The letter showed up on a Colorado morning the way these letters always do. No phone call. No neighbor knocking on the door. Just a printed notice from the homeowners association informing the homeowner that a tree on her own property was allegedly damaging the neighbor’s patio and that the HOA had decided to take her to court over it.
She posted about it on r/legaladvice the same day. The post reads like most r/legaladvice posts: half disbelief, half asking if any of this is actually legal. And the detail that makes the whole thing surreal is that the neighbor, the person whose patio is supposedly being ruined, had already told the Colorado homeowner she didn’t mind the tree. The neighbor reportedly loved the tree. She hadn’t asked anyone to do anything about it. The HOA decided on its own that the tree was a problem and filed suit.
“I received a letter this morning informing me that my tree is causing ‘damage’ to the patios of my neighbor’s.”
— via r/legaladvice
Read that again. Not a fence. Not a structure. A tree. A living thing that was on the property before she bought the house, and, based on her account, is part of why she bought the house in the first place. The aggregator The Cool Down picked up the thread and summarized the rest of what she wrote. The tree isn’t leaning. It isn’t diseased. It isn’t dropping branches on the neighbor’s patio furniture. What’s leaning, by her account, is the fence, and the fence is leaning because it’s old.
“The tree is not leaning, the fence is leaning because it is old.”
— via r/legaladvice
That one sentence is the entire legal theory of her defense. If the fence is failing on its own, the tree isn’t causing damage. The HOA’s letter, based on what she described, skipped past that distinction and treated the tree as the cause of a problem nobody on the other side of the fence had actually complained about.
Then she said the part that made the thread take off.
“The tree is a huge reason I bought this place and I refuse to cut it down.”
— via r/legaladvice
You can feel the shape of the whole story in that sentence. She bought the house because of the tree. The HOA wants the tree gone. The neighbor, the one whose patio is allegedly suffering, doesn’t want the tree gone either. And somewhere in the middle of this triangle is a board of volunteers with a law firm on retainer deciding they’d rather litigate than walk over and look at the fence.
The commenters on r/legaladvice went in two directions at once. Half of them told her to get an arborist out to document the tree’s health before the HOA could claim it was a hazard. The other half told her to get an attorney to pull the CC&Rs on her deed and read every word about trees, landscaping, and enforcement. Both halves were right. What nobody in the thread told her, because nobody in an r/legaladvice thread ever has time to get into it, is why HOAs can actually do this. And what she’d need to do over the next few months to keep a tree she legally owns.
This keeps happening, and not just in Colorado
The Colorado tree post landed the same week a bunch of other HOA stories were circulating. There was a post on r/HOA from a Texas homeowner whose community association had reportedly overcharged residents roughly $52,000 in water billing over several years, quietly, with no correction offered until a homeowner pulled the ledgers and ran the math themselves. There was a widely aggregated story out of North Carolina about a homeowner who’d been fined $50,000 by an HOA over solar panels on the roof and who ultimately won a four-year legal fight that reportedly pushed state legislators to tighten North Carolina’s solar-access laws. And there was the classic r/MaliciousCompliance post about an HOA that ordered a homeowner to cut down a tree in the front yard and then had no policy language stopping the homeowner from dropping a toilet on the stump and planting flowers in it.
The toilet one is funny. The other two aren’t.
Every one of these stories runs on the same machinery. A homeowner signed a set of governing documents at closing. A volunteer board then interpreted those documents to mean whatever they wanted them to mean. When the homeowner pushed back, the board handed the file to an outside law firm, and the law firm sent a letter. That’s the script. It runs the same way in Aurora, Colorado and in Charlotte, North Carolina and in Venice, Florida, where a homeowner named Denise Wuetcher was reportedly fined $2,500 by her HOA, Verona Reserve, over the visibility of a clothesline on her property. The claim made headlines because Florida state law specifically protects residential clotheslines as an energy-conservation measure, and the HOA reportedly tried to enforce an internal rule anyway.
What CC&Rs actually do, and what they can’t
Here’s the part most homeowners don’t realize until a letter like the Colorado one arrives. The contract that governs your HOA isn’t the email from the property manager. It isn’t the board meeting minutes. It’s a recorded document called the CC&Rs, short for Covenants, Conditions, and Restrictions. It was recorded in the county land records before you bought the house. When you signed the closing paperwork, you agreed to be bound by it. That’s the legal hook.
CC&Rs run with the land. They’re enforceable like any other real estate covenant, which means a court will generally uphold them if they’re clear, recorded, and applied consistently. But they’re not unlimited. Two things constrain them hard, and both of those constraints are where homeowners like the Colorado poster can push back.
First, the HOA can only enforce what the CC&Rs actually say. If there’s no language in the recorded covenants about tree height, tree species, or trees overhanging a fence, the HOA doesn’t get to invent the rule by vote of the board. This is the single most common place boards overreach. They treat their own design guidelines or rules resolutions as if those documents had the same weight as the recorded covenants. They don’t. A design guideline adopted by a board without a formal CC&R amendment generally can’t be enforced through a lien or a lawsuit unless the CC&Rs themselves authorize the board to issue that specific kind of rule.
Second, state law sits on top of the CC&Rs and supersedes them where it conflicts. In Colorado, the governing statute is the Colorado Common Interest Ownership Act, C.R.S. §§ 38-33.3-101 et seq., and a set of amendments the state legislature passed in 2022 that are often called the HOA Homeowner Rights Act. Those amendments, codified at C.R.S. §§ 38-33.3-209.4 and following, require HOAs to adopt written enforcement policies, give homeowners pre-enforcement notice and a cure period, cap certain fines, and require the association to hold a hearing before imposing a penalty. The Colorado HOA Information and Resource Center, run through the state Division of Real Estate, publishes plain-English summaries of what HOAs can and can’t do under the statute and accepts complaints from homeowners who think their association is out of bounds.
If the Colorado HOA in the tree post skipped the notice-and-cure step, or skipped the hearing, or imposed a penalty without a written enforcement policy on file, those are procedural defenses the homeowner can raise in the lawsuit itself. Courts don’t treat procedural violations as technicalities. The 2022 amendments were specifically written to give homeowners teeth.
The “business judgment rule” and why it isn’t a magic shield
One phrase you’ll see HOA attorneys lean on in almost every one of these cases is the “business judgment rule.” The short version: courts generally defer to HOA board decisions the same way they defer to corporate board decisions, assuming the board acted in good faith and within its authority. Boards hear this and treat it as a blank check.
It isn’t. The business judgment rule doesn’t cover arbitrary enforcement, selective enforcement, or enforcement outside the board’s authority. If the HOA has let ten other trees on ten other lots grow unchallenged and is only going after this one, the homeowner can argue selective enforcement, which is a recognized equitable defense in most states. If the board skipped the procedures required by the CC&Rs or by state statute, the business judgment rule won’t save a decision that was made without following the rules. And if the enforcement action is so disproportionate to the alleged violation that it looks retaliatory or punitive, courts have authority to strike it down.
The Community Associations Institute, the national trade group for HOAs and management companies, actually publishes guidance telling boards not to file lawsuits like the Colorado one without first exhausting internal enforcement options. Boards ignore that guidance regularly. When they do, they expose the association to counterclaims for abuse of process, breach of the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing, and in some states, violations of the federal Fair Housing Act if the enforcement falls along protected-class lines.
If part of the fight runs along a property line, the rules get weirder fast — our fence and adverse possession guide walks through how long-standing encroachments can harden into legal rights, and how HOAs sometimes trip over them.
What to do if your HOA is doing this to you
If you’re the homeowner who just got a letter like the one in the Colorado post, the order of operations matters. Don’t call the HOA to argue. Don’t cut the tree down. Don’t fire off an angry email to the board. Every one of those moves either costs you leverage or creates a record the HOA’s attorney will use against you later.
Pull your CC&Rs first. The recorded set, not the rules-and-regulations pamphlet the property manager handed you. Your county recorder’s office has the recorded version. Read every section on landscaping, trees, fences, architectural review, and enforcement. Write down the specific language the HOA would have to rely on to win. If that language doesn’t exist, the case has a problem from the start.
Hire an arborist and get a written report on the tree. Paid, independent, not the HOA’s person. The report should cover the tree’s species, health, structural stability, root behavior, and whether the tree is actually causing any damage to the fence or the neighbor’s property. A clean arborist report costs a few hundred dollars and is usually dispositive evidence in a tree-damage case. If the tree is healthy and the fence is failing on its own, the arborist’s report is the Colorado homeowner’s opening brief.
Hire a consumer or real estate attorney before responding to anything in writing. Not an HOA-specialist attorney who represents associations. You want a homeowner-side attorney who has handled CC&R disputes. The initial consultation is often free. The first letter they send back to the HOA’s lawyer is usually enough to slow the whole thing down, because it tells the HOA’s counsel this isn’t going to be a default judgment case.
File a complaint with your state HOA oversight body if one exists. Colorado has the HOA Information Office through the Division of Real Estate. Florida has the Department of Business and Professional Regulation. Texas has the Texas Real Estate Commission and the complaint process under Texas Property Code Chapter 209. California has the Davis-Stirling Common Interest Development Act and an active enforcement arm. Filing early creates a written record that carries weight if the matter ends up in litigation.
Talking to a consumer-rights attorney is free. If you’re looking at a letter, a lawsuit, or a decision you don’t understand, a quick consultation with a licensed attorney in your state is usually the fastest way to stop the damage. Our matching service connects you with attorneys who handle these cases on contingency — you don’t pay unless they win.
If the HOA has already filed suit, answer the complaint on time. Ignoring it gets you a default judgment, which in most states lets the HOA go straight to a lien or even a forced sale of the property to collect. An answer denying the allegations, asserting affirmative defenses (selective enforcement, failure to follow CC&R procedures, failure to follow statutory notice requirements, estoppel if the board previously approved the tree), and demanding strict proof forces the HOA to actually prove its case. In a tree-damage lawsuit without a specific CC&R hook and without a complaining neighbor, that proof is hard to produce.
Consider a counterclaim. If the HOA filed a lawsuit it didn’t have grounds to file, a counterclaim for abuse of process or under your state’s anti-SLAPP statute (if the suit is chilling protected conduct) shifts the leverage. Several states have strengthened homeowner remedies against HOAs that bring baseless enforcement actions, including fee-shifting provisions that can make the HOA pay the homeowner’s legal fees if the homeowner wins.
Some homeowners facing HOA litigation explore whether an anti-SLAPP motion applies, especially where the “lawsuit” started after the homeowner criticized the board at a community meeting or on a neighborhood forum.
And if the HOA is threatening a lien or foreclosure as part of the pressure campaign, read the other piece I wrote about what those liens look like in practice and how fast the math can turn against a homeowner who doesn’t respond quickly.
The stakes escalate when unpaid fines stack up. We walked through a full example in our HOA foreclosure nightmare piece, how small late fees and legal charges can roll into a lien, then a sale, before most owners think they’re seriously at risk.
Frequently asked questions
Can an HOA sue me over a tree on my own property?
Sometimes, yes. If the recorded CC&Rs give the HOA authority over landscaping, tree height, or trees that allegedly damage neighboring property, the association can bring an enforcement action. The key is whether the specific rule the HOA is enforcing is actually in the recorded covenants, not just in a board-adopted rule or guideline. State HOA statutes also require procedural steps (notice, cure period, hearing) before an association can penalize or sue a homeowner. If the HOA skipped those steps, the homeowner has procedural defenses to raise in the lawsuit.
What are CC&Rs and why do they matter?
CC&Rs stand for Covenants, Conditions, and Restrictions. They’re recorded in the county land records and run with the property, meaning every owner is bound by them. CC&Rs establish what the HOA can regulate, what homeowners have to do, and how disputes are resolved. A rule the board adopts at a meeting generally can’t be enforced through a lien or a lawsuit unless the CC&Rs themselves authorize that kind of rule. If the rule the HOA is enforcing isn’t in the recorded CC&Rs, the association’s legal position is weak.
Does Colorado law protect homeowners against HOA overreach?
Yes. The Colorado Common Interest Ownership Act, C.R.S. §§ 38-33.3-101 et seq., and the 2022 amendments often called the HOA Homeowner Rights Act require associations to adopt written enforcement policies, give pre-enforcement notice and a cure period, cap certain fines, and hold hearings before imposing penalties. The Colorado HOA Information Office at the Division of Real Estate accepts complaints and publishes guidance on what HOAs can and can’t do.
Can my HOA make me cut down a tree?
Only if the recorded CC&Rs specifically authorize removal under the circumstances present, and only if the HOA follows its own procedures and state law. If the tree predates the covenants, or the CC&Rs were previously interpreted to allow the tree, or the tree isn’t actually causing the damage the HOA alleges, those are all defenses. A written arborist report is often the most important piece of evidence in a tree-removal dispute.
What is selective enforcement and how do I prove it?
Selective enforcement is when an HOA enforces a rule against one homeowner while ignoring violations by others. It’s a recognized equitable defense in most states. To prove it, the homeowner needs evidence of comparable violations on other properties that the HOA didn’t pursue. Photographs, property records, HOA correspondence about other lots, and testimony from neighbors all help. Selective enforcement can defeat an HOA lawsuit even when the underlying rule would otherwise be valid.
Where do I file a complaint against my HOA?
Most states with significant HOA populations have a state-level agency that accepts complaints. Colorado’s HOA Information Office at the Division of Real Estate, Florida’s Department of Business and Professional Regulation, Texas’s complaint process under Property Code Chapter 209, and California’s enforcement of the Davis-Stirling Act are common examples. The state attorney general’s consumer protection division is another option. Filing early creates a written record that carries weight if the dispute escalates to litigation.
