A photo making the rounds on Reddit has broken hearts across the internet.
The photo contains a letter written to an "anonymous passerby" who lodged a complaint with the neighborhood's homeowner's association in order to have a children's treehouse removed from a tree.
It starts by calling out the person's "casual cruelty."
from facepalm
The missive continued:
"The complaint you lodged against the HOA was heard. They had me take down the small treefort that I built on this location with my sons during the pandemic."
"No longer will its presence offend your walk past my house."
"Please enjoy your stroll free from the sound of my children's play and laughter."
"They are safely back inside now, watching television I'm sure."
Homeowners' Associations are notoriously problematic, with often nosy neighbors taking every chance they can to complain about someone else in the neighborhood.
One Redditor described, after her husband was elected to the board of the HOA, neighbors "went from complaining about us having our porch light on at night and how our dog barked all night (that night no one was home, not even our dog) to having zero complaints."
HOAs also have a reputation for being ridiculously picky and petty.
One Redditor wrote:
"In my wife's old neighborhood, people would ride horses around since the streets are basically 4 car lanes wide with houses that had at least 2 aces of land."
"There were tiny yellow signs of people riding horses on the some of the stop signs."
"Someone would install signs with unicorns every now and then but the HOA would immediately take them down as the HOA did not approve those signs because there were no unicorns."-illgot
Another told of the time they outsmarted their own HOA:
"I started participating in my communities HOA with three of my neighbors after some weird architecture rules they tried to implement(they wanted us to all paint our fences dark brown for some reason)."
"Come to find out, out of the hundred or so residences only about eight people show up to each meeting making us a good third of the votes."
"Of those eight two of them were fairly reasonable and one guy proclaims himself a libertarian and votes every new rule down."
"With our voting power our fences can now be whatever color, the pool is getting a waterslide, and we made sure instead of making additions to the clubhouse at the pool no one uses the HOA fee now includes sewer and trash in exchange for an additional $5 a month."
"Plus we upset the brown fence Karen's so much they stopped showing up to meetings. If you cant beat em join em."-eskimoexplosion
No further information was provided about exactly who or where these children and this father are, but the pain of Homeowners' Associations is universal and shared by many.
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