![]() Given the number of communities throughout Florida that were developed during the '80s and '90s this is becoming a major problem in many locales. If and when that occurs, governing associations may no longer be able to collect assessments to perform maintenance and upkeep on facilities and improvements within a community and to enforce the aesthetic covenants which enhance property values. While a complicated law, which was enacted to eliminate stale claims and interests affecting property titles that even few lawyers fully understand, the bottom line is that this law renders the covenants and restrictions that enable the private system of community governance unenforceable and extinguishes them after 30 years. In Florida, there's a law that was enacted back in 1964 called the Marketable Record Title Act, or as it's affectionately referred to by those in the legal community MRTA (Ch. Most view this well-entrenched system of private community governance as both necessary and positive. Therefore, the ability of the homeowners' association to administer to and enforce the private covenants and restrictions for the community is vital. Symmetry of beauty, uniformity of maintenance and harmony of aesthetics is proven to promote property values that benefits all owners in the community. In most organized communities, homeowners cannot renovate their homes, or even change their landscaping or the color of their homes, without gaining approval from their homeowners' association. So, most of us accept as a given that the homeowners' association acts as a governing body controlling how to maintain and upkeep properties. It was a well-devised plan to keep property taxes low, attracting hordes of new transplants from the North looking to escape their high tax burdens, and for local politicians to keep themselves in power by being able to brag about such accomplishments. ![]() During that same period, local governments were all too eager to pass along maintenance responsibilities for lakes, swales and open green spaces and other areas within these communities over to the homeowners' associations that governed them, instead of those governmental authorities picking up the tab in the traditional manner. Most newcomers to Florida during that period of time became accustomed to purchasing homes in amenity-rich communities that offered pools and clubhouses, and, in many instances, gates and guardhouses with a promise of security that required privatization of the streets and roadways within them. ![]() Andrew Blasi, shareholder with Shapiro, Blasi, Wasserman & Hermann.ĭuring the last 30 to 40 years, exponential population growth and concomitant community development has occurred throughout the Sunshine State.
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