Vanessa Vaile's List: Mountainair

• One of every five Americans lives under rules and regulations that could confiscate their homes from them, remove their right to privacy and take away their freedom of expression.

  Neither Congress, the police nor local governments can do anything about it. Some people hate the situation. Others love the rules. Many homeowners, however, don't realize what rights they've signed away until it's too late
• The reason: The rules that govern private home developments are very difficult to change and are set up by developers who never live on the site and who disappear after a few years.

• Signing away your rights

  "It is an enormously serious and growing problem," says Evan McKenzie, a professor of political science at the University of Illinois.

  "If you move into a covenanted neighborhood, you have no choice but to abide by the covenants. It might be your house, but you can't do just what you want with it," explains McKenzie, a condo law expert and author of "Privatopia: Homeowner Associations and the Rise of Residential Private Government."

• How it all started

  McKenzie outlines how the problem arose: "For years, there was an emergence of incentives that produced common-interest housing.

• The changing American landscape

  Local governments liked getting property taxes from developments that cost them nothing, so states such as Texas, California, Nevada, Florida and Virginia saw to it that little else was built.

• Today, although there is no official monitoring, experts estimate there are 250,000 common-interest developments.

       

   

   

   

   

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• Is this a bad thing? "It is for homeowners who are sacrificing privacy, control and freedom of choice," says watchdog Hyland, director of the National Institute of Community Management, in Phoenix.

• When you move into a CID, Hyland explained, you automatically become a member of the association and are bound to certain deed restrictions, covenants and conditions.

  They include the association's regulations, and require that every owner be a member of the association and abide by its rules.
• "When you join a homeowners association, you are signing a contract," says McKenzie, who teaches a course on condo law at John Marshall Law School, Chicago. "These are legally-binding covenants and if you don't want to live by them you should not buy the house.
• rules can get far more intrusive.
• Another area of great concern, says McKenzie, is property maintenance.

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• A homeowner association is corporation formed by a real estate developer for the purpose of marketing, managing, and selling of homes and lots in a residential subdivision. It grants the developer privileged voting rights in governing the association, while allowing the developer to exit financial and legal responsibility of the organization, typically by transferring ownership of the association to the homeowners after selling off a predetermined number of lots. It allows a civil municipality to increase its tax base, but without requiring it to provide equal services to all of its citizens. Membership in the homeowners association by a residential buyer is typically a condition of purchase; a buyer isn't given an option to reject it. Some homeowner associations hire and retain property management companies. The board of directors is responsible for the retention of these companies.

  • aka POA or Property Owner Association
• Most homeowner associations are incorporated, and are subject to state statutes that govern non-profit corporations and homeowner associations. State oversight of homeowner associations is minimal, and mainly takes the form of laws which are inconsistent from state to state.
• common-interest developments (CIDs
• The Federal Housing Administration in 1963 authorized federal home mortgage insurance exclusively for condominiums or for homes in subdivisions where there was a qualifying homeowner association.
• The effect, however, was to divert investment from multifamily housing and home construction or renovation in the inner cities, speeding a middle-class exodus to the suburbs and into common-interest housing.
• Another primary driver in the proliferation of single family homeowners' associations was the U.S. Clean Water Act of 1977, which required all new real estate developments to detain storm water so that flow to adjoining properties was no greater than the pre-development runoff.
• Community Associations Institute (CAI) is a trade organization of individuals and businesses that sell supplies or services to homeowners associations
• An HOA provides people with shared neighborhood values, an opportunity to enforce regulations, consistent with overarching statutory constraints, to achieve a community representative of such values. In doing so, an HOA inherently restricts the rights that would otherwise exist for its members based on municipal codes.

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• Social capital is a sociological concept, which refers to connections within and between social networks. The concept of social capital highlights the value of social relations and the role of cooperation and confidence to get collective or economic results.
• core idea "that social networks have value
• Hanifan contrasts social capital with material good
• Jane Jacobs used the term early in the 1960s. Although she did not explicitly define the term social capital her usage referred to the value of networks
• critical component of interest group formation
• Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu used the term in 1972 in his Outline of a Theory of Practice,^[5] and clarified the term some years later in contrast to cultural, economic, and symbolic capital.
• In the late 1990s the concept gained popularity
• The concept that underlies social capital has a much longer history
• many thinkers questioned the complicated relationship between 'modern society' and the importance of 'old institutions
• breakdown of traditional bonds and the progressive development of anomie and alienation in society
• All these reflections contributed remarkably to the development of the social capital concept in the following decades.
• his work tends to show how it can be used practically to produce or reproduce inequality,
• Bourdieu
• consensus building as a direct positive indicator of social capital.
• two key issues in the study of social capital. First, social capital is not equally available to all, in much the same way that other forms of capital are differently available. Geographic and social isolation limit access to this resource. Second, not all social capital is created equally.
• distinction between "bonding" and "bridging". There is currently no research which identifies the negative consequences of "bridging" social capital when in balance with its necessary antecedent, "bonding".
• Social capital lends itself to multiple definitions, interpretations, and uses.
• Early attempts to define social capital focused on the degree to which social capital as a resource should be used for public good or for the benefit of individuals. Putnam^[29] suggested that social capital would facilitate co-operation and mutually supportive relations in communities and nations and would therefore be a valuable means of combating many of the social disorders inherent in modern societies,
• Bourdieu distinguishes between three forms of capital: economic capital, cultural capital and social capital.
• durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships
• deliberate construction of sociability for the purpose of creating this resource.”^[1]
• According to Robert Putnam, social capital "refers to the collective value of all 'social networks' and the inclinations that arise from these networks to do things for each other."
• In "Social Capital and Development: The Coming Agenda," Francis Fukuyama points out that there isn't an agreed definition of social capital, so he explains it as "shared norms or values that promote social cooperation, instantiated in actual social relationships"
• Familism is a major problem of trust because it fosters a two-tiered moral system, in which a person must favor the opinions of family members.
• weak and strong ties
• Communication is needed to access and use social capital
• A network-based conception can also be used for characterizing the social capital of collectivities (such as organizations or business clusters).^[

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• meet others in your field as well as potential customers
• involved in business - or who want to be - and you're looking for a venue to network
• Band together with others to promote issues
• committees that work to help out various areas of the community
• avenues to improve/grow your business
• three chambers of commerce in the Las Cruces area
• a capital campaign
• Education will be a key part of 2012.
• portfolio of business-related classes that we held in 2011 at DACC at no charge to our members
• annual awards banquet
• keynote speaker
• a variety of awards will be handed out
• The Hispano Chamber, which is open to any business, will continue to promote education with its Middle School Student Recognition Program
• effort to grow its numbers
• focusing on a membership drive and letting people know the features and benefits of what we offer
• hosts a golfing event each year
• In about two years, the Green Chamber of Commerce in Las Cruces has gone from a volunteer group without an office or a staff, to becoming a charter member in a statewide green chamber with a full-time executive director.
• several major priorities for the Las Cruces Green Chamber, which endorses the "triple bottom line" approach to business. The idea is a belief that a successful business should look at three bottom lines: Investing in people; protecting air, land and water; creating sustainable profits.
• Recently, the chamber produced its "Las Cruces Think Local First" guide for 2012 that highlights the benefits of shopping locally and also provides a directory of a variety of businesses, and the group plans to expand on that effort. Also, start-up companies using the triple-bottom-line approach will also, in a joint project with GreenWorks, have access to support, office space and resources.

• The organization plans to also have a hand in local and state government affairs.

   "(We'll have a) stronger representative voice at city council meetings - to provide a stronger local voice for our members on local decisions that directly impact our membership,"

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• For our purposes, consider a MOOC to be a free, open-ended, online course involving potentially thousands of participants using all kinds of social tools like websites, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, discussion forums — you name it — to discuss and learn about a topic from every angle and generate a body of knowledge that all can share.
• I usually ask clients what they can give away for free that will increase their brand recognition or status. A MOOC is a great example.

• the necessary ingredients for a MOOC:

   
   
  • Knowledge or the opposite of knowledge: a question to which you don’t have an answer, but that you’d like to have answered.
   
  • People to serve as facilitators.
   
  • A digital infrastructure.

• Hosting a MOOC doesn’t require:

   
   
  • A large budget for staff.
   
  • The mandate to measure ROI.
   
  • A significant input of time, since participants take much of the lead.
   
  • Physical space, since MOOCs take place in the virtual world.
• Offering a MOOC is like putting on Woodstock. It will probably be chaotic, unruly, produce totally unexpected outcomes
• Typically, a MOOC begins by setting up a simple registration website put together by your facilitators
• Everyone is part participant and part presenter
• If your company is looking for ways to expand its client base and position itself as a thought leader, consider hosting a MOOC.

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