The HOA President Told My Neighbors to Force Me to Sell — Then She Found Out Who Owns the Building She’s Been Working From

Sandra Keller stood at the front of the Whitmore Circle community room at7:23 p.m. on a Thursday, held up four printed photographs of my property, and told forty-two of my neighbors that the peeling trim on my porch and the overgrown roses in my front garden were affecting everyone’s home values. I sat in a folding chair in the third row and said nothing. My husband Roger had planted those roses in 2003, and the trim had been peeling since his stroke eighteen months ago because I had been spending most of my time getting him through rehabilitation, then through hospice, then through the paperwork that comes after a man dies in a house he spent thirty years improving. Sandra had sent four written notices, photographed my property from the public sidewalk, and filed a county inquiry about a possible nuisance ordinance. Now she was asking the neighborhood to pressure me into selling. I took a photo of the meeting agenda on my phone and texted it to my son-in-law David, who had been managing the Benning Family Land Trust since Roger’s stroke. He called me back in six minutes and asked if I knew the HOA community building — the room we were sitting in, the offices, the parking lot — was on land the trust had never transferred.

Roger and I developed Whitmore Circle in 1991, when the parcel was still unimproved land off County Road 14and most people thought building a planned residential community there was either visionary or foolish. We named the streets, filed the subdivision plat, installed the utilities, built the community room as a shared amenity, and sold the lots one by one over twelve years. When we formed the HOA and handed management to the residents, we transferred the common areas — the walking path, the mailbox cluster, the small green space near the entrance. But the community building parcel, a separate lot we had always kept for potential future expansion, sat in the Benning Family Land Trust with a ground lease to the HOA that Roger had intended to formalize into a transfer before his health declined. The lease had expired in 2019. Nobody noticed because Roger was already sick and I had stopped reviewing the trust documents carefully. Sandra Keller had been running her neighborhood presidency from a building whose lease had lapsed, on land the HOA did not own, for four years.

David sent a formal letter from the trust’s attorney to the HOA the following Monday. It notified the association that the community building sat on a parcel of land held by the Benning Family Land Trust, that the previous ground lease had expired without renewal, and that the trust was now reviewing its options regarding the property, including potential renegotiation of lease terms, alternative use, or sale to a third party. The letter included the original plat documents, the trust’s chain of title, the expired lease agreement, and a request that Sandra Keller, as HOA president, confirm receipt and arrange a meeting with the trust’s representatives within fourteen days. Sandra called me the morning the letter arrived. Her voice was different from the one she used at meetings — smaller, careful, stripped of the organizational confidence that came from running a room you believed you controlled. She asked if we could “resolve this quietly.” I told her I was happy to meet with the trust’s attorney and her HOA counsel together, at her earliest convenience, in the community room if she preferred.

The HOA’s attorney reviewed the documents and confirmed the trust’s position without dispute. The ground lease had expired, the parcel had never been formally conveyed, and the Benning Family Land Trust held clear title with no outstanding encumbrances. The HOA had been maintaining the building, paying utilities, and using the property under an assumption of continued permission that had no legal basis after2019. David’s attorney presented three options: a new ground lease at current market rate, a purchase offer at appraised value, or a conversion of the building to trust-managed use with the HOA renting meeting space on a per-event basis. The HOA board held an emergency meeting and voted to negotiate a new lease, which required funding they had not budgeted for. During the financial review that followed, the HOA treasurer discovered that Sandra had been approving her own reimbursements for “administrative expenses” without a second signature, a pattern totaling $14,800 over three years that the board referred to their insurance carrier and, eventually, to the county prosecutor. Sandra resigned as HOA president before the audit was complete. The four written notices she had sent me were formally withdrawn from the HOA records.

The new ground lease was signed in the spring, at terms the HOA could manage, and the trust used the first payment to hire a handyman who fixed the porch trim in one afternoon and cut back the roses properly for the first time since Roger planted them. Several neighbors stopped by while the work was being done — not to apologize, exactly, but in the way people come by when they want to acknowledge something without having to say it clearly. The man who had looked at the floor during Sandra’s meeting brought over tomatoes from his garden and said Roger had always been a good neighbor. I thanked him and meant it, because I don’t think most of those forty-two people understood what they were nodding along to. Some people follow the loudest voice in a room because it’s easier than asking questions. Roger always said that, and he was usually right about people. The roses came back thick that summer, yellow and sprawling the way Roger always let them grow, and I left them exactly that way because some things look better when you stop trying to make them fit someone else’s standards.