[Sydney]

Originally Posted by SteveZ

Waiting lists are long....so what!

The issue is not whether there is a person day-caring a child, but whether the covenants really mean anything now and downstream. What other covenants are okay to ignore because of the "its only...." attitude? Who decides which are the appropriate "exceptions," or if there should be any at all?

We have an Architectural Control Committee as part of the covenants. We all knew about that group as well. Perhaps we should just ignore them out of artistic license.....

We have noise abatement at 10PM. Oh, well.... that's a little too old fogey, especially if we REALLY have a reason to party, or I'm very hard of hearing and I need my TV loud along with the windows wide open, so let's toss that out when we feel like it as well.....

We have a 2-pet limit per dwelling. But I REALLY love all of my 5 cats, or my 4 dogs are really small, so perhaps that covenant should be given a blind eye, too. After all, my pets are just as important to me.....

And those poor people two houses down the street. Their daughter just got divorced and has nowhere to go with her two kids. They are willing to drive the kids to school (for now), so until she can get "back on her feet, " and that should only take until the school year is over (we hope!), so they too should be the exception....

Amenities access is a great stick, but it beats wrong. "Amenities" is more than clubhouses, it does include lifestyle.

Muliply all of the above instances by 500 or more - because the exceptions have now become the rule - and you no longer have TV, but instead have Dorchester, or Brooklyn, or Oviedo, or Warwick, or Squirrel Hill, or Arlington, or a whole host of comparable cities.

This is not about being hearltless, but more about being a good neighbor - and that's your neighbor following the same rules as are expected of you and the other 30,000 households within TV.

This isn't just a case of a 6-month-old staying 3 days a week until a day care is found. It's also downstream as the child who is sick and can't go to day care later who now needs a dropping-off place, followed by the next child which wasn't expected, followed by the next reason. The two-income family can't seem to survive without grandparents to bail them out of overcommitment and kid-needs, and TV is a retirement community, not a child-rearing village.

Again, what's the next exception going to be, and how many thousand of them, because we can't be discriminatory on who is excused.......

Good neighbors look for all the alternatives before ever expecting others to ignore the rules, even if those alternatives cost a few bucks more or are inconvenient.

This is the point I was making! Where does it end?