Why this matters
The USA will celebrate its 250th anniversary with plenty of patriotic displays Saturday. In San Marcos, two families are fighting their HOA this week over the right to fly the American flag.
Amy Cooke has proudly flown the American flag in front of her San Marcos home for 20 years.
Her homeowners association wants her to take it down.
Cooke lives in one of 112 townhomes managed by the Ambiance Homeowners Association. The HOA adopted a flag policy in 2024 banning residential flag displays, and documents reviewed by inewsource show she’s been told to remove the flag repeatedly or face a $100 fine.
But Cooke has not removed the flag, and legal experts say forcing her to do so violates the law.
On Tuesday, four days before the United States of America celebrates its 250th anniversary, Cooke has a hearing to present her case before the HOA’s management. Her neighbor Terri Collins has a separate hearing to make a similar argument to keep flying her own U.S. flag.
Cooke said she and Collins are the last of what used to be several people in the townhome community flying the American flag from their homes. They say the HOA is violating their rights to display a symbol of their country and also to honor family members who lost their lives in war. They’re not giving up, especially on the eve of such a significant Independence Day.
“I’m not going to stop,” Cooke said. “It’s clear that I have the right to fly the American flag.”
“If anything, everyone should be able to feel like they can hang a flag,” Collins said. “Two hundred and fifty years is amazing. That’s fabulous. We survived. We did it. We’re doing the American Dream. We’re going for it. We’re doing it, a plan that everyone thought would fail, and it’s still going. Everybody should be able to express that with the flag, and it’s too bad.”
Ambiance HOA did not respond to several requests for comment for this story.
Legal experts weren’t so hesitant.
‘The law is crystal clear’
Two HOA experts inewsource interviewed said that the law backs Cooke and Collins up. They said people have the right to fly the American flag, even in homes subject to regulations by homeowners associations.
Federal law protects the right to display the American flag. It says no real estate management association can adopt a policy that would “restrict or prevent a member of the association from displaying the flag of the United States on residential property.”
State law also says that HOAs cannot prohibit non-commercial flags in what’s known as “exclusive common areas,” which are common areas designated for the exclusive use of the homeowner, according to the law.
The Ambiance HOA governing documents reviewed by inewsource show that “door frames,” where Cooke has her flag, are included in that designation.
Michael Kushner, an Aliso Viejo lawyer and HOA expert, said that the HOA was “barking up the wrong tree” and that “the law is crystal clear.”
HOAs “count on the fact that homeowners don’t know better and might be scared,” he said. “I would tell these people to stand firm and under no circumstances should they remove that flag.”
Douglas Kruschen, a homeowner advocate who specializes in internal dispute resolutions with HOAs, agreed. He added that it was also past the five-year window for enforcing any policy, given how long the families have flown their flags.
“They’re trying to start a war with homeowners,” he said.
Cooke said that moving the flag to the back patio would render it less relevant.
“Flags are meant to be ‘displayed,’ as in ‘flag display,’” she said. “Not hidden inside your house draped from an inside window or your patio facing the park sewage gutter or nothing at all.”
From several flags to two
The development’s flag drama started a few years ago, when neighbor Greg Henninger tried to hang a Padres flag in front of his house and he was fined. He said not only was he told no but also that the HOA created a sweeping flag policy prohibiting all residential flag displays.
A 2024 memo from HOA management quotes the association’s lawyer saying, “Once the members allow use of common property by an owner to express what is essentially a political or affiliative view in a flag, sign, or banner, other owners will want to do the same and the common area will degrade.”
The memo ends, “Thus, in the best interest of the community, it was for this reason that the flag policy was adopted.”
Around the time of that memo is when people started to receive warnings about the American flags they had flown for decades.
“I backed off because it’s not a hill I was willing to completely die on,” Henninger said.
Cooke and Collins both felt more strongly. The American flag is not a political statement to them — it’s a tribute to family members who served — and some who died while serving.
“There’s a significant difference between some random flag for whatever you support and the American flag, the symbol of our country,” Cooke said. “It’s not just a flag. It’s a symbol.”
Both Cooke and Collins said they would pay a fine if they are forced to pay it — and then take the HOA to small claims court to get their money back. They said they would keep fighting what they are confident is an unjust rule.
“Forty-two years of my life, my husband and I hung a flag, and prior to that, my father hung a flag, like it’s just always part of our family thing,” Collins said. “I’m not taking my flag down.”
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