A Troubled Time in the Courtyard Available to Purchase

In January 2001, realtor Earline Wakefield stood for director of the homeowners association for the Courtyard, a secluded neighborhood on the upscale west side of Austin, Texas (see Exhibit 1). Typical of HOAs² across the country, this one was actually a non-profit corporation, the Courtyard Homeowners Association, Inc. (CHAI). At that time, HOAs governed 230,000 U.S. communities with about 46 million residents, up from just 2.1 million in 701,000 communities in 1970.³ In general, these “members,”⁴ including some directors and officers, did not know their HOAs were corporations, referring to them as “associations” and often believing...