Condo wars

When I first arrived in Manuel Antonio I lived in a nice friendly condo with views to die for and friendly neighbors. About a year later a war broke out. There were about fifty percent straight owners and fifty percent gay owners living in the condos. There was no animosity between the two groups and times were good for everybody.

Then one day a group of the gay owners were sitting around in the bar and they decided that the condos would be more fun if they were 100 percent gay instead of only fifty percent gay. They came up with a mean spirited plan to drive out the straight owners and have new gay owners buy all the condos. They schemed and plotted and started their war. The first thing they tried was just telling everybody that the place was all gay. They thought that it would embarrass the straight owners into selling out if the condos had a reputation for being gay. Well the straight owners turned out to be too gay friendly and did not mind the new reputation and they were not at all inclined to sell out of their condos that they loved so much merely because they had some gay neighbors. Then the gays decided to up the stakes a bit more. The gays were in charge of management of the condos which were built on a steep hill. Most of the straight owners lived in the upper units and most of the gays lived in the lower units. To get to their condos the straights entered a few doors at the top of the hill and walked straight and level sidewalks to get to their condos. The management locked those doors forcing the owners to enter at the gates on the bottom of the hill and walk up steep flights of stairs to get to their units. Some of the units were about a hundred steep steps up from the bottom and it was a tough climb in the hot humid weather. The gay friendly management insisted the new rule was for security. It took a while but the straights now started to talk to each other about what was going on. They suddenly realized that the gays were messing with them to try to get them to sell out. The straights decided to fight back. There were some more dirty tricks the gay group of owners tried also, some of them were little things like broken down phone lines to the straight units and electrical problems and plumbing problems all artificially created hassles to drive out the straights.

When the straights decided to fight back it got even worse. The gay owners tried to deny that they were doing anything while escalating the harassment level even more with new parking restrictions to make the straights have to park further away from their units. They also started to pick on one of the straight owners who was doing some remodeling. They actually went in and physically destroyed the condo one night when the owner was not there. They cut it up with saws and wrecked the walls and fixtures. When the straight owner came back and found the destruction the fighting escalated to hiring thugs to physically threaten the gay owners that were doing the harassment. That stopped the war. The gay owner who was the ringleader of the war was physically threatened by the thugs and he sold out in a matter of days. Several of the other ringleaders also moved out including the management that was involved in the events. The police threatened to arrest several of them and that is what finally ended the attempted gay takeover. A few of the gay owners were not involved in the altercations and they remained living there but all the actively involved gays that planned and carried out the war against the straights were driven out quickly and the war was over.

There was and probably still is tension left over from this stupid juvenile war that was fought. The condo management is always suspect now and the straight owners are very careful to make sure they don't get taken advantage of again. The whole town knows about all the problems and real estate agents do not like to get involved in any sales involving these condos now because of all the historical problems in this association. The good days there were short lived.

Now development all around these condos has driven away most of the animals and birds that originally made the place so charming. The big new buildings are blocking the beautiful views that once existed. The new developments have overwhelmed the water, electrical and sewer capacities of the area also. There is always a water shortage now. The electrical goes out almost every single day and the whole place is starting to smell like ass as South Park says from all of the over loaded septic systems over flowing into the streams and ground water. There are lots of problems and the current downturn in the international economy has not helped either. Most of the new development that ruined the ambiance of the place is now sitting empty because there are not enough tourists to fill them. My dream of retiring there and living the idyllic life I found when I first arrived were shattered now by all the ugly changes taking place. Manuel Antonio went from a tropical green jungle to just another concrete jungle like any other big ugly tourist trap.

I sadly left the area after several years of living there because I just could not watch the place getting destroyed so quickly.