I had the thankless task of being executor for my parents' estate. I distinctly remember the Florida HOA that made that so much worse.
After expressing their utmost sympathies and saying they'd help any way they could, mere weeks later they put a legal "estoppel" on the sale of the house due to some overgrown vines(?), which of course, were never mentioned by anyone.
This is not possible and maybe mixing terms. HOA has to disclose an existing violation as part of the estoppel process. Estoppel is just a disclosure certificate not a legal hold
I can prompt an LLM to refute this and it would give me 5 reasons HOAs are making things better. Hard to read this and really come away with a sense of what the truth is. HOAs and homeowners have always been at odds but HOAs do provide some benefit in large communities. I hardly feel like they are making the “home crisis” worse.
You can prompt an llm and make it give you 5 reasons for any argument. LLMs are very good at writing highly convincing things that sound logical but may or may not be based in reality.
Would be better to say "I can run a research agent session and it can pull 5 data trends and papers that show the HOA are making things better" (I dont know if this is true and I did not do it)
I don't really think HOAs are the biggest driver of home prices/availbility one way or the other though.
And this is of the typical quality of what you’d get.
80% incoherent narration of random numbers, all down to the 1’s place so it looks super duper precise and impressive if you squint and don’t think too hard, like the “author” seems to have done.
To an extent they might make sense where there are shared facilities that need to be funded, like a swimming pool or something. Most of what they seem to do is just bullshit though.
>To an extent they might make sense where there are shared facilities that need to be funded, like a swimming pool or something. Most of what they seem to do is just bullshit though.
You can say the exact same about the government. To be clear, are you in favor of more liberty for homeowners, or are you in favor of the government stepping in to regulate HOAs?
The purpose of the system is what it does - providing retirees with even faker jobs than they gave up to go on vacation paid by the fools that still work.
Yes. I lived in an HOA neighborhood in Texas that was fine. Dues were $25/month, and from that we got a nice community pool, and a legitimately nice Christmas party: they’d rent food trucks that were pre-paid, put up a Santa village, bring in VR rides, etc. All paid for from dues. They also really did not bother you if you were making an attempt at keeping your place looking decent.
Then I moved to one in North Carolina that was god-awful. Dues started at $65/month and went up every year. They’d send out neighborhood reminders that a pressure-washing service would be in the neighborhood next week if anyone wanted to hire them; anyone who didn’t got notices a few weeks later that they needed to pressure-wash their driveway and/or house. I also had to buy a specific brand and sheen of paint to repaint my mailbox; of course, the lettering was only available from a single supplier.
I now live on an acre lot that sits between two neighborhoods. I have no HOA, and it is glorious.
> Then I moved to one in North Carolina that was god-awful. Dues started at $65/month and went up every year. They’d send out neighborhood reminders that a pressure-washing service would be in the neighborhood next week if anyone wanted to hire them; anyone who didn’t got notices a few weeks later that they needed to pressure-wash their driveway and/or house. I also had to buy a specific brand and sheen of paint to repaint my mailbox; of course, the lettering was only available from a single supplier.
There really needs to be a way to harm organizations that do this. The HOA system is setup where the organization is protected and given the ability to make these kinds of rules. The only real option you have in that is you have to pawn the property off to some poor sucker that will also run into this issue later.
I live on a shared driveway with two other neighbors. The zoning laws in my town require an HOA for any shared driveways. So I technically live under an HOA. But we’ve all agreed to not fund it or bring it to life in any way. We just work out the shared responsibilities of the driveway informally over a bottle of whiskey.
I wouldn’t want to live in a neighborhood without an HOA, especially in the south. If you don’t have an HOA like 30% of your neighbors are going to have a lot full of junk cars, houses patchily painted lavender and shitty unmowed front yards. However, I very carefully read all the fine print for what the HOA enforces and how much it costs before each home purchase. Some of them can be insane. I’ve seen up to $500 a month.
What's wrong with lavender? Why does everything have to be a boring tan or grey? You sound like the exact reason I would never buy a house with an HOA.
But this is great...there is a market for homes with HOAs and for homes without HOAs. The reason is clearly because homes that are more cookie cutter with standard features retain their value because there are fewer people on the market who want a lavender house. The HOA is partly responsible for upkeeping the homogeneity by enforcing some of these things, thereby keeping values stable. Depending on the HOA, the board can also be full of people on a power trip, but that's pretty dependent on the geographical area(looks like Florida may not be great) and case by case basis.
> I can prompt an LLM to refute this and it would give me 5 reasons ... Hard to read this and really come away with a sense of what the truth is.
Are you arguing a meta point that there is no such thing as truth because LLMs can make you any counter argument to you want? That seems bleak. Argue against the actual points of the article.
What points? Does the article make any points? I couldn't find any. For instance, point 1 ends with
"A foreclosure suit is not a lost home — most end when the owner, or the owner's lender, pays — but the pressure is the point."
Which makes no sense whatsoever. I thought they were making a housing crisis worse by forcing foreclosures, but now apparently "the pressure is the point." The point of what, exactly?
Sorry, I'm not going to spend an hour reading every LLM article to figure out if its truthy, and then come up with the counter arguments against it, and on and on. The whole point of a human source is that depending on the source, I can already trust that they did some leg work to get the data and do the research, and they already have something to their name that I can trust. LLMs write in such a way that everything looks believable, so you spend 10x the time trying to find what is false.
We're just talking about one article here, but its an ocean of garbage being generated out there, yeah...go argue against all those and you'll waste your whole life.
It often takes years between "HOA puts lien on house" and "house is foreclosed and sold", and during that time the house is in limbo, the owner can't sell it and buyers can't buy it.
I used to live in Broward county, Florida, so I'm not surprised that it shows up as number one on the OP article's list. It's totally insane how much power HOAs have in that state. The idea that an entity other than a mortgage lender you owe can "foreclose" and seize the home you live in is total lunacy.
I'm not sure how Florida has managed it's "free state" image. I've lived across the south and midwest my whole life and Florida was easily the least "free" state I've lived in.
I came in here gung ho to defend HOA’s because I’ve seen neighborhoods without them and they’re never really stunning. That being said the ability or the power to foreclose on your home because of that should not be allowed.
> I’ve seen neighborhoods without them and they’re never really stunning
I don't give a shit about a "stunning" neighborhood. If I own property nobody else should have a say about its appearance.
The only exception I'd defend is a historic neighborhood where the goal is specifically to upkeep a historically accurate appearance of centuries ago.
But no, I will NEVER support an HOA anywhere else. These consortiums of Karens that patrol modern housing communities can go to hell.
I will plant the flowers I want, have the Halloween decorations I want, and do whatever woodworking I want in my front yard. What's the point of ownership if I can't own it?
I live in a neighborhood without an HOA, and any time someone comes over for the first time they all make comments about how nice the neighborhood is. Acceptance of an HOA is the pinnacle of Stockholm syndrome.
HOA’s kill any character an area has. The fees more than offset the economic benefits of joining one. The damming economics largely comes down to local governments skipping road maintenance without giving you a discount on your taxes.
Net resolution you lose money living in a worse location.
> because I’ve seen neighborhoods without them and they’re never really stunning.
Most neighborhoods I’ve lived in have not had an HOA. They’ve ranged from okay to great.
I can think of a few neighbor situations where an HOA with teeth would have been welcome. The most specific involved someone getting a big angry dog breed, neglecting it, and then leaving their gate unlocked so it got out. That one was eventually dealt with by the city, though.
Meanwhile the one HOA I lived under was pretty boring and friendly. Didn’t really bother anyone but maintained a nice common area. HOA board members were friendly and reasonable, but then again so were all the neighbors so there wasn’t much to deal with.
I think the nightmare situation is a busybody HOA that starts going after things that don’t matter, which would be hell.
> I can think of a few neighbor situations where an HOA with teeth would have been welcome. The most specific involved someone getting a big angry dog breed, neglecting it, and then leaving their gate unlocked so it got out. That one was eventually dealt with by the city, though.
Wow, no. That should only be dealt with by the city. I cannot imagine the types of misuse and abuse that would come from the self-centered, small-minded petty tyrants that want to be on a HOA board deciding what breeds of dog they'd like in their community. It'd be a bunch of "toy" dogs that frankly I find far more obnoxious than larger breeds with incessant yapping. I don't get to make the decision that that's a problem, because it's a preference/annoyance, not a problem. But you can guarantee that that's the kind of thing that happens.
> I think the nightmare situation is a busybody HOA that starts going after things that don’t matter, which would be hell.
I think many HOAs are exactly that, because often the kind of person drawn to being on a HOA board is exactly that. Just like they're often the kind of person to post on Nextdoor, "Hey, there are a bunch of black teenagers I've not seen before walking down the street."
I dunno, I live in a neighborhood in LA without an HOA and it's great. Housing values have skyrocketed in the decade I've been here. There are a sprinkling of places that don't take great care of their yards: the bane of every Karen-filled HOA. This has done absolutely nothing to harm property values.
I would wager that the money residents might have paid for HOA fees have largely gone into their own home/yard improvements, and it shows. Adding an HOA in this place, and I think most places, would be a burden rather than a benefit.
To be fair though, the nicest neighborhoods in LA where the price floor is like 2 million are often HOA, old or new. Really the HOA doesn't do too much directly, but selects for the sort of people who don't care about an HOA fee along with the littany of other fees their lifestyle brings them, and that's enough to see home values and associated factors change dramatically from Hancock Park to parts adjacent only a couple hundred feet away.
By far the nicest neighborhood in town is ours, the one with no HOA. We have the most sports fields and courts, playgrounds, trails, dog parks, skate park, etc. No HOA, so we don't hoard, all facilities are shared to all. But across the street for us, making it a nice neighborhood.
Also, we have no HOA, so there are no ridiculous restrictions, which means the neighborhood has character. Every house is painted in unique colorful styles, instead of endless shades of dull beige. Every house has unique vegetation choices based on owner preferences so it is fun to walk around and sightsee. We have no HOA, so there are zero restrictions on decorations, so we are the Halloween capital of the county (coming up in a few weeks!)
It's a vibrant unique neighborhood full of facilities and character, precisely because there is no HOA to destroy it.
A similar neighborhood across town (we're a small town so across town is just a mile away) has a HOA, every house is a dull shade of beige and they have very harsh rules, like HOAs of course do, on decorations, so Halloween and Christmas are DOA over there.
You are exactly the kind of neighborhood that is my nightmare. What you claim are fun Halloween and Christmas decorations I’m sure are way too intrusive to others living next to you (I have seen things like Halloween blow up things that are running the motors 24/7 and even play sounds), excessive Christmas lighting that never gets turned off and so you have to live permanently with all of your blinds closed. To make matters worse, a lot of people start Halloween on Sep 1 and Christmas decorations even before Thanksgiving is over. So you have to live through that for 4 months not just like a 2 week period. I’d definitely pick to live in the other HOA neighborhood you describe.
Luckily there are tons of HOA neighborhood where everything is gray or beige and all character and fun is strictly prohibited, patrolled by the Karen army of the HOA. So you have plenty of choices.
Unfortunately there are nowhere near enough choices for people who want a bit more joy out of their neighborhood than that.
> The idea that an entity other than a mortgage lender you owe can "foreclose" and seize the home you live in is total lunacy.
What consequences are sane for a member who does not pay dues, water bills, etc., for a prolonged period? Turning off the water is illegal here. Liens get ignored. My HOA will avoid foreclosure for years, and has only resorted to it twice in twenty years, but it's the ultimate recourse. Should the other members just suck it up forever?
You don’t seem to know how HOAs work. I’m not really a fan of how they currently work either, but you can’t just kick out a member when the legal “member” is the plot/home, and what would that even look like when you get kicked out, you are, e.g., still behind the gate benefiting from common elements. Do you get barred from, e.g., driving on the HOA owned and maintained street? Do you not get to enter the HOA controlled access gate?
Even if it’s a very low maintenance and amenity HOA on public roads, how do you resolve the fact that all the fees and costs have accumulated if the home were to be sold, you essentially end up at a similar end point where the home is sold. Usually these are also not individual circumstances, i.e., a person who has ignored all kind of warnings and letters and board meetings over usually years, also has many other issues going on and often they’re just letting the home go anyways and e.g., are just living there for “free” for about 1-3 years of HOA/bank legal proceedings.
> and what would that even look like when you get kicked out,
Very easy answer: they don't get access to the pool, river docks, common lakes (per peer thread) that the HOA maintains.
They of course must maintain full control and ownership of their private home.
If you answer that there is nothing they would lose access to (no pool, no rivers, no lakes) then that is a very strong answer stating the HOA has no right to exist.
I’ve always found it funny that many of the states that despise unions love HOAs.
For example, they’ve fought for the right to have a “right to work”, so that closed shops can’t be a thing — you cannot compel inclusion in a bargaining unit by nature of employment.
Yet restrictive deed covenants where you are compelled by the state to join a private association are fine.
The arguments for or against them are similar if you dig into them.
Did you even consider why it's illegal to turn off the water? And maybe ask yourself how foreclosing on someone who can't pay for water only seems like a way to skirt the law and take water away from them in addition to their shelter.
Our community well water system is owned and operated by the HOA. That and gravel road maintenance are the great majority of HOA expenses. Should members not have to pay for water and roads but still get to use them? That's not sustainable.
And his HOA maintains water service and roads. So his point stands. How can the HOA provide these critical functions if they lack capacity to collect fees?
The fact that some HOAs are meddlesome neighbors havens doesn’t mean all of them are. (Though I agree with others here that the roles herein described belong to a municipality.)
We're a rural subdivision that just needs to share private road and water system maintenance between land owners. HOAs are a simple lightweight form of governance for this. We can't add more services without pricing residents on fixed incomes out of their retirement homes. There is no growth or common development to manage. We don't need or want police or tax power or the overhead of incorporation.
Our property taxes are so low they have made grown men shed tears of joy.
Honestly that sounds like a ridiculous scenario. Your community should have never been built in a location without municipal services. Because you did you took up the responsibility for those 'municipal' services. And now you have a hard time to deliver those services, because you lack the funds that would come with a real municipality and taxes.
So instead you put this burden on the people living there, who presumably are already paying some form of taxes?
What's the point of all this? Give up ownership of your own house and frontyard, so you can pay dues, to get access to services that would be free with a real municipality?
It sounds very much like this person’s HOA is de facto a municipality. They charge fees instead of taxes, which are essentially indistinguishable in this context.
There was a fairly crazy case in Georgia recently where a lady stopped paying her annual dues over a billing dispute. The amount worked out to be less than $3,000.
The HOA hired a law firm, forced a foreclosure, held a foreclosure auction where the HOA itself bought her house for THREE DOLLARS, and continued to charge her HOA dues (even though the HOA owned the home now) before evicting her later.
The HOA then sold the home to an employee involved in the foreclosure, whose partner was on the HOA board that had voted to foreclose, and voted to accept the three dollar ($3.24, to be precise) bid, though they hid this behind an LLC that didn't actually exist when they did it. The employee then reactivated her real estate license and sold the home to another family several months later.
There are fewer greater lunacies than HOAs, and the type of people drawn to run them.
> The HOA then sold the home to an employee involved in the foreclosure, whose partner was on the HOA board that had voted to foreclose, and voted to accept the three dollar ($3.24, to be precise) bid
And when I say they sold it to an employee involved after buying it themselves at auction for that $3.24, they sold it to the employee for one dollar. So this woman was out hundreds of thousands of dollars of equity because a self-dealing HOA and its law firm (tied by marriage to one of the HOA board) voted to foreclose on her home and accept a purchase price that couldn't buy you a drink at Starbucks.
Hi, previous neigbor! I’m in Broward too. It’s insane here but also in Miami-Dade. My condo maintenance cost went x2 over the last few years and the pool where the water isn’t yellow with you know has been shut down for at least 3 years. Meanwhile the “board” argues about the carpet patterns for about as long as.
That's cause Broward is a BLUE country unlike the north half of Florida that is RED. BLUE counties are the worst down here when it comes to HOAs. Almost every development or neighborhood has them and they are AGRESSIVE. In the northern RED areas of Florida, there are either no HOAs OR the HOA only has authority or the communal shared spaces (ie, club houses, pools, common esways) and leave the home owners themselves alone in terms of dictating their lives.
The municipality that collects property taxes, utilities, contractors/mechanics liens, etc. have had the ability to foreclose everywhere since time immemorial, so it's not too crazy really...
>Florida ranks 1st of the states on HOA Spy for foreclosure suits brought by associations, with 10,296 of 14,168. The count depends on which courts are indexed in each state as well as on the associations, so it is a count of records, not a rate.
Florida is known for having the strongest "sunshine" laws in the country, that make government records transparent. That makes this statistic pretty useless.
Same goes with the whole "Florida man" shtick--news channels and YouTube channels dredging for wild stories are more likely to get the info on Florida-specific misdemeanors due to sunshine laws.
Court records are public everywhere. How companies like RealtyTrac get their stats/data, they grab records from county recorder offices. So what does that have to do with sunshine laws?
Technically public and transparent are different things. I looked up a couple HOAs on HOA Spy that I know have filed liens in my state–they come up green.
It is GOOD that HOAs can bring foreclosure suits. Suits are the only way to get maintenance fees from some owners. Without maintenance fees HOAs decline and their owners' values decrease. Foreclosure also has the side-effect of removing a badly-acting owner from the association and replacing them with one who WILL pay their bills promptly.
Really? In fifty years of home owning, not once with the "benefit" of a HOA, I've yet to see an owned house value decline.
Some countries just bypassed this entire US obsession with redlining and keeping the others out. Maybe try working more on community and less on uniformity.
HOAs shouldn’t exist. They have no justification for authority. The legal frameworks allowing their existence should be dismantled with extreme prejudice and at the expense of those who benefit from the current system.
> HOAs shouldn’t exist. They have no justification for authority
Freedom of assembly. If my neighbors and I buy stuff, put it in a box and then buy and create rules around how its benefits and costs are divided, and I sell my share in the box, that should be fine.
Yeah but if you sell that box/stuff to another person, they own it now and shouldn't be bound by your rules. If that's not true, I didn't actually buy anything. I just paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to have my name put on someone else's contract without being able to negotiate any terms.
It's like "buying" digital movies. The button says Purchase but you/Amazon still get to dictate terms long after the sale.
I think that property taxes and similars (e.g. HOA dues) should accrue as a lien against a property but not be foreclosable during the original owner's life. Then you create a state-backed entity that provides guarantees on loans against those liens for the municipalities and HOA subject to certain rules. (They could still factor those liens privately sans limitation.)
Now I don't trust HOAs but some of this is deceptive weasally writing.
> They foreclose on their own members, over debts that start small
There are members who refuse to pay special assessments or fees for the community. Given that's Flordia, theres an above average population that would believe "they aren't required to" even though they accepted it when starting. (yes there are abusive HOAs and there are non-sense fines.. and sometimes those nonsense fines come from people neglecting the property in a very bad situation)
It's your job to handle it when it's a small situation. Moving to the stage of liens takes more time to do that and then resolving that usually happens on sale or refinancing.
Sure, but it makes sense to research one you're about to buy into and there's a lot more to the site than this post. I clicked around some.
This site seems to provide some data that's compelling. I see some gaps in California and a couple of liens that mention FL in Los Angeles. Maybe it's a starting point if moving though. This kind of transparency is a good thing. Some HOAs are abusive.
I have a house. I have no HOA. I'm very happy with this situation and don't see any possible value that an HOA could add to this situation.
Funnily enough, there does seem to be a sort of wannabe HOA in my neighborhood that is always dropping things off in our mailbox asking for donations and telling us about events. I never give them any money, and never go to their events though, so either they don't provide any value or the value they provide apparently is not derived from them having any enforcement power.
This article slightly mixes condo and HOAs. HOAs are covered under 720 and it does not have the same rules (which are more stringent) than condo’s
Condo rules are much stricter than HOAs
State of Florida also puts caps on fines - the max is $100/day or $1000 for a single violation. But that’s after a period to cure and then due process meetings (made up of homeowners not board members) who may waive or not fine at all or defer.
A homeowner can also fix the problem and later have the same problem again but not be fined if they fix in time.
The foreclosures are for extreme cases and a lot of HOA attorney shops don’t charge a retainer but will tack on fees that are paid back to the HOA attorney and association.
We all wanna blame HOAs. Nobody asks why HOA? The legal BS to set one up isn't free, so why?
The near universal proliferation of owner's associations and management groups and whatnot for developments larger than ~1ac (the EPA threshold, some states/towns have lower) is something you can lay at the feet of the Clean Water Act and it's implementation and precedents over the following decades.
Developers don't do anything that costs money, like set up an HOA, without a reason. The developers create the HOA because you need your >1ac residential development to pass stormwater permitting. While you theoretically could make each individual .25ac parcel you're putting a house on compliant as a standalone it's infinitely cheaper to just ignore all that, grade everything toward the road, dig a ditch, send the contents of the ditch through your stormwater treatment features, build in a little margin to those items, show the permitting authority the numbers that prove it passes with flying colors and when some jerk says "but what if X Y Z changes" you point to the excess you built in and tell them to GFY.
Now, where it really gets evil is when you start really pinching pennies or where the rules change over the course of the process making your numbers not work. Say you've got a lot of grade, a lot of rainfall, a lot of stormwater you gotta "treat". Well, you start adding rules to the HOA. Require certain parts of the lots remains grass or planter or whatever. Disallow patios, but do allow wood decks because the municipality considers those pervious, etc, etc. Or maybe the results you've got are marginal but you throw the bureaucrats a bone by saying you'll disallow car-ports and sheds in the HOA rules to prevent people from adding impervious surface. Or maybe you're uphill of some wetlands but not close enough to be regulated by default you promise to disallow working on cars and require people pick up their pet waste and not use lawn fertilizer or some other laundry list of certain things in order to make the local town's wetlands people comfortable not raising objection and claiming jurisdiction.
And of course, however these rules and plans shake out, the HOA is responsible for enforcing whatever those rules and requirements are in perpetuity so it's not like a pissed off majority can show up to vote "ok, this has gone too far, pack it in boys"
But nobody wants to talk about any of that because it's uncomfortable.
People love to hate on HOAs but not all are bad, and in general they are a good example of self-governance, when the alternative is having people who DON'T live in your neighborhood regulate your neighborhood. Which would you prefer?
> People love to hate on HOAs but not all are bad, and in general they are a good example of self-governance, when the alternative is having people who DON'T live in your neighborhood regulate your neighborhood. Which would you prefer?
The latter, because I can kick them out of office, and because silly rules will impact a much larger number of people, and a large number can have their voices heard.
When your HOA has only 20-30 members, variance is high. It's a lot easier for people to abuse HOA power for their own personal gains.
You can very easily run to be part of your HOA leadership, and it is significantly easier to do than kicking an elected professional-politician out of office. The biggest issue with most HOA/COAs is that basically no one (especially the people who might have some qualifications) want to participate. This leaves only the people who want to be, frankly, petty little shits. It is not hard to exert influence over a group of 20-30 despondent neighbors.
> You can very easily run to be part of your HOA leadership
Yes, and then you find out just how petty petty politics can be.
The inconvenient truth, at least for HOA advocates, is that a community of 20-30 people, or even a hundred or so, does not need to be governed at the level of the community. Most people are reasonable and will respond to reasonable requests from neighbors if there is an issue, without having to drag in a higher authority at all. Those who are not reasonable, are not going to be magically made reasonable by having an HOA--indeed, as you admit, they're precisely the ones who are going to end up running the HOA. On balance, you're better off not having "governance" at all until you get to a larger population, like a town or a city.
You definitely need that level of governance if there are common elements which need to be funded and maintained (pools, parks, the building itself for condos)
You need an organization to manage the common elements, yes. But the only "governance" that's required for that is...to manage the common elements. Which isn't really "governance", it's just management, and oversight of whoever is doing the managing. There's no need at all for the rest of the intrusive rules and regulations that HOAs impose in the name of "governance".
Only in a very minimal sense. A management that is only empowered to maintain common areas of a community can't "govern" the community members except in the very narrow sense of enforcing whatever rules the community wants to have for the use of common areas. Which is just an aspect of the fact that the community as a whole owns the common areas and the owner makes the rules.
Such a management can't mess with community members about how often they cut their lawns, or what color they paint their house, etc. But that sort of micromanagement is what "governance" by HOAs ends up being when it goes beyond basic management of common areas.
Okay, well, nearly half of all HOAs are condominium communities which inherently have common elements. I’m not saying that detached SFHs with no common elements should be governed by HOAs; I was if anything implying the opposite
In the article, the associations that appear to be causing the most problems, at least in Florida, are condominium associations. So it might be worth reconsidering whether filling a "need" for such governance ends up being more trouble than it's worth--at least if it goes beyond just maintaining the common elements (which it seems like condo associations in Florida do).
> Okay, well, nearly half of all HOAs are condominium communities which inherently have common elements.
This varies widely depending on the city. In many cities, it's hard to find a detached house in a neighborhood (that isn't ghetto) that doesn't have an HOA.
> You definitely need that level of governance if there are common elements which need to be funded and maintained (pools, parks
Sure. I think very few, if any, people dispute that. If there actually are common facilities like pools, it makes sense to have a common pot of money everyone contributes into, to maintain those facilities. Just about everyone will agree with that.
How do you make the huge leap from that, into saying a HOA has any kind of right to demand what kinds of flowers or windowshades or decorations someone installs into their private (not shared!) property?
I'm on my HOA board, and not because I want to be, I can tell you that.
I showed up to my first annual meeting where basically no one was there other than the president. He asked if I wanted to be on the board because they didn't have enough people participating. I asked what I'd have to do, and he said "just vote on things". I said OK, and he said the rules let him appoint members to vacancies (spoilers: the rules don't), so he "appointed" me on the spot.
At subsequent meetings, I discovered most of the board was completely disinterested in doing anything, other than the president who would probably fall under the "petty little shit" category, but he seemed like he knew what he was doing (spoilers: he didn't), so everyone pretty much just voted in favor of what he wanted to do. I was the only board member who worked from home, so I would be the only one on site to deal with things that involved vendors working on the property, so then I became the guy everyone expected to do everything.
The president got diagnosed with cancer and had to step down. He wanted me to be president, but I was like fuck that. The VP took the role, but she has pretty much done nothing and is clueless, so I keep being the one people expect to take the lead on everything.
I'm honestly tired of it and wished some competent people in the association would get on the board. There were massive mistakes I caught as a board member because I'm the only one who actually reads anything in the bylaws, CC&Rs, and all that shit. The HOA had been paying hundreds of dollars a year for decades on things that didn't need to be performed because our property management company misclassified us under some statute that didn't even apply to us, and nobody knew any better or even bothered to ask, "Hey, why the fuck are we actually doing this?"
I'll not say I'm a "good" board member. I don't care about enforcing house rules, and I don't want to get involved when people complain about their neighbors unless it's something that affects the association's financial health. The only reason I stay on is because I've done enough of after-the-fact clean-up of the previous president's mess that I'm terrified of what insane things might happen if no one is keeping an eye on the other members. If you're in an HOA, I'd encourage getting involved to keep the crazies in check, at least for as long as you can stomach it.
That is a risk you freely accept when choosing to buy in an HOA. Co-ops, which are related but distinct, solve for this risk by requiring the co-op board to vote to approve any new residents. You have a co-op as an option for your living arrangements, as well. Optionality is a good thing.
People love to take extreme positions, because they’re easy and satisfies an emotional itch they have, not because they’re correct. The same can be said about government regulation which is analogically similar. You have those who fallaciously infer that, because government regulation can go wrong, it is therefore bad (contra abusus non tollit usum). Others take opposing socialist views.
People should instead think in terms of ends. Human beings are social animals. We have obligations toward others (here, the community). That includes obligations that concern the environment that the community occupies. So the fruitful focus of energy and debate should be what this means for the community (what are these obligations, and why) and if and how to regulate them.
That's a false dichotomy. Everyone has to comply with laws regardless of what neighborhood they live in. The only difference is that the HOA has more stupid rules than the city. I'd rather have fewer rules.
The term "self-governance" has always seemed to me to be an oxymoron. On its face it means everyone governs themselves, and nobody governs other people. Which if the people are reasonable mature adults, works out fine. But the term is always used to refer to some kind of governing institution, which means some people are given the power to govern other people. That's not "self-governance".
Which is why Jefferson, who would agree with you, thought that a well-informed people (education) was critical and without it self-governance would fail. It's not an oxymoron - it just comes with caveats.
> "I think by far the most important bill in our whole code is that for the diffusion of knowledge among the people...whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government"
> "The most effectual means of preventing tyranny would be to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large"
No, he wouldn't, because he used "self-governance" to mean the thing that contradicts what it says on its face.
> It's not an oxymoron - it just comes with caveats.
The kind of "democratic" governance we actually have certainly comes with caveats, yes--caveats that have basically never been really dealt with. Jefferson's ideal of a "well-informed people" has never been achieved.
Jefferson did claim to believe that the US Federal government should be as minimal as possible--until he became President and found that it's actually kind of nice to be able to use that power to do things you feel like doing, whether they actually meet that minimal government ideal or not.
But in any case, none of that justifies describing the governance we actually have as "self-governance".
I, and I suspect many other people here, prefer to live in countries where there are no neighbourhood associations that can dictate the look of your house, what colour of paint you must use, etc.
I mean, where I live, there are no HOAs, but the city council instead mandates those kinds of things via zoning rules.
I think I still prefer that to HOAs, because
- The city is pretty good at taking care of public facilities
- I only pay city tax, not city tax and HOA fees
- The city has better things to do than walk around neighborhoods looking for violations, so enforcement is pretty lax
- The city government is subject to checks and balances
I prefer to spend $1.25mil on a house that won't drop in value because my neighbor is not allowed to put up demon statues and paint the house pink, etc.
Instead you chose a house that has significantly less value because of home buyer's preference for houses with a HOA and reduction in mortgage payment they can afford because of the fees.
The implication is the people in my neighborhood know anything at all about what would make sense from a neighborhood regulatory standpoint. The sell is to drum up ancient peasant fears of the far away feudal lord vs local villagers gumptions, but the reality is usually denying genuine domain expertise besmirched by the mark of coming from a higher centralized government, in favor of rule by the loudest of the local bigots.
I'm not sure how much "genuine domain expertise" is actually embodied in most laws or regulations at any level of government. When I look at the US Code (or the Code of Federal Regulations), or state laws, or city or county municipal codes, I see some things that make sense, sure, but also a huge bunch of rules that are just arbitrary, and are only there because some special interest got a law or regulation written to benefit them at the expense of everyone else.
The one advantage of higher levels of government over HOAs is that they are generally impersonal. The faceless bureacrats that are processing your forms generally don't have any personal animus against you. They don't have to live next door to you and they don't have to care what your personal oddities are. They're just executing a bureaucratic process. Whereas with an HOA, every little petty personal grievance gets magnified, and so-called "governance" turns into endless feuding.
I’ve owned three places, two in HOAs and the currently place doesn’t have one. The HOAs were fine. I don’t miss them at all. At their best they just provided services (trash pickup, landscaping, etc.) that I can easily contract for myself.
If you don’t need an HOA (because there are actually shared common elements that need to be maintained) then why would you want one? And if you do need one, why would you want it to do anything beyond what’s required to maintain the shared bits?
The facts don't seem to support your implied claim that being governed by people who do live in your neighborhood is better. At least not in Florida.
My own personal experience from my wife having owned one condo and she and I having owned four houses is not very encouraging for your claim either. Of the four HOAs involved, the two that were run entirely by management companies (i.e., by people with no personal connection to the neighborhood, with little or no activity from the community members on the Board that we could see) were fine, they kept the common areas maintained and basically did nothing else that affected us. The condo association, while it had a management company, also had a Board filled with community members who had nothing better to do than harass everyone else, which they did with an energy that would have been amazing if it had been directed towards something productive. The other HOA had no management company, just the Board of community members, and was very intrusive, and from what we learned from neighbors, had been a mess for the entire history of the community.
So we now live in a neighborhood with no HOA, we only have to deal with the municipality. We like it.
> People love to hate on HOAs but not all are bad, and in general they are a good example of self-governance, when the alternative is having people who DON'T live in your neighborhood regulate your neighborhood. Which would you prefer?
This is a false dichotomy: if you live under the rule of an HOA, you still have to follow municipal ordinances and city laws in addition to HOA regulations.
I would never buy a house that was part of a HOA. For people that like them, more power to ya. But I don't understand the people who complain, just don't buy into an HOA then?
Last time I looked for a house, it was hard to find a house that wasn't part of an HOA. Maybe this was specific to the locale, but personally, I'm ok with people evangelizing against them if it means the next time I'm involved in a house search, there are more non-hoa options.
It’s extremely common for local governments to make an HOA a legal requirement for new developments. This lets them put things like road maintenance, park maintenance, and trash pickup in private hands so the local government doesn’t have to pay for them. (They’re still happy to collect property taxes from the new residents at full rate, of course.) The result is that it becomes harder and harder to find non-HOA homes.
I’d have no problem with their existence if it was a free market, but I have a big problem with them when they’re being legally mandated.
To your “happily collect taxes at full rate” comment, strongtowns.org’s whole message is that only the densest cities in the country bring in enough taxes to pay for the maintenance of streets, sewers etc.
“Full rate” is almost always subsidized through the windfall taxes on new growth and development, putting towns in a ponzi scheme like situation.
Vocabulary objection: "Ponzi" requires fraud, where someone is lying to you about what assets exist, how much of it is yours, and where the money goes.
Kind of like how not all software problems are Buffer Overflows.
> Then people ought to be complaining about their local governments, not HOAs.
Complain all you want, but if all new homes in your city are in a HOA, you are going to be under the thumb of those 80-something HOA board members who have nothing else to do in life but nitpick your house violations. Is that a desirable outcome for anyone?
Too many old people in homes they don’t need. There’s a reason the term “day of the pillow” was getting popular around Covid. I really wish we did get those 3% CFR rates in boomers we were promised by Italy!
Do I read this correctly; you are lamenting that death rates among older people during the COVID-19 pandemic were not higher? What an abhorrent misanthropic sentiment to post in public.
It’s pretty common and reasonable to complain about a specific thing you don’t like rather than a general complaint about the government. Compare “then people ought to be complaining about their local government, not Flock cameras.”
Not exactly the same thing but if you live in a dense urban environment and want to own and you're basically looking at a condo or a co-op. In other words you're dealing with the complexities of intermingling your affairs with your neighbors and a joint ownership structure one way or another and that has a variety of problems associated with it. Of course the upside is you get to live in the center of it all.
Still renting is almost always a better economic choice. It's a question of whether your quality of life and the ability to experience meaning is directly tied to your feeling of ownership which somehow translates back to your interest in building your community and neighborhood. And that's where it comes full circle
This is the result if people generally mistrust their local governments, defund them and then create little private villages (HOA governed). Turbo-capitalism wins once again ;)
Maybe HOA's are bad, maybe they're good, but the intellectual laziness required to shit this kind of garbage out onto the internet in place of genuine thought and analysis will fuckin kill us all.
Can someone explain to me (an European) what purpose HOAs serve? I mean do they actually have any benefits? I only know them from videos where people are being harassed by them
Look and feel of the house, paint, Pool Management, Park (if the community has one, and not the city managed one) Management, Yard Management (Trees, Plants, Mopping, Trimming), Trash (overflow vs contained, when to put trash out, when to take your trash can back, to keep it out of sight from street view and such) Regulations on whether a house can be given to AirBnb and such, Single Family staying vs multiple family, cars that can be parked on the road and you can ask Chatgpt for more if you want.
That's different. They cant create new "laws", and they can't spy on you etc. Also that's just for one building usually (the building where you live in) not a whole community
HOAs can't create laws. They can create rules that are contract bound, but not anything criminal or physical based enforcement. (Taking away someone's home is civil)
Folks, I suggest before you comment, make it clear whether you're talking about HOAs for condos (shared structures), or detached houses. There's a big difference between the two.
Florida has a lot of people. The article never addresses the important questions - are these issues without merit?
If you want to live in an apartment, but - get the tax and investment advantages of owning then you need to do it via buying into a corporation of some sort. So they must exist.
If you are not paying on upkeep of your house they have to do something and that is going to be expensive, they have a right to get that money from whoever didn't pay not spread it out to the other owners.
While it isn't called foreclosure if you don't pay your property taxes your house will be foreclosed on. That an HOA can is just another entity.
There are a lot of people who live in Florida so I'd expect them to have a lot of HOAs. The only surprise is California doesn't beat Florida in this list, but that could well be a case of California has stupid laws and so you can't get the good parts of an HOA.
These is a lot to hate about HOAs. However the idea is sound and they can do good things. We need to stop the bad things that they do, but nothing that in the article points to anything bad.
I (thankfully) live in a neighborhood without an HOA. Just one block away, there is an HOA. No reason to prefer that street (and home values aren't higher there).
This isn't an upper class neighborhood. It's mixed. Half of the residents are blue collar workers.
Over the years, I would think of reasons/annoyances where I'd say "Yes, while I'm glad I don't have an HOA, if we did have one it would take care of this or that annoying problem with the neighbor."
Then I spoke to friends who live in HOA neighborhoods and are on the HOA board. They told me clearly that "No, in practice, the HOA is not going to get involved in those (serious) matters. All they care about is the veneer (house appearance) and really petty rules." They also told me the purpose of the HOA was to justify its own existence. The owners get almost nothing for the funds they collect, other than a 3rd party company driving by and noting minor violations.
Another friend just had to spend $4000 to paint the front of his house. He's temporarily living in another state for a work assignment, and he and several others got notices that the HOA has decided to change the "look" of the neighborhood. Otherwise his house looked fine (not worn out paint or anything). I bet someone in the neighborhood has friends with a painting outfit.
I can stomach the idea of an HOA if they solved real problems (sanitation, etc), and not just appearances, but they don't. Even if it's in their bylaws, they don't enforce the serious stuff. Just the petty stuff.
Someone losing a home because they decided to have a window AC facing the street is plain immoral.
There is no reason to stomach an HOA, even if they are solving real problems. If there are real problems that need solving the municipality can handle it or a local cooperative can in some special cases; these can exist without any enforcement or review board authority and they can handle everything else you'd need for a community/centrally managed for a neighborhood.
The idea is supposed to be that an HOA can be more efficient in taking care of problems. The municipality can be underfunded, etc, and take a long time to solve a problem.
In practice, HOAs generally don't do anything useful, though.
Our neighborhood actually saves the County money for property they don’t have to maintain (drainage/swales/mowing/etc) and provides community things like tennis courts, basketball courts, pools, playgrounds etc that the County doesn’t have to provide or maintain. It’s also cheaper for the HOA to do it
Competitive bids are only required if it exceeds 10% of budget in Florida. You still have to get quotes ahead of making a budget or it makes no sense. For example, you can’t go for a high bidder just-because. It has to be in budget. Then, people have to be elected to serve and usually it’s 1-2 year terms. If someone doesn’t like how the HOA is run then they can always try to run against the current Board members running for re election.
> You still have to get quotes ahead of making a budget or it makes no sense. For example, you can’t go for a high bidder just-because
There are a couple examples in the comments, of HOAs awarding no-bid, single-source contracts to cronies or family. Are you sure that a government-par bid process is universally, legally required for HOAs contracting out with contractors?
> If someone doesn’t like how the HOA is run then they can always try to run against the current Board members running for re election.
There are also several examples in the comments, of dreadful HOAs which retain power for reasons other than residents simply wanting it. Applied to the crony contracting described above, I don't think that most residents, if polled, would say that they want that, yet the examples still happened. That seems to indicate that your remedy was inadequate to effect the will of the people. So my question to you is:
If, say, people don't want their HOA corruptly accepting inflated charges in no-bid contracts with friends and family, using HOA money, how is it that in some cases, their HOA did so? Those are the failure points in representation which need addressing.
State of Florida requires a list of bids to be posted and before a Board meeting. The motions on whom was selected is required to be documented in the meeting minutes.
Yes, per Fl Statute 720 any quotes/bids for contracts exceeding 10% of the budget requires competitive bids but doesn’t set a number like 3. Two is practical minimum.
But competitive bids for attorneys, architects, CPAs, community association managers, or sole source vendors where there is only one in the area that does the work etc are not required. Like say a business that is the only one in the area that does aquatic maintenance on ponds.
I'm all for paying dues for things like tennis courts, etc. These are truly common amenities.
My house, though, is not common property. Let the HOA rules cover only the common stuff.
Incidentally, local government where I live provides tennis courts, basketball courts, swimming pools and plenty of playgrounds. A few of these are within walking distance...
> If it had a convenience store nearby, it would be like a little village
I get that there's a certain type of person who'd like this, but for the majority of people, you're highlighting the reason people don't like HOAs. You're creating a little city, whereas most people just want a home.
In any case, as I may have said somewhere - if you exclude condos, only a small percentage of HOAs have any shared facilities. No courts, no clubhouse, no pool, etc. When I was house hunting, easily under 10% of HOAs had any shared area.
In my local area HOAs are apparently required by the city. We manage ours, a very small HOA, and recently were in discussion about removal. If we remove the HOA, the cost for each house will likely go up significantly because there's work needed to manage a detention pond that the city requires we manage. If the HOA dissolves, they city takes it over but charges much more for the same management.
Feels really odd, no one in our area actually wants an HOA. Yet i think people are going to flip when their HOA dues are suddenly required by the city and at much steeper rates (i imagine 2-4x the cost, our dues are quite small atm).
That’s the entire point of HOAs though; so that the city can offload those costs onto another organization AND collect the same revenue they would otherwise. At least where I live, it’s well understood among developers that the zoning and permitting process is how this is enforced.
The real, completely arbitrary thing that makes housing expensive is zoning. There is research on this. Zoning, especially in the long term, has enormous effects, including on things seemingly unrelated such as reducing construction productivity, reducing competition among construction firms (fewer contractors) and reducing housing supply (supply vs demand).
I think people generally don’t appreciate how restrictive zoning effectively is. It’s not just what you can build, but how big it is, layout things, and can even reach into aesthetics etc.
This is essentially why HOA are mandatory for issuing zoning permits to developers. It's a easy way for municipalities to disavow themselves of having to provide basic infrastructure like water and sewage lines
You have the neighbors you have, and if you want to live in a "free country" then you have to accept that, that street goes both ways.
That doesn't mean, you can't invite your neighbors over pizza or coffee, be friendly and one day mention that you think X, Y or Z and you wouldn't mind helping, and if they they aren't interested you'll totally respect that.
Don't be a Karen. But being considerate the old school way can go far.
The rest you just have to live with :)
When you say "live and let live" it seems impersonal or mutually exclusive. Like "they do their thing, you do yours, never the twain shall meet".
I think GP is advocating exercising social skills rather than "live and let live" without interaction between you.
Get to know each other - BBQ or similar. Sure, you find out or confirm you hate some of their views/hobbies. But it also means you develop human empathy and usually find things you do agree on.
Maybe you hate their loud car. But you both hate the climbing vine on the fenceline and could spend a saturday morning fixing that together.
You know, if you. Built your houses out of brick with proper insulation you wouldn't hear your neighbors playing music when living in detached single family homes.
Why Americans insist on living in fcking plywood shacks is beyond me
As someone who lives in an HOA, the purpose of it is to push responsibilities the city doesn't want to pay for onto us (even though we pay city taxes e.g. property and sales taxes). These include road maintenance and weed abatement. The predictable outcome of forcing a bunch of volunteers to be in charge of this stuff is that the final product is even worse than what the government manages, I.e. everything is constantly falling apart.
I am completely unfamiliar with a world in which HOAs fix roads.
I have also never lived in a city whose government got rid of weeds. What even is “weed abatement”? (Joke: Is this some slang for getting rid of the local marijuana grow houses?)
Don't know if it's what gp is talking about, but in areas prone to wildfire, there are often laws about keeping brush and weeds a certain distance away from any structures.
Not only that but also a responsibility to build whatever fire breaks the fire department seems necessary on land the HOA owns. (This is land that can't be developed; land ownership becomes a liability.)
In one area I lived in, there were legally defined "noxious weeds". Mostly invasive species that have several undesirable attributes.
One example is Musk Thistle. It grows extremely rapidly, reproduces at a rate that's unbelievable, and is very difficult to kill. In this heavily farmed region, a few of them growing in a roadside ditch can turn into tens/hundreds of thousands of them within a year. Not only do they outcompete just about any other plant including crops, but they have incredibly sharp barbs that injure livestock.
In publicly owned spaces or abandoned fields/lots, the county has people that searches for them and sprays them with a herbicide. If they're spotted on your private land, usually they'll notify you that you have X days to cut them down (before they flower and seed) or they'll come do it whether you want them to or not. Some counties will send a bill for this, some fund it from property taxes.
If you haven't lived in an area where they vigorously grow it sounds like a huge overreaction, but left uncontrolled because one neighbor isn't taking care of it, it can become impossible to keep it out of your yard. According to wikipedia, a single plant can produce 10,000 seeds that disperse through the wind and remain viable for decades in the soil. Even the desire to not have a painful rapidly reproducing weed in your yard aside, they can do incredible damage to cropland.
It's a shame though, it's a kinda pretty flower. Imagine a vivid pink sunflower.
In WA we have enormous problems with Himalayan blackberries and scotch broom. When they get a toehold, they take over and leave a "dead zone" underneath. They're very hard to kill. The blackberries grow over 8 feet high and form a thicket that is a lot like razor wire.
Scotch broom seeds will also be viable up to 30 years.
My HOA owns all the common area in the neighborhood, including the streets and parking spaces. So, all that upkeep (paint, seal, re-pave, snow removal, etc) gets paid out of a HOA dues. They also pay for landscaping of common areas, neighborhood lighting, and a few other things. The also organize trash collection (without which we'd have to buy individually and have a constant stream of trash trucks rolling through). And they have to carry insurance to cover that common property.
Who else is going to fix the roads? The county and state aren't going to, they don't own it. We seal the asphalt every 5-8 years and repave every 15-20 (I've only lived her 10 years, so those are very rough guesses).
> The also organize trash collection (without which we'd have to buy individually and have a constant stream of trash trucks rolling through).
That's not a given. I live in a non-HOA area, and everyone on my street has trash collection from the same company on the same day. Thursday night, we set our carts out. Friday morning, we bring them in.
There's a wide middle between HOA bureaucracy and pure chaos.
In my city, and everywhere I've lived, when you buy a house, you by default get no trash service. You find out which trash company services your neighborhood (there will only be one that does), and make an account with them.
I believe that usually means the local government has given a company an 'exclusive'. Or, to use the HN vernacular, the local government has outsourced a service. It's not uncommon.
In a perfect world, sure. That's not reality in most of the US. The county absolutely does NOT provide trash service in my area. And we (via the HOA) absolutely own the roads within the subdivision.
Would be good to get stats on this. Does most of the US (by population, not by area) really not manage the roads (potholes, etc)? And not trash? I've yet to live in a place that didn't have either (across multiple states), but I also don't live in rural areas.
Neighborhood streets - it's mixed, largely on age of development. Pre-1980 (very roughly) that state/county likely own and maintain the roads. Post-1980 (roughly) it's an HOA or condo or similar.
Is this a trick question? The county of course. They own the roads.
Is this a trick answer, or just deeply ignorant. Within 20 miles of me there are different places where a county, a city, a neighborhood and the state own the roads.
Seriously, WTF do you live where there's one answer to this question?
I lived in a townhouse community with an HOA for a few years. They handled paving the roads and all the lawn mowing and landscaping (which included weeding, as well as replacing the tree outside my unit when it died).
Not that I'd ever want an HOA again, but that was nice and your experience isn't canonical.
Hiring a landscaper that does a decent job and doesn't just collect a paycheck is surprisingly hard, especially on the budget that most HOAs try to get by on.
As far as the road part, I agree, doesn't mean that it's reality though.
I dunno...I paid a small, entirely 'reasonable' fee, and shit got taken care of without me dealing with it. Just like if I'd paid that fee to a government (which I didn't). I know that doesn't fit your agenda, but don't let me stop you virtue signally how much more enlightened your view of how I should run my life is.
So you didn't bother to read where I explicitly said I wouldn't want an HOA ever again. I guess it was more important to hear yourself speak than replay to what was actually posted.
You said that, and you also said your experience was "nice" and accused me of virtue signalling about how you should run your life when I mentioned that the advantages you listed are pretty insignificant. I hope you'll forgive me for having a hard time figuring out what the hell your point is.
Friend of mine lives in an HOA that provides gym access to the community.
You'd think that means they have a gym on-site, but no; the HOA has a contract with a local health club to provide them with gym access. The club is owned by the builder's brother and the builder wrote the gym membership agreement into the HOA bylaws before turning it over to the community for management.
My friend is pretty understandably upset at this petty corruption, but every time it comes up, the HOA board would much rather deal with the "veneer" issues. Part of that is because the HOA board are busybodies, and part of that is because they're volunteers who have no desire to start a legal slap fight with the builder and his brother when they remove the (probably) unenforceable gym agreement from the bylaws.
Home issue will never get solved unless houses are mandated by law to be a shelter, not an investment, or at least, an asset that depreciates over time same way japan did it. As long as housing is considered an investment, it will always go up to the point they become like now, their values become speculative rather than real actual cost, and that will open the doors for many monkey business to keep the speculative prices high. An authoritarian law to change housing to shelter rights will solve it, not a democratic one since majority of voters are home owners or who is in charge it’s in their interests to keep it that way. Will that happen? Not peacefully I assume, so many things are built on the current status, from banks interests and creating credits out of thin air, to countries economy based on keeping people near certain spots to milk more taxes, remember, one of the biggest reasons why WFH was attacked in such coordinated way is to protect the real-estate industry and the things built around it.
The problem is that municipalities absolutely love HOAs. They get all the tax revenue and get to wash their hands of most responsibilities involved with them. From their perspective, they get to found little vassal townships where they can say “it’s your problem” to little people problems like “there’s too many potholes in the road” and “that sewer lift station is making weird smells.”
Oh, but if you want to do anything, you still need to pay those permit and inspection fees! No, we won’t help you find a paver at a reasonable rate even though putting those contracts out to bid is what we do all day long.
What is really bullshit is that HOAs aren’t granted a property tax abatement for absorbing many municipal functions.
I understand why they do that though. Cities don't usually make enough money from property taxes to fund the infrastructure in the suburbs. That why they always seem to be on the verge of budget cuts, raising taxes, or bankruptcy.
> From their perspective, they get to found little vassal townships where they can say “it’s your problem” to little people problems like “there’s too many potholes in the road” and “that sewer lift station is making weird smells.”
Roads and sewer are two things I've never seen an HOA have jurisdiction over; in every HOA community I've lived in, the municipality still owned the roads and the water and sewer infrastructure. The HOA was only responsible for things like mowing the grass in common areas and maintaining play equipment there.
I’ve lived in two HOAs and they both owned and maintained roads in the community. One of them was a new development, and making the roads private was probably a big reason the county required an HOA for it.
Thanks to Governor Kotek, Oregon passed a bit of housing reform in 2025 that lets you build 'middle housing' despite anything an HOA says. I was really happy to go to Salem (Oregon's capital) to speak in favor of that.
The way to deal with a bad HOA is to get on the board. Normally, HOA boards attract the most petty minded people because most of the normal people living in the community are too busy but if a bunch of like-minded people get on the board, they can bring sanity back.
> if a bunch of like-minded people get on the board, they can bring sanity back.
This sounds good, but I don't think it generally works. The problem is that the petty minded people are also the ones who don't have anything else to do with their time, so they can expend all their effort on being petty. Whereas the normal people have other things to do with their lives, and simply don't have the time to deal with all the pettiness, and if they end up on the board, they now don't have a choice: their lives are basically hostage to the petty people who keep taking up their time with bogus issues that can't just be ignored because the structure of the HOA requires some kind of response.
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 56.7 ms ] threadAfter expressing their utmost sympathies and saying they'd help any way they could, mere weeks later they put a legal "estoppel" on the sale of the house due to some overgrown vines(?), which of course, were never mentioned by anyone.
Regardless, they made a simple issue (which was not disclosed at least to me) a legal hassle.
Would be better to say "I can run a research agent session and it can pull 5 data trends and papers that show the HOA are making things better" (I dont know if this is true and I did not do it)
I don't really think HOAs are the biggest driver of home prices/availbility one way or the other though.
80% incoherent narration of random numbers, all down to the 1’s place so it looks super duper precise and impressive if you squint and don’t think too hard, like the “author” seems to have done.
You can say the exact same about the government. To be clear, are you in favor of more liberty for homeowners, or are you in favor of the government stepping in to regulate HOAs?
Then I moved to one in North Carolina that was god-awful. Dues started at $65/month and went up every year. They’d send out neighborhood reminders that a pressure-washing service would be in the neighborhood next week if anyone wanted to hire them; anyone who didn’t got notices a few weeks later that they needed to pressure-wash their driveway and/or house. I also had to buy a specific brand and sheen of paint to repaint my mailbox; of course, the lettering was only available from a single supplier.
I now live on an acre lot that sits between two neighborhoods. I have no HOA, and it is glorious.
There really needs to be a way to harm organizations that do this. The HOA system is setup where the organization is protected and given the ability to make these kinds of rules. The only real option you have in that is you have to pawn the property off to some poor sucker that will also run into this issue later.
They are not truth or judgment machines.
I guess you could be in a LLM, in which case you'd have to wait for retraining.
What's wrong with lavender? Why does everything have to be a boring tan or grey? You sound like the exact reason I would never buy a house with an HOA.
Are you arguing a meta point that there is no such thing as truth because LLMs can make you any counter argument to you want? That seems bleak. Argue against the actual points of the article.
"A foreclosure suit is not a lost home — most end when the owner, or the owner's lender, pays — but the pressure is the point."
Which makes no sense whatsoever. I thought they were making a housing crisis worse by forcing foreclosures, but now apparently "the pressure is the point." The point of what, exactly?
We're just talking about one article here, but its an ocean of garbage being generated out there, yeah...go argue against all those and you'll waste your whole life.
I don't give a shit about a "stunning" neighborhood. If I own property nobody else should have a say about its appearance.
The only exception I'd defend is a historic neighborhood where the goal is specifically to upkeep a historically accurate appearance of centuries ago.
But no, I will NEVER support an HOA anywhere else. These consortiums of Karens that patrol modern housing communities can go to hell.
I will plant the flowers I want, have the Halloween decorations I want, and do whatever woodworking I want in my front yard. What's the point of ownership if I can't own it?
Net resolution you lose money living in a worse location.
Most neighborhoods I’ve lived in have not had an HOA. They’ve ranged from okay to great.
I can think of a few neighbor situations where an HOA with teeth would have been welcome. The most specific involved someone getting a big angry dog breed, neglecting it, and then leaving their gate unlocked so it got out. That one was eventually dealt with by the city, though.
Meanwhile the one HOA I lived under was pretty boring and friendly. Didn’t really bother anyone but maintained a nice common area. HOA board members were friendly and reasonable, but then again so were all the neighbors so there wasn’t much to deal with.
I think the nightmare situation is a busybody HOA that starts going after things that don’t matter, which would be hell.
Wow, no. That should only be dealt with by the city. I cannot imagine the types of misuse and abuse that would come from the self-centered, small-minded petty tyrants that want to be on a HOA board deciding what breeds of dog they'd like in their community. It'd be a bunch of "toy" dogs that frankly I find far more obnoxious than larger breeds with incessant yapping. I don't get to make the decision that that's a problem, because it's a preference/annoyance, not a problem. But you can guarantee that that's the kind of thing that happens.
> I think the nightmare situation is a busybody HOA that starts going after things that don’t matter, which would be hell.
I think many HOAs are exactly that, because often the kind of person drawn to being on a HOA board is exactly that. Just like they're often the kind of person to post on Nextdoor, "Hey, there are a bunch of black teenagers I've not seen before walking down the street."
I would wager that the money residents might have paid for HOA fees have largely gone into their own home/yard improvements, and it shows. Adding an HOA in this place, and I think most places, would be a burden rather than a benefit.
Also, we have no HOA, so there are no ridiculous restrictions, which means the neighborhood has character. Every house is painted in unique colorful styles, instead of endless shades of dull beige. Every house has unique vegetation choices based on owner preferences so it is fun to walk around and sightsee. We have no HOA, so there are zero restrictions on decorations, so we are the Halloween capital of the county (coming up in a few weeks!)
It's a vibrant unique neighborhood full of facilities and character, precisely because there is no HOA to destroy it.
A similar neighborhood across town (we're a small town so across town is just a mile away) has a HOA, every house is a dull shade of beige and they have very harsh rules, like HOAs of course do, on decorations, so Halloween and Christmas are DOA over there.
Unfortunately there are nowhere near enough choices for people who want a bit more joy out of their neighborhood than that.
What consequences are sane for a member who does not pay dues, water bills, etc., for a prolonged period? Turning off the water is illegal here. Liens get ignored. My HOA will avoid foreclosure for years, and has only resorted to it twice in twenty years, but it's the ultimate recourse. Should the other members just suck it up forever?
HOA should be allowed to kick out member. And people should be allowed to not be members of HOA.
Even if it’s a very low maintenance and amenity HOA on public roads, how do you resolve the fact that all the fees and costs have accumulated if the home were to be sold, you essentially end up at a similar end point where the home is sold. Usually these are also not individual circumstances, i.e., a person who has ignored all kind of warnings and letters and board meetings over usually years, also has many other issues going on and often they’re just letting the home go anyways and e.g., are just living there for “free” for about 1-3 years of HOA/bank legal proceedings.
There is no need for "HOA owned and maintained street". You do not need HOA to maintain streets.
You might in the event the streets aren't publicly maintained.
But that use case is in the extreme minority (rural development) compared to the common HOA usage (dense large suburban developments).
Very easy answer: they don't get access to the pool, river docks, common lakes (per peer thread) that the HOA maintains.
They of course must maintain full control and ownership of their private home.
If you answer that there is nothing they would lose access to (no pool, no rivers, no lakes) then that is a very strong answer stating the HOA has no right to exist.
For example, they’ve fought for the right to have a “right to work”, so that closed shops can’t be a thing — you cannot compel inclusion in a bargaining unit by nature of employment.
Yet restrictive deed covenants where you are compelled by the state to join a private association are fine.
The arguments for or against them are similar if you dig into them.
None. No HOA should have any power over a private home owned by an individual.
Not sure how water bill is relevant, that is paid to the water agency. They'll shut off water if not paid for some months.
What does this have to do with a HOA being allowed to demand color of windowshades or what kind of flowers someone likes to plant in their yard?
The fact that some HOAs are meddlesome neighbors havens doesn’t mean all of them are. (Though I agree with others here that the roles herein described belong to a municipality.)
... there should be one, wtf is wrong with your country? Why are you replacing towns with HOAs?
Our property taxes are so low they have made grown men shed tears of joy.
So instead you put this burden on the people living there, who presumably are already paying some form of taxes?
What's the point of all this? Give up ownership of your own house and frontyard, so you can pay dues, to get access to services that would be free with a real municipality?
> would be free with a real municipality
You can’t possibly be serious with this.
The HOA hired a law firm, forced a foreclosure, held a foreclosure auction where the HOA itself bought her house for THREE DOLLARS, and continued to charge her HOA dues (even though the HOA owned the home now) before evicting her later.
The HOA then sold the home to an employee involved in the foreclosure, whose partner was on the HOA board that had voted to foreclose, and voted to accept the three dollar ($3.24, to be precise) bid, though they hid this behind an LLC that didn't actually exist when they did it. The employee then reactivated her real estate license and sold the home to another family several months later.
There are fewer greater lunacies than HOAs, and the type of people drawn to run them.
And when I say they sold it to an employee involved after buying it themselves at auction for that $3.24, they sold it to the employee for one dollar. So this woman was out hundreds of thousands of dollars of equity because a self-dealing HOA and its law firm (tied by marriage to one of the HOA board) voted to foreclose on her home and accept a purchase price that couldn't buy you a drink at Starbucks.
>Florida ranks 1st of the states on HOA Spy for foreclosure suits brought by associations, with 10,296 of 14,168. The count depends on which courts are indexed in each state as well as on the associations, so it is a count of records, not a rate.
Florida is known for having the strongest "sunshine" laws in the country, that make government records transparent. That makes this statistic pretty useless.
Technically public and transparent are different things. I looked up a couple HOAs on HOA Spy that I know have filed liens in my state–they come up green.
Good.
> ... and their owners' values decrease.
Really? In fifty years of home owning, not once with the "benefit" of a HOA, I've yet to see an owned house value decline.
Some countries just bypassed this entire US obsession with redlining and keeping the others out. Maybe try working more on community and less on uniformity.
I have that (see: Australia).
Don't need no HOA for that, just good community spirit, sensible local government, etc.
Freedom of assembly. If my neighbors and I buy stuff, put it in a box and then buy and create rules around how its benefits and costs are divided, and I sell my share in the box, that should be fine.
It's like "buying" digital movies. The button says Purchase but you/Amazon still get to dictate terms long after the sale.
They bought the box with the rules attached. Property is a packet of rights and obligations.
Should the town be allowed, ex post facto, to decide you’re no longer getting police and fire protection because they control those resources?
> I just paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to have my name put on someone else's contract without being able to negotiate any terms
Plenty of people negotiate HOA riders in buyers’ markets.
> like "buying" digital movies
Someone buying a house like they buy movies is always going wind up with the short end of the stick.
I’ll do whatever I can to wage war against the median HOA owner. They are the scum of society and deserve every bad thing that happens to them.
I think that property taxes and similars (e.g. HOA dues) should accrue as a lien against a property but not be foreclosable during the original owner's life. Then you create a state-backed entity that provides guarantees on loans against those liens for the municipalities and HOA subject to certain rules. (They could still factor those liens privately sans limitation.)
> They foreclose on their own members, over debts that start small
There are members who refuse to pay special assessments or fees for the community. Given that's Flordia, theres an above average population that would believe "they aren't required to" even though they accepted it when starting. (yes there are abusive HOAs and there are non-sense fines.. and sometimes those nonsense fines come from people neglecting the property in a very bad situation)
It's your job to handle it when it's a small situation. Moving to the stage of liens takes more time to do that and then resolving that usually happens on sale or refinancing.
This site seems to provide some data that's compelling. I see some gaps in California and a couple of liens that mention FL in Los Angeles. Maybe it's a starting point if moving though. This kind of transparency is a good thing. Some HOAs are abusive.
Funnily enough, there does seem to be a sort of wannabe HOA in my neighborhood that is always dropping things off in our mailbox asking for donations and telling us about events. I never give them any money, and never go to their events though, so either they don't provide any value or the value they provide apparently is not derived from them having any enforcement power.
Condo rules are much stricter than HOAs
State of Florida also puts caps on fines - the max is $100/day or $1000 for a single violation. But that’s after a period to cure and then due process meetings (made up of homeowners not board members) who may waive or not fine at all or defer.
A homeowner can also fix the problem and later have the same problem again but not be fined if they fix in time.
The foreclosures are for extreme cases and a lot of HOA attorney shops don’t charge a retainer but will tack on fees that are paid back to the HOA attorney and association.
To get to that point takes a long time
The near universal proliferation of owner's associations and management groups and whatnot for developments larger than ~1ac (the EPA threshold, some states/towns have lower) is something you can lay at the feet of the Clean Water Act and it's implementation and precedents over the following decades.
Developers don't do anything that costs money, like set up an HOA, without a reason. The developers create the HOA because you need your >1ac residential development to pass stormwater permitting. While you theoretically could make each individual .25ac parcel you're putting a house on compliant as a standalone it's infinitely cheaper to just ignore all that, grade everything toward the road, dig a ditch, send the contents of the ditch through your stormwater treatment features, build in a little margin to those items, show the permitting authority the numbers that prove it passes with flying colors and when some jerk says "but what if X Y Z changes" you point to the excess you built in and tell them to GFY.
Now, where it really gets evil is when you start really pinching pennies or where the rules change over the course of the process making your numbers not work. Say you've got a lot of grade, a lot of rainfall, a lot of stormwater you gotta "treat". Well, you start adding rules to the HOA. Require certain parts of the lots remains grass or planter or whatever. Disallow patios, but do allow wood decks because the municipality considers those pervious, etc, etc. Or maybe the results you've got are marginal but you throw the bureaucrats a bone by saying you'll disallow car-ports and sheds in the HOA rules to prevent people from adding impervious surface. Or maybe you're uphill of some wetlands but not close enough to be regulated by default you promise to disallow working on cars and require people pick up their pet waste and not use lawn fertilizer or some other laundry list of certain things in order to make the local town's wetlands people comfortable not raising objection and claiming jurisdiction.
And of course, however these rules and plans shake out, the HOA is responsible for enforcing whatever those rules and requirements are in perpetuity so it's not like a pissed off majority can show up to vote "ok, this has gone too far, pack it in boys"
But nobody wants to talk about any of that because it's uncomfortable.
The latter, because I can kick them out of office, and because silly rules will impact a much larger number of people, and a large number can have their voices heard.
When your HOA has only 20-30 members, variance is high. It's a lot easier for people to abuse HOA power for their own personal gains.
Yes, and then you find out just how petty petty politics can be.
The inconvenient truth, at least for HOA advocates, is that a community of 20-30 people, or even a hundred or so, does not need to be governed at the level of the community. Most people are reasonable and will respond to reasonable requests from neighbors if there is an issue, without having to drag in a higher authority at all. Those who are not reasonable, are not going to be magically made reasonable by having an HOA--indeed, as you admit, they're precisely the ones who are going to end up running the HOA. On balance, you're better off not having "governance" at all until you get to a larger population, like a town or a city.
Only in a very minimal sense. A management that is only empowered to maintain common areas of a community can't "govern" the community members except in the very narrow sense of enforcing whatever rules the community wants to have for the use of common areas. Which is just an aspect of the fact that the community as a whole owns the common areas and the owner makes the rules.
Such a management can't mess with community members about how often they cut their lawns, or what color they paint their house, etc. But that sort of micromanagement is what "governance" by HOAs ends up being when it goes beyond basic management of common areas.
This varies widely depending on the city. In many cities, it's hard to find a detached house in a neighborhood (that isn't ghetto) that doesn't have an HOA.
Sure. I think very few, if any, people dispute that. If there actually are common facilities like pools, it makes sense to have a common pot of money everyone contributes into, to maintain those facilities. Just about everyone will agree with that.
How do you make the huge leap from that, into saying a HOA has any kind of right to demand what kinds of flowers or windowshades or decorations someone installs into their private (not shared!) property?
I showed up to my first annual meeting where basically no one was there other than the president. He asked if I wanted to be on the board because they didn't have enough people participating. I asked what I'd have to do, and he said "just vote on things". I said OK, and he said the rules let him appoint members to vacancies (spoilers: the rules don't), so he "appointed" me on the spot.
At subsequent meetings, I discovered most of the board was completely disinterested in doing anything, other than the president who would probably fall under the "petty little shit" category, but he seemed like he knew what he was doing (spoilers: he didn't), so everyone pretty much just voted in favor of what he wanted to do. I was the only board member who worked from home, so I would be the only one on site to deal with things that involved vendors working on the property, so then I became the guy everyone expected to do everything.
The president got diagnosed with cancer and had to step down. He wanted me to be president, but I was like fuck that. The VP took the role, but she has pretty much done nothing and is clueless, so I keep being the one people expect to take the lead on everything.
I'm honestly tired of it and wished some competent people in the association would get on the board. There were massive mistakes I caught as a board member because I'm the only one who actually reads anything in the bylaws, CC&Rs, and all that shit. The HOA had been paying hundreds of dollars a year for decades on things that didn't need to be performed because our property management company misclassified us under some statute that didn't even apply to us, and nobody knew any better or even bothered to ask, "Hey, why the fuck are we actually doing this?"
I'll not say I'm a "good" board member. I don't care about enforcing house rules, and I don't want to get involved when people complain about their neighbors unless it's something that affects the association's financial health. The only reason I stay on is because I've done enough of after-the-fact clean-up of the previous president's mess that I'm terrified of what insane things might happen if no one is keeping an eye on the other members. If you're in an HOA, I'd encourage getting involved to keep the crazies in check, at least for as long as you can stomach it.
Anyway, thanks for listening to my TED talk.
It's not a competition, but I'm pretty sure my "wow this is totally fucked up" stories beat yours ;)
People should instead think in terms of ends. Human beings are social animals. We have obligations toward others (here, the community). That includes obligations that concern the environment that the community occupies. So the fruitful focus of energy and debate should be what this means for the community (what are these obligations, and why) and if and how to regulate them.
> "I think by far the most important bill in our whole code is that for the diffusion of knowledge among the people...whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government"
> "The most effectual means of preventing tyranny would be to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large"
No, he wouldn't, because he used "self-governance" to mean the thing that contradicts what it says on its face.
> It's not an oxymoron - it just comes with caveats.
The kind of "democratic" governance we actually have certainly comes with caveats, yes--caveats that have basically never been really dealt with. Jefferson's ideal of a "well-informed people" has never been achieved.
Jefferson did claim to believe that the US Federal government should be as minimal as possible--until he became President and found that it's actually kind of nice to be able to use that power to do things you feel like doing, whether they actually meet that minimal government ideal or not.
But in any case, none of that justifies describing the governance we actually have as "self-governance".
I think I still prefer that to HOAs, because - The city is pretty good at taking care of public facilities - I only pay city tax, not city tax and HOA fees - The city has better things to do than walk around neighborhoods looking for violations, so enforcement is pretty lax - The city government is subject to checks and balances
The one advantage of higher levels of government over HOAs is that they are generally impersonal. The faceless bureacrats that are processing your forms generally don't have any personal animus against you. They don't have to live next door to you and they don't have to care what your personal oddities are. They're just executing a bureaucratic process. Whereas with an HOA, every little petty personal grievance gets magnified, and so-called "governance" turns into endless feuding.
If you don’t need an HOA (because there are actually shared common elements that need to be maintained) then why would you want one? And if you do need one, why would you want it to do anything beyond what’s required to maintain the shared bits?
My own personal experience from my wife having owned one condo and she and I having owned four houses is not very encouraging for your claim either. Of the four HOAs involved, the two that were run entirely by management companies (i.e., by people with no personal connection to the neighborhood, with little or no activity from the community members on the Board that we could see) were fine, they kept the common areas maintained and basically did nothing else that affected us. The condo association, while it had a management company, also had a Board filled with community members who had nothing better to do than harass everyone else, which they did with an energy that would have been amazing if it had been directed towards something productive. The other HOA had no management company, just the Board of community members, and was very intrusive, and from what we learned from neighbors, had been a mess for the entire history of the community.
So we now live in a neighborhood with no HOA, we only have to deal with the municipality. We like it.
This is a false dichotomy: if you live under the rule of an HOA, you still have to follow municipal ordinances and city laws in addition to HOA regulations.
I’d have no problem with their existence if it was a free market, but I have a big problem with them when they’re being legally mandated.
This is true, and I'd never choose to live in an area like that.
“Full rate” is almost always subsidized through the windfall taxes on new growth and development, putting towns in a ponzi scheme like situation.
Kind of like how not all software problems are Buffer Overflows.
Then people ought to be complaining about their local governments, not HOAs.
Complain all you want, but if all new homes in your city are in a HOA, you are going to be under the thumb of those 80-something HOA board members who have nothing else to do in life but nitpick your house violations. Is that a desirable outcome for anyone?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/24/older-people-w...
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/03/dan-patrick-coronavi...
https://www.democracynow.org/2020/3/24/headlines/texas_lt_go...
Still renting is almost always a better economic choice. It's a question of whether your quality of life and the ability to experience meaning is directly tied to your feeling of ownership which somehow translates back to your interest in building your community and neighborhood. And that's where it comes full circle
Maybe HOA's are bad, maybe they're good, but the intellectual laziness required to shit this kind of garbage out onto the internet in place of genuine thought and analysis will fuckin kill us all.
If you want to live in an apartment, but - get the tax and investment advantages of owning then you need to do it via buying into a corporation of some sort. So they must exist.
If you are not paying on upkeep of your house they have to do something and that is going to be expensive, they have a right to get that money from whoever didn't pay not spread it out to the other owners.
While it isn't called foreclosure if you don't pay your property taxes your house will be foreclosed on. That an HOA can is just another entity.
There are a lot of people who live in Florida so I'd expect them to have a lot of HOAs. The only surprise is California doesn't beat Florida in this list, but that could well be a case of California has stupid laws and so you can't get the good parts of an HOA.
These is a lot to hate about HOAs. However the idea is sound and they can do good things. We need to stop the bad things that they do, but nothing that in the article points to anything bad.
I (thankfully) live in a neighborhood without an HOA. Just one block away, there is an HOA. No reason to prefer that street (and home values aren't higher there).
This isn't an upper class neighborhood. It's mixed. Half of the residents are blue collar workers.
Over the years, I would think of reasons/annoyances where I'd say "Yes, while I'm glad I don't have an HOA, if we did have one it would take care of this or that annoying problem with the neighbor."
Then I spoke to friends who live in HOA neighborhoods and are on the HOA board. They told me clearly that "No, in practice, the HOA is not going to get involved in those (serious) matters. All they care about is the veneer (house appearance) and really petty rules." They also told me the purpose of the HOA was to justify its own existence. The owners get almost nothing for the funds they collect, other than a 3rd party company driving by and noting minor violations.
Another friend just had to spend $4000 to paint the front of his house. He's temporarily living in another state for a work assignment, and he and several others got notices that the HOA has decided to change the "look" of the neighborhood. Otherwise his house looked fine (not worn out paint or anything). I bet someone in the neighborhood has friends with a painting outfit.
I can stomach the idea of an HOA if they solved real problems (sanitation, etc), and not just appearances, but they don't. Even if it's in their bylaws, they don't enforce the serious stuff. Just the petty stuff.
Someone losing a home because they decided to have a window AC facing the street is plain immoral.
In practice, HOAs generally don't do anything useful, though.
How?
There are a couple examples in the comments, of HOAs awarding no-bid, single-source contracts to cronies or family. Are you sure that a government-par bid process is universally, legally required for HOAs contracting out with contractors?
> If someone doesn’t like how the HOA is run then they can always try to run against the current Board members running for re election.
There are also several examples in the comments, of dreadful HOAs which retain power for reasons other than residents simply wanting it. Applied to the crony contracting described above, I don't think that most residents, if polled, would say that they want that, yet the examples still happened. That seems to indicate that your remedy was inadequate to effect the will of the people. So my question to you is:
If, say, people don't want their HOA corruptly accepting inflated charges in no-bid contracts with friends and family, using HOA money, how is it that in some cases, their HOA did so? Those are the failure points in representation which need addressing.
Yes, per Fl Statute 720 any quotes/bids for contracts exceeding 10% of the budget requires competitive bids but doesn’t set a number like 3. Two is practical minimum.
But competitive bids for attorneys, architects, CPAs, community association managers, or sole source vendors where there is only one in the area that does the work etc are not required. Like say a business that is the only one in the area that does aquatic maintenance on ponds.
Anything else in here is just anecdotal
My house, though, is not common property. Let the HOA rules cover only the common stuff.
Incidentally, local government where I live provides tennis courts, basketball courts, swimming pools and plenty of playgrounds. A few of these are within walking distance...
If it had a convenience store nearby, it would be like a little village
I get that there's a certain type of person who'd like this, but for the majority of people, you're highlighting the reason people don't like HOAs. You're creating a little city, whereas most people just want a home.
In any case, as I may have said somewhere - if you exclude condos, only a small percentage of HOAs have any shared facilities. No courts, no clubhouse, no pool, etc. When I was house hunting, easily under 10% of HOAs had any shared area.
Feels really odd, no one in our area actually wants an HOA. Yet i think people are going to flip when their HOA dues are suddenly required by the city and at much steeper rates (i imagine 2-4x the cost, our dues are quite small atm).
The real, completely arbitrary thing that makes housing expensive is zoning. There is research on this. Zoning, especially in the long term, has enormous effects, including on things seemingly unrelated such as reducing construction productivity, reducing competition among construction firms (fewer contractors) and reducing housing supply (supply vs demand).
I think people generally don’t appreciate how restrictive zoning effectively is. It’s not just what you can build, but how big it is, layout things, and can even reach into aesthetics etc.
That doesn't mean, you can't invite your neighbors over pizza or coffee, be friendly and one day mention that you think X, Y or Z and you wouldn't mind helping, and if they they aren't interested you'll totally respect that.
Don't be a Karen. But being considerate the old school way can go far. The rest you just have to live with :)
(I have nothing to add to the HOA discussion, just saying that “live and let live” has limits)
I think GP is advocating exercising social skills rather than "live and let live" without interaction between you.
Get to know each other - BBQ or similar. Sure, you find out or confirm you hate some of their views/hobbies. But it also means you develop human empathy and usually find things you do agree on.
Maybe you hate their loud car. But you both hate the climbing vine on the fenceline and could spend a saturday morning fixing that together.
Why Americans insist on living in fcking plywood shacks is beyond me
I am completely unfamiliar with a world in which HOAs fix roads.
I have also never lived in a city whose government got rid of weeds. What even is “weed abatement”? (Joke: Is this some slang for getting rid of the local marijuana grow houses?)
Wrt weeds, I suspect you are simply unaware of all the maintenance tasks your city does. Consider yourself blessed!
One example is Musk Thistle. It grows extremely rapidly, reproduces at a rate that's unbelievable, and is very difficult to kill. In this heavily farmed region, a few of them growing in a roadside ditch can turn into tens/hundreds of thousands of them within a year. Not only do they outcompete just about any other plant including crops, but they have incredibly sharp barbs that injure livestock.
In publicly owned spaces or abandoned fields/lots, the county has people that searches for them and sprays them with a herbicide. If they're spotted on your private land, usually they'll notify you that you have X days to cut them down (before they flower and seed) or they'll come do it whether you want them to or not. Some counties will send a bill for this, some fund it from property taxes.
If you haven't lived in an area where they vigorously grow it sounds like a huge overreaction, but left uncontrolled because one neighbor isn't taking care of it, it can become impossible to keep it out of your yard. According to wikipedia, a single plant can produce 10,000 seeds that disperse through the wind and remain viable for decades in the soil. Even the desire to not have a painful rapidly reproducing weed in your yard aside, they can do incredible damage to cropland.
It's a shame though, it's a kinda pretty flower. Imagine a vivid pink sunflower.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carduus_nutans
Scotch broom seeds will also be viable up to 30 years.
Who else is going to fix the roads? The county and state aren't going to, they don't own it. We seal the asphalt every 5-8 years and repave every 15-20 (I've only lived her 10 years, so those are very rough guesses).
That's not a given. I live in a non-HOA area, and everyone on my street has trash collection from the same company on the same day. Thursday night, we set our carts out. Friday morning, we bring them in.
There's a wide middle between HOA bureaucracy and pure chaos.
My neighborhood - HOA handles it, trash pickup twice/weekly.
My parent's neighborhood (where I grew up) - no HOA, everybody handles it themselves, so adjacent houses end up with pickup on different days.
My previous neighborhood - county service (grandfathered in, the county stopped providing it decades ago, probably because people want a tax cut).
Just like electricity, gas, etc.
There is a single trash company serving our area. Everyone just has a contact with them.
Of course not, that's not how it works. The city contracts with a trash collector and they set a weekly schedule for each neighborhood.
> Who else is going to fix the roads?
Is this a trick question? The county of course. They own the roads.
HOAs have no purpose.
Dumb AF? Yes, no argument. Reality? Sad but true.
Neighborhood streets - it's mixed, largely on age of development. Pre-1980 (very roughly) that state/county likely own and maintain the roads. Post-1980 (roughly) it's an HOA or condo or similar.
Similar for trash.
Is this a trick answer, or just deeply ignorant. Within 20 miles of me there are different places where a county, a city, a neighborhood and the state own the roads.
Seriously, WTF do you live where there's one answer to this question?
Not that I'd ever want an HOA again, but that was nice and your experience isn't canonical.
As far as the road part, I agree, doesn't mean that it's reality though.
You'd think that means they have a gym on-site, but no; the HOA has a contract with a local health club to provide them with gym access. The club is owned by the builder's brother and the builder wrote the gym membership agreement into the HOA bylaws before turning it over to the community for management.
My friend is pretty understandably upset at this petty corruption, but every time it comes up, the HOA board would much rather deal with the "veneer" issues. Part of that is because the HOA board are busybodies, and part of that is because they're volunteers who have no desire to start a legal slap fight with the builder and his brother when they remove the (probably) unenforceable gym agreement from the bylaws.
The segment ends with a funny "ad" about HOAs[1].
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrizmAo17Os
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrizmAo17Os&t=1273s
Oh, but if you want to do anything, you still need to pay those permit and inspection fees! No, we won’t help you find a paver at a reasonable rate even though putting those contracts out to bid is what we do all day long.
What is really bullshit is that HOAs aren’t granted a property tax abatement for absorbing many municipal functions.
Roads and sewer are two things I've never seen an HOA have jurisdiction over; in every HOA community I've lived in, the municipality still owned the roads and the water and sewer infrastructure. The HOA was only responsible for things like mowing the grass in common areas and maintaining play equipment there.
This sounds good, but I don't think it generally works. The problem is that the petty minded people are also the ones who don't have anything else to do with their time, so they can expend all their effort on being petty. Whereas the normal people have other things to do with their lives, and simply don't have the time to deal with all the pettiness, and if they end up on the board, they now don't have a choice: their lives are basically hostage to the petty people who keep taking up their time with bogus issues that can't just be ignored because the structure of the HOA requires some kind of response.