I live in a town next to a border. On the other side of the river, I would save 4K in taxes every year. But I would pay more in car insurance, car registration, city property tax, public transportation and other smaller things. All in all, I pay maybe 1K more to live on my side of the river. That's completely sidestepping the whole issue of housing being way more expensive on the other side, which means I couldn't own a house.

Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one of my peers who has actually sat down and counted the beans. Everybody else just looks at the 4K and thinks I'm crazy to live where I live.

They're the same tyranny, no?

Someone else claims an amount of your money that they choose to be spent as they choose and you get an 1/N vote in the matter.

You can leave whenever you sell.

> They're the same tyranny, no?

It's much easier to replace local politicians or constrain/require local government action via the courts than it is to do the same to an HOA, isn't it?

In either case, you can vote with your feet, but I prefer being able to vote with a ballot

Do the courts show up less for HOAs because owners sign arbitration clauses? I don't otherwise see why the courts should be less relevant to HOAs.

Well, except no one wants to be the guy suing the neighborhood but somehow suing the government lacks that stigma. But that's peer pressure not courts.

I sat on an HOA board as president with no prior experience. Getting involved usually isn't hard. One just has to be willing to show up and to do grunt work.

I am doubt there are many non-democratic HOAs so voting seems a wash between the two.

> Do the courts show up less for HOAs because owners sign arbitration clauses? I don't otherwise see why the courts should be less relevant to HOAs.

Sometimes arbitration clauses are the cause. More often, it's because a homeowners association is a private, non-governmental entity and the case between the property owner and the HOA is, legally, a contract dispute.

There's an often-brought-out idea that the Constitution, be it state or Federal, only binds the government and not private parties. "Twitter can censor whatever it wants but the Department of the Interior can't," that sort of thing. Governments at all levels have to follow the Constitution and are generally a lot more restricted in what they can do, and the presumption is that people have much more broad rights to push back through the courts.

But with an HOA, many of them have been set up as quasi-governmental bodies, as in they act like governments--some even have the power of condemnation and foreclosure through their position as technically holding a lien over all of the properties in the development--but they have none of the responsibilities of governments. And if a property owner sues, a court is largely limited to looking at the plain language of the contract and the instrumentalities recorded against the parcel and see if those are being followed. (Occasionally there are state laws that deem some contract provisions to be "against public policy" and unenforceable in that state's courts, but states are very reticent to do this for anything other than quick political wins, like overturning prohibitions on flag poles.)

If they are being followed, the court's ruling is "well, you signed it, tough cookies."

NJ to Mcclellanville, SC is my guess. Aside tho actual cost of living is gonna be way cheaper for them.