After ten years of one neighbor parking cars on their lawn, another growing more weeds than blades of grass, and another with 8 vehicles parked along the street I was done.
When I bought my second house I specifically wanted an HOA. After another 6 years, I couldn’t be happier. Yes the HOA prevents me from doing a handful of things, things that aren’t really a big deal in the grand scheme of things. While the HOA keeps the entire neighborhood looking nice and slaps people on the wrist when they need it.
Also keep in mind that getting together to organize a set of common standards and restrictions is the basis for all exclusive communities. That's OK if you are on the casual compliance side of the rules, or if you get to write them to suit your preferences. But it is discriminatory. Similar covenants have been used to keep out ethnic minorities (because of the way they live, like animals!).
Being for or against HOAs is like being for or against laws. It's meaningless without context.
Some HOAs are traffic lights. Some HOAs are civil forfeiture.
An HOA can morph from tolerable into unconscionable. Deny the HOA the right to exist in the first place, and it will never go bad. This is an appealing tradeoff for many.
A friend of mine lived in an unconscionable one and managed to turn it tolerable by running for President on a platform of vowing not to enforce any rules. Stayed in “power” for quite a while.
It's had mixed results. The neighborhood is surrounded by a brick wall that had a gap below (why??). The mortar is failing in several places. But the entry ways are kept pristine (developer is a big one in the area and has been slapped by lawsuits for not holding up their end before).
I suppose essentially that's just living in a society, i.e. as anywhere without a 'HOA', but codified.
I just meant that you could also deliberately have rules (as opposed to come into office after them) and you do intend that people follow them, create new ones, update them, etc., but they're just not enforced, and everyone knows that.
As in just codifying some social expectations that would probably exist in roughly the same form anyway.
We bought our house in 2016, next to an old tear down house. (I’m talking about plants growing inside because the roof doesn’t keep the water out.) Recently someone bought the house, tore it down, and built a million dollar house in its place. The other day, he gets into a fight with my wife—over various things, but among them the fact that he’s mad we won’t clean our porch. I told him that he’s the idiot who built a million dollar house next to people who were happy living next to a tear down for years.
Now before, I felt a little guilty for keeping the pool toys out there all year, but now I’m definitely not going to put them away.
Restricting nazi flags also restricts pride flags.
The question is "Would you be okay if I hung flags?"
What about other forms of displaying support? Are posters just a cheaper flag?
Otherwise all you're doing is saying "this neighbourhood only allows support for these politics".
Are you sure you want to go that way?
Pride is not hate, despite modern recasting of homosexuality in scripture by conservative religions.
There's already hate-speech laws to address actual hate-speech. I'm still asking if it is a good idea for HOAs to dictate what politics may be openly supported and what politics are not welcome in the neighborhood. There's a lot more nuance here than simply using the most extreme possible case and basing all the rules around that case.
> Pride is not hate, despite modern recasting of homosexuality in scripture by conservative religions.
It's funny that you bring up religious positions :-)
I had pretty much the same conversation recently with a very religious person who was appalled to find out that Satanism isn't against the law, being a Satanist isn't against the law and openly worshipping Satan isn't against the law.
They pretty much said what you are saying:
Them: "But they do animal sacrifice!"
Me: "Yeah, that's not legal".
Them: "So Satanism must* be illegal then."*
Me: "No, you can worship whoever you want to; you just cannot torture animals while doing so. The torturing is illegal, the worshiping is not."
So yeah - proclamations that are in fact hate-speech will run afoul of the law. Political support is not. IOW, Hate speech is illegal, political support is not.
The problem you will often run into when carving out your legal exceptions (for example, saying support for Nazi(ism) is hate speech) is that where do you draw the line?
Okay, we agree - support for Nazis is hate speech.
How about support for a political group that is formally sympathetic to Nazis but is otherwise not active in that regard at all? Do you now move the line to include this case?
What if that group is only informally sympathetic to Nazis?
What if the group is neutral towards Nazis but some members are openly supportive of Nazis?
What if the group is simply neutral to Nazis?
What if the group is only neutral and refuses to issue any formal statement on Nazis, even when asked?
What if the group actually is against the Nazi policies, and formally states this position, but also doesn't think they are a large enough or viable enough threat to spend their time on?
What if the group is only loosely associated with a group which is loosely associated with a group that fulfills one of the above criteria?
At each point above your exceptions get muddier and muddier. At some point your rules will become, in practice, a whitelist of what politics are allowed (all the rest are disallowed).
Basing all rules on the most extreme example is the most reliable way for an authority to extend its power.
"But they are Nazis" is the new "Think of the children".
I didn't buy the "Think of the children" argument back when, and I'm not buying it now just because someone slapped some lipstick on it.
My partner and I started sending yearly thank you gifts to the HOA board after our first year here. They manage contractors and landscapers to handle upkeep and repairs on the property, coordinate information among neighbors, contract and negotiate with service providers, and even pass along helpful maintenance tips. (Most recently it was "most people still have their original hot water tanks and several people have had theirs start to fail -- it's a good idea to start replacing yours before it becomes a problem" which, as someone newly moved in, I hadn't thought about but sincerely appreciated.) It's like having an advisor on hand who cares as much as we do because they live there too.
I still side-eye the idea of HOAs, but I'm coming around. People talk about the horror stories but "everything is fine with my HOA" doesn't make for exciting reading.
I hope your approach is working as well for you.
It seems to me, at best, the HOA is a committee of volunteers from the community, serving the community. It is not your boss; it's your peers completing the executive function of the rules and procedures you have collectively agreed.
Buying a gift for a peer's uncompensated labour is standard politeness.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31348078
> As an ethnic Bangladeshi my kids and I have a right of return. I can obtain Bangladeshi citizenship any time I want.
Well then, why aren't you returning. Why continue to impugn on America.
> > Why are you treating America as some kind of science experiment?
> I try not to! My family was invited here by Americans on certain terms, and nobody has ever really complained. But I think they have every right to complain if they wanted.
You were not "invited by Americans"
Your father received a visa from the "American government" and you were a tag along. You are not a special snowflake and when you tell Indians and Bangladeshis to go back to their own country, you should take the first step and go back to your "own country".
The US right wing is strongly anti immigrant and dont welcome you. Liberals don't care about your skin color but will notice your hypocrisy and won't welcome you either. Trust me, 90% of Americans don't want you here - including me.
So yeah, you should take your own advice and go back to your own country Bangladesh, before advising other people on dignity, lol. Clayton bigsby, if you had paid attention, was supposed to be a joke - not a role model.
I guess you don't like your HOA and you're projecting.
My parents live in a real HOA and it's miserable. Lawyers had to get involved recently when they got into a fight with the HOA over cutting down trees on their own property.
I do understand hating your parents' HOA, I don't get lacking the perspective to imagine a world where someone gets along with it. Sending a Christmas card to your neighbors isn't bootlicking if you like them.
I don't live in the US, and at best the concept is very rare here, and I don't like the idea of it, but that sort of thing is exactly what I would like.
Flying a flag (why?!) has much more impact (probably negative) on your neighbours than it does (presumably positive) you.
In the UK flying a union flag (residentially) would be extremely unusual - I'm aware of one, not where I live, and indeed it attracts scoffs and eyerolls - you do see England flags (St George crosses) more, particularly at certain times of year or certain years; that's more a signal that 'I am a football fan' than of patriotism, though.
Maybe that biases me against them in general. But even for things I do 'support' in some sense (I noticed a Ukraine flag covering a garage door recently, for example) I don't want a flag waved at me, and I wouldn't want a neighbour that did that.
My neighborhood growing up had a HOA that just maintained a little shared beach. They had a couple rules for yards, but nothing too onerous (don't have someone stay in a camper in your front yard -- a rule we actually broke, but just for a weekend or so, family visit with not enough rooms in the house). Annoying neighbors will find a way to be annoying, reasonable ones will find a way to be reasonable, the HOA is just a medium for this sort of behavior.
That said, I’m -1 on HOAs. I’ve heard far too many complaints and too few people happy with them to deal with one.
A couple months ago a coyote decided to poop on my front door. Obviously, it was sending a message, but I'm not sure what it was.
Probably didn't like my HackerNews posts!
Certain types of invasive plans are noxious, outright poisonous, encourage hay fever, or just spread so fast that they can end up destroying neighbor's yards as well.
Plants don't obey property lines.
Edit: Unkempt yards can also be breeding ground for pests. From mosquitoes in still water to hoards of rats. Most people don't want to put up with those styles of annoyances that are trivially avoidable if everyone in the area cares just a little.
Rats come from having edible garbage available and fruit trees dropping fruit.
The most annoying things about neighbors are dogs that bark all day, and the leafblowers and lawnmowers.
Do you not encounter leaf blowers and lawn mowers in a HOA community? I would have expected it to be much worse because there would be maintenance crews doing it for every house in the area vs maybe a few houses on a ~20 house block.
If you have a plan for reforming the local judiciary to be so effective that HOAs are no longer necessary I am all ears, but I have not heard any proposals for doing that.
You know weeds are only weeds if you don't want them, right? Everywhere else they're just wild plants.
Fortunately the HoA board didn’t look kindly on it for a variety of reasons/ issues.
He eventually moved. I hope he found a good place with a big garage and fewer neighbors to do that thing.
Same with the rental party house (before the days of air bnb(but same issues)).
Dude operated at all hours with air tools and etc and took up all the guest parking with broken down cars, leaking all sorts of stuff. He was also dumping all sorts of shit in storm drains and dumping his greasy parts and trash in other people’s trash.
The catch was this wasn’t a constant thing (well not until he chose to go full asshole), just often enough to be a pain, then stop, folks hope he was done, and then he would start up again.
Even had his customers wandering around looking for where he stashed their car and asking to park in front of people’s garage… other times not asking. A few would empty their car trash on the lawns and streets.
Edit I was curious and I googled him, someone with the same name got into tax trouble a few years later. I would not be surprised.
Put a car repair sign up then yeah. Be more “quiet” about it and claim and you are fixing a friends car and it becomes less easy / an ordeal for the city or county to act. Unfortunately the car repair guy was not honest and that was an issue.
Party house was a bit of an ordeal.
HOAs tend to fill a lot of zoning gaps.
However the concept of nuisance has existed in the common law for centuries and insofar as someone’s behavior might be a nuisance it has always been actionable.
Yeah, it's totally ridiculous that I would want to live in a neighborhood of like-minded people who would want to maintain and improve their most valuable possession.
I should be totally happy putting time, money and effort into the upkeep and improvement of my plot of land while my nextdoor neighbor adds to their collection of front-yard beer cans and beater cars.
HOA or not
Good folks or not
The balance between the two is nuanced and it sounds like you landed on a different side of the debate to me. I’m sorry to hear that, and I respect that, as a result, you have a different view of HOAs to me. Peace.
* One house near the entrance was bordering on being uninhabitable; rotting roof with tarps covering the holes, rotting siding, gutters hanging half on. Always shocked the city didn't declare it a public hazard.
* The people behind me would drag their TV and sofa out in the front yard every time the state's football team was playing, be noisy and would leave discarded beer cans all over the lawn.
* The people in front of me left a disabled car in the road for more than a year. Suspension shot, tires flat, windows busted out and left in the rain. After a year I finally called the city, who sent a code enforcement officer out. The person's response was to push the car out of the road ... into the front yard.
* My next door neighbor mowed his yard about 4 times a year. I even offered on several occasions to mow it for him, just because I didn't want to look at it.
My current neighborhood has none of the above problems. We have a low-BS HOA that basically exists just to be sure the common areas are maintained and that the homes are maintained to a minimum standard as specified in the rules. Otherwise, they stay out of your life. I was even on the board for a few years; we issued a grand total of about 8 warnings and zero fines in that entire time - and IIRC all of the warnings related to parking. Often, just having rules and an enforcement mechanism is enough to ensure minimum standards are maintained by the vast majority of people.
Also, an underrated HOA benefit we discovered is that they are great for collectively getting the city's attention when we need something fixed. We've had problems with potholes forming in some of the roads and, for a long time, the issue was ignored by the city despite numerous homeowners complaining. Until we got our HOA's legal representative to draft a letter to the city. The next week all the potholes were fixed.
I have never had a problem with the HOA preventing me from doing something, even if it was technically against the rules. Last year our HVAC went out and it was going to be a week before we could get it replaced. The HVAC contractor loaned us some window units to keep the house cool until everything could be ordered. Technically window units are against the bylaws. I didn't even run it by the HOA, just put a sign in the window above it saying it was temporary until next week. No issues at all.
The key with HOAs is to be involved! Think of them as mini-municipalities, like a town within a town. And, as an owner, you are entitled to attend the meetings, introduce measurs to change the bylaws, vote on business and hold office in them. This is why "Karens" tend to get and retain power - because no one opposes them. In our HOA, about 60% of the houses never voted and most rarely attended meetings. Sometimes it was hard to even get quorum, and elections were often uncontested. The way I ended up as secretary was because literally no one ran for it. Don't like the way your HOA is being run? Change it. There's a pretty fair chance you'll succeed.
I know the Internet largely hates HOAs, and it is true that there are a fair number of really bad overbearing HOAs out there. A friend of mine once got cited for having grass a half-inch too high. But I think people focus too much on the extreme; there are actually a lot of fairly nice, low BS HOAs out there as well.
Negative liberties ("freedom from") are limited and relatively easy to regulate. If you ban people from killing each other and stealing their property, almost everyone agrees it's not a huge burden. While these liberties sometimes come into conflict, such situations tend to be rare.
In practice, people care more about positive liberties ("freedom to"). In particular, they want the freedom to live a good life. Unfortunately people have different ideas of a good life, and those ideas usually require other people living their lives in a certain way and providing various services. If you try regulating this, you start quickly making choices who is allowed to live a good life.
Because laws are insufficient for a good life, people make voluntary agreements to ensure it. If certain kinds of agreements (such as HOAs) become popular, they can effectively prevent some minorities from living their idea of a good life. But the agreements are only a symptom, not the cause. The real cause are other people. Without HOAs, the same people would try getting actual governments regulate the same behavior. And failing to do so, they would often feel that the society prevents them from living a good life.
Open town meetings, which are pure democracies, have been working pretty well in New England for quite a long time now, with the biggest issues in modern times being low attendence and committee overstep.
Each state generally sets its own standards for HOAs. There are legal frameworks, insurance laws, etc. which are fairly similar across the country.
>If they have equivalent legal status to a government or a police department, are there constitutional rights which they cannot violate?
They do not have equivalent legal status to a government or police department. HOAs are limited in their powers by federal, state, and municipal guidelines. Every state has its own laws in this regard. There are also federal laws prohibiting certain bylaws, e.g. the Fair Housing Act prevent HOAs from enforcing racially discriminatory covenants.
>Can two competing HOAs exist in the same geographic area, and home owners are free to setup additional ones if the incumbents don’t meet their needs?
I don't know exactly what you're referring to, but generally speaking, nobody is forced to buy in an HOA neighborhood unless they want to, there are generally a multitude of HOA-managed (and non-HOA-managed) neighborhoods to choose from within a single town/school district/etc. The only exception might be things like specific lakes/small island communities, where the entire geographic feature is managed under a single association (e.g. for lakes they generally pay for the maintenance of the lake itself, stocking fish, removing trash, etc.)
That's the statement, but it's never worked that way. Of course minority groups have been steamrolled
An understandable sentiment. How much are you willing to pay for it? If you have a $1.5 million mortgage and that loon shows up next door and paints their house purple, your house might lose $300,000 in value. Same with the other neighbors, who also pay mortgages but aren’t as compassionate as you.
What happens when your spouse gets a sudden offer to relocate and you can’t make your money back on the house?
This kind of system doesn’t let people do something as simple as postpone repairs until they can get favorable financing, and ends up a tax on the poor or different to protect an asset for the majority landowners in my view.
HOAs started as a way to handle common infrastructure, like drainage. They allow a few homes to share drainage, without sticking all of the costs of maintenance to the homeowner who happens to have the pipe on their property.
In my case, my HOA carries property insurance for undeveloped land, maintains a grassy cul-de-sac, and maintains a fire road. (I personally spend about 2 hours a year trimming growth on the fire road because so many people walk on it.)
As far as saying that an HOA is to keep the loons out, we did have a hoarder live around the corner from the HOA. The people who lived across the street couldn't sell their home. (They had kids and wanted a larger house.) Could the HOA really do anything about the hoarder? I know the people who lived around the hoarder all put a lot of pressure on hee, the town condemned the house, and eventually it burnt to the ground. At least my with HOA, there isn't any good way to "evict" a loon who makes a mess.
In the case of the hoarder, she owned her home outright. The town put liens on the property to cover the cost of cleaning up the lot. But, she still owns the lot and hasn't put it on the market. (She also places things on it, too.)
Dramatic license aside, I'd hate to live anywhere where property value (or residents' senses of well-being) was so fragile that it couldn't handle a purple house.
Tangentially, Victorian houses were frequently very colorful. The lack of color photography leads people to think of them as drab, depressing shades of gray. But nothing could be further from the truth. HOAs that restrict colors to a boring beige are doing a disservice to their neighborhoods.
How is that someone else's problem? Ironically, in some areas around me properties without HOAs are priced and selling a couple of 100ks higher than ones within HOAs.
That means those in the minority. The crazy guy growing gourds instead of a lawn. The loon with the purple house. The impoverished who can’t paint their house every other year. Those kinds of folk need representation the most.