Image: KCRA News/ YouTube

In this week’s display of homeowners’ association idiocy, the Auburn Greens complex in Auburn, California is allegedly requiring all of its residents to keep their garage doors open during the week, all because one resident had people sleeping in their garage, Sacramento-based news channel KCRA 3 reports. Of all possible solutions to this “problem,” this HOA appears to have found the very dumbest.




This insanity comes to you from Placer County, California, where a homeowners’ association apparently posted notices on residents’ doors telling them of their requirement to keep garage doors open from 8 A.M. to 4 P.M. Monday through Friday or to face “an immediate hearing notice and [be] subjected to a $200 fine.”

KCRA 3 spoke with an HOA board member, who told them that the policy came into being after the neighborhood managers learned that people were actually living in one resident’s garage.


In perhaps the most obvious statement ever recorded in an interview, one of the homeowners living in Auburn Greens, named Fred Waidtlow, told the news site:

That’s an issue that they should address differently, I feel...If we have to have this open from 8 in the morning to 4 in the afternoon, anybody can help themselves and steal you blind. And they do it in this Auburn Greens complex.

How the homeowners’ association doesn’t realize the theft concerns associated with their policy is beyond me. I tried reaching out the Auburn Greens HOA to get answers, but the call went straight to voicemail.

Waidtlow and other residents have had to clear their valuables from their garages to keep their stuff protected, while other residents have simply ignored the notice, and kept their garage doors closed—because what’s the point of a garage door if you can’t close it?


The whole thing almost sounds too dumb to be true; this HOA wants you to keep your garage door open so that they can see if you’re housing people in there? Hopefully the HOA calls me back, and this was somehow a big misunderstanding, because I still have some hope for this world.