It's the same reason you have a high density of sports fans when you stand near the exit of a stadium after a game. The people (mosquitos) are streaming out of the stadium (standing water) so fast that there's a local high-density zone.
I literally live in a swamp, so I reasoned "how much could one tire hurt?" Oh boy was I wrong! Eliminating that one single mosquito breeding site near the house made an enormous difference on the local mosquito density.
One thing that an HOA might actually be good for - I would love to see what happens if our entire neighborhood did this.
I've gotten nothing but benefits from living in neighborhoods with HOAs. Basic stuff like funding for landscapers to keep up the shared grassy areas along the streets, to plowing the access roads in winter time. But the main benefit has always been that it provides a legal mechanism to force everyone to maintain their yards and property. No need to drop passive-aggressive notes in a mailbox about people parking their cars on their lawns.
10/10 highly recommend
edit: apparently you guys don't like HOAs haha. Well I love them. Keeps the neighborhood from looking like a dump.
Indeed, God forbid people would like to park their cars on their property!
(And I am not a fan of HOAs personally, so I do in fact live elsewhere, but my neighbors house is also an eyesore)
I'm happy somebody has. Except for you, I have never heard anything but nightmares from the people I know who suffer under HOAs.
My building has an HOA, and the worst I can say about is that's it's pretty boring.
I don't believe that it is a constitutional right to live in a neighborhood that will permit you to operate a chop-shop in your overgrown yard.
> They should leave if it is really that stressful and onerous.
Easier said than done. A few people I know found that it was difficult to sell their home because the existence of an HOA scares off buyers.
It can be a concern. But I actually found the opposite to be true in my case. During my house-hunt I was far more turned-off by the appearance and disrepair of several houses and properties near the places that I was looking at. So it can definitely be a consideration from both perspectives.
I didn't write those standards, so why would I agree with them? Should I be homeless now?
You like paying extra for stuff that is normally included in your property taxes? I'm dumbfounded.
People are grudgingly willing to pay to put in a brand new sewer once. No one wants to fund maintenance or pay millions to replace it in 60 years and cities are literally going bankrupt because the population density isn't enough to maintain the infrastructure.
Cities realized this decades ago which is why many are reluctant to add more unsustainable public roads/sewers/etc. and insist new development owns and funds them privately....which tends to require a HOA to fund maintenance from communal contributions/reserves.
https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2024/01/benjamin-h...
They were so lucky this happened in the summer. In the winter, the hoses would have frozen solid.
These folks were very sad the city’s water utility couldn’t do the work. They fix water main breaks within a couple days, usually the same day.
Wildflowers? Generally good.
Tall grass that allows rats to thrive and spread into adjacent yards? Bad.
Most people don't want to have to go to court to battle pedantic neighbors who confuse the two.
Unless you're a decamillionaire (or a cop), the cops in America don't care about you.
People get fines all the time for failing to cut their grass. Some cities just love the income. They can add up to several thousand (https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/in-court-of-appeals/168774...).
FWIW, I'd love to know how they're monitoring everyone's pools.
This I will take a nuanced position on. If your kids are playing in the backyard, and it doesn't impact me at all ... perfect please enjoy life.
But I can often hear people outside, especially children screeching and yelling, over my television with all of my doors and windows shut and the air conditioner on full blast.
In those scenarios, the laughter IS adversely affecting the ability of other people to enjoy their own property.
I do feel for people who move in next to schools or public pools/playgrounds but considering how much time kids spend indoors these days I'd guess that people today have it much easier than people did in the past.
I'd much rather have to occasionally be reminded that kids are somewhere playing and having a good time than deal with a lot of the other noises that can disrupt a person's day like loud cars/motorcycles, drunk people fighting, landscapers or sirens.
But it does often go on for hours at a time. And I'm not talking about a school zone or a park. As another person pointed out, if you move next to a school or a park you know what you are signing up for. But in a quiet suburb, if the issue is new neighbours that weren't there when you bought the house.. or who just started a family recently. That's something that's being imposed on you that didn't exist before.
And we don't tolerate this when it is barking dogs or loud music. Most cities have noise ordinances and I even read mine because of problematic neighbours. Not because of children, mind you. The man was an alcoholic who would get drunk early in the morning and go into his backyard where he would have loud screaming matches with hallucinations which terrified our small daughters so I wanted to know if the noise ordinance covered it. Answer is, technically yes but the police don't enforce yelling and hollering despite it being spelled out in the letter of the bylaw.
Why is it acceptable to expect people to keep their pets quiet, their music at a reasonable volume, their power tools and machinery at bay and to not have extremely loud parties where people are screaming and blasting noise ... but the second it's loud children we're talking about oh no ... you just need to learn to "live in a community"?
You can make the same argument about anything. Living with neighbours who have tall grass is part of "living in a community." Some people don't care about well trimmed lawns. Motorcycles with extremely loud engines, just part of "living in a community." Barking dogs. Honking car horns etc. etc. etc. We have noise ordinances for a reason; noise directly affects other people.
And I say all of this as a parent who raised two daughters to adulthood. I don't understand this weird standard. We (their mother and I) always expected our children to be respectful of our neighbours.
Key word there. HOA rules exist for the sole purpose of defining a common, enforceable, agreed upon definition of "within reason".
HOA is another layer of local government, I think it's great that moving is a chance to choose the government (or anarchy) that you prefer.
I'll often upvote comments with opinions that are counter to my own, especially if they are presented in a clear, coherent, or novel way that causes me to think a bit.
It helps prevent brigading and ensures that users have a moment to adjust to the community and its general expectations before being able to participate in community moderation.
If a user cannot reach that low bar after a while, they probably aren't a particularly active or positive member of the community.
I lived in a four unit condo buildings before and the HOA was fine, because all residents were on the board.
I now live in a more typical suburban HOA development and the HOA is very unobtrusive and only comes down on the actual problem properties (overgrown, uninhabited houses) and doesn’t do much other than handle common area upkeep. Dues are only $150 per year.
I've seen both - folks who are good stewards of the community's money and add to its energy, and folks who can't manage money and exhaust the community's energy on trivialities.
This is so good, it can be used as a textbook definition of a strawman.
The single highest priority in life. Completely reasonable to give up everything else to get that.
So frickin noisy!!!!
I can't understand the people that think the artificial look holds any beauty whatsoever.
That being said, a yard of native plants can still do more good than a yard of grass. Grasses are cool and come in many other forms though, and can be extremely resistant to drought. Native grasses often have much deeper roots, or even taproots sometimes.
When cutting i use a scythe and sheers to minimise the amount of caterpillars etc. getting killed.
For my protected potted/bedded plants i use a variety of natural methods to keep aphids and snails at bay, and they work brilliantly. Bait plants (some weeds fill this purpose too), Neem oil treatment, nematodes, and more.
The amount of life, happy bugs, birds, bees, etc. i find thriving, and the variety, fills me with far more joy than the equivalent of giving my garden a bowl cut.
This is not to say that traps don’t make your house more livable. Once, I lived in a house connected to a forest in Brazil—no real neighbors, and a shitload of mosquitoes.
I did buy some fancy traps with UV lights and fans, and oh boy, I killed a shitload of them. Not to say I fully solved the mosquito problem, but I significantly reduced the bites. My wife is allergic to them, so she’s a great sensor—if there’s even one mosquito in the room, she knows.