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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Freedom of association means the freedom to be a member of an HOA. But requiring HOA membership to purchase a specific property should be banned. Freedom of association means that you should have the freedom to not be a part of the HOA.
There’s nuance to it. I live in a townhouse and if some fucker in my row tanked my property value because they didn’t redo their roof on a reasonable schedule, I’d be pissed. There are limited situations where having a collective solution on stuff like this is necessary, but the vast majority of shit the HOA does is just red tape annoyance and platforming the neighborhood Karens.
Maybe the HOA should pay for his roof then? You know, with HOA fees.
I get there is nuance, but times suck, people can afford less, and HOAs have become a way for people with tiny dicks to harm others. If we used them as a a way to identify and address issues in a neighborhood in constructive ways, it wouldn’t be an issue. They are about power.
Roof replacement is one of the things our HOA does, that’s why I used that as an example.
This might be unpopular, but I don’t think HOAs should be banned. WAIT! I, personally, think HOAs suck and I’d never agree to buying a home in an HOA. That said, not everyone feels that way. Some folks genuinely like living in HOAs, and for all the horror stories, there’s at least a few where the HOA simply exists to provide amenities to the neighborhood i.e. playgrounds, walking trails, pools, etc. People should be free to choose the kind of housing arrangements they want, and if they want an HOA, then that’s their prerogative.
The real problem with HOAs is that we’re trying to solve the housing crisis exclusively with single family residential zoning, which means that HOAs are vastly overrepresented in terms of what’s available on the housing market. It’s fundamentally a zoning issue. People who don’t want an HOA or can’t spend $2,000/mo in mortgage plus another $300/mo or whatever in HOA fees should have options, but they kinda don’t. Ask your city why their zoning sucks.
Absolutely ban them as they currently exist. If you must band together for whatever reason, do so en masse not hand the reins to a small handful of people who inevitably go power mad
Fun fact: this also works this way for whole societies!
No. Should they be as pervasive as they are with unbounded layers of beurocracy? Also no.
I think people might not understand how many assholes live around you that the HOA keeps in check. I didn’t until I joined the board. Sometimes you have to litigate, but sometimes you also just need a dedicated (and elected) group of people to go knock on the door and talk out a problem. It’s nicer to have this somewhat regulated (bank accounts, insurance, taxes, and yes even covenants for procedure if they are kept up to date) than to just knock on some doors and wing it.
If your HOA has an old lady measuring your grass and some dude using color swatches to check the paint on your mailbox, move. If your neighborhood has lights, clear sidewalks, fences and landscaping that are cared for, and no dog crap to step in, keep paying into it. They are doing a good job.
Disclaimer: I’m very anti-HOA. But I do think the case could be made for them in high-density housing like apartment buildings and condos.
Single family homes, though, no. When I was house shopping, I removed any that were part of an HOA from my search. I’m not saying there are no “good” HOAs, but I’ve heard too many horror stories, and good HOAs can become bad HOAs over time, and your only recourse is to move. No thanks.
I don’t think they should be banned, per se, they definitely need reigned in as far as what they can mandate and an opt-out mechanism. I’m not sure how the latter would work if there’s things like street maintenance, etc that’s part of it, but I’m sure some solution could be found.
Wouldn’t things like street maintenance be handled by the city? If they aren’t currently and HOAs got banned, it seems like cities could step in and take over without much fuss.
The maintenance costs are why cities make this deal with developers. The city will green light the development provided an HOA is present so their responsibility is kept at a minimum.
The HOA of today isn’t an idea born of people saying they want to govern themselves. It’s from government yelling “less regulation” and pushing their residents into an adrift situation where it’s the only option.
The ethos from the gated community is there, somehow, but that’s the grift. The HOA is only there, in most cases, to remove cost and responsibility from the municipality.
Yup. Even plowing is an HOA task in some places. It’s all a privatization scam and the HOA residents are the marks.
smew or field plowing?
Smew, but also snow.
This is why HOAs are allowed to exist in the first place.
They tell the city, “hey, you’ve got this huge plot of land that can be developed for residential housing, but it looks like you can’t afford to develop it (roads, water pipes, power, etc). Instead of developing and selling it bit by bit, you can sell the land to us, and we’ll take care of everything, and just cut you your check!”
HOAs pass the municipal buck from the government to the HOA. Since the HOA (in most cases) owns the infrastructure for the community, there isn’t a good way to allow individuals to opt out.
In theory but they do a shit job of it.
Neighborhood associations also exist and are usually much better than HOAs. I would be happy if mine was in charge of the streets instead of the city. But not my HOA, they suck.
I was thinking like gated community type areas which are treated more like private property. And in that example, I meant more like if one house opted out of the HOA, but the HOA was still there, then they’d be using the roads without contributing to maintenance.
But yeah, assuming the HOA dissolved, I would imagine the city or county would take over.
yeah I live in an apartment type condo and its a necessity.
I think I wouldn’t mind an HOA if the dues they collected were used to fund things like maintenance and upkeep of houses to the standards they set, but as far as I can tell all they really do is take your money to tell you your lawn’s too weedy and your fence is the wrong color.
They only exist because everyone in this fucked up country treats housing as an investment vehicle first and a shelter second.
if the dues they collected were used to fund things like maintenance and upkeep
That was basically their original intention until they got perverted to only care about protecting their property values like you said. There are still some “good” HOAs that are basically just that, but you don’t hear much about them. Still, any good HOA can become a bad one at any time, so I just avoid them like the plague.
When I lived in a single-family house, there was technically an HOA formed when the development was, well, developed. Everyone forgot about it until someone wanted to build on an addition to their home. They asked the town for building permission, town said “what’d the HOA say?” and the homeowners went “oh, shoot”, and formed a quick entity to rubber-stamp plans. No dues or anything.
The only other thing they did was send out annual reminders to have your septic system pumped please (we had communal drainage fields but per-house septic tanks).
I’m good with that sort of HOA for single-family homes.
That’s cool it was easy-peasy, but would also have been a prime opportunity to dissolve the HOA (which, I believe, the HOA can do itself).
I don’t think HOA’s should be banned, but I don’t think they should have any real legal power around them. Like they should be able to give fines and such, but those fines should not be legally enforceable or affect your credit. So that if the HOA tries to apply something heinous in your neighbourhood you can opt out without much action or repercussion as long as you don’t give a fuck if you’re removed from the HOA.
If the fines are not enforceable, then they are only a suggestion. Thus defeating the entire point of the HOA.
Not taking a side on that, but that is the end result.
Yes. I am fine with that. Because I hate HOA’s.
You chose not to live in an HOA. Why do you think it’s OK to force others that want to live in an HOA from doing so?
There’s tons of horror stories out there, but that’s also because “I live in an HOA and I like it” isn’t really a story that get written and shared on the internet. It’s boring.
I’d never live in one. No one is telling me what color my house is or where I can put a fence. But I also know plenty of people who do live in HOA’s and like it.
I’ve lived with good HOAs. I’d still rather they dissolve and everything be part of normal city operations.
Plus is it just me or are the same people that say they want small government also the ones who are super pro HOA?
I hate my HOA except that it’s the only thing from keeping my neighbor from filling his yard up with garbage and junk cars. My bar is low, but it’s above that. We live too close for that kinda shit.
City ordinance usually covers things like that. Many even cover decent maintenance of the lawn.
yep, and at least city ordinances are made by elected leaders or direct democracy so if having a used car collection located immediately in front of your house is a popular storage method it will be harder for the nimbys to prevent it.
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.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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes. Housing is tough enough as it is. Linking a lot of properties to the HOA is disgusting and should be illegal.
The point of HOAs is protecting/increasing property value. We need property to be cheaper, not more expensive. Higher property values benefit speculation, not ownership. Burn them all.
Also, higher property values can mean increased property taxes. As out of reach as it feels, I’d rather my future home cost me less money to just live and grow old in, thank you :c
I wouldn’t ban them, but I would make sure they need continual community buy-in to keep going. Make them automatically sunset if not renewed. Like, every ten years you have to get signatures from 2/3 of the home owners in the HOA in order to renew it. Good HOAs can keep going indefinitely or be reestablished later. Bad ones just disappear when they can’t get enough signatures to keep the thing going.
I don’t have a problem with people volunteering to bind themselves into a communal covenant. I do have a problem with the long dead hand of developers past binding people into a perpetual obligation. I know it is possible to dissolve HOAs, but it requires getting the vast majority of homeowners to come together to actively choose to revoke it. I would use the opposite system. Every ten years you need a supermajority of homeowners to commit to renewing it.
This is obviously in the context of single family homes. They’re unavoidable in condos.
bind themselves into a communal covenant
This sounds like a black magic ritual in a fantasy game. I dig it.
I would support a state law that required all HOA board members to dress in black robes during meetings. Also all meetings must be conducted by candlelight.
Thank God someone in this thread actually knows how HOAs work.
HOAs are great for enforcing Jim Crow laws privately, since the government can’t do it anymore. Fuck HOAs
How?
Oh, it’s easy. The HOA gets to approve all new residents to the neighborhood. While they can’t block a family of color who qualifies for a loan, from buying a house, they can prevent them from moving in, through background check requirements or simply by using stupid rules to harass them into leaving. The same goes for renters. I lived in South Florida for a few years and the segregation is real. All white neighborhoods run by HOAs and you cross the highway and it’s all black people. The rent is just as outrageous in both places. Money isn’t what is keeping the black people from renting the newer nicer housing. They aren’t allowed.
While they can’t block a family of color who qualifies for a loan, from buying a house, they can prevent them from moving in, through background check requirements or simply by using stupid rules to harass them into leaving.
That’s fucked up that that is happening near you. This doesn’t happen in my subdivision. I positive of this, because my wife is on the board and I attend every meeting. The board doesn’t get to decide who gets to buy a house. Also, no violations are ever given without full board approval. We live in a somewhat diverse neighborhood.
To be clear, anyone who can get a loan can buy the houses. The HOA can only decide if the potential residents meet community standards. The mechanism used to keep people of color out is the background check. It doesn’t mean the person rejected has a criminal record. The HOA doesn’t have to give a reason why someone failed the background check.
We don’t even get notified if a house is sold or not unless there’s a lien from dues. We have nothing to do with sales and don’t even know about them.
In the area of South Florida where I was living, the HOA dues were factored into the loan and though the HOA had no control over who could buy a house, they could reject the occupant (including the owner) based on any criteria they liked. I thought about buying a house there and went through the loan procedure then decided I didn’t want to stay in Florida long term and decided to rent. The HOA has to approve the occupant of the property in either case. Lucky for me, I’m Caucasian so I wasn’t rejected anywhere.
Florida? Racist? No way!
Don’t ban them, there are some good parts in there
Require yearly elections on who leads
Limit the power they have, especially with giving out citations
Don’t allow to outsource the work. You want a HOA, you do the HOA. Those HOA companies are thr worst
An HOA can have a very positive effect on a neighborhood when handled properly, but inevitably a troublemaker gets on the board and starts making life miserable for everyone.
There was a recent local case where an elderly lady in her 80s accidentally underpaid her HOA dues by 30 cents. They started fining her, and before she figured out there was an issue, the fines were thousands of dollars, and she couldn’t afford it. She tried to work it out with the HOA board, but they were immovable. Then they started foreclosure proceedings, and that’s when she went to the local news.
This lady’s house was paid off, and they had every intention of taking it away from her in her old age, over THIRTY CENTS!
The news tried to reason with the HOA, but they wouldn’t be reasonable, and the last I heard, she was going to have to pay a lawyer to fight it in court.
No HOA should be able to take anyone’s house away for any reason. Same with back property taxes, especially if a propery is fully paid off. It invites predatory behavior, and there are always people who will gleefully exploit such situations.
