What the hell is the story behind this? $2500 a month for the HOA when it used to be $150? This won’t end well for the board or the developer. You mess with someone’s home then you get a nice in-person visit.
What terms justify "absurd" rent? Where do you draw the line? Doesn't the fact that YOU would need to deem it absurd mean the terms aren't reasonable to you?
You should work with neighbors to control the HOA board. That means running candidates and getting them elected. Depending on how corrupt the builder is this can be hard to do and may take legal action (suing to enforce the HOA governing rules).
But on its face it seems suicidal to cause the home owners to go bankrupt and leave your properties. Unless of course you'd like to tear down the development and build a big fat datacenter on it (the only building that is going on these days) which would net a profit. As grifts go it would kind of amazingly evil you get as much money as you can out of making your homeowners broke followed by selling the land out of foreclosure to build a data center on it and making a profit on that too.
They don't have voting power nor the power to air grievances in the HOA meetings.
States need to step in and pass laws against this. Georgia recently passed laws to prohibit what HOAs can do and how much they can charge. It also made them register with the state and remain in good standing to be able to collect dues at all. Other states need to follow suit.
Why wouldn't it be legal? Reminds me of those 'non-profit' charter schools where the 'school' entity pays huge rent and/or other admin type costs to a very much for-profit entity controlled by the same people. So they set the price at what they want and extract what they can.
At least here in Argentina the equivalent of the HOA of the apartments have a lot of governmental regulations, they can't decide to pay the administrator a million dollars per month. Most accusation are about overprice in repair work and other stuff that is harder to prove.
A few years ago a common trick was that the developer designated the initial administrator. Then add a rule that requires a super majority to change the administrator, so it was almost impossible to remove it. Now there is a law that declares that special rule void in all apartments.
This isn't a "subscription service". This is a home. It's a significant portion of most people's net worth.
Most HOAs exist to do common area maintenance and make sure neighbors don't paint their house purple, install neon exterior lights, and chase away buyers.
This is something else entirely. It's malicious theft.
> Read the article. The HOA was a few hundred a month. Now it's 10x as much.
Read my comment, I specifically mentioned about not getting a house with an HOA in the first place. Again, if you chose a house that's in a HOA, it's on you.
> This is beyond predatory.
Of course, they're predatory, what did you think was it about? It's always someone with a power trip sitting on their boards. For a "HN contrarian", you sure get upset about a logical argument.
People could vote to weaken HOAs so that people could have a way to leave HOAs when they are not providing value to home owners. We don't have to let corporate owners of residential property or landlords that do not live in their properties have any HOA voting rights. HOAs are currently used by builders to control homeowners.
This should flip to the HOA being used by residents to control builders and landlords. Builders would stop using HOAs if they could not control them, just like it used to be when houses were built just fine without HOAs.
Voting for billionaire conspiracies is more important to a lot of people than voting for themselves.
That doesn't work because a lot of city councils have offloaded responsibilities to HOAs as cost-saving measures. HOAs now build roads, water, sewage systems, garbage collection and security in many places. If a house leaves the HOA ... does it lose access to the road? How will road maintenance be paid? What about water? Etc.
This is getting worse, by the way. What will people do once the city council decides HOAs must run schools as well?
First, it doesn't matter what city council wants to do. They cannot force anyone into an HOA.
Second, it sounds like you are saying they need to run for their HOA to end it and run for city council to tax rich people again so we can pay for basic bare minimum services again. Giving tax breaks for the rich and telling people to form an HOA for garbage collection is not a solution to anything. Vote out the current people who set this nonsense up.
The board is shooting themselves in the foot here. You raise fees enough then no one will be able to afford living there. If no one is able to afford it, then the board is exacerbating the problem they’re attempting to solve in the first place with the fee increase, which is legal collection fees from delinquent owners.
Is there oil underneath or will this be a good place to build a datacenter? This is obviously intentional. The foreclosed properties will be sold for the price of the debt, probably back to the developer.
For those saying dissolve the HOA or don't buy in an HOA. FTA: The developer, who owns the majority of the houses controls the HOA.
It is not easy to buy a house in the US that is not controlled by an HOA. A lot of houses are in an HOA and you really have to go out of your way to avoid it. If you're looking in a suburb, exurb, it's 100% going to be an HOA. It's by design:
HOAs are tightly connected to racial segregation, racially restrictive housing, and redlining. Read up on those and it will make you sick to your stomach.
Controlling what homeowners can do to the exterior of their houses has been the main theme of many HOAs. Combined with this, racist policies and architectural uniformity were historically intertwined. They were both done for the same reason: protecting property values.
Are you angry yet?
Some HOAs do OK and are kind of like a collective: They form their own street cleaning, street light installation and electricity bills, snow plow, garbage pickup, lawn mowing all for a deeply discounted monthly fee of sometimes just a few $10s a month.
I feel nowadays it’s the opposite. I’m willing to pay a premium for a house that is not within an HOA.
A house being part of an HOA decreases its value to me.
And this is because local governments have offloaded a lot of their responsibilities to HOAs. Some HOAs put up water, electricity, roads, garbage collection and security. Even "public" transport in some cases. Things that used to be the responsibility of the city.
This leads to 2 very undesirable consequences:
1) given that the community of homeowners makes the area livable ... why would they allow public access to their roads? This is almost a complete negative for them.
2) this is effectively an extra tax for the homeowners. Which then also means there can now be very big differences in public services within the same city ... and the city council does not have many options (or justification) to change it.
Frankly this is switching how American cities operate to how it works in third world countries.
> It is not easy to buy a house in the US that is not controlled by an HOA.
Perhaps in some places. In a large number of US cities, it is remarkably easy.
> If you're looking in a suburb, exurb, it's 100% going to be an HOA.
This is just categorically nonsense. Have you ever bought a house? Have you ever looked at houses outside the 20mi surrounding wherever it is you've always lived?
Sorry, this reads like a typical teenager-on-Reddit comment - deeply convinced that you know everything about everything, everywhere because you overheard your parents talking about it at the dinner table.
It's not that hard in the USA. If you don't like driving or have some pseudomoral dilemma over that, I don't know what to tell you. It's hardly a downside.
The homes in this neighborhood are fairly average single-family homes, ~$400k, roughly the median home price in the US now. There's no shared roof or walls that would be the HOAs responsibility. There's no community pool. Does not appear to be gated. Only expense as far as I can tell is the periodically repaving street, salting, perhaps some gardening -- $2500/mo, even $1250/mo is not supported by those expenses.
Who is the developer? What is their financial situation? Did they take on debt to finance development when rates were near 0% when this development was built ~2020, now that debt has come due but rates are > 5%, and they cannot pay, so they figure they can up the HOA to drop the property prices, evict the homeowners, then drop the HOA again and resell the houses for a profit to shore up their balance sheet?
I'm guessing one of the victims of this predatory behavior will respond with a gas can and a match. There are multiple ways to express discontent to this type of behavior, and it's statistically likely one of those ways will be arson.
This type of vigilante justice isn't good for a society, but it does tend to discourage the behavior. Similar to how markets where some thieves have a stump in place of a hand don't have a shoplifting problem(any more).
tldr; someone will likely make the developer suffer as a result of the suffering they are inflicting on others to feed their greed.
Our first home was in a 7 unit townhome complex with a HOA. Complete opposite problem, we could not get people to vote to raise dues, even though we had a delinquent account and our expenses were 95% of our dues.
Me and my wife ended up having to manage everything, she was accountant, I did snow removal when the snowfall was not enough to trigger the company we hired to come out, vendors contact, etc. It got to be a lot.
We kept looking around and seeing the major maintenance headaches coming in the next decade and the utter lack of savings by the association and it was scary. We ended up leaving and now we have no HOA. We are still treasurer and snow removal though.
My in laws are in an HOA and their board is obsessed with preemptive maintenance. They are redoing siding on every property over the next few years and assessing more than ten thousand dollars a unit. Utter insanity and waste.
I have other friends and family who have no particular feelings about their HOA, so apparently they are not all evil, but man is it tough to believe.
45 comments
[ 593 ms ] story [ 417 ms ] threadBut on its face it seems suicidal to cause the home owners to go bankrupt and leave your properties. Unless of course you'd like to tear down the development and build a big fat datacenter on it (the only building that is going on these days) which would net a profit. As grifts go it would kind of amazingly evil you get as much money as you can out of making your homeowners broke followed by selling the land out of foreclosure to build a data center on it and making a profit on that too.
States need to step in and pass laws against this. Georgia recently passed laws to prohibit what HOAs can do and how much they can charge. It also made them register with the state and remain in good standing to be able to collect dues at all. Other states need to follow suit.
It's a 51% attack in real life.
A few years ago a common trick was that the developer designated the initial administrator. Then add a rule that requires a super majority to change the administrator, so it was almost impossible to remove it. Now there is a law that declares that special rule void in all apartments.
Apparently the developer owns half the homes and has voting power.
This isn't the homeowners' faults. This is beyond predatory.
This shit needs to be illegal, and the company doing this needs to pay.
Most HOAs exist to do common area maintenance and make sure neighbors don't paint their house purple, install neon exterior lights, and chase away buyers.
This is something else entirely. It's malicious theft.
Read my comment, I specifically mentioned about not getting a house with an HOA in the first place. Again, if you chose a house that's in a HOA, it's on you.
> This is beyond predatory.
Of course, they're predatory, what did you think was it about? It's always someone with a power trip sitting on their boards. For a "HN contrarian", you sure get upset about a logical argument.
This should flip to the HOA being used by residents to control builders and landlords. Builders would stop using HOAs if they could not control them, just like it used to be when houses were built just fine without HOAs.
Voting for billionaire conspiracies is more important to a lot of people than voting for themselves.
This is getting worse, by the way. What will people do once the city council decides HOAs must run schools as well?
Second, it sounds like you are saying they need to run for their HOA to end it and run for city council to tax rich people again so we can pay for basic bare minimum services again. Giving tax breaks for the rich and telling people to form an HOA for garbage collection is not a solution to anything. Vote out the current people who set this nonsense up.
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It is not easy to buy a house in the US that is not controlled by an HOA. A lot of houses are in an HOA and you really have to go out of your way to avoid it. If you're looking in a suburb, exurb, it's 100% going to be an HOA. It's by design:
HOAs are tightly connected to racial segregation, racially restrictive housing, and redlining. Read up on those and it will make you sick to your stomach.
Controlling what homeowners can do to the exterior of their houses has been the main theme of many HOAs. Combined with this, racist policies and architectural uniformity were historically intertwined. They were both done for the same reason: protecting property values.
Are you angry yet?
Some HOAs do OK and are kind of like a collective: They form their own street cleaning, street light installation and electricity bills, snow plow, garbage pickup, lawn mowing all for a deeply discounted monthly fee of sometimes just a few $10s a month.
And this is because local governments have offloaded a lot of their responsibilities to HOAs. Some HOAs put up water, electricity, roads, garbage collection and security. Even "public" transport in some cases. Things that used to be the responsibility of the city.
This leads to 2 very undesirable consequences:
1) given that the community of homeowners makes the area livable ... why would they allow public access to their roads? This is almost a complete negative for them.
2) this is effectively an extra tax for the homeowners. Which then also means there can now be very big differences in public services within the same city ... and the city council does not have many options (or justification) to change it.
Frankly this is switching how American cities operate to how it works in third world countries.
Perhaps in some places. In a large number of US cities, it is remarkably easy.
> If you're looking in a suburb, exurb, it's 100% going to be an HOA.
This is just categorically nonsense. Have you ever bought a house? Have you ever looked at houses outside the 20mi surrounding wherever it is you've always lived?
Sorry, this reads like a typical teenager-on-Reddit comment - deeply convinced that you know everything about everything, everywhere because you overheard your parents talking about it at the dinner table.
It's not that hard in the USA. If you don't like driving or have some pseudomoral dilemma over that, I don't know what to tell you. It's hardly a downside.
https://www.terravistarealty.com/search/NC/Sherrills-Ford/45...
The homes in this neighborhood are fairly average single-family homes, ~$400k, roughly the median home price in the US now. There's no shared roof or walls that would be the HOAs responsibility. There's no community pool. Does not appear to be gated. Only expense as far as I can tell is the periodically repaving street, salting, perhaps some gardening -- $2500/mo, even $1250/mo is not supported by those expenses.
Who is the developer? What is their financial situation? Did they take on debt to finance development when rates were near 0% when this development was built ~2020, now that debt has come due but rates are > 5%, and they cannot pay, so they figure they can up the HOA to drop the property prices, evict the homeowners, then drop the HOA again and resell the houses for a profit to shore up their balance sheet?
Always tick the "No HOA" box on Zillow when searching for homes.
This type of vigilante justice isn't good for a society, but it does tend to discourage the behavior. Similar to how markets where some thieves have a stump in place of a hand don't have a shoplifting problem(any more).
tldr; someone will likely make the developer suffer as a result of the suffering they are inflicting on others to feed their greed.
Me and my wife ended up having to manage everything, she was accountant, I did snow removal when the snowfall was not enough to trigger the company we hired to come out, vendors contact, etc. It got to be a lot.
We kept looking around and seeing the major maintenance headaches coming in the next decade and the utter lack of savings by the association and it was scary. We ended up leaving and now we have no HOA. We are still treasurer and snow removal though.
My in laws are in an HOA and their board is obsessed with preemptive maintenance. They are redoing siding on every property over the next few years and assessing more than ten thousand dollars a unit. Utter insanity and waste.
I have other friends and family who have no particular feelings about their HOA, so apparently they are not all evil, but man is it tough to believe.