Not all townhomes have HOAs but it is absolutely insane to say a townhouse that does, where land is owned by the HOA, would have land redistributed to various individuals by legislature fiat.

It's even a crazy proposal for detached single family homes. Will a government official show up and decide what land is owned by each owner and record by government decree what the new property lines are?

It’s not insane. Many apartment buildings in Europe work exactly like that.

A HOA for a highrise is a very different beast than a HOA for a suburban neighborhood.

That is, I agree - but the suburban SFH HOAs are shitshows.

Probably true in general but, to the degree there are shared areas, someone needs to assess and allocate costs which isn't always obvious. Not really suburban but I have a relative who lives on a private road with other houses and (primarily) plowing and road maintenance needs to be dealt with.

I agree that "your lawn isn't neat enough" HOAs are generally a plague at least up to a certain point.

"someone needs to assess and allocate costs which isn't always obvious"

In most places, this is called the city government.

Ultimately this feels like the "low tax area" myth is getting exposed. You still need to pay for all the same things your taxes would otherwise pay for, but for some reason it's different as long as it's not called a tax.

Ok, how about "Other people in our city refuse to raise taxes enough to maintain things to our standards, let's make a coalition of neighbors that all donate monthly to pay for additional upkeep for our neighborhood instead of each negotiating individually with different landscapers etc?"

It's popular to shit on HOAs, largely because Americans (of which I am one) are allergic to paying taxes and being told what to do, but if you call it a "Neighborhood co-op" all of a sudden it's not clear why it shouldn't be allowed. Whatever happened to freedom of association?

So shared facilities for a group of private individuals have to approved by and ongoing maintenance provided by the a government (as long as they feel like it) or they're not allowed to exist?

In the absence of an HOA, what you're describing as "shared facilities for a group of private individuals" would be commonly considered a private club. The difference is most private clubs that are not HOA's are not tied to owning specific property. For example, my sister belongs to a private pool club in their neighborhood. They pay membership dues to the club which provides operating revenue for the pool facilities, but it's not tied to any property ownership.

Some things like beaches/pools/golf clubs/etc. can generally be policed with tokens/keys and so forth. That is not generally true of all shared facilities in a neighborhood. And I'm not at all sure the local government should be responsible for anything that residents should care to share on a communal basis. Want a playground or dog park? That's the government's responsibility? Maybe. But now that's up to a broader section of voters.

>> Want a playground or dog park? That's the government's responsibility? Maybe

Yes, this is how it works pretty much everywhere else. Even my rural hometown with <1500 people has an elected park board that is responsible for parks, the swimming pool, tennis courts, summer rec programs, etc.

And the 7K person town where I live in, there are some conservation lands (no idea how maintenance splits up between town and conservation/commission and other volunteers), along with other conservation organizations. But dog parks, playgrounds, etc. just don't exist.

In my suburban neighborhood the HOA mostly takes care of common areas. Things like community swimming pools, dog parks, tennis courts, sports fields, landscaping, etc... They also organize fun runs and movie nights and other seasonal events.

There's occasional drama, but mostly things just run fairly smoothly.

I think he's only planning to try to ban them for single family homes:

>Porras acknowledged condominiums, with shared roofs and common areas, present a more complicated case. But he said single-family HOAs in particular have lost their purpose.

Are HOA officials elected by the residents? I live in a country where building management is compulsory and their meetings are subject to law and even can be witnessed by state officials. I know it sounds a bit fascist and I can't say it isn't, but that's how buildings are taken care of. If you don't like the management you can change it in the next meeting if you gather enough support.

By the way land is usually collectively owned by the apartment owners too.

Agreed. The logical answer here is to limit the things HOAs can and cannot do rather than ban them outright. But that doesn't make for a good headline.

Logical answer is to get reasonable people to vote when HOA is having vote.

Don’t let Karen and her buddies run the meetings.

People nagging about HOA seems like are not owners or not knowing how HOA works o r supposed to work.

Same problem you have with any kind of local government: time. Busybodies with too much time on their hands will dominate. People who actually have lives to lead don't have the time to compete.

Or how about

if you don't want to join an HOA....

you don't join an HOA?

If the house is covered by an HOA, it's typically not optional.

And in some areas it's very difficult to find housing not part of an HOA. I think somebody mentioned elsewhere in this thread that all new housing in Phoenix requires an HOA.

Except it's currently not optional because it comes with the house and it's with almost every house.

Those things are usually rentals here in Florida. HOAs are a real problem here due to the legal protection they have. They can literally take your house because your mailbox is blue.

There are over 1 million condos in Florida, and many of them are in buildings that need repairs the HOA can’t pay for. Remember the Surfside collapse?

Sure, it’d be interesting to see how people work out the concept of shared benefits that need being paid for from scratch, but I know and like some people in Florida so I’d still be sorry to see them do it.

Maybe just take away that protection? Where I live nobody is losing a house for having the wrong color mailbox, but there are certain historical protected areas where beauty is an externality — you can’t demolish a historic house in the middle of the beautiful downtown

HOA's are ultimately run by the homeowners themselves. It's right there in the name. If the HOA is such a problem, elect different people to the board and change the rules.

You can't because they don't have elections... It's up to the documents to determine when elections can be held and often these HOA's in FL make it so that once elected, they don't hold elections again for 25 years.

25 years is wild. No wonder HOA's have a reputation for boards with power trips.

Just long enough to milk the other homeowners for their own personal mortgages - paying off their own home, earn a cool $100k, and watch their property values go up.

> They can literally take your house because your mailbox is blue.

This is hard to believe. Have you got a source?

It's a slightly longer process but it basically comes down to:

1. HOA has stupid rule about mailbox 2. Homeowner is found to be in violation of the rule and fined. 3. Homeowner does not pay fines 4. HOA places lien on house and is eventually able to force a sale to pay the fine.

It has to escalate to get there, but it is possible.

Also I can state from personal experience with two different HOAs on two different sides of the state of Ohio that they are exactly that petty.

The first one harassed my grandparents and threatened them with fines over having the "wrong" mailbox despite my grandparents literally being the first owners of the home and the mailbox they had having been put up by the developer who built the neighborhood and still controlled the HOA at the time (if you're not familiar with HOAs, in new developments it's common for the developer to have a controlling vote until a certain percentage of lots have been sold which allows them to exercise tighter control over the way the neighborhood appears to potential buyers). If I recall correctly the "right" mailbox was also one that was built by some random local shop that was connected to the developers so you couldn't just go buy one retail.

The second one was a decade later when I was renting a room from a friend, he had one of the common "Step 2" brand plastic mailboxes which had been installed for years and was also common around the neighborhood. Apparently it wasn't the right color, it was tan and only the black and green variants were allowed.

I don't mind the concept of a HOA for maintaining shared areas and such. The one in the second case actually was responsible for all yard maintenance in the neighborhood which was nice (except that their vendor loved to show up at 6 AM on a Saturday to wake us all up with the sound of two-stroke engines) and that was fine. The problem is that they have too much power over individuals' property. Outside of special cases like historical properties there is no excuse for HOAs to care about what color I paint my front door, what brand of mailbox I use, what type of shingles I install, if I have a satellite dish, etc. If it does not objectively affect others who are not on my property the HOA should keep its nose out of it.

>Last week, I-Team Investigator Adam Walser reported how a Riverview homeowner ended up in jail and her neighbor faced foreclosure over what started out as HOA violations.

https://www.tampabay28.com/news/local-news/i-team-investigat...

One of the remedies HOAs typically possess is the ability to put a lien on your property. The end game to one of these liens can be complicated, but losing your house is among them.

There’s like 5 intermediate steps you’re just sort of glossing over there. This is like saying the inevitable result of a paper cut is losing the entire arm to gangrene.

HOA will put a lien on your house, you won't even know it, eventually when you don't pay it, they'll take your house through the courts. Happened to a friend of mine and almost happened to me until I sold my house and got out of the HOA. I'll never buy in an HOA again.

The irony here is I've never found my neighborhood HOA problematic. They plan the block party and take care of the landscaping of the neighborhood signage.

My condo HOA experience was so bad I would never again recommend someone buy a condo. They refused to look at a structural issue until I got a lawyer and then refused to let the residents see the engineering report for the building we legally own. (Note: If you ever experience this, get out. There is no louder signal of an unsafe structure than "the engineering report is privileged".)

Is that legal?!

I would have thought your lawyer would be salivating at the prospect of raking your HOA over the coals. Or at least of mailing a nastygram with all sorts of colorful threats. I suppose not?

It is most decidedly not legal, but they had the largest condo law firm in the Chicago area on retainer who made the statement they wouldn't provide it. (Literally the lawyer I was recommended to use until it turned out... it was theirs.) Their lawyer's own website basically said the HOA can't hide stuff like this from owners.

Which is to say if I had had the time and money for a protracted court drama, I do think a judge would have literally laughed them out of the courthouse, but everyone involved knew the case wouldn't get that far.

One really fun fact I learned from this is lawyers mostly just email each other polite requests with the vague threat of "this could escalate to court" as the grease that moves things. And if one side doesn't think it'll end up in court they just... say no!

There's an agency problem here.

The building could have been perfectly safe but the lawyer wants to "win" so says "fuck you we won't provide the report". The lawyer has no stake in the health of the project, if they are a litigator they just care about "winning".

Alternatively the building could have been about to collapse but the lawyer wants to "win" and doesn't live there so says "fuck you we won't provide it." Same result, different safety profile.

So in Illinois merely refusing to provide the report is illegal on its own. So it's unlikely a condo lawyer did this "just to win" for a safe building. Specifically if you take the HOA to court for not revealing a document they legally have to, and the judge sides with the unit owner, the HOA has to pay the owner's attorney fees.

The issue is HOAs and management companies have warchests for stuff like this, individual owners of partial-buildings generally do not have a lot of money to fund lawyers until the judgment happens.

Maybe you could explain why you think they refused to turn the engineer report over?

Obviously I don't know the details but their lawyer being an adversarial asshole sounds most likely to me.

What other explanation is there? Like... was the board planning to sell their units before people realized the building had problems?

So the HOA was indeed quite concerned with their property values and that a higher assessment impacts sale value. It's also important to note that this HOA covered multiple buildings, and none of the board lived in mine: So their unit was not at risk from the structure, but their assessment price was.

The buildings were approaching an age where more significant/costly maintenance is necessary and I don't think they wanted to have to do those things.

HOAs get lots of hate because many are terrible, but like all things there are good ones and bad ones.

My current suburban HOA is fine. My only gripe with them is when I had to get some outdoor changes approved, I never heard back from them so I had to wait until it was approved by default after no response for X days. Dues are $160/year so I'm not really complaining. Other than that, they maintain the common areas and the only times I've seen them flex their muscles were to pressure the bank to maintain and sell foreclosed homes in the neighborhood to get somebody living there again.

I also used to own a condo in a four unit building and the HOA board was just everyone who lived in the building.

I can imagine some scenarios where portions of the report may be privileged - if there are photos of people's apartments or unique information. But the summary with a list of deficiencies and recommended/required actions should certainly be provided!

This.

And then when more of their towers collapse these same politicians will look around with surprised Pikachu faces.

Florida is just kicking the can, as they always do. Their real estate market is rapidly cooling due to ever increasing carrying costs (insurance), and they are doing whatever they can to enable existing real estate owners to sell and to attract new people to the state.

https://www.tampabay.com/news/environment/2025/05/06/florida...

https://nypost.com/2025/06/26/real-estate/south-floridas-res...

https://www.newsweek.com/florida-condo-prices-plunge-2099157

https://www.newsweek.com/map-shows-cities-where-house-prices...

You can't run into a problem if you are the problem.

There is no problem being addressed here. You are salivating over a conversation on "peanut butter bad, lets regulate it!"

I genuinely have no idea what you are trying to say here.

Sure, but this can be very simple.

Allow HOAs, with a strictly specific purpose of budgeting for common area expenses. Whether it is for structure maintenance (in apartment buildings and townhouses with shared structural elements) or common sports areas, elevators, pools, etc. A HOA can be allowed to collect reasonable costs to fund those projected maintenance expenses. That makes sense.

Then, outlaw everything else. A HOA must not be able to have any say in anything that is not a common area maintenance cost.

This would be very easy to codify into law and solves all the problems with HOAs.