Thanks for offering your opinion, which obviously differed from the original answer.
For what its worth, I know in my original description of the work being done I used the term "renovation," when in fact, it could just as easily all be considered maintenance and repairs. All of the projects that are meant to be completed by the money raised were thing that the HOA could have (and incidentally should have) been taking care of over the course of many years, but in an effort to keep monthly HOA fees artificially low (which makes any individual unit more appealing when put up for sale), they put off several repairs and what would otherwise be reasonably considered maintenance, until we had simply reached a tipping point. For most owners in the building, they elected to have their portion of the cost spread out over 8 years, along with interest, and baked into their monthly HOA dues. I elected to take care of it in lump sum to avoid the interest.
Additionally, the HOA took out a loan to cover these expenses (which is being paid off by the increased HOA dues for those who elected to spread it out), and for what its worth, if the HOA defaults, the liability goes to the association, not to any individual owner, which suggests to me that the common elements are indeed owned by the association, NOT by any one indivdual owner or collection of individual owners. . I'm curious -Does that change your opinion on how this should be handled?
