Condo owners can be booted in Arizona, thanks to this obscure law | CPT PPP Coverage
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Condo owners can be booted in Arizona, thanks to this obscure law appeared on www.azcentral.com by The Arizona Republic.
The American Dream is a pretty vague concept.
Depending on whom you ask, it includes the freedoms guaranteed in the Bill of Rights and the “right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence.
It also suggests that, with a little hard work, every citizen can buy a place of their own. Even a new immigrant.
That dream became reality for Jie Cao and Haining Xia, two Chinese citizens who moved to the United States in the 1980s, earned law degrees and settled in the Valley of the Sun.
When their son was headed to the Barrett Honors College at Arizona State University, they purchased a condominium for him to live in just a 10-minute walk from campus.
With a rental, perhaps a landlord could sell off the whole block of apartments, leaving their child without a place to stay. But this was a condo; a home that belonged to them.
Or not.
Obscure law can boot condo owners
A private equity real estate investment firm out of San Diego bought 90 of the 96 condo units, allowing them to exploit a little-known provision in Arizona law.
As it turns out, if 80% of unit owners vote to sell the entire condo complex, it can be sold. If 20% opposes the decision, they’ll get kicked out of the property they own.
Since the firm, Pathfinder Partners, owned the lion’s share, they voted to sell. The six owners of the remaining units voted against it, but the sale proceeded anyway.
Cao and Xia, both attorneys, tried to fight the taking of their property, but it is codified in Arizona’s bizarre Condominium Termination law.
This obscure rule is rarely invoked, but it’s all right there in the Arizona Revised Statutes.
One owner was arrested for ‘trespassing’
They didn’t want to leave the condo but found themselves locked out.
Thousands of dollars of their belongings remained inside. The new management even had Cao arrested for “trespassing.”
Remember, this is a home she bought. Or at least thought she bought. This government-sanctioned nightmare sounds like something that might happen in Tianjin, not Tempe.
Thankfully, another lawyer is coming to their aid. Local attorney Eric M. Fraser has taken up their cause, and has been joined by the Goldwater Institute and Pacific Legal Foundation, which have filed amicus briefs.
As the documents point out, the Arizona Court of Appeals declared the Condominium Termination law “unconstitutional on its face,” but then said it could be enforced anyway.
The plaintiffs signed a contract that included the law’s boilerplate language, and that’s enough apparently for one party to kick another party out of their own property.
The law is wrong. Arizona must repeal it
After leafing through the legal arguments, I read “The Trial” by Franz Kafka to try to make sense of it all.
It didn’t help.
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Imagine some dusty old law prohibited selling real estate to Asian Americans, that language was buried in a long contract and signed by a willing buyer.
The courts surely wouldn’t claim the rule was unconstitutional but enforceable. Wrong is wrong, and everyone can see it.
The Arizona Constitution bars the Legislature from authorizing one party to take another person’s property. The U.S. Supreme Court agrees.
We can’t have a society where some California investor can waltz up to your door, hand you a check for the appraised value, then kick you to the curb.
In Thomas Jefferson’s first draft of the Declaration, he mentioned a “right to life, liberty and property.” The more expansive phrase “pursuit of happiness” is even better, as it includes buying a home and much more.
Until this Orwellian law is repealed, the American Dream is null and void in Arizona.
Jon Gabriel, a Mesa resident, is editor-in-chief of Ricochet.com and a contributor to The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com. On Twitter: @exjon.
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