Will calm ever come to the Sierra Pointe Condominiums?

I’ve written about the 282-unit complex near Palmer Park several times over the years. It’s homeowners association is a chronic mess.

It’s always the same story: power-hungry HOA board members battling for control.

This time, there’s a twist.

Hossein Forouzandeh, the HOA president elected in January, said he’s under attack because he was born in Iran.

Could he, in fact, be a victim of hate? Or is he just another HOA tyrant who abuses the rules and punishes his opponents?

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Forouzandeh was recruited to run for the Sierra Pointe HOA board by a past president unhappy with the way the 2010 board operated.

That’s not unusual, especially at Sierra Pointe. It has endured years of feuding and upheaval of its HOA board.

What makes him different is his age – he’s 30 – and background as an actor with little experience in the knife-fighting world of HOA boards.

At the time Forouzandeh was elected, Sierra Pointe was being managed by Diversified Property Management, a company formed in 2005 by Steve and Tracy Martin. They manage 24 associations with 8,000 homeowners.

Diversified had been working at Sierra Pointe two years at the time, trying to get caught up on a $4 million backlog of maintenance — especially the repair of failing roofs across the complex and its 34 buildings.

Steve Martin said his team also was working to whittle down the list of folks behind on their association dues. A law firm that specializes in collections was hired to begin the lengthy process.

But after just 90 days of Forouzandeh’s tenure, Diversified quit, walking away from 15 percent of its revenue.

“Hossein was pretty impossible to deal with,” Martin said. “He doesn’t understand the HOA. He thought he could come in and change the workd in a heartbeat.”

Martin further described working with Forouzandeh as a “horror” and “a complete nightmare.”

Forouzandeh, 30, insists he is just a guy trying to restore order after years of chaos at Sierra Pointe. He says he inherited an inept board and management team.

And he says he’s a victim of hate and discrimination because he is a native of Iran who became a naturalized U.S. citizen in second grade.

But former board members paint a darker picture of him. They say Forouzandeh is more often the angry “urban turban” he portrayed in a You Tube video monologue “Persian Rant – Heyokah Project – Garden Of Peaches by Hossein Forouzandeh.”

In it, he describes his U.S. relocation as being “thrown into a den of hungry red, white and blue wolves.”

Former board member Angie Brown says she was unfairly ousted because she challenged Forouzandeh.

She claims he held board meetings and didn’t invite all members. He held executive sessions without following proper procedures, she said, even inviting people who should not have been privy to the sessions. Martin confirms these meetings.

Brown also claims Forouzandeh entered private condos without permission and took action without meeting or getting property board approval.

Forouzandeh denies breaking any rules and attributes the hard feelings to his work trying to reform Sierra Pointe HOA after years of neglect and abuse.

“It’s just lies,” he said, admitting only that he’s been “too blunt” at times.

Part of the problem, Forouzandeh said, is racial.

“I’ve gotten this all my life because I’m brown and my name is Hossein,” he said. “I promise you there’s a little bit of that involved in this.”

He may be right. Martin insists he simply couldn’t take the abuse any longer. But Brown doesn’t like his “Persian rant” and even said she’s worried “Sierra Pointe is coming under Muslim control.”

Hmm. Maybe Forouzandeh has a point.

Here’s a column I wrote in 2007 about Sierra Point and follow this link to the accompanying blog.

This is another column from 2008 and here is the associated blog.
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