What it changes for boards and managers

The practical exposure here is larger than a single Ashe County dispute, because of where these clauses sit in the enforcement stack.

A general nuisance or annoyance covenant is rarely the first tool an association uses. It is the fallback — the clause cited when an owner's conduct is plainly unwelcome but does not violate the parking rule, the pet rule, the architectural standard or the occupancy limit. Barking, odours, unsightly but permitted objects, hostile behaviour between neighbours, and noise not covered by a specific quiet-hours provision all tend to land here.

Villazon means that in North Carolina, that fallback may simply not exist. An association that issues a violation notice, holds a hearing, and levies a fine under a clause of this shape has built an enforcement action on a covenant a court may decline to enforce — and if the fine went unpaid and became a claim of lien, the defect runs all the way down the chain.

Three practical consequences:

• Audit which clause your enforcement actually rests on. Where a specific covenant applies, cite the specific covenant and not the nuisance clause. Associations frequently cite both as belt and braces; here the braces are the weak part, and citing them can invite the whole notice to be attacked.
• Rules adopted under a vague covenant inherit the problem. A board rule elaborating what counts as a nuisance does not cure a void covenant — the rule-making authority has to come from somewhere, and a void clause is not a source of authority.
• The exposure is asymmetric. An owner does not have to sue to raise this. It is a defence, available whenever the association tries to enforce.

What still works

This is not a holding that associations cannot regulate nuisance-type conduct. It is a holding about drafting.

What survives is a covenant that states an objective standard a court can apply without consulting the sensibilities of the complainant. Specific, measurable, or externally referenced restrictions are enforceable: quiet hours by clock time; noise by decibel or by reference to a local ordinance; enumerated prohibited activities; restrictions tied to a statutory or code standard. The further a clause moves from “what a neighbour finds annoying” toward “what an observer can verify,” the safer it is.

It is also worth noting what an association retains outside the declaration entirely. Common-law private nuisance remains available to an affected owner as a tort claim, and local noise, animal and property-maintenance ordinances remain enforceable by the local government. Neither is an association enforcement tool, but both are real answers for a board that has been asked to do something it may not lawfully do.

How this fits with the other 2025 covenant decisions

Read alongside Schroeder v. Oak Grove Farm, decided by the Supreme Court six weeks earlier, the two cases bracket the problem of evaluative language in covenants.

In Schroeder, an otherwise concrete restriction — no poultry, except household pets — contained one evaluative term, and the Supreme Court held that applying that term was a jury question. The covenant was enforceable; the fight was about facts.

In Villazon, the restriction consisted of nothing but evaluative terms, and it was not enforceable at all. There was no factual question to try.

The distinction the pair draws: an evaluative word attached to a defined category is survivable and expensive. An evaluative word standing alone as the whole standard is fatal.

What to watch next

No petition for discretionary review to the Supreme Court has been located, though North Carolina's appellate docket system does not reliably return docket sheets to public queries, so treat “no petition found” as unverified rather than as confirmation that none was filed.

The more useful thing to watch is amendment activity. Steiner has been on the books since 2011 and this line of authority is not new; what Villazon adds is a published rejection of the best counter-argument. Associations that have been relying on a nuisance clause since 2011 without testing it now have a clearer signal, and the remedy — amending the declaration to replace subjective language with objective standards — requires the owner vote their declaration specifies. That is slow, and it is the reason most of these clauses will still be in place a decade from now.