This is a story about such a community.
IT’S A TRUE STORY.
It shows that one small misunderstanding, one minor disagreement can quickly sour everything and make life quite unpleasant in a community where everybody had previously been getting along just splendidly. It also shows that when a conflict specialist or any other peacemaker in the community intervenes, the possibility of a long, drawn-out fight can very quickly fade away.
The story centers on Giselle, a successful entrepreneur in her thirties who owned a unit with her husband, Frank, in a Near North Side Chicago condominium association consisting of twenty-four units in two buildings.
Giselle and Frank had a friendly acquaintance with everybody in the association.
Giselle was an active member of the board. And the board was an active board. The board members managed everything without a professional property manager. True, they didn’t exactly follow all the standards in the condo industry or necessarily follow all the requirements in the Illinois Condominium Property Act. Unfortunately, nobody subscribed to Common Interest. The most any of them read about how to run a condo association was the Mark Pearlstein column in the Sunday edition of the Chicago Tribune. They had no attorney on call. But they were professionals and small business owners, and they used common sense to get things done. The complex was looking great and neighborliness was pretty high.
One day the board took up the issue of how to get people to respect the rules about visitor parking.
The association’s parking was located under the buildings but not in an enclosed garage. There were three spaces set aside for visitors’ cars. The problem was nobody knew whose cars were parked in those spaces. Actual visitors’ cars? Owners’ second cars? Opportunistic neighbors with nowhere else to park? Sometimes cars would sit there for a couple of weeks. The board kept hearing complaints and decided to look into the situation.
Giselle was all for fixing the problem. She didn’t like the solution the majority of the board agreed to: your visitor can park there if she gets a form downloaded from the Association’s website, fills it out, and displays it on the vehicle’s dashboard. She especially didn’t like the provision that any board member could immediately call the
|
-
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60