Comment by BeetleB
6 hours ago
(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?)
In one area I lived in, there were legally defined "noxious weeds". Mostly invasive species that have several undesirable attributes.
One example is Musk Thistle. It grows extremely rapidly, reproduces at a rate that's unbelievable, and is very difficult to kill. In this heavily farmed region, a few of them growing in a roadside ditch can turn into tens/hundreds of thousands of them within a year. Not only do they outcompete just about any other plant including crops, but they have incredibly sharp barbs that injure livestock.
In publicly owned spaces or abandoned fields/lots, the county has people that searches for them and sprays them with a herbicide. If they're spotted on your private land, usually they'll notify you that you have X days to cut them down (before they flower and seed) or they'll come do it whether you want them to or not. Some counties will send a bill for this, some fund it from property taxes.
If you haven't lived in an area where they vigorously grow it sounds like a huge overreaction, but left uncontrolled because one neighbor isn't taking care of it, it can become impossible to keep it out of your yard. According to wikipedia, a single plant can produce 10,000 seeds that disperse through the wind and remain viable for decades in the soil. Even the desire to not have a painful rapidly reproducing weed in your yard aside, they can do incredible damage to cropland.
It's a shame though, it's a kinda pretty flower. Imagine a vivid pink sunflower.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carduus_nutans
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Don't know if it's what gp is talking about, but in areas prone to wildfire, there are often laws about keeping brush and weeds a certain distance away from any structures.
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My HOA owns all the common area in the neighborhood, including the streets and parking spaces. So, all that upkeep (paint, seal, re-pave, snow removal, etc) gets paid out of a HOA dues. They also pay for landscaping of common areas, neighborhood lighting, and a few other things. The also organize trash collection (without which we'd have to buy individually and have a constant stream of trash trucks rolling through). And they have to carry insurance to cover that common property.
Who else is going to fix the roads? The county and state aren't going to, they don't own it. We seal the asphalt every 5-8 years and repave every 15-20 (I've only lived her 10 years, so those are very rough guesses).
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I lived in a townhouse community with an HOA for a few years. They handled paving the roads and all the lawn mowing and landscaping (which included weeding, as well as replacing the tree outside my unit when it died).
Not that I'd ever want an HOA again, but that was nice and your experience isn't canonical.
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If there is a gate then the roads behind the gate are privately owned and the HOA members pay thousands of dollars a year to maintain the roads.
Wrt weeds, I suspect you are simply unaware of all the maintenance tasks your city does. Consider yourself blessed!
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.
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).
The idea is supposed to be that an HOA can be more efficient in taking care of problems. The municipality can be underfunded, etc, and take a long time to solve a problem.
In practice, HOAs generally don't do anything useful, though.
Our neighborhood actually saves the County money for property they don’t have to maintain (drainage/swales/mowing/etc) and provides community things like tennis courts, basketball courts, pools, playgrounds etc that the County doesn’t have to provide or maintain. It’s also cheaper for the HOA to do it
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That’s always the pitch when privatizing government functions. It rarely works out.
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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.
John Oliver did a section on HOAs[0], and was brutal. They sound like a nightmare.
The segment ends with a funny "ad" about HOAs[1].
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrizmAo17Os
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrizmAo17Os&t=1273s
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)
When you say "live and let live" it seems impersonal or mutually exclusive. Like "they do their thing, you do yours, never the twain shall meet".
I think GP is advocating exercising social skills rather than "live and let live" without interaction between you.
Get to know each other - BBQ or similar. Sure, you find out or confirm you hate some of their views/hobbies. But it also means you develop human empathy and usually find things you do agree on.
Maybe you hate their loud car. But you both hate the climbing vine on the fenceline and could spend a saturday morning fixing that together.