly don’t.

The HOA, however, threatened to fine anyone who put their trash out too early and asked us to effectively spy and report on our neighbors so that the rules could be enforced. You know how bureaucracies can be sometimes; punish people for something that no one else has a problem with and offer no alternatives or solutions.

Given this fact, I was surprised when public trash bins showed up on the common areas Tuesday. Though we haven’t been given official word, it seems that the new trash bins (which are just your standard bin that most companies distribute for disposal) are there for early disposal.

People started putting their trash in them almost as soon as they appeared which shows that the people in my neighborhood actually do take pride in their surroundings (something the HOA didn’t think that we possessed). It’s a shame that it took (at least) three years of them crowing and making threats to realize that the problem didn’t lie completely with the residents, and that they should make a go at trying to solve the problem themselves.

So yeah…way to go.