Banned is maybe too far, but why should we as a country allow people to have petty power over meaningless things their neighbors do? Could we ban HOAs from being included in house sales, and every time it’s sold the new owners have to opt in?
For the most part, I’m wondering about this in the context of single family homes since for homes like condos, you could make the case that HOAs are useful for shared things like roofs and whatnot. Maybe limit mandatory HOA involvement to things like what’s truly necessary and shared and not how tall your grass is?
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I think they have the potential to be good if they were way more democratic, but they’re never run that way.
When I lived in a townhouse that was part of an HOA that had some nice things going for it. There were a couple tennis courts, a swimming pool, a communal garden, a club house thing you can pay to use, they regularly mowed the front yards and trimmed the front hedges and they would periodically repaint the fronts of the houses. However, while I was living there, the head of the HOA was a douche that kept misusing funds.
The house my sister lives in has an HOA that does literally nothing except bitch residents to upkeep their lawn.
it’s baffling that HOAs don’t have strict regulation on how they’re run, how it should work is like any other association: elections every X years, any member can run for positions, and operations have to be documented and transparent.
Banned? No. Regulated to rein in power? Yes.
My HOA has mellowed a bit over the years. Nowadays, 27 years after the subdivision was built, they negotiate for decent landscaping service, and make sure people don’t leave trash and junk cars in their yard, that’s about it. I’m happy enough with how they operate. I don’t own a lawn mower or a rake.
Some HOAs are run like mini fiefdoms, though.
I feel like you really only hear about the terrible HOAs. No one is posting videos online of how pleased they are with their HOA. I would bet that most people are somewhat satisfied with their HOA.
Yes.
HOAs, at base, are there because the municipality the development is being built in doesn’t want to pay for anything. Not paying is part of the deal worked with developers that now has inertial momentum to it such that it’s baked into just about every new development.
Houses, people, and taxes are added to the municipality with as little responsibility as possible. It’s a great deal, for them.
The grift is this. Normally, sidewalks, parks, and snow management fall to the city, town, or village governments. With HOAs, the town government gets to say it’s not our responsibility, let that neighborhood manage itself. We don’t want to pay for another park or police the snow, so build your houses within our borders, but leave us out of it. The town grows, has enough people to attract new business, but adds less new costs and responsibility than they otherwise would.
So now the people are managing themselves and the only enforcement on it is the risk of losing your house (having it sold out from under you to pay random fees), depending on how Karen the people in the HOA happen to be.
Example. You’re alone in the world. You get sick and end up in an extended hospital stay, let’s say 62 days. It’s a GI problem and you had an ileus. Your lawn isn’t mowed for the duration. You finally get a taxi ride home and find you’ve been fined $1000 a day for 6 weeks because your lawn isn’t mowed. Alongside the incredible medical bills, you can’t pay this. A lien is placed on your home.
That this scenario is even possible with HOAs is very wrong.
An HOA makes perfect sense in a condo scenario because people share walls and the HOA deals with building management. But with single family homes, absolutely not. At that point, it’s no longer a single family home but a condo, just not one that shares walls.
Waiting for the inevitable showdown over having hens in your backyard. Instant solution to the egg problem.
Anyone who’s in favor of HOA’s should watch Hot Fuzz.
Or anyone who isn’t. It’s a good movie.
Excellent point.
Should HOAs be banned?
That’s an easy one:
YES!!!
Yes, definitely. They’re just bullies trying to rebrand themselves.
HOAs can be really good things but have all the same problems as regular democracies, mainly voter apathy. If the members of the HOA don’t keep informed about the issues in the neighborhood, don’t attend meetings, and don’t vote, then you very quickly end up with a few assholes gaining power and doing whatever they want.
Most of the suggestions I see in the comments would also render HOAs powerless and essentially pointless.
I think we should just aggressively limit their authority. Essentially saying you can’t make a contract that exceeds our defined limits. If you do, the entire contract is void, not just the parts that cross the line. Let’s put them on eggshells so they don’t lose what little authority we allow them to have. I live in a suburb with no HOA. Really missing city community though.
A thousand times YES
I won’t live in an HOA. But that being said, I don’t really have an issue with other people wanting to live in an HOA.
However, I do not like the fact that the HOA has permanent authority over any property you purchase inside of its zone.
I feel like there should be a specific and reasonable amount of money that you can pay in order to exempt your home from the HOA permanently, a method to break the HOA contract at least for as long as you live there.
Like maybe the HOA could reinstate the contract once you move out, and the next owner would have to break it again, but at least while you’re living there, you should be able to be exempt from them if you so choose.
And also, I feel like there should be a governmental body that HOAs are responsible to that can handle mediation and give you a higher authority to appeal to.
I’ve heard horror stories of HLA presidents coming into people’s houses to make sure that they’ve emptied their trash appropriately and other weird stuff like that should have a method of redress that does not necessarily involve a protracted legal battle.
Some sort of HOA governance that is nationwide with state and county chapters would massively lower my resistance to HOA’s and give them a little bit more legitimacy in my opinion.
They should have to clearly establish their bylaws and submit them to the governance body and have them approved, and then they should only be allowed to exercise the bylaws that have been agreed upon by the community.
No more weird old people sitting out in your front yard, measuring your grass with a ruler and stuff like that.
I’ve heard horror stories of HLA presidents coming into people’s houses
The primary remedy for
coming into people’s houseshome invasion is called “Castle Doctrine”, which falls well outside the HOA’s jurisdiction.That is highly location specific, and even then it’s gonna be a tough row to hoe unless you happen to possess a burner gun and can sprinkle a little crack on his corpse.
Absolutely.
A lot of things an hoa covers is already covered by the township here so I’m unsure why you’d join one. But they’re also not as common here because of that. I know some neighbors tried ages ago and something like 80 percent told those prone to screw off.
My experience- the difference is enforcement. In the US anyway, the town isn’t going to tow cars parked illegally in the neighborhood or cite someone for their junked up yard.
Town here absolutely cites for lawn maint. We’ve let it get too long and they’ve sent a warning. They also warn if a car is parked too long on the street. They don’t care if a car is parked in a driveway and never moved though, that’s fine.
I think a small community being able to have say in who moves in, asking contract term violators to leave in exceptional cases, while still being liable for discriminatory actions, can be a good thing. However, being able to fine members and repossess their property? That should be 100,000,000% illegal.
Never understood how they gained traction in the US you pride yourselves on freedom and land protection but then allow some curtain twitcher to dictate how you use the land you paid for.
HOAs were created to keep the
blackspeople who couldn’t meet the community standards out.City governments love HOAs, because they can push the responsibility for utilities and public services onto the hoa. The city supplies water to the hoa with a single bill, the hoa bills the residents. Privatized trash and recycling pickup. Maybe even an electrical substation. Hoa builds and maintains the roads and parks.
The city gets the benefits of property tax payments without the costs of infrastructure.
Never understood how they gained traction in the US
They gained traction specifically in 3 types of places:
- Condo buildings with shared common elements where everyone in the building should share the financial burden of maintaining the roof, elevators, common areas.
- Planned communities where farmland or other underdeveloped land was converted into a lot of houses, in a city or state unwilling to build or maintain the roads, power lines, sewers, and other infrastructure that makes it livable.
- Communities with exclusive amenities, like private beach/lake access, private parks/playgrounds, golf courses, gate guards who keep out the uninvited non-residents, etc. There’s a strain of historical practice here of basically keeping our non-white people from gated communities.
None of these 3 types of places need an HOA to accomplish this.
For that condo category, New York pioneered the use of co-ops that effectively accomplish the same thing. It’s just that the co-op legal structure is a little bit more unwieldy and inefficient than a modern condominium owners association.
For the “the city won’t pay for our infrastructure” category, it is always possible to persuade the city to actually take over those responsibilities, but it would probably slow down development, and put too much in favor of the incumbent residents over potential future residents. NIMBYism is bad enough, we don’t need to take away a legal tool for overcoming it.
For the “let’s keep out the poors” type of community, those are exactly the types of communities that actually love their HOAs. The HOAs are, in a sense, harmful to the people not within the community but upheld by the people who are in that community. Abolishing that is probably fine, although it would do nothing about the types of complaints that most people have about their HOAs.
pretty sure HOAs exist everywhere, you kinda need an entity to coordinate local amenities like water pipes and roads. The problem in the US is just that HOAs can make up any arbitrary requirements they want and no one seems to give a shit.
in sane countries HOA-equivalents have pretty strict limits on what they can and cannot do, generally their ability to outright ban things is limited to extreme cases like someone painting their house magenta and lime stripes or having 8 cows in their backyard.
Here, this is 100% the councils job. There are no HOAs here with curtain twitchers that tell you that you have to keep your grass this green.
