I love the inherent contradiction of the existence of HOAs. Americans love freedom and small government so much, they have to invent a worse and more invasive replacement.
It's absurd. People are forced into them if they want to buy a house, and part of the agreement is if you sell the house, you can only sell it to a person that agrees to sign. It _should_ be illegal, especially given the racist history that HOAs were designed for.
Neither of the two real estate agents I've worked with batted an eye when I asked to exclude any property subject to an HOA.
If enough of us do this, the price of HOA properties will drop due to decreased demand and people will more broadly recognize HOAs as the liability they are.
I've lived most of my life in houses not subject to an HOA, but for the past four years I've been "under the thumb" of one. Anecdotally, I notice startlingly little difference between the two regimes. I suppose if someone wants to park a wheelless rusty pickup truck in the middle of their lawn the HOA would do something about it, but that sort of thing was never really an issue.
From my perspective, the HOA has done little except offer a pool, and insist once that I remove an almost completely invisible stump in my front lawn that was over my water line.
Valuable things my HOA does: pools, parks, negotiated bulk internet, neighbors keep their lawn mowed and low weeds, no junk cars in the yard type stuff, no unsightly house colors, no serious disrepair of homes, no cars parked on the side of the road because 10 people live in a 3/2.
Annoying things my HOA does: I had to replace some plants in my yard because they were not technically shrubs, and the rules said I had to have shrubs.
I don't feel that way. I will go this far. The negative emotion from having to swap out plants because they are technically not shrubs is far worse than the positive emotion I get from having nice parks and neighbors who have nice grass.
I get that, HOAs wouldn’t survive without people like you, I think the US wouldn’t be what it is either. The feeling I get from having all so manicured is like I’m living in a fake world with no creativity, where everything is made of the same cookie cutter, where a small group dictates minuscule details like what blinds you can have or what plants. It feels very oppressive and constricting to me.
Not that it matters, but just for conversation's sake I value my HOA primarily for property value reasons. Once my kids are out of school and I don't care about things like school zones or parks I will be moving to more rural areas without an HOA for similar reasons to why you dislike HOAs so much.
It’s odd that in my area non HOA areas have grown in price more than the gated cookie cutter communities. The people with money want out of there and live by the river and be able to have block parties with cookouts without having to be backed by a change.org petition and petty meetings.
But I’ve also seen that in some areas all you have is HOAs because nothing was developed before those communities and whatever is outside can be pretty crappy.
I think the main issue is that hall monitor types are attracted to the power, and so if a HOA gets taken over by people who like judging others without any other major obligations, they lose sight of the reason for the HOA rules and enforce to the letter of the rules rather than the spirit.
> People are forced into them if they want to buy a house
“Forced” in the sense that they voluntarily enter them by buying a house in an HOA.
Each HOA (or lack thereof) is a property of the house you are looking to buy. Complaining about being forced to take the HOA is like complaining about being forced to be a part of the county.
> Each HOA (or lack thereof) is a property of the house you are looking to buy. Complaining about being forced to take the HOA is like complaining about being forced to be a part of the county.
No, it's like complaining that the lawn has been saturated with salt so that it can never grow properly, and a previous owner somehow managed to legally enshrine that so that you can't fix it.
This shitty analogy assumes that nobody wants HOAs. I personally hate them growing up in the west but a huge chunk of the population thinks they are as important to a neighborhood as having good schools, garbage service, etc.
There is no transparency nor accountability for the "condo commandos" who rule some HOA boards like the girls in Mean Girls. I've ended up on 2 separate condo boards and each time I swear "never again!". Maybe this time I mean it.
HOAs were originally "White Homeowners' Associations," so after (and likely before) losing their legal purpose of being entities that enforced the racial covenants that restricted their members from selling their homes to black and Jewish people, their purpose instead became to enforce a particular kind of cultural whiteness on the neighborhood. Whites who didn't take care of their lawns or wanted to paint their houses the wrong color weren't being white well enough.
> Americans love freedom and small government so much, they have to invent a worse and more invasive replacement.
The same group of Americans, too. HOAs were like a GPL for racists.
The perk of HOAs is that you can get elected to it. You can organize your neighborhood to get elected and make changes if they aren’t happy with the way it’s currently run.
The whole goal of smaller and more localized governing bodies is that you have easier access to change them. The only thing stopping you is getting the support of your neighbors.
HOAs are much better, not worse replacement. If I don’t like HOA rules, I have more ability to affect these than to affect county, state or federal level rules. I can also vote with my feet by moving out of HOA, to a different HOA or even to a place with no HOA. Moving out of county, state or country has significant higher cost, which is higher the bigger the administrative unit is. In short, for any given problem with HOA, municipal/state/federal government has the same problem, and in fact it’s worse there.
It's a small, local government run by people who actually live in the area they are governing. It's objectively better than a large, non-local government that has no skin in the game and doesn't have to live with the consequences of their actions.
> It's a small, local government run by people who actually live in the area they are governing.
More specifically, it's run by people who live in the area they are governing and have nothing else to do with their time.
Not sure what can be done about this; it's a general failure mode of democratic systems at every level (and many non-democratic as well): over time, the power goes to those who prioritize getting the power. I.e. career politicians.
(Yes, I'd classify the few people who show up at our HOA-equivalent meetings as career politicians, and the small group of troublemakers in my block of flats as the opposition :).)
It's worse. They're not bored. They're very much enjoying the politicking. And some of them are even in this with good, selfless intentions - but it doesn't change the fact that full-time politicians are not representative of the rest of the population, that has jobs to work, lectures to attend, children to rear, and countless other things to do.
That's not entirely true, my municipal government has skin in the game because taxes are based on property values here. So for example, I know someone who had the bricks redone on his house and when he got the permit to do the renovation, it stipulated that the surface area of brick afterwards was to be equal or greater than before. I suppose it is because brick has higher value than vinyl siding.
