Can I hold my HOA liable?

BriceJohnson · **Joined:** Thu Apr 13, 2006 7:33 am **Posts:** 2230

Let me start this thread by pleading that this not turn into an "HOA's are the devil" thread. They have good and bad, mostly the latter, but the point of this thread is do I have an actual case against them, and how can I go about making them pay for some repairs I recently had to have made to my house.

The story is this. I have, for the past couple of years, had to rent a sewer auger around once a year to cut roots out of my main sewer line that runs from my house to the cleanout at the street. This year, we decided to finally address the problem for good and replace the line. Its not a very long line, only about 30-40 feet, but we had to get the gigantic tree removed from our front yard first. Upon digging up the line, we found the source of how the roots got into the sewer pipe. Whoever installed the pipe didn't actually GLUE the pipe to anything. Instead, they were just counting on the slip fit of the pipe into the cleanout fittings.

Obviously the idiot responsible is the builder, or whatever sub-contractor they hired. However, doesn't the HOA take responsibility after some period of time of the neighborhood being in place? My house was built in 1998 if that matters.

Part of me wants to just suck it up and call it "one of the joys of home ownership", but this is kind of BS right? Let me know your thoughts.

Aaron Buckley · **Posted:** Tue Aug 13, 2013 12:43 pm

BriceJohnson wrote:

Let me start this thread by pleading that this not turn into an "HOA's are the devil" thread. They have good and bad, mostly the latter, but the point of this thread is do I have an actual case against them, and how can I go about making them pay for some repairs I recently had to have made to my house.

The story is this. I have, for the past couple of years, had to rent a sewer auger around once a year to cut roots out of my main sewer line that runs from my house to the cleanout at the street. This year, we decided to finally address the problem for good and replace the line. Its not a very long line, only about 30-40 feet, but we had to get the gigantic tree removed from our front yard first. Upon digging up the line, we found the source of how the roots got into the sewer pipe. Whoever installed the pipe didn't actually GLUE the pipe to anything. Instead, they were just counting on the slip fit of the pipe into the cleanout fittings.

Obviously the idiot responsible is the builder, or whatever sub-contractor they hired. However, doesn't the HOA take responsibility after some period of time of the neighborhood being in place? My house was built in 1998 if that matters.

Part of me wants to just suck it up and call it "one of the joys of home ownership", but this is kind of BS right? Let me know your thoughts.

I would have thought you would be SOL, but if NC laws are like CA and your in a towhouse, then this thread would interest you:

http://www.hoatalk.com/Forum/tabid/55/v ... fault.aspx

If you own the land that the pipe is in, then you are out sh1t out of luck. - AB

BriceJohnson · **Joined:** Thu Apr 13, 2006 7:33 am **Posts:** 2230

I do own the land where the pipe is.

Aaron Buckley · **Posted:** Tue Aug 13, 2013 1:08 pm

BriceJohnson wrote:

I do own the land where the pipe is.

Then that will likely be a problem. I know that replacing that pipe is not cheap. We almost had to do it on our last house, but sold it shortly after having the roots cut out for the 2nd time. - AB

BriceJohnson · **Joined:** Thu Apr 13, 2006 7:33 am **Posts:** 2230

I guess my beef is not that roots grew in it. That's a "shit happens". The fact that the idiots that put it in didn't glue it in the first place (i.e. installed plumbing that was not to code, or at least I ASSUME code requires that you glue joints in sewer pipes).

Independent of this is the fact that one of the set of intruding roots belongs to my neighbors trees, but I don't wanna start that fight.

Richard Casto · **Posted:** Tue Aug 13, 2013 2:44 pm

BriceJohnson wrote:

I do own the land where the pipe is.

IMHO, the HOA in this case is faultless. If the contractor is still around you might have a case against them, but depending upon how much it cost me to do the repair would factor in how hard I would press to get something out of them. I can even imagine the contractor saying "you didn't give us a chance to fix it", blah, blah, blah...

Interestingly enough I have heard of this type of issue before. I my wife had a co-worker who kept having sewage blockage issues as well as the yard being wet. It ended up being that the pipe that left the house was never connected to the sewer system. There was a gap of a few inches or something. He would joke that if you flushed the toilet the yard would bubble up. It shouldn't have passed inspection, but I am not surprised.

Richard

Scott Johnson · **Posted:** Tue Aug 13, 2013 3:35 pm

I don't think you have a case here. I assume you are not the first owner, *if* the seller knew of the issue you might have a case for breach of contract based on the sellers disclosure form.

BriceJohnson · **Joined:** Thu Apr 13, 2006 7:33 am **Posts:** 2230

Kinda what I thought, the HOA hasn't really done anything wrong (unless their fence over top caused the problem which it doesn't appear that it did), I just wasn't sure if liability transferred at some point from the builder to the HOA (not sure why it would, but sounded logical in my head). If I could stick it to them, I most certainly would though.

Jordan Normark · **Posted:** Tue Aug 13, 2013 6:07 pm

You should have or can get a copy of the HOA bylaws. They will spell out what the HOA is responsible for. I had a townhome that had a root growing into the sewer line and an HOA contractor cleaned the line and I think they eventually repaired it (I was told it was on the "to list"). In this instance, the growth was in a portion of the pipe that was in the common area and carried sewage from several other units.

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Can I hold my HOA liable?

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