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.
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?)
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
>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.
This article slightly mixes condo and HOAs. HOAs are covered under 720 and it does not have the same rules (which are less 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.
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 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?
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.
Do all houses available require an HOA, even the ones that don’t look so nice or aren’t in great neighborhoods? I don’t usually like to go around questioning people’s experiences, but I think a lot of people go around with ideas of what an acceptable street looks like that simply aren’t achievable without an HOA or extreme price segregation.
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.
> 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?
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.
>Should the other members just suck it up forever?
given that an HOA is completely unnecessary... yes. you should suck it up forever. if you want to be part of an HOA and pay dues into it, good for you, go ahead.
if somebody else doesn't want to be part of your little club, why should you get to take their house away for that?
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.
Nope, but what are the countermeasures for abusing this power?
Also, once in a decade is not a rare occurrence for events of this significance. Once in 20 years is OK, once is 50 is rare, but once in a decade is not.
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.
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.
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 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...
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.
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.
> 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.
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 effect you lose money living in a worse location.
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.
You have to pay for the community utilities, door people, elevators, exterior maintenance/repair, roof repair, and snow maintenance that people won't pay for as a group when given a chance. It's really the only lever that guarantees compliance the least amount of drama. The alternative is that you have to file civil suit to settle obligations. (You share a roof with your neighbors.. they refuse to pay for it because the roof isn't explicitly over them, they refuse to shovel and everyone gets fined.. etc)
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.
This is relative. You might not think native flowers and plants are stunning, and that a manicured lawn is, but I do! And lawn rules might prevent me from obtaining my version of “stunning”. This is something…you want to defend? A lack of freedom to do what one wants with something they own?
This has to do more with price of house, not HOAs. In Florida for example, some(maybe most?) counties require all new developments to maintain their own roads, which requires something akin to a CDD/HOA. Newer houses typically cost more and bring in people with money, not someone who inherited the house or has been living there for generations.
I could show you HOA neighborhoods that look like a warzone, and beautiful nonHOA areas of million dollar houses.
is stunning even real though? who wants a picture when you can be alive. hoas tend to be more about the veneer than the spirit of their existence. the intent is nice but humans gonna power trip if they seek those positions of authority
Eh, I live in Berkeley, a lot of the neighborhoods here are amazing, and there are almost no HOAs (besides the kind that keep condo buildings running). It's nicer than the bast majority of American suburbs I've seen. If anything, the amazing yards and cozy houses are only viable because there is no HOA pushing down arbitrary top-down rules on aesthetics. Forcing people to have traditional lawns would have totally killed the place.
You have a very narrow experience of the world, then. The most bland, ugly, tasteless neighborhoods I’ve seen are all in HOAs. The most beautiful are all without HOAs.
But that’s all beside the point, because this article is about how HOAs are bad for people who need somewhere to live, not about what offends your (unusual) taste.
> 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?
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 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?
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.
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 microcosm of subdivision-level governance where Karens/Kens with too much free time relish in power-tripping over their neighbors... All things equal, I'll take state, county, or city government over HOAs.
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.
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".
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’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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wait a gosh darn second... I was told, by our president no less, that only California had a housing crisis, and it was specifically caused by democrats. Is this the fake news I hear about?
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.
You can accomplish this without an HOA, also. That’s just a non-profit. The idea that deed restrictions and dues are tied together is a serious overstep, in my opinion.
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.
>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.
> 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?
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.
The constant history lesson of what something was 80-90 years ago but they aren’t that way anymore but they were doesn’t advance the conversation especially when it has no impact on the actual topic.
> HOAs exist as a way to enforce racial segregation
How do HOAs enforce racial segregation in monoethnic countries?
"HOAs are most frequently found in the United States, Japan, Canada, Australia, and the Philippines, and to some extent in other countries, such as New Zealand, Israel, Mauritius, South Africa, most of the countries of the European Union, such as Denmark, France, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, Ireland, Austria, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Greece, Sweden, Belgium, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Latvia, Lithuania, Cyprus, Luxembourg, Estonia, Slovakia and Slovenia, and some of the Latin American countries, such as Chile, Argentina, Brazil and Mexico."
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.
Overall, with America being a capitalist country (and Florida state being the best example of it), they want people to keep spending their money on something, and would never allow someone to just 'settle' and live a life without spending money. HOA, among other things property taxes and other city imposed taxes you are never "resting in peace" after retirement, but wait for your next notice to come - either from City or HOA.
That does not have to be the responsibility of HOAs. I have had a period where my previous gardener quit and I was looking for a new one; some weeds in the front yard grew too tall. The city sent me an official reminder. This was in a neighborhood without HOAs.
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
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.
Exactly. HOAs can be a pain in the butt but they aren't taking peoples homes away Willy nilly
The only way you get in that situation is by not paying your dues. Some HOAs may be more or less aggressive in handling it. But when you can't pay your dues, the other homeowners have to pay for your share
Dues are just a mandatory part of being in HOA that reflect the costs of the community
> The only way you get in that situation is by not paying your dues.
No, it isn't. You can also get in that situation by having the HOA cite you for a violation of its rules and regulations and you not fixing the violation.
An HOA acting in good faith will not do this unless it's actually necessary. But an HOA run by busybodies can cite you for things that aren't actually violations (and often what is or is not a violation can be subjective, because the language in the rules and regulations is often vague or ambiguous), but which you still have to take the time and energy to respond to--or else they can say you didn't fix the violation and put a lien on your house.
And if you do respond, now you're embroiled in an argument about whether what they cited you for actually is a violation or isn't, and you're arguing with bad faith actors who are not going to be reasonable. And who might put a lien on your house anyway--even though they're actually not supposed to do that if you're following the process established by the HOA (and often by state law) for disputes--and now you're faced with having to hire a lawyer and convince a judge that the lien should be dismissed.
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 ;)
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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
That's actually the more dangerous situation. For instance, a meta-analysis of 394 blog posts suggests that 94% of LLM-written data presentations use spurious statistics. In addition, 2513 posts out of 3408 analyzed were found to use the same fabricated data. Click here for more info on singles near you.
Yea even reading the first couple paragraphs I can't really get a sense of what it's trying to say. Feels like generic claude output and doesn't really communicate what the "crisis" is or how it's getting "worse".
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.
Short term renters, questionable people (thieves, renters who abuse the properties around them, people who use the property poorly [massive parties that bring guns + drunk loud people]), illegal activities (like off permit filming of commercial works), brings disproportionate problems to the neighbors. Airbnb is a lightning rod of people who do that. That's one of the reasons why hotels have weird rules in states and cities.
That is exactly what the people who live under HOAs want. I despise HOAs, but I'm happy that the kind of people who like HOAs have a community they can all congregate in. It keeps some of them from mingling with the rest of us.
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.
And I have a house without a HOA but did go through a bunch of complicated (and expensive) easement agreements and survey definitions that LePage’s to a lot of loose-gooey hand shakes and outright mistakes over the years.
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.
(My comment is about detached houses).
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.
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.
> road maintenance and weed abatement
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?)
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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.
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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.
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.
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 :)
Not sure why you're replying to me. But mostly, sounds like you're agreeing with me!
Neighbors can and do do things that impinge on your life. Such as, playing loud music when you’re trying to sleep
(I have nothing to add to the HOA discussion, just saying that “live and let live” has limits)
>Is Florida the worst state for HOA foreclosures?
>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.
I was sort of wondering the same thing. It would be helpful to get a clearer picture of what's missing from the data.
This article slightly mixes condo and HOAs. HOAs are covered under 720 and it does not have the same rules (which are less 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.
To get to that point takes a long time
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
It is possible I am mixing terms, as IANAL and also this was several years ago
Regardless, they made a simple issue (which was not disclosed at least to me) a legal hassle.
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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?
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.
> It’s extremely common for local governments to make an HOA a legal requirement for new developments.
This is true, and I'd never choose to live in an area like that.
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The houses available in my area and price range all required an HOA. In general it’s not safe to assume all people have all options at all times.
It's still a choice being made. People choose to live where they live. They could choose to live elsewhere.
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Are you willing to share the general area? I’m curious.
Where I’ve bought houses, HOAs were rare. I’ve always heard about these places where HOAs are the only option but I fortunately haven’t run into one.
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Do all houses available require an HOA, even the ones that don’t look so nice or aren’t in great neighborhoods? I don’t usually like to go around questioning people’s experiences, but I think a lot of people go around with ideas of what an acceptable street looks like that simply aren’t achievable without an HOA or extreme price segregation.
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.
> 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?
We have other situations where you can end up owing a debt, you don’t get to foreclose. You go to civil court, get a judgment and then try to collect.
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> Liens get ignored. > Should the other members just suck it up forever?
Until the house is sold or refinanced. Yes, the HOA has to wait, but can eventually get its money with interest.
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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.
>Should the other members just suck it up forever?
given that an HOA is completely unnecessary... yes. you should suck it up forever. if you want to be part of an HOA and pay dues into it, good for you, go ahead.
if somebody else doesn't want to be part of your little club, why should you get to take their house away for that?
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You deal with it exactly the same way as if any other club member or customer don't pay. Not by giving something like HOA an unchecked power.
HOA should be allowed to kick out member. And people should be allowed to not be members of HOA.
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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.
Nope, but what are the countermeasures for abusing this power?
Also, once in a decade is not a rare occurrence for events of this significance. Once in 20 years is OK, once is 50 is rare, but once in a decade is not.
I mean, the idea is nice, but it involves humans.
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.
There is an interesting parallel here with that state's dominant political party espousing 'freedom of speech' but only when it's in their favor.
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.
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.
This is one of those cases where suing would have had a better outcome and the 3k+legal fees garnished from her income would have been better.
I can't imagine that a good judge would accept that settlement to scam someone out of a house far below value and leave them with the debt.
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...
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.
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.
> 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.
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 effect you lose money living in a worse location.
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.
You have to pay for the community utilities, door people, elevators, exterior maintenance/repair, roof repair, and snow maintenance that people won't pay for as a group when given a chance. It's really the only lever that guarantees compliance the least amount of drama. The alternative is that you have to file civil suit to settle obligations. (You share a roof with your neighbors.. they refuse to pay for it because the roof isn't explicitly over them, they refuse to shovel and everyone gets fined.. etc)
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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.
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> never really stunning.
This is relative. You might not think native flowers and plants are stunning, and that a manicured lawn is, but I do! And lawn rules might prevent me from obtaining my version of “stunning”. This is something…you want to defend? A lack of freedom to do what one wants with something they own?
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This has to do more with price of house, not HOAs. In Florida for example, some(maybe most?) counties require all new developments to maintain their own roads, which requires something akin to a CDD/HOA. Newer houses typically cost more and bring in people with money, not someone who inherited the house or has been living there for generations.
I could show you HOA neighborhoods that look like a warzone, and beautiful nonHOA areas of million dollar houses.
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is stunning even real though? who wants a picture when you can be alive. hoas tend to be more about the veneer than the spirit of their existence. the intent is nice but humans gonna power trip if they seek those positions of authority
Eh, I live in Berkeley, a lot of the neighborhoods here are amazing, and there are almost no HOAs (besides the kind that keep condo buildings running). It's nicer than the bast majority of American suburbs I've seen. If anything, the amazing yards and cozy houses are only viable because there is no HOA pushing down arbitrary top-down rules on aesthetics. Forcing people to have traditional lawns would have totally killed the place.
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You have a very narrow experience of the world, then. The most bland, ugly, tasteless neighborhoods I’ve seen are all in HOAs. The most beautiful are all without HOAs.
But that’s all beside the point, because this article is about how HOAs are bad for people who need somewhere to live, not about what offends your (unusual) taste.
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have you ever like, gone to San Francisco?
> 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?
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 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?
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.
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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 microcosm of subdivision-level governance where Karens/Kens with too much free time relish in power-tripping over their neighbors... All things equal, I'll take state, county, or city government over HOAs.
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.
If HOAs are a good example of self-governance, I can only conclude that self-governance is bad.
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".
Democracy in the US has been withering together with the rise of the HOAs. An ironic correlation.
Buying a house is often a multi-decade commitment. A specific HOA might not be bad today, but what about 10 years from now?
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’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?
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.
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.
How would foreclosing make the housing crisis worse? Wouldn't another family purchase the home thus creating a net zero?
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.
Between the foreclosure and sale, who is paying to bring the property up to HOA code?
The party who foreclosed the house and is currently selling it. Who else could it be?
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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.
Wait a gosh darn second... I was told, by our president no less, that only California had a housing crisis, and it was specifically caused by democrats. Is this the fake news I hear about?
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.
I think that's his point as this article reads like that exact prompt. Pure LLM garbage.
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.
You can accomplish this without an HOA, also. That’s just a non-profit. The idea that deed restrictions and dues are tied together is a serious overstep, in my opinion.
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.
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>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.
> 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?
I can prompt and LLM to prove this and it gives me 5 reasons HOAs are making things worse.
"HOAs and homeowners have always been at odds" might be the most succinct description of the problem that modern "homeowner associations" constitute.
That's not a reason to change your mind ... LLMs can refute anything you ask them to without thinking.
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.
> houses patchily painted lavender
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.
You care about unmowed frontyards? No wonder your country is going to shit if this is what you’re worried about.
Barring any guardrails, AI would tell me that the Holocaust had redeeming qualities if I asked it.
They are not truth or judgment machines.
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How does this add to the conversation?
The constant history lesson of what something was 80-90 years ago but they aren’t that way anymore but they were doesn’t advance the conversation especially when it has no impact on the actual topic.
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Even if I accepted the premise that racial segregation was the sole reason for their creation, if that's no longer their purpose, why does it matter?
> HOAs exist as a way to enforce racial segregation
How do HOAs enforce racial segregation in monoethnic countries?
"HOAs are most frequently found in the United States, Japan, Canada, Australia, and the Philippines, and to some extent in other countries, such as New Zealand, Israel, Mauritius, South Africa, most of the countries of the European Union, such as Denmark, France, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, Ireland, Austria, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Greece, Sweden, Belgium, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Latvia, Lithuania, Cyprus, Luxembourg, Estonia, Slovakia and Slovenia, and some of the Latin American countries, such as Chile, Argentina, Brazil and Mexico."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeowner_association
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No. The Democratic Party exists as a way to enforce racial segregation.
Thats no longer the reason they still persist. But their creation was nothing but.
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The main purpose of HOAs is to privatize government and taxes into managememt company hands
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
If you want a simple one-sentence description, I would HOAs are an example of the old saying about a beautiful theory being spoiled by an ugly fact.
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.
Overall, with America being a capitalist country (and Florida state being the best example of it), they want people to keep spending their money on something, and would never allow someone to just 'settle' and live a life without spending money. HOA, among other things property taxes and other city imposed taxes you are never "resting in peace" after retirement, but wait for your next notice to come - either from City or HOA.
As a fellow European, preventing the value of your house dropping because your neighbors didn’t clean up their front yard.
That does not have to be the responsibility of HOAs. I have had a period where my previous gardener quit and I was looking for a new one; some weeds in the front yard grew too tall. The city sent me an official reminder. This was in a neighborhood without HOAs.
but why would you need an HOA for that? If your neighbor drops their junk on the street you can just call the cops on them yourself
Same function as the laws about when you can mow in Germany, simply at a sub municipal level.
So they are able to enact their own laws? That's pretty different from Germany, where a municipality cannot override laws from higher courts.
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There are HOAs in Europe. The Wohnungseigentümergemeinschaft comes to mind.
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
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They empower grumpy assholes to play police and impose their will on you.
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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.
Exactly. HOAs can be a pain in the butt but they aren't taking peoples homes away Willy nilly
The only way you get in that situation is by not paying your dues. Some HOAs may be more or less aggressive in handling it. But when you can't pay your dues, the other homeowners have to pay for your share
Dues are just a mandatory part of being in HOA that reflect the costs of the community
> The only way you get in that situation is by not paying your dues.
No, it isn't. You can also get in that situation by having the HOA cite you for a violation of its rules and regulations and you not fixing the violation.
An HOA acting in good faith will not do this unless it's actually necessary. But an HOA run by busybodies can cite you for things that aren't actually violations (and often what is or is not a violation can be subjective, because the language in the rules and regulations is often vague or ambiguous), but which you still have to take the time and energy to respond to--or else they can say you didn't fix the violation and put a lien on your house.
And if you do respond, now you're embroiled in an argument about whether what they cited you for actually is a violation or isn't, and you're arguing with bad faith actors who are not going to be reasonable. And who might put a lien on your house anyway--even though they're actually not supposed to do that if you're following the process established by the HOA (and often by state law) for disputes--and now you're faced with having to hire a lawyer and convince a judge that the lien should be dismissed.
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 ;)
This is an ad to buy free public records.
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.
> 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 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.
And Florida plans on making it worse by cutting property tax limits.
Sweet f'kin christ that website is unreadable.
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.
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.
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.
LLM written.
I'd rather not read LLM output, but this post is mostly a data presentation, not a written argument.
That's actually the more dangerous situation. For instance, a meta-analysis of 394 blog posts suggests that 94% of LLM-written data presentations use spurious statistics. In addition, 2513 posts out of 3408 analyzed were found to use the same fabricated data. Click here for more info on singles near you.
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It’s literally like 90% text, and it’s not an insignificant amount of text.
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This comment effectively places a lien on the article - check the article to see the analogy!
Yea even reading the first couple paragraphs I can't really get a sense of what it's trying to say. Feels like generic claude output and doesn't really communicate what the "crisis" is or how it's getting "worse".
The debt was the accusation. The frustration was the catalyst.
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.
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HOAs are great. They keep the AirBnB trash out.
Might as well just say "I want to control what other people do with their private property"
Short term renters, questionable people (thieves, renters who abuse the properties around them, people who use the property poorly [massive parties that bring guns + drunk loud people]), illegal activities (like off permit filming of commercial works), brings disproportionate problems to the neighbors. Airbnb is a lightning rod of people who do that. That's one of the reasons why hotels have weird rules in states and cities.
That’s not really a controversial idea and nearly everyone who owns a home where you can see your neighbor’s house wants to do that to some degree.
If you live in close proximity to other people, you should not be allowed to do whatever you want on your private property.
Pretty much every municipality already has laws that limit you in that manner.
If you live in an area covered by an HOA then you signed up for it, literally, like your signature is on the paperwork. I have zero sympathy.
That is exactly what the people who live under HOAs want. I despise HOAs, but I'm happy that the kind of people who like HOAs have a community they can all congregate in. It keeps some of them from mingling with the rest of us.
You already can't do what ever you want with your own property.
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.
If you have wonderful neighbors, HOAs are unnecessary.
If you have horrible neighbors you will wish you had one.
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And I have a house without a HOA but did go through a bunch of complicated (and expensive) easement agreements and survey definitions that LePage’s to a lot of loose-gooey hand shakes and outright mistakes over the years.
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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.
> Now I don't trust HOAs but some of this is deceptive weasally writing.
No surprise, it reeks of being written by an LLM.
Highly suggested that it's influenced by forums who have reported poor situations by people that have been in them.