Important New Book on the Market: Insurance Law for Common Interest Communities: Condominiums, Cooperatives And Homeowners Associations.

• Date: 15 October 2018

* Francine L. Semaya and Douglas Scott MacGregor have done a lot of thinking on a topic that affects the insuring community substantially. The result is a highly accurate, readable and useful 1,100 page to me: Insurance Law for Common Interest Communities. It is a winner and should be in every agency, claims and underwriting office in the business.

By way of background, the authors view their subject in a helpful context, explaining that Prior to World War II, common interest communities were rare. Here is an overview.

One form of common interest community, the housing cooperative, first appeared in the late 19th Century and by the roaring 20s, cooperatives were found in 16 cities and were the most popular form of "community housing" in the immediate post-war era. The homeowners association (HOA) also has a long history. One of the earliest was formed in the mid-19th Century in Boston. It had many of the features now associated with HOAs: common area maintenance, assessments for common expenses, and use regulations. It was not, however, until the post-war boom in suburban development that HOAs began to become popular. Condominiums existed in Puerto Rico in the 1950s, but did not arrive on the mainland United States in their present form until the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) adopted a Model Act in the 1960s based on which all 50 states adopted enabling legislation for the formation of condominiums. In the last quarter of the 20th Century, common interest communities spread rapidly across the...