Why Your HOA Membership Is Actually a Right, Like Your Right to Vote

Most of us probably don’t think of our ability to join Camelot’s HOA as a bonafide right -- similar to our right to vote in state and federal elections. But it absolutely is a right.

          Here’s why:  Like voting, HOA membership gives us the ability to further our own best interests as manufactured home owners. That’s because Camelot’s HOA (501c(4) nonprofit) is a member of the Delaware Manufactured Home Owners Association. And our HOA helps support DMHOA’s work with a small percentage of our annual membership dues. In return, DMHOA (dmhoa.org) meets with state legislators to further the interests of more than 20,000 manufactured homeowner members in Delaware (including those living in Camelot).

          What does that mean in actual practice?

          Most recently, DMHOA has been monitoring two state senate bills that were recently signed by Delaware’s governor, Matt Meyer, which affect us.

According to DMHOA’s newsletter, the first bill, SB 235, “lifts the sunset of SB 317 that was passed 4 years ago to solve the problem of ‘Market Rent.’ At the time, landowners were raising rents community wide based on the higher rate a single new homeowner paid, putting many homeowners at risk. This bill is far from perfect but necessary if we are to start working on stabilizing a future rent formula.”

          The second bill, SB 297, notes the newsletter, “reverses a DE Supreme Court ruling that did not hold landowners accountable for their actions after we signed our lease.” This bill will do that. (The referred-to actions could include raising the rent beyond the amount stipulated in the lease just signed.)

          Landowners -- manufactured home park owners – are in a superior financial position to hire attorneys and lobbyists to impose their interests at the expense of their homeowner tenants. But DMHOA gives Camelot residents a collective voice and a degree of representation that no single resident could duplicate. Our membership turns us into a population of constituents large enough that state legislators listen when DMHOA’s representatives meet with them to further our homeowner interests.

       So that’s why your Camelot HOA membership is a right: it gives you rights you would not have without it.

If you’ve not gotten around to joining, please submit your membership form, so we can help support DMHOA -- and your interests can continue to be represented, legislatively. (Check out the HOA page on this site for more information.)