Constance was 62, retired from some kind of middle-management HR position, and she'd found in the HOA presidency the power she'd apparently been building toward her whole career. She was the type who knew the exact page number of every covenant in the community guidelines. She drove a pearl white Cadillac Escalade with the Millbrook Pines HOA magnet on the door—yes, an actual magnetic placard, like she was a volunteer deputy. And she wore reading glasses on a beaded chain even when she didn't need them, just so she could peer over them at you. You know the type.
The first unfair act happened in March, two years after Constance took over. The HOA had approved a landscaping project around the clubhouse: a big flagstone patio, new drainage infrastructure, the works. Pretty standard.
What they did not announce at any meeting, in any newsletter, was that the new drainage system would route excess stormwater runoff from the clubhouse's impervious surfaces—the parking lot, the patio—through a PVC pipe that terminated at the edge of the community's common area, which happened to border my back fence.
The first rain after that installation, I walked outside and found my yard, my vegetable beds, my kids' old sandbox, the patch of clover I'd been nursing for the bees, under two inches of standing brown water. It smelled like wet clay and diesel. The water had a faint orange tint from the iron in the soil. My boots sank to the ankle with a sound like someone pulling a cork out of a wine bottle—that sucking, squelching sound. I'll never forget it.
I took photos. I filed a complaint with the HOA.
I got a letter back two weeks later, signed by Constance, informing me that the drainage system had been installed in accordance with all applicable HOA guidelines, and that routine stormwater management was not grounds for a formal grievance. Routine stormwater management, as if my yard were a retention ditch.
Denise told me to let it go.
Our neighbor down the street, an older gentleman named Theo Baskin, who'd been in the neighborhood for 20 years and had watched three HOA boards come and go, told me to document everything.
"With Constance," Theo said, standing at my fence line in his Cardinals cap, squinting at the waterlogged mess, "you're going to need receipts."
He meant that literally and figuratively. I should have listened harder to Theo on day one, but I'm stubborn the way most tradesmen are. I figured I could fix this myself, the right way, the first time. What I didn't know yet was just how deep the rabbit hole went.
For the next several months, I played it by the book—their book. I attended every HOA board meeting. I brought photographs, timestamped on my phone, showing the waterline against my fence posts. I brought soil samples, literally Mason jars of muddy Carolina clay, and set them on the folding table in the clubhouse conference room while Constance watched me with the expression of a woman who has decided to be infinitely patient because patience is its own form of dominance.
"Mr. Hollenbeck," she said at the September meeting, her reading glasses perched low, "stormwater naturally flows downhill. That is a function of gravity, not of HOA policy."
There were nine people in the room: three were board members who voted exactly how Constance wanted; two were residents who didn't own property at the bottom of the slope; three were my neighbors, including Theo, who was there mostly for moral support and because, as he told me later, he'd been waiting for someone to finally push back against Constance since 2019.