The woman told me the board president had proposed the gate, but she said he’d been talking about “security” for years even though we’d never had a serious security problem. I went home and pulled the minutes from every meeting I could find, and his name kept appearing beside every proposal that made renting harder. The rental cap, the guest restrictions, the parking permits, and now the gate had all started with him. Then I noticed that every one of those measures had been introduced after a group of homeowners refused to sell their houses to the same buyer.
I called my landlord and asked whether anyone had tried to buy the house. He said he’d received an offer in February from an LLC he’d never heard of, and the price was almost thirty percent below what similar houses had sold for. He declined it, and two months later the board approved the gate. I asked him whether he’d received anything else, and he said the same company had contacted him again after the gate went up, this time offering even less because, according to the letter, “the property now carried additional access limitations.”
My lawyer pulled the LLC records and found the board president listed as the sole member. Then she checked the other rental properties and found the same company had made offers on eleven of the fourteen. The gate wasn’t built to protect the neighborhood — it was built to make fourteen rental houses harder to rent until their owners were willing to sell, and the board president had already bought three of them.
