Enforcement & Violations · Governance Philosophy · Neighbor Conflict

The Three Ways a Board Fails a Neighbor Dispute

Most governance writing about enforcement assumes two parties: the association and the owner it is citing. A neighbor dispute has three. Two owners are at war, and the association is standing between them holding the only instruments that matter — the covenants, the notice, the hearing, the fine, the lien. In that position a board can fail in exactly three directions. It can do too little. It can do too much. Or it can do it inconsistently. This article maps all three against published decisions and sets out the questions a board can run before it acts.

Educational notice. This information is educational in nature and should not be construed as legal advice. Court decisions are described from the published opinions and are descriptive of those records only; they are not predictive of any other dispute. Consult qualified association counsel regarding legal interpretation specific to your jurisdiction and facts.

The Three-Party Problem

An association’s enforcement library is almost always written in two-party terms. The board observes a violation, the board sends a notice, the board holds a hearing, the board imposes a consequence. The owner is the counterparty. The analysis is about the association’s authority and the owner’s due process.

A neighbor dispute breaks that frame. The fight belongs to two owners — over a tree line, a shared wall, an animal, a camera, an assessment — and the association is not a party to the grievance. What the association holds instead is the machinery. It owns the covenant. It owns the notice. It owns the hearing. In many communities it also owns the physical condition causing the harm: the lighting, the ventilation, the fence line, the common element.

That structural position is why associations end up as defendants in fights they did not start. Owners rarely sue each other alone. They sue the institution that had the authority to act and, in their telling, used it wrongly or not at all. The board is not a bystander to a neighbor war; it is the referee whose decisions about whether to blow the whistle become the case.

Across the published record, boards in that position fail in three recognizable ways. Each has a distinct signature, a distinct legal theory attached to it, and a distinct prevention discipline.

Failure One: Doing Too Little

The most common failure is also the one that feels most responsible from the head table. Enforcement is expensive, unpopular, and permanent. Restraint reads as prudence. And a board that declines to act in a neighbor war can tell itself, honestly, that it is staying neutral.

It is not staying neutral. Where the documents already answer the question, declining to run them is a decision on the merits — in favor of the owner who benefits from non-enforcement.

Ekstrom v. Marquesa at Monarch Beach Homeowners Assn., 168 Cal.App.4th 1111 (2008), is the clean illustration. The recorded CC&Rs at a Dana Point, California community provided that “[a]ll trees, hedges and other plant materials shall be trimmed by the Owner of the Lot upon which they are located so that they shall not exceed the height of the house on the Lot,” subject to a carve-out where the architectural committee determined the trees did not obstruct any other lot’s view. View owners asked the association to enforce the provision against neighbors’ palm trees. The board instead adopted a policy exempting palms from the covenant, and later adopted rules that excluded all palms planted before 2006.

The Court of Appeal was unpersuaded. “Section 7.18 is not at all ambiguous,” the court wrote, and “[n]othing in the CC&R’s permits the Association to exclude an entire species of trees from section 7.18’s application simply because it prefers the aesthetic benefit of those trees to the community.” Even assuming good faith, the board’s policy “was not in accord with the CC&R’s,” and its interpretation was “inconsistent with the plain meaning of the document and thus not entitled to judicial deference.” The court affirmed a judgment ordering the association “to enforce [s]ection 7.18 and to utilize every enforcement mechanism available to it under the CC&Rs and the law in order to do so,” and noted the plaintiffs had been declared the prevailing parties and awarded their costs and attorney fees.

Two operational points follow. First, the defendant was the association, not the neighbors with the trees. In a covenant fight between owners, the party holding the enforcement power inherits the exposure for sitting on it. Second, in most jurisdictions a governing-documents dispute carries fee-shifting, which means the cost of being wrong about non-enforcement is not zero — it is both sides’ legal bills plus the enforcement the association was always going to have to perform. Non-enforcement never appears on a budget line, which is precisely why boards under-price it.

Where “Too Little” Begins: The Documents Set the Floor

“Do more” is not a standard. The useful question is where the duty line actually sits, and the answer is that it moves with two variables: what the recorded documents say, and what a reasonable, documented effort looks like against the specific complaint.

Davis v. Echo Valley Condominium Ass’n, 945 F.3d 483 (6th Cir. 2019), shows the low end of the range and the discipline that wins there. An owner with asthma complained that cigarette smoke from a downstairs unit was entering her condominium. She asked the association to impose a building-wide smoking ban. The bylaws said nothing about smoking, and residents had long smoked in their units.

The association did not adopt the ban. It did three other things, each of which appears in the published opinion: the board authorized a letter asking the unit owners to help keep the smoke contained; it then contracted, at association expense, for a $275 fresh-air system on the complainant’s ductwork, which she acknowledged helped reduce the smell; and it ultimately put a proposed smoking ban to a vote of the owners. The neighboring tenants separately volunteered to run an air purifier.

The Sixth Circuit affirmed summary judgment for the association on all claims. On the covenant theory, the court observed that Michigan courts construe restrictive covenants strictly against those claiming to enforce them, and concluded: “Unless the bylaws plainly cover the challenged in-condo smoking, therefore, Davis must lose.” It also noted that the association and its manager “did not simply ignore Davis’s concerns,” recited the steps above, and wrote that “[t]hese efforts undermine any claim that the board failed to enforce the bylaw.” On the federal disability claim, the court resolved the case on the ground that a “reasonable accommodation” means a moderate adjustment to a policy rather than a fundamental change, and that a categorical building-wide ban fell in the latter category.

Note what actually did the work. The association did not solve the problem — the complainant was still dissatisfied enough to litigate to a federal court of appeals. It prevailed because the record showed proportionate, documented effort against a covenant that did not plainly reach the conduct. Reasonableness, not success, is the standard, and undocumented effort is legally indistinguishable from no effort at all.

The contrasting scenario is a community whose recorded documents do speak. Where a declaration contains a nuisance or quiet-enjoyment covenant, an owner complaining that the covenant is being violated is not merely dissatisfied — that owner is a party to a recorded instrument watching the enforcing body decline to perform. A widely reported 2013 Orange County, California jury verdict in a secondhand-smoke case, in which the association was assigned a substantial share of responsibility for emotional-distress damages notwithstanding that it never produced any smoke, is the cautionary version of this scenario. Because that matter produced no published appellate opinion, the figures circulate only as contemporaneous reporting, and boards should treat them as such. The structural point does not depend on the numbers: a covenant the association holds and does not run is a covenant the association can be asked to answer for.

Failure Two: Doing Too Much

The second failure is not tyranny. It is rule-boundedness — treating the existence of a rule as permission to stop thinking about what enforcing it will do.

Frances T. v. Village Green Owners Assn., 42 Cal.3d 490 (1986), is the enduring statement of the problem. The procedural posture is essential and must not be flattened: the case reached the California Supreme Court on demurrer. The court accepted the complaint’s allegations as true for purposes of the appeal and decided only whether, if true, they stated a claim. No trial established what happened, and no one was found liable in that opinion.

As alleged and accepted for the appeal: the project experienced a crime wave through 1980; the board began investigating lighting improvements in early 1980; the plaintiff’s unit was burglarized in April 1980; she transmitted a formal request for additional lighting in May and a further memorandum in August after no action was taken; she then installed exterior lighting at her own unit; the site manager advised her that the lighting violated the CC&Rs; and after she appeared before the board, it resolved that she remove the added lighting and restore the association property to its original condition by a stated date. Because the added lights shared circuitry with the original fixtures, complying meant extinguishing all of her exterior lighting. On the night she complied, an intruder entered her unit and she was raped and robbed.

The court held that the association “is, for all practical purposes, the Project’s ‘landlord,’” and that traditional tort principles impose on associations that function as a landlord in maintaining common areas a duty to exercise due care for residents’ safety in the areas under their control. It further held that the negligence claim against the individual directors could proceed, while affirming dismissal of the breach-of-contract and breach-of-fiduciary-duty causes of action. On the contract theory the court was explicit that the CC&Rs expressly prohibited the installation without prior board approval, and that in ordering removal “the board may have acted negligently as a landlord, but it did not breach any contractual obligation to the residents.”

Read that sentence carefully, because it is the whole lesson of “too much.” The board had the authority. The rule was valid. The order was contractually permissible. What the court allowed to proceed was the claim that exercising that authority, with knowledge of the specific hazard, was negligent. Authority and judgment are separate questions, and having the first does not answer the second.

The operational discipline is a single question asked before every enforcement action: what does this order remove, and what condition does it restore? A notice about paint color removes paint. An order to disconnect security lighting during a known crime wave restores darkness. Both are “enforcement.” They are not the same act.

The second variant of “too much” is litigating past every exit. A small Fairfax County, Virginia association became a national example after a dispute over a campaign sign that was, according to contemporaneous reporting, four inches taller than the covenant allowed. As reported, the association moved to levy a penalty, the dispute became litigation over the board’s power to fine, the association spent roughly $400,000 in legal fees over about four years, the homeowners prevailed and were awarded $100,000 toward their fees, and the association subsequently sought to sell common ground and went through bankruptcy. Those figures come from news coverage rather than court records and should be cited that way. The governance point stands independently: every enforcement decision is a capital-allocation decision. Litigation consumes reserves at the same rate a roof does, and an open-ended authorization to counsel is a spending decision the board has declined to scope.

Failure Three: Doing It Inconsistently

The third failure is the one courts punish most reliably, because it converts a valid rule into evidence. It is also the failure most likely to appear alongside the other two.

Revock v. Cowpet Bay West Condominium Ass’n, 853 F.3d 96 (3d Cir. 2017), is the compound case. Two owners with documented disabilities obtained emotional support animals and filed physicians’ letters and certifications with the association’s office — one in February 2011, the other in July 2011. The association’s rule stated: “Dogs and farm animals are prohibited, and owners will be fined as specified by the Board of Directors.” It had no assistive-animal policy. For months the files sat. In October 2011 the board president wrote both owners declaring them in violation and giving ten days to apply for an exception; he copied that correspondence to a resident who ran a community blog, and the blog published it. In January 2012 the board voted to fine the two owners fifty dollars per day. A new board president took office in March 2012; formal requests were submitted, and in April 2012 the board granted both accommodations and waived the accrued fines.

The Third Circuit reversed summary judgment for the association on both the accommodation and interference claims, reversed as to two individual residents, and vacated as to the former president. That is an appellate revival for trial, not a finding of liability — the court held only what a reasonable jury could find. Two doctrinal points carry beyond the case. First, on refusal: “a refusal may be ‘actual or constructive,’” and “[a]n undue delay in granting a reasonable accommodation may amount to a refusal.” Second, on interference under 42 U.S.C. § 3617, the court held a reasonable jury could find that a private resident’s written harassment campaign was “sufficiently severe or pervasive as to ‘interfere’” with the owners’ fair housing rights.

Set against the association’s own later conduct, the inconsistency is the story: the same association, the same covenant, the same animals, resolved in roughly a month once someone simply processed the requests. What preceded it was all three failure modes at once — nothing on the accommodation files, a daily fine on the enforcement file, and a year of asymmetry between the two.

The transferable rule is narrow and easy to operationalize: when a request is pending on the very rule being enforced, enforcement pauses. Deciding first and enforcing second is neutral. Enforcing while the request sits is, in litigation, evidence of refusal.

The Outer Boundary: What the Association Does Not Owe

None of this makes an association the general referee of neighborhood life, and boards that over-correct create their own exposure.

Woolard v. Regent Real Estate Services, Inc. (Cal. Ct. App., 4th Dist., Div. 3, filed December 3, 2024; certified for publication December 23, 2024) affirmed summary judgment for an association and its management company on a negligence cross-complaint arising from a physical altercation between residents. The court found the cross-complainants had “failed to establish, or even articulate, a duty of care” and wrote that “[i]mposing a duty on homeowners associations or their managing agents to intervene and attempt to resolve disputes between homeowners (or their tenants) would place an untenable burden on these entities,” noting that “[a]ssociations do not have police powers or subpoena power.” The court also observed that the cross-complainants were tenants rather than owners and members, which limited the relationship further.

The boundary shifts when a protected class is involved. In Wetzel v. Glen St. Andrew Living Community, LLC, 901 F.3d 856 (7th Cir. 2018), the court read the Fair Housing Act to create “liability against a landlord that has actual notice of tenant-on-tenant harassment based on a protected status, yet chooses not to take any reasonable steps within its control to stop that harassment,” and reversed a dismissal at the pleading stage. That was a landlord case decided on a motion to dismiss, and the court expressly declined to rest on HUD’s 2016 regulation. It nonetheless marks the lane where inaction, rather than action, is the risk.

The Three Failures at a Glance

Five Questions Before the Board Acts

1. Do our recorded documents speak to this conduct? Read the declaration with the complaint in hand, not from memory. Silence narrows the covenant theory; plain language forecloses the option of quietly declining.
2. What does this order remove, and what does it restore? If the answer touches lighting, locks, cameras, handrails, ventilation, or any other mitigation of a hazard the board already knows about, the file leaves the routine track and goes in front of the full board as its own item.
3. Is anything pending from this owner on this rule? An accommodation request, a hardship request, an architectural application, or a written assertion of a federal right. If so, decide the pending item before the enforcement step advances.
4. Does this dispute attach to a protected characteristic? If a complaint references disability, race, religion, sex, familial status, or national origin — from either side — the file goes to counsel before the next letter goes out.
5. What does being right cost, and who pays? Attach a number to the letter, the hearing, and the litigation path before the vote. If the number would be uncomfortable to read aloud at the annual meeting, the board has its answer.

Key Takeaways

• A neighbor dispute has three parties, and the association holds the instruments. Standing in the middle is a position of authority, not a position outside the conflict.
• Non-enforcement is a decision, and it is priced. Ekstrom is the published example of a board that lost the deference argument because its “interpretation” contradicted plain covenant language, and had a mandatory enforcement judgment and a fee award entered against it.
• Reasonableness, documented, is the win condition. The association in Davis never solved the problem and prevailed anyway, on a record of proportionate steps the court recited by name.
• Authority does not answer the judgment question. Frances T. allowed a negligence claim to proceed against the association and individual directors while dismissing the contract theory — on demurrer, with allegations accepted as true, not adjudicated.
• Pause enforcement while a request on the same rule is pending. Revock confirms that undue delay may itself amount to a refusal under the Fair Housing Act.
• There is no general duty to referee. Woolard holds that imposing one would be an untenable burden — but the analysis changes on notice of protected-class harassment, as Wetzel illustrates at the pleading stage.

Related in This Series

• The Neighbor-Conflict Intake Procedure — the operational companion to this framework: intake, the duty line, documentation, and when the association is not the forum.
• When “All” Means All — the covenant-reading discipline behind the “too little” failure, built on Ekstrom.
• Actual Notice and the Director Who Knew — the personal-exposure analysis in Frances T., and why the business judgment rule does not reach it.
• Selective Enforcement: The One Thing That Voids a Valid Rule — the full doctrine behind the third failure mode.
• Compliance Before Conflict — the progressive-enforcement philosophy that keeps most disputes off this map entirely.
• The Fair Housing Act and HOA Boards — protected classes, accommodations, and the framework these decisions sit inside.
• Due Process Before Fines — the notice-and-hearing sequence any enforcement step in a neighbor dispute must satisfy.

Tags: neighbor disputes · Ekstrom v. Marquesa · Davis v. Echo Valley · Frances T. v. Village Green · Revock v. Cowpet Bay West · Woolard v. Regent Real Estate · Wetzel v. Glen St. Andrew · duty to enforce · selective enforcement · reasonable accommodation · § 3617 interference

Disclaimer. This article is published by the Common Interest Community Standards Council for educational and informational purposes only. It is not legal advice and does not establish an attorney-client relationship. Case descriptions are drawn from published opinions and are descriptive of those records; Frances T. was decided on demurrer with allegations accepted as true, and Revock and Wetzel reversed pre-trial dispositions rather than entering judgments of liability. Figures attributed to news reporting are identified as such and have not been verified against court records. The application of any decision described here to a specific association depends on the particular facts, the governing documents, and the current state of the law in the relevant jurisdiction. Boards should consult association counsel before acting on any enforcement matter involving safety, litigation exposure, or a protected characteristic. CIC-SC, its authors, and its members assume no liability for actions taken in reliance on this content.

Published by the Common Interest Community Standards Council (CICSC). Part of the CICSC Member Education Library. © 2026 CICSC. Educational use permitted with attribution.