When James Anthony and his wife bought their villa on a wooded lot in a St. Peters, Missouri, neighborhood 18 years ago, they were drawn to the central location, the attractive three-street layout, and the brick mailboxes. They also liked the promise of yard work handled by the homeowners’ association. What they didn’t anticipate was a two-decade saga of board overreach, secret deals, and what Anthony describes as a system of governance that has more in common with a corporate fiefdom than a community of neighbors.
In a first-person account published this week in American Thinker, Anthony details a series of grievances against his HOA that will resonate with anyone who has ever felt trapped by the fine print of covenants they never truly read—much less agreed to.
The Developer’s Long Shadow
The trouble started early. The original developer, Anthony writes, piled up a maintenance line-item for the association that topped $157,000 before the homeowners even thought to lawyer up. But the developer went bankrupt and abandoned the claim, sparing the then-61 households from what would have been a significant hit.
Six years later, a second developer came in to finish the neighborhood. That’s when, Anthony says, a few board members saw an opportunity. With new homeowners paying into the association, the board decided to fulfill a promise in the covenants to maintain roofing—a promise that had been left unfunded for roughly a decade.
For Anthony, this was a fundamental fairness problem. Homeowners who had been in the neighborhood from the start received windfalls of roughly $7,500 per home, paid for by the newer residents who had just moved in. He and his wife disagreed with the decision, but the covenants gave the board broad powers that made it nearly impossible to stop.
“Homeowners should keep fulfilling the promise of low assessments, not disproportionately take from new neighbors,” Anthony writes.
Secret Deals and Neglected Maintenance
The roofing issue was just the beginning. Anthony describes a pattern of what he calls arbitrary and secretive board behavior:
- After discovering erosion on his property, Anthony took a landscaper’s advice to route his gutter downspouts underground to French drains. Board members, he says, secretly paid to do the same work for other homeowners—and then told gutter cleaners to service those homeowners’ underground lines but not his.
- Board members once paid to aerate the neighborhood pond, but subsequent boards stopped the practice.
- A hollowed-out tree on common ground—leaning toward Anthony’s home—finally fell onto his roof on a zero-wind day. The board initially refused to pay for removal, then relented, but now won’t repair the ensuing roof, gutter, and siding damage.
- Erosion remains an unresolved issue. Both Missouri state and St. Peters city experts recommend replacing honeysuckle to prevent erosion, but past boards told homeowners not to—and the current board isn’t addressing it either. Instead, they’re using heavy equipment to bring in rocks to remediate some homeowners’ erosion, a costly and, in Anthony’s view, ineffective approach.
The Road to a Rewrite—and Resistance
Last summer, a rewrite committee called a homeowners meeting to push through new covenants that would keep all existing restrictions and add more. Anthony spoke up, arguing a point that strikes at the heart of HOA governance: “We had never agreed to the covenants themselves; we had just bought the home we wanted.”
When asked later to approve the new covenants as a standalone contract, he says it was an easy no.
One committee member criticized him for never having served on the board or a committee. The presenter then made a backhanded comment: “No, Jim did do something: He sent a proposed association constitution to members, and it went nowhere.”
But that attempt to dismiss him backfired. Anthony’s opposition helped defeat the rewrite.
Earlier this year, a new rewrite committee returned, claiming the only sticking point left was erosion. They ended up meeting only with a small, select group of homeowners. The board pushed yet another set of new covenants on homeowners in April, May, and June—and this time, the official rewrites were approved.
A State Law Problem
Anthony places a large share of the blame on Missouri state lawmakers. He points to the state’s nonprofit corporation law, which he says requires associations to have boards of at least three directors, allows boards to appoint executives who may be directors, and doesn’t require associations to have judicial functions—meaning there’s no independent mechanism for homeowners to challenge board decisions.
That’s a recipe for the kind of power imbalance he says has plagued his neighborhood.
An Alternative Vision, Modeled on the Founding Fathers
Anthony has spent two decades thinking about what a better HOA could look like. He canvassed his now-complete 125 households, reaching 65 percent of them. He conducted a survey about the official covenants and a possible new governance framework, and got responses from 34 percent of households. Support for meeting to discuss a new governance framework came in at 30 percent of households.
His proposal is ambitious: model HOA governance on the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the U.S. Code, and executive orders. He drafted documents that include a software standard and a standard for handling maintenance requests. He estimated rebates and repayments for roofing to make everybody whole. He gave an example of a table of homeowner reviews of contractors, to help homeowners arrange their own repairs. And he added background notes on keeping governance simple, plus excerpts of state statutes and the city code.
Even under the current governance documents, any board majority could voluntarily follow almost all of his proposed changes, he notes. But that’s not likely to happen unless homeowners demand it.
“I’m developing options,” Anthony writes. “Options are what make freedom work best.”
His story is a reminder that the fight over the size and scope of government isn’t just about Washington, D.C. Sometimes, as he puts it, “overreaching and obnoxious government is super-local.”
This article is based on a first-person account published by American Thinker on August 13, 2026. The views expressed are the author’s own.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/08/a-conservative-versus-the-homeowners-association/