Re: Shipyard Condo Board election - Please sign before May 21

Hi Shipyard Condo HOA Members-

Many of you have hopefully received notices about the results of our recent HOA Board election.  What many of you might not know is the full story behind those elections. As a community we voted for Jason Fried and Anthony Booth by a landslide. They are both incredibly active in the community - frequently get feedback from the homeowners, and try to work on viable solutions to our problems. These 2 passionate and vocal people were ultimately not elected to represent us because Lennar "reinterpreted" the bylaws and selected their own candidates without communicating any rule change to the homeowners.   

We are a community of passionate, smart people who are deeply invested in the Shipyard.  We deserve to have a voice in our own HOA board that we pay thousands into each year.  At this moment, a corporation has selected 5 of the 5 seats, not the actual homeowners.  This is shameful.

Our ask of you: 

Several of us have started to organize to push for representation on our own Board and we'd greatly appreciate your support.  Our ask is to sign on to the letter below by filling out this form before EOD May 21st.   

We will be sharing this letter and signatures with Lennar executives and presenting at the next HOA Board meeting on May 22nd.  (Note - if you have comments or ideas to strengthen the letter, please share them on the Google doc here)

I've also only included people who we have email addresses for in our master directory owner directory. Several of the new buildings we don't have emails for. Please forward this email to them and add them to this sheet.

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To the Condominiums at the Shipyard Owners Association:

As a community, we feel shocked and betrayed by our recent HOA Board elections.  At this moment, 5 of the 5 people who were elected to the Board were not elected by the actual homeowner community, but by a corporation.  We each pay thousands of hard earned dollars each year to an HOA where we now have zero representation.

 

We all bought into a vision of what this community would become, and are all deeply invested in creating a safe, sustainable, diverse, and collaborative place to live.  We assumed that your goal here is the same. Here are a few snippets of how the Shipyard is described on its own website for the principles of this community:

It's people that make places, not buildings. We want to encourage folks to be themselves here and to make this place their own. We can't make a piece of San Francisco history by ourselves – we need help. Let's embrace co-creation and encourage curation, and invite amazing people to do remarkable things.

In the end, a great community is not complete without people who are passionate about where they live and work. We understand this part of the puzzle because it is how we want to live.

How can we achieve any of these ideals if we do not have voice on our own HOA Board?  

Here are the 3 critical issues we'd like addressed:

1. Bylaw reinterpretation: For years, we've been running our Board where Lennar gets to submit votes for 1 of the 2 community held seats.  There was a reinterpretation of the bylaws to where Lennar gets to submit votes for both seats, not just one. This change in vote process was never communicated to any HOA members and was decided after the votes were counted.

2. Suppressing our voice: When you take out the 192 Lennar votes, the vote count by the community was the following:

• Jason Fried - 44

• Anthony Booth - 23

• Malia Mulherin - 13

• Caroline Cooper - 12

• Brian Yee - 7

• Anthony Parazoli - 1

• Zara Janer - 1

Jason and Anthony are incredibly active in the community - frequently get feedback from the homeowners, and try to work on viable solutions to our problems.  We have clearly stated that we want them to represent us on this Board. If you truly believed in the values you state and sell, you would welcome Board members chosen by the community.

3. The bylaws themselves: Lennar has 3 votes to each homeowner's 1 vote, not to mention 3 seats that we cannot vote on at all.  For this last vote, you had a total of 192 votes. All of our votes in combination couldn't add up to your total vote count.  We literally will never win representation on this Board with how you've stacked the Board and bylaws.

What we are asking for:

1. An explanation of how, why and when the reinterpretation of how votes get counted happened.
2. To support and elect the 2 candidates we as a community chose.
3. Our ideal request is that the community itself would get to manage our own board that we've literally invested our life's savings in. However, the minimum you can do is actually allow us representation for the 2 out of 5 seats on the Board.  We'd like for you to update the bylaws to allow the community full and clear to elect our 2 Board members, no votes from Lennar allowed. Note, this still allows you the majority on the Board.

As you state on your own website, "All of us at Lennar are committed to doing the right thing for the right reason." We all hope that you truly partner with us as a community instead of trying to silence us. We are prepared to step up our activism on this issue and publicize it more widely if we do not get resolution to all of the above points.

Signed: