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Q: My daughter purchased a home in August 2020. The home has an asphalt driveway. She recently received a notice from the HOA that all driveways must be pavers or cement. If not completed by a specific date, they will start fining her. She is a single mom and works as a teacher; such an expense would be a hardship. Would she be tenured under the rules that were in place when she purchased the home? — Arthur

A: The relationship between homeowner associations and their members is based on the underlying community documents. These formative documents are simply contracts that outline the arrangement between the various members of the community. Of course, statutory law limits what these community agreements are allowed to control. Still, the association members are allowed a wide latitude in how they agree to run their community.

Homeowner association rules only control people who have agreed to them by purchasing a property within the association. When your daughter purchased her home, she agreed to live with and comply with the agreements that govern her community. This arrangement works because if someone does not like the rules in a particular community, they do not have to purchase a home there. read more

Thanks to its depopulation efforts, state-owned Citizens Property Insurance Corp. saw its first month-to-month policy-count decline in years between September and October.

While that news is soothing to lawmakers and insurance regulators in Tallahassee who are eager to reduce the company’s size, it’s not exactly welcomed by many of the policyholders who felt they had no choice but accept offers from private-market insurers at costs projected to rise by up to 20% over the projected renewal cost of their Citizens policies.

The number of policies held by Citizens dropped from 1,407,805 on Sept. 30 to 1,334,620 at the end of October, said Kelly Booten, Citizens’ chief operating officer, during a meeting of the company’s Market Accountability Advisory Board on Wednesday.

Citizens’ policy count further dropped to 1,255,381 by Nov. 24, prompting the company to revise its 2023 year-end projections from 1,680,967 to 1,216,408.