Legal Question in Real Estate Law in California

Re: Home Owner Association

The HOA is almost certainly justified in requiring that you park both cars in the garage. When you purchased the home, you bought it subject to Conditions, Covenants & Restrictions (CC&Rs) which govern what you can and cannot do with your property (I'm assuming you have CC&Rs since you mention an HOA). These are binding rules by which you agreed to abide when you bought the home. You were not forced to buy that home, with those particular rules, and courts have generally held that requiring cars to be parked in garages is a resonable restriction. You can make a request for special exemption from the rule if there is a reason they feel is valid for not parking in the garage, or you can attempt to get 2/3rds of the homeowners in the project to agree to change the CC&Rs to remove that rule. Unfortunately, this type of restriction on your property rights is the tradeoff for living in a neighborhood where there are controls over people's conduct - the underlying justification for the rules is to keep property values up by keeping people from painting their homes neon green, or parking cars on their lawns, etc...

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