Many struggling homeowners have to make tough choices about which bills to pay. If you live in a community with a homeowners association or own an apartment in a building with a condo association in Florida, you'd better pay those monthly fees -- or you could lose your house.

Florida law puts a homeowners association on par with the bank. Don't pay association fees or special assessments and the association could foreclose on your house. Across the state, HOAs are cracking down on delinquent members, barring them from common areas and even from getting their pizza delivered. With HOA delinquency rates as high as 50 percent in some communities, several bills up for consideration in Tallahassee would give associations even more power to deal with in arrears members.

Southern Florida has become the capital of bargain real estate. More than 56 percent of residential properties for resale in South Florida can be nabbed for less than $250,000, far less than prices a few years ago during the boom, according to a recent report by Condo Vultures LLC. For condos and townhouses, the deals are even greater: more than two-thirds of the roughly 41,000 condos and townhomes on the market are less than a quarter mil.

Sun, palm trees and cheap homes... what more is needed to warm a homebuyer's heart?

Water, you say? Well, there's the catch. For that, you still have to pay.

As Florida continues to reel from foreclosures, some officials have had enough. Of Bank of America, that is.

Last week, Broward County's Board of Commissioners barred the bank from participating as one of five co-managers in an upcoming municipal bond sale. The bond will raise $208 million to pay for the replacement of a section of the county courthouse in downtown Fort Lauderdale.

Why keep out brawny BofA?

The county commission wanted to send a message: Bank of America, they believe, is not playing nice with struggling homeowners who desperately need mortgage loan modifications.

The check's in the mail.

The money promised to homeowners in Florida and 39 other states -- part of a 2008 settlement with a mortgage lender that came to symbolize the worst practices in the realm of subprime lending -- began to flow last week.

Some 2,700 Florida residents who had lost their homes after Countrywide Financial Corp. foreclosed on their mortgages can look forward to checks totaling a little more than $6,000 each. Seems like chump change to someone who's lost their home. Yet, Florida homeowners may be faring better than most.

In foreclosure-wracked Florida, there are tiny signs of life. The state's foreclosure rate dipped in January. Earlier this month, all eyes were on Miami when the Super Bowl XLIV came to town. And recently, the deep freeze in real estate lending seems to have thawed.

An investor group buying a 63-unit condo project on Brickell Avenue in Downtown Miami recently secured financing from a local bank, according to CondoVultures LLC, a real estate consulting firm in Bal Harbour, Fla. Granted, the $5.5 million mortgage for the new buyers works out to $68 per square foot -- quite a drop from the $126 per square foot price that was the basis for the building's original purchase price of $10.2 million in August 2009.

Still, these events amount to cheery news for the southern Florida's beleaguered real estate market.

New-and-improved home sweet home.

A Mediterranean Revival style building, once so deteriorated that the city of Miami Beach was ready to demolish it, has been brought back to life by the Miami Beach Community Development Corporation (CDC), a non-profit group that will maintain it as housing for low-income seniors.

The 11 residents who still lived at Villa Maria when the renovation work began in July 2008 will come back to the building, which sits on Collins Avenue and 28th Street in the heart of the city's heavily trafficked hotel district. Returning to their renovated apartments is a huge blessing. They enjoyed -- and missed -- the comeraderie among the tenants in the building.

The rest of the 34 units will be rented to seniors on fixed incomes. The tenants will pay only 30 percent of their monthly income for rent. The remainder is subsidized through a federal housing program. (To be eligible for HUD's Section 8 housing subsidy program, family income must be 50 percent below the median income of an area. In the Miami/Fort Lauderdale area, the median income is $55,900.)

Hasta la vista, your honor.

The Florida Bankers Association has proposed a new approach to deal with the backlog of foreclosure proceedings in the state's courthouses: skip the courts and proceed immediately to the sale.

The banking trade group -- a significant lobbying force in the state capital -- is shopping a bill that would allow "non-judicial" foreclosures as a way to speed up the process that can take as long as 18 months, according to the St. Petersburg Times. The bill would kick troubled homeowners out of their homes in as little as three months, and allow banks to continue pursuing homeowners for unpaid mortgage debt long after they've been foreclosed upon.

With Orwellian flair, the bankers have called the bill The Florida Consumer Protection and Homeowner Credit Rehabilitation Act.

The proposal comes just a month after the Florida Supreme Court mandated a statewide mediation program between lenders and homeowners aimed at averting foreclosures -- a program the bankers' proposal would nullify.

How times have changed.... at least if retirement trends are the measure.

When my parents' generation thought of retirement living, it was in Florida, probably on a golf course. If you lived in the Northeast, it was Boca Raton, Fort Lauderdale or Miami. Midwesterners typically opted for Naples or Fort Myers.

But Baby Boomers -- always the individualists -- are breaking the mold. As the post-war generation begins hitting retirement age, they are bypassing the golf course communities, Sunshine State and other traditional retirement trappings of their parents. Instead, they're choosing smaller urban areas, in states such as North and South Carolina, and even downsizing on housing choices.

So you want to live in a home on a golf course? You may want think twice about that.

The cachet that comes from that beautiful expanse of green outside your window and country club living, also comes with...golf balls.

Hundreds and hundreds of golf balls.

Ask Willam and Dorothy Abbott in North Naples, Fla. For more than 15 years, the couple has tried to co-exist with the Stonebridge Country Club next door. But errant golf balls have rained down on their property, breaking windows, roof tiles and patio screens. The Naples Daily News reports the couple has tried to get the country club to pay to repair the damage but to no avail. When the Abbotts built their retirement home in 1988, there was no golf course next door. It came five years later and they quickly realized this might not be the best neighbor.

Their plight isn't unique, especially in states like Florida, California, and Nevada, where many new communities -- both high-end and more modest -- are built around golf courses. There are more than 2,941 golf courses built in real estate developments in the United States, according to the National Golf Foundation.

For a house with a self-professed "wow" factor-its website address is www,ownthewow.com-it seems that no amount of promotion is too much.

The Temple House, in the heart of Miami Beach, has a Facebook fan page, a Twitter account, its own blog with postings of all the celebs-Jennifer Lopez, Ricky Martin, BowWow and Playboy model Vicky Vodar, to name a few- who have crossed its threshold, and a stream of photos of its Flickr page.

Ines Hegedus-Garcia, an agent who is working with Broker Jeff Morr, owner of Majestic Properties, has tapped social media tools to market the Temple House. She tweets about every event at the house; all are chronicled with photos and videos.

Many a real estate dream has died on the courthouse steps during the past two years, via a foreclosure auction. Going forward, these mini-dramas will play out more quietly and efficiently on the Web.

To whittle down the load of pending sales-a record 2.8 million properties received foreclosure notices last year, up 21 percent from 2008-local officials are turning to online auctions.

Florida, which recorded the second highest number of foreclosure filings in the country in 2009, is the first state to turn to Internet-based auctions to process distressed property sales. These cyber auctions can bring in buyers from around the state or around the world.