I wrote down the plate and waited until Monday because I didn’t want to accuse somebody based on a guess. The architectural review committee has five members, and I knew the names because they were printed on every notice I’d received. The plate came back to a man three houses over from the street behind mine, and when I looked at the committee roster, there he was. I called the management company and asked whether committee members were allowed to submit violation complaints against other residents, and the woman said yes, as long as the complaint was documented. I asked whether they were required to disclose that relationship. She said she didn’t know. Then I asked for the original photographs from my eleven violations instead of the copies attached to the notices. She said those files were maintained by the committee. That was when I understood why nobody had ever been willing to show them to me.
I requested the records in writing, and three days later I got eleven photographs and a spreadsheet. Every photograph had been taken within four minutes of the time that car stopped outside my house. The first was a trash-can violation. The second was my car supposedly parked too long. The third showed holiday decorations that had already been removed that morning. I went through them one by one, and in every photograph you could see the same section of sidewalk from almost exactly the same height and angle. It wasn’t a photograph someone casually took while walking past. Whoever took them had been sitting inside a vehicle. I checked the dates against my doorbell footage and found something else: on ten of the eleven mornings, the car stayed outside my house for between three and seven minutes after the photograph was taken. On one morning it stayed for twenty-six minutes. I watched that clip again and saw the man get out, walk toward my mailbox, stand there for a moment, and then return to the car. I had never seen him speak to me, but he’d been looking at my house for months.
I brought everything to the next association meeting and put the photographs beside my doorbell timestamps. The room went quiet because everyone could see the pattern. The committee member said he’d only been documenting violations from a public street and that he had nothing against me personally. I asked why none of the other houses had received a single violation in two years when the neighborhood rules applied to everyone. He didn’t answer. Then another homeowner raised her hand and said she’d received a notice the previous year for leaving her trash can out, but when she complained, the committee member had told her not to worry about it. I asked the management company to explain why his name appeared as the submitter on fourteen complaints against my property but none against anyone else. The president finally said they would review the matter. Then the committee member stood up, gathered his papers, and walked out. The next morning I received an email from the association saying my eleven violations had been “administratively reviewed” and were being withdrawn — and attached to that email was a resignation letter from the committee member, dated six months earlier, that I had never been told existed.
