Here we do special assessments because the owners want the regular, monthly HOA fee to remain as low as possible.
Most are elderly & on fixed incomes, having moved into our townhouse development after selling their SFR once the kids left home.
Most residents here will be DEAD before the next re-roofing, so it makes sense that they don't want to pay extra monthly when it would only benefit the next owner
Liens and foreclosure are usually the two available options when a homeowner is delinquent. In my experience, once foreclosure proceedings begin, the delinquent homeowner almost always pays up pretty quickly.
There may be a limit on how much the HOA can collect in a foreclosure. In Florida, this limit is about one year's worth of assessments.
Every Homeowners Association and Condominium Association should put enough money into reserves annually to pay for their major infrequent expenses as they arise. These include projects such as paving, new roofs, exterior painting, replacing sidewalks, clubhouse furnishings and equipment, and fence replacements. Special assessments and bank loans are less desirable ways to pay for these expenses for several reasons.
1. Not every homeowner can easily write a check, or be willing to write a check, to cover a large special assessment when the funds are needed.
2. Former residents will not have paid their fair share of long-range expenses. They won’t have contributed their fair shares to these expenses while they lived in the community as the assets were deteriorating.
3. Newer residents will be unfairly burdened by paying for items that have deteriorated over time before they moved in.
4. In most cases, there is no mechanism to alert potential new residents that a special assessment or loan may be needed by the Association.
5. It’s better to allocate funds to reserves as evenly as possible over the years to simplify the budgeting for residents and for the Association.
Some associations use loans instead of special assessments. This may ease the cash flows for residents, but loans also incur additional costs for loan processing and interest payments. And a bank may restrict Association operations until the loan is repaid.
As an illustration, when 10% of the useful life of your roads remains you should already have 90% of the repaving cost in your reserves. The same philosophy applies to every long-term maintenance item. Underfunded reserves cause underfunded budgets which misrepresent the true cost of living in that HOA.
Some Boards prefer to keep their assessments artificially low because they are concerned some residents cannot afford to pay higher assessments. If a resident cannot afford to pay the necessary assessments, that resident cannot afford to live in that community.
Special assessments or loans are sometimes needed when unexpected large expenses arise. But most long term maintenance expenses are guaranteed to occur and should rarely be a surprise when they arise.
). Our commerce boiler for hot water died and we had to buy a gently used one for 40k. It took 16 days to find and arrive. A new one was 75k and going to take a month to arrive. It wasn’t fun not having hot water. 
