(Disclaimer: All opinions stated here are my own and do
not imply any official endorsement by the Hyde Park Neighborhood Association)
Irecently got a call from an
anguished homeowner who had just discovered that the roots of her very
large tree had been damaged, perhaps fatally, by the excavation of a trench
on the neighbor's property to replace a sewer line. She said she was shocked
to find there were not more safeguards in place to prevent this sort of thing
from happening.
There are several issues here worth considering by Hyde
Park residents:
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I frequently hear people refer to the Hyde Park Neighborhood
Association (HPNA) as "the home owner's association." I always attempt to
remind them that HPNA is not a homeowners' association. That is not just a
pedantic/semantic quibble: not only do we welcome tenants, including
apartment dwellers, and business owners and operators, but we are an
entirely voluntary organization that does not owe its existence to a
package of restrictive covenants created by a real estate developer. In
the newer suburbs -- especially the ones which bill themselves as
"restricted and master-planned" -- homeowners' associations are created by
the developer and have real legal power drawn from deed restrictions which
they enforce. While Hyde Park is a subdivision, it was created long before
developers presumed to tell their customers how to behave after they moved
in. Like most neighborhood associations in the city, HPNA has no legal
authority to bid or forbid and depends entirely on persuasion, although
such persuasion is sometimes directed at the City in an attempt to get it
to enforce its rules in a particular case. In the case of the tree root mangling I was called about, probably no rule, however binding, would have sufficed to prevent the damage without the presence of someone who realized that a tree's roots extend out as far as the tree's canopies, and that digging a deep trench through a root ball is not much different than cutting the tree down. That is where good judgment and good professional practices are required. Unfortunately, many people in the development and building business and their support trades seem to actively dislike trees, regarding them as obstacles to be removed to get a nice building site where the bulldozer can be maneuvered with abandon. This puts an obligation on the customer/homeowner to supervise his or her own contractors and |
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tradesmen. (One suspects that if there were more tradeswomen involved this
would not be quite so necessary, though obviously this is a personal
opinion.) Since most people hire a contractor in order not to have to
worry about how the work is to get done, the need to personally participate
in the decision-making is perhaps not very welcome. However, experience
indicates that if you leave the remodeling and repair of your house
entirely to others, you will find the results as unsatisfactory as leaving
the maintenance of your health entirely to your doctor. On the home front
there is the additional need to respect one's neighbor's property,
including the landscaping. The most conspicuous elements of our individual and common landscape are the trees, many of which are now 50 to 100 years old in this neighborhood. Continued on page 3
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