Maintaining Clay

Holding true as a responsible homeowner upon moving in, I joined the homeowners association. I started attending the monthly get togethers to discuss neighborhood politics and create solutions for the problems plaguing Clay Street and surrounding areas. Most of our focus is on the improvement of quality of life within the confines.

This past Monday we debated about the parking situation and are in the process of instituting some new rules geared towards eliminating people from parking in the lot that is reserved for residents. There are only 22 spots in the court and there are 22 row homes in our community. Now, not everyone owns a car in the community but, others own 2, or have frequent guests, or we have some who work in the area (don’t live here) and see our lot as a place to park for free, or the purchasers and suppliers (remember most commute to work here) of the neighborhood’s cheif sellable product (aka illegal drugs) have used our parking lot. This has caused a bottleneck and can result in arguments over parking spaces, anger by residents when they have to park far from their homes.

The solution we have come up with is to give each resident one highly visible parking tag to be displayed in the window of the car. The tag will correspond to the resident’s home address number. This coupled with an aggressive towing policy should serve to reduce the volume of illegal parkers back here. Of course this has some residents uneasy because they are concerned that people who they want to be here will wind up getting towed. My feeling is the responsibility of our visitors well being falls on us as homeowners, if we don’t let the people know who come to visit us that we have an aggressive parking policy and that they could be towed or if we don’t give them our parking pass and we park elsewhere, we are putting out guest at risk. Not to mention there is a sign out front as you pull into our court that states pretty clearly that the lot is not for public parking.

Other issues we are working on right now include: maintenance of the property, trash pick up, paving of the parking lot, landscape changes, tree removal, and exterior renovations to all of the homes.