this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
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I've heard a lot of horror stories about HOAs and I'm certain there are a statistically significant number of bad eggs.
However, that's definitely not all of them, and in fairness to the HOAs that actually do shit (like mine): maintaining communal property costs money, running communal utilities like heating and cooling costs money, paying groundskeepers costs money, insurance and lawyers and regulatory compliance costs money, etc.
If someone isn't paying those fees, everyone else's costs go up and that isn't fair to the rest of the community. It's usually a lot of (expensive) legal work to confiscate a domicile, so it's not the first solution a collection of middle-class homeowners reaches for.
It's good you have a good one, but the big issue with them is they have almost no oversight at all. They almost function as little privately owned fiefdoms with extremely broad powers over anyone under them. Yours might be good now, but there have been plenty of examples of a good HOA being bought by a corporation and then becoming tyrannical almost overnight. There's a whole industry of HOA management companies out there, and they are bad news. The last time I saw the statistic something like 80% of new construction in the US is managed by an HOA, too.
Don't get me wrong, when they work right they serve a purpose, but the lack of laws and oversight of them is pretty scary when you look into it.
HOAβs should not have rules or enforcement power inside city limits. They are duplicating the role of the city. That is different than community maintenance off of public right of way.
Yeah, HOAs for residential neighbourhoods of houses with each house on its own land are bullshit, no question. Those are the ones that don't actually do anything, though (as far as I can tell anyway).
My HOA does have some petty rules, like specifying the backing colour of drapes or the shape of our windows, doors, etc. Some make a lot of sense, like "your balcony cannot be covered in dog shit" (which I'm paraphrasing but it's a recent addition spurred by at least one person leaving their balcony covered in it for weeks at a time), or "Damage to communal property by contractors or guests will be paid for by the homeowner contracting the workers/hosting the guests".
I think part of the problem is that under US law there are few restrictions on contracts that adults enter of their own free will. This approach kind of assumes equal power on both sides which obviously isn't the case here, or even most of the time.
The other issue of course is that greater regulation requires greater operating cost most of the time (if for no other reason than extra compliance burden), and ends up further raising the bar for citizens to band together and build communal utilities it other improvements that would be too great for a single person to bear.
It's a tough problem, and curtailing freedoms generally isn't a winning solution in the US, but it sure does need a solution. We all have enough to deal with; middle managers measuring your grass for a taste of authority aren't helping anyone.
I live in a townhouse that is one of 30 on our lot. All of the houses are a part of a land trust program that owners have to qualify in order to buy, a minimum income set to ensure applicants can pay a mortgage and a maximum set by the average income of the city. The houses are sold at cost and buyers agree to sell at that cost, plus a small percentage of equity gain per year lived in the house. Property taxes are fixed to this valuation agreement so nobody in the program is forced out of their home from real estate bubbles.
The HOA is responsible for repaving our shared driveway, external window cleaning, gutter cleaning, ect. On three storied townhouses some of those tasks would be difficult for neighbors to manage themselves and kinda ridiculous for each individual to take care of, when pooling resources is a simpler solution.
Your view of HOAs is entirely skewed by suburbia, which is terrible community planning from the onset.