NC homeowners fear being forced out as HOA fees skyrocket

 Homeowners in a North Carolina neighborhood say they could be forced out of their homes after their homeowners association doubled monthly fees to a staggering $2,500 — just months after residents were hit with another massive increase.

The latest hike in Magnolia Cove, a community in Sherrills Ford, means residents will now have to shell out $30,000 a year in HOA dues alone, on top of their mortgages, property taxes and other expenses.

The association voted Monday to raise monthly fees from $1,250 to $2,500, after initially proposing an eye-watering $7,500 monthly charge, according to local outlet WSOC-TV.

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Homeowners in Magnolia Cove face soaring HOA fees that have reached $2,500 a month.trekandphoto – stock.adobe.com

For some homeowners, the increase has turned their dream of settling down into a financial nightmare.

Jill Menson and her husband bought their home believing it would be the last place they would ever live. Five years ago, their monthly HOA dues were just $158.

But those fees have since ballooned, reaching more than $1,200 this summer alongside a $10,000 special assessment, before the latest increase pushed the monthly bill to $2,500.

“We are going to be forced out with nowhere to go, because no one is going to get a dime for their houses even if we put them on the market,” Menson told the outlet.

The Post previously reported on the neighborhood’s HOA controversy in July, when residents were already reeling from fees that had jumped from $350 to $1,250 a month.

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Residents say rising fees and ongoing legal disputes are threatening their ability to stay in their homes.spiritofamerica – stock.adobe.com

Now, the dues have doubled again, leaving some residents worried about bankruptcy, foreclosure and whether they will be able to sell their homes at all.

One homeowner told WSOC-TV that he feared he had only months left before he would be forced to leave.

“There has to be HOA reform,” the resident said. “It’s insane that they have this much power to take everything that you have worked for over fees.”

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The North Carolina community has been embroiled in a yearslong dispute over HOA fees and promised amenities.Google Maps

The dispute has been brewing for years.

Residents have accused developer Aaron Guess, who they say owns most of the properties in Magnolia Cove and controls the HOA board, of failing to deliver promised amenities, including a swimming pool, lawn services and mailboxes.

But the association argues that the steep fees are necessary to cover mounting legal bills and unpaid assessments.

According to the HOA, more than 20 homeowners sued the association and some of its officers in early 2024. The association said those claims were either voluntarily withdrawn or dismissed by the court.

The HOA subsequently pursued counterclaims, and a jury found certain homeowners liable for defamation, awarding monetary and punitive damages, according to the association.

The board says defending the litigation has become the single largest expense in its budget, while years of unpaid dues have shifted additional costs onto homeowners who continue paying.

The association, which operates as a nonprofit, maintains that it does not profit from the assessments and that the money goes toward community expenses.

It also suggested the fees could eventually decrease once legal expenses subside and delinquent accounts are paid.

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Some homeowners fear they will be unable to sell their properties as HOA costs continue to climb.Google Maps

Not everyone in the neighborhood opposes the board.

“They started a fight. They lost,” resident Paige Johnson told WSOC-TV, referring to the homeowners who pursued legal action. “They don’t like the outcome and now they think everyone else needs to pay their dues.”

Guess did not respond to WSOC-TV’s requests for comment.

For homeowners hoping for government intervention, there may be little immediate relief.

The North Carolina Attorney General’s Office told the station that state law does not impose a general cap on how much an HOA can increase its fees annually, although associations must comply with their governing documents.

That leaves residents facing a difficult choice: pay the soaring fees, attempt to sell homes they fear have become unattractive to buyers or risk falling behind on payments.

For Menson and her neighbors, the prospect of losing the homes they worked to afford has become an increasingly real concern.

https://nypost.com/2026/10/31/real-estate/nc-hoa-fees-double-to-2500-a-month-leaving-owners-fuming/

'I live with a ghost': Japan's haunted homes attract bargain hunters

 From the moment Ryua first walked into her rental apartment in Tokyo she believed it to be haunted.

"When I visited the place for a viewing there was a man standing there, glaring at me," she says.

"Since the estate agent couldn't see him, I realised he must be a ghost."

While someone more squeamish would probably have quickly left the flat never to return, Ryua chose to go ahead and move in.

"I'm a bit of a contrarian, so I decided I wanted to become friends with this glaring male ghost," adds Ryua, who works as an aidoru, a young entertainer, and who doesn't wish to share her surname.

Four years later, and still in the same apartment, she says she continues to experience paranormal activity on a daily basis. She says she hears endless footsteps and the ghost talking.

Although Japan has increasingly marked Halloween in recent years, many Japanese people take ghosts seriously all year round. The country has a word, "yuurei", which means a lingering, troubled spirit.

These are the ghosts of people who died in violent or tragic circumstances - those who were murdered, killed themselves, or simply were lonely and died alone. If they died at home, then the belief is that their yuurei won't go away.

For house hunters who are not superstitious or squeamish it means there are big bargains to be found. There is a whole category of dwellings called jiko bukken, which means "stigmatised" or "incident" properties.

Under guidelines issued by the government in 2021, Japanese estate agents must disclose suicide, murder, death by fire, and any death where the body was not discovered for an extended period of time.

For rental properties this information must be disclosed for three years, and it must be revealed indefinitely for any property offered for sale.

By contrast, in the UK there is no legal requirement to reveal that a person died in a property. And in the US, it differs from state to state. For example, in California you have to reveal if a person has died in the property in the past three years, while in Arizona and Oregon you do not.

Ryua was told that a man had killed himself in her apartment. It meant that she gets an almost 30% discount on her rent on her tiny, 25 sq m bedsit in the fashionable ward of Setagaya. She says she pays 45,000 yen ($285; £213) a month, instead of what should have been 62,000 yen.

While a house where there had been a murder or suicide would probably be harder to sell or rent out anywhere in the world, Tokyo estate agent Erik Oskamp says that Japanese people are particularly superstitious and averse to stigmatised properties.

"[Even] an apartment next to a cemetery will be difficult to rent out, especially if you can see the tombs from the kitchen," explains Oskamp. "The worst thing is if a suicide has happened in the apartment. Even if somebody has jumped from the roof, many renters will move out. Other issues are a serious crime or a lonely death."

The latter issue, that of a person dying alone, would not generally affect the price of a property in, say, the UK or the US.

But in rural Kagoshima, in Japan's southwest, it enabled Diane Tincher to buy a large three-bedroom house for about half of what would have otherwise been the asking price.

'If there is a ghost I'm thankful to her'

The 79-year-old American has lived in Japan for nearly 40 years, working as a tour guide. She says that the estate agent had been straight with her – there was a heavy discount as an elderly lady had died alone, thereby stigmatising the property.

Tincher paid 20m yen for the house, in a location where similar properties usually sell for up to 45m yen.

"I don't believe in ghosts. But I know that the Japanese are very superstitious," she says. "If there is a ghost I'm thankful to her every day... to live in such a splendid and affordable home."

Researching the house, Tincher had found it on a website called Oshimaland, which lists jiko bukken properties, giving details of the events that occurred. It was launched in 2005 covering Tokyo, before expanding across Japan and then internationally in 2011.

It is crowdsourced, meaning that members of the public add the homes and their details.

Teru Oshima, the founder of Oshimaland, says that in the past such properties were "not very attractive options" in Japan.

Yet as house prices have surged in the country in recent years, as well as a big increase in the wider cost of living, one 2025 survey found that more than half of Japanese people would now rent a jiko bukken if it was cheap.

Back in Setagaya, Ryua says she is happy living with her ghostly flatmate. "I believe that ghosts were once living human beings, so they deserve our respect," she says.

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/articles/live-ghost-japans-haunted-homes-000022206.html

City Council’s ‘Distressed’ Housing Scheme Would Aggravate New York’s Affordability Crisis

“Decline is a choice,” Charles Krauthammer famously said of the policies of the Obama Administration. A version of the phrase applies to the New York City Council’s latest, misguided housing policy: distress is a choice.


The Council is blessing what is not a self-evident idea: that non-profit organizations will do a better job than private owners in rescuing the city’s thousands of “distressed” rental apartment buildings.

By giving such groups a right of first refusal to buy, the Community Opportunity To Purchase Act would, per its sponsors, “stabilize an increasingly distressed affordable housing sector.” In contrast to Mayor Eric Adams, who refused to sign a similar bill, Mayor Mamdani has indicated he will do so.

Rather than signing the bill into law, here’s a better idea: address the reasons why older rental buildings are falling into disrepair in the first place, rather than handing them over to groups which, according to NYU’s Furman Housing Center, lack the financial capacity to fix them up.

“A lack of resources and a lack of capacity within the qualified not-for-profit sector,” the Furman center says, “make it unlikely that this sector can meet the demand from tenants involved in the more than 6,000 annual sales of residential buildings with three or more units in New York City. This will make the experience frustrating for tenants who may be interested in exercising the new right.”

Ironically, the language of the bill’s justification for taking property out of the hands of the private sector reveals the true underlying housing problems: a combination of “inflating costs and stagnating revenues.”

It’s tough to control inflating costs at a time of rising fuel bills, for instance — but stagnating revenues have everything to do with city policies, none more obvious than Mr. Mamdani’s rent freeze, coupled with rising property tax bills. Per Furman: “Property tax bills for older, predominantly rent-stabilized buildings (where 90 percent or more of units are regulated) have risen faster than inflation even as their net operating incomes have declined in real terms.”

The city has applied a tourniquet to rental revenues — and having caused distress, blames it on “predatory landlords,” as a sponsor of the Opportunity to Purchase Act, Councilwoman Sandy Nurse, puts it. The numbers are stark.

Even before the rent freeze a Furman Center study of the financial pressures faced by these older, rent-stabilized buildings found that net operating income — in other words, profit — declined, after inflation, between 2019 and 2025 to the point that “tightening operating margins that may limit the ability of owners to invest in building upkeep.”

Furman’s Mark Willis told the city’s Rent Guidelines Board that thousands of prewar buildings in the Bronx are operating under water as rent increases failed to cover increased operating costs “ by roughly 1 percent per year in pre-1974 rent-stabilized buildings in the Bronx. “ That’s the recipe for distressed housing.

As the most recent Census Bureau Survey of NY Housing makes clear, there’s a direct link between price regulation — “rent stabilization” — and poor building conditions, or distress. Per the survey: a third of rent-regulated units have “rodents” — almost twice the rate of unregulated apartments, as well as twice the number of leaks and three times the number of heat breakdowns.

Not only do the City Council and the mayor have to ignore their own role in causing housing distress, they have to believe that taking the profit motive out of housing management will lead to better days.

That was the theory that inspired public housing in the 1930s. Its original advocates were avowed, confident socialists, like Lewis Mumford, who viewed government as the best provider of good housing. “Where is the impetus for such housing to come from?” he asked, asserting that “it cannot be found in capitalistic methods of production.”

In practice, NYCHA operates the most distressed housing in Gotham. Under the Opportunity to Purchase Act, it’s likely the city will have to invest millions to renovate units for the new non-profit owners.

Notably, nonprofit management did not prevent the 19 buildings owned by Harlem Congregations for Community Improvement from accumulating, per the Chronicle of Philanthropy, “hundreds of citations for trash accumulation, inadequate heat, mold in apartments and sewage in hallways.”

Private owners have skin in the game; nothing is worse for them than distressed units that they can’t rent and stay vacant. If the value of their property falls, they still can face unforgiving mortgage payments. No rational owner chooses to starve a building of maintenance — except for that “declining revenue” problem.

Non-profit operators may, to be sure, have altruistic motives to help stabilize neighborhoods and improve buildings. Yet they will not be immune from a shortage of investment capital. Their management teams tend to be salaried bureaucrats — with no ownership stake.




Here’s a better idea for the council and mayor: unfreeze rents, freeze rental building property taxes — and phase out rent stabilization. Watch housing “distress” fade away.




Howard Husock is a senior fellow for Domestic Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute and author of 'The Projects: A New History of Public Housing.'





https://www.nysun.com/article/city-councils-distressed-housing-scheme-would-aggravate-new-yorks-affordability-crisis

Orthodox Jews flee NY for Florida amid rising antisemitism

 More than 100 Orthodox Jewish families, fed up with rising antisemitism and political dysfunction in New York, are planning to join the 60 who already fled the state for a new community in Florida — only for far-right influencers to descend on their community and spew vicious Jew-hating rhetoric.

Lakefront Estates, a $300 million, 550-acre neighborhood developed in Glades County, officially opened its doors in October and has seen an influx ever since.

The community boasts a kosher supermarket, synagogue and yeshiva for the Orthodox Jewish community.

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Jews are fleeing antisemitism in New York for Lakefront Estates in Florida.Zak Bennett for New York Post

Lakefront Estates CEO Yidel Perlstein said that the Orthodox Jewish community represents the first wave of sales at the development because so many Jews were seeking to leave New York, but that the homes at Lakefront Estates are open for anyone to buy.

The town offers 4 bedroom 2,5000 square foot homes starting at $460,000 and 7 bedroom 3700 square foot homes for $585,000, Perlstein said.

Multiple families interviewed by The Post said that rising antisemitism, which supercharged under Mayor Zohran Mamdani, gave them the final push to leave The Empire State.

“You could feel the antisemitism everywhere; even my community Borough Park changed after Mamdani came in,” said Morris, a former Brooklynite, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation from the influencers.

A mother of four, who also wished to remain anonymous, said that rising antisemitism and the high cost of housing in New York led her family to make the move to the sunshine state.

“New York has become increasingly antisemitic, we’ve been facing that a lot,” she said.

She also said that Florida’s policy of providing vouchers to help pay for private school tuition was a factor in her family’s decision to move.

Hate crimes in New York City have soared nearly 16% since last year, with attacks against Jews comprising half of them, according to NYPD data.

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Mr. Weiss, an employee at a grocery store in Okeechobee, Fla., checks out customers on Friday, Oct. 23, 2026.Zak Bennett for New York Post

New York State Rep. Aron Wieder (D-Rockland County), who has seen 20 families from his heavily Orthodox district move to Lakefront, said that the rise in antisemitism has spurred many from his community to look for homes outside of New York.

“All my grandparents were Holocaust survivors, never would they have dreamed that their descendants would have to face what they faced in the leadup to the Holocaust,” Wieder said.

“For a Jew to have to look over their shoulder when they’re walking down the street, it’s very disturbing,” he added.

Wieder also said that high taxes and the high cost of housing in New York has also pushed Orthodox Jews out of the state.

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Yidel Perlstein, CEO of Lakefront Estates, said that the locals in Florida have been extremely welcoming.Zak Bennett for New York Post

New York has the highest state and local taxes in the nation, and collects ad staggering $13,000 per capita, according to a study by the Citizens Budget Commission.

The Empire State ranked dead last in housing affordability and homebuilding in the 2026 Realtor Housing Report Card.

Orthodox Jews tend to have larger families and require more spacious homes or costly additions to their existing homes that are increasingly out of reach for them in New York.

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New York’s high property costs have also pushed the religious Jews to flee the state.Zak Bennett for New York Post

Perlstein said that the locals of the population 13,270 Glades County have welcomed their new neighbors with open arms, and his investment in Glades County has been a boon for the local economy.

“It’s a paradise, the weather is nice, the people are nice, everyone is so welcoming,” Perlstein said.

However, the mother of four, who works as an educator in the town along with her husband, said that while business owners have been friendly, she’s faced hostility from some local residents.

However, online hatemongers like Jake Lang and “The Jersey Goy” Jeffrey Walstein have descended on the quiet town and have launched vicious social media campaigns against the Jewish residents.

Lang visited the town once on October 13, and Walstein arrived the following day.

“They don’t assimilate, they eat their own food, speak their own language, they worship their own God, they don’t dress like us, they are not Americans,” Lang snarled outside the community in a viral video, referring to the residents.

Perlstein said the local authorities have done a great job protecting the community from the influencers, but residents are still nervous.

“Millions of people watch him, all it takes is one crazy person,” he said.

“We’re just a few people in no man’s land, We’re here to build our families, build our community, be nice to our neighbors,” the local mother of four said.

https://nypost.com/2026/10/25/us-news/orthodox-jews-flee-ny-for-florida-amid-rising-antisemitism/