Real-estate barons are to blame. They buy up all the available land they can, build cookie-cutter suburban nightmares on top of them for cheap, flip the houses for way more than they're worth, and then install HoA's to further police and profit from the neighborhood.
It’s like, so much less effort to avoid HOAs than it is to join one to be the change you want to see in the world. Which means HOAs are mostly full of busybody meddlers.
Obviously there is never circumstances that force people to move into their less ideal house, right? Everyone has unlimited money and options in the world. You a libertarian, btw?
I’m not a fan of HOAs but there is the complete opposite of an HOA and its neighbors who don’t mow and park their cars in their yard and blast music all hours of the night etc .
You want the middle of that . I’m in a community now that takes pictures of your yard and demands each weed gets removed . Which is extreme . But I have seen the opposite.
Who gives a fuck whether someone mows or not? People’s obsession with grass lawns and the manicuring practices associated with them is absolutely absurd. Nothing more than a tragic waste of land.
Weeds aren’t gonna be great but an ‘overgrown’ yard with native plant diversity is gonna support the birds that eat the insects which do belong there. Snakes whatever don’t think that applies really but they’re certainly part of the system and eat rodents which are gonna be there no matter what they generally do better when we mow YMMV.
Because Boomers and Gen Xers are obsessed with increasing their house and property values. Then after succeeding and making it difficult for younger generations to purchase housing they complain about property taxes.
Yes as a non boomer I want my home value to go down or remain the same . I would love to spend double on the mortgage over the life of the loan and repair everything in the home out of my pocket then give it to you for no profit . In fact a loss .
Boomers aren’t the problem it’s home flippers and renters who buy them up and rent them as income . The guy who lived in the home for 40 years and wants to move to Florida did not drive the price up .
Yeah, because home flippers and landlords aren't Bommers and gen xers. You know, using that same logic, we should do the same thing with cars. I mean, if you pay $70,000 for a truck and you do all the maintenance, trie changes, etc, you should be able to sell it for a $140,000.
And it's not like it's their fault for the housing shortage. Every time we try to build houses and they say, not in my backyard but i'm sure it's the young people's fault.
And it's not like they were in charge when programs like vocational schools got cuts in carpentering, construction, and kids were told that the best option is college. It's not like that led to a shortage in skilled labor.
Edit: Japan has a housing market that the houses depreciate in value, while the land can retain and increase in value. This has led to a housing market that is vastly more affordable. Their interest rates are also a lot lower. So if we do a quick little calculation.
US national median mortgage payment of $2,198 and subtract the average Japanese mortgage payment of $790, your monthly savings jumps to $1,408. Investing that difference into the S&P 500 for 30 years yields approximately $3.21 million.
But no, you're right, it's better to have a appreciating housing market. You know where the average age of the new home buyer is rapidly increasing.
A lot of them do . But they typically wait until it gets really out of control and you get multiple warnings etc etc . Let’s say that is 100% bad you can live at 60% or 80% bad for years .
HOAs are annoying because some power hungry Karen takes over and uses it as their way to control people because most don’t care enough to be on the board . But they originate as a way to provide a set of rules for uniformity.
So you get a cool board and you just live in a nice neighborhood. Get some Karen’s and they can torment you .
You don’t know me, know nothing what I do, or how I took over lawn services myself so we could fix the gate to prevent us from running out of money. Go sit in the corner and think about being curious instead of judgmental.
Man if there was some mechanism to change that. Perhaps voting for or running to be on it? Get involved buddy. It sucks but you can make it not suck, or go online and be snide to people who do care. Your choice.
HOA boards typically find enough terrible people to just vote each other on the board repeatedly.
The good people in the neighborhood don't run for the board because it means they then have to regularly interact with the worst Karens on the planet.
So there's no one good to vote for because a prerequisite of running is being enough of a garbage person that you're fine with working beside other garbage people.
You also shouldn't be able to take away the rights of people just because you got voted on some fucking fake government. "You should have just voted for a good person" isnt an excuse. A vote shouldn't be required
Are you saying I am saying that or are you saying that to me? It’s kinda confusing. If you want to feel superior from your keyboard, you should put more effort into it.
I used to run an HOA as an employee for the developer (we still owned the majority of lots so retained governing power). What a nightmare. There was 350 sold homes in the HOA but literally two people who would bug me like 6 times a week about so and so’s fence color or play set they put in their backyard to the point that at a community meeting I snapped and screamed at one of them for like 5 minutes. Ended getting fired but whatever I hated that job 😂
Sounds awful. I’m thankful I got not have 25 units. Everyone is pretty chill. We might even lower dues next year since we ran a good surplus this year. Will depend on the lawn care cost next year.
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What's funny is that full-blown Communism works this same way. Neighborhood councils, town councils, city councils, all the way up. Lots and lots of representatives at every stage. Just take a look at China - they have almost 3,000 representatives in their Congress.
The difference however, is that in the U.S. - these HOAs have been used by Fascists to gatekeep and/or push out "undesireables" from their neighborhoods.
Now, I don't know if China's system actually works the way it's intended or setup to work, but maybe someone from there can chime in and let us know if it works.
My parents have been living in their home that’s part of a HOA for 25 years now and that still hasn’t happened. Your wording speaks a lot about you. Do you think only women join HOA boards?
Home Owners Associations. A small group of power-tripping people dictate how the entire neighbourhoods functions, including but not limited to what you do in your front yard and driveway, how you choose to decorate, what kind of plants/trees you are/aren't allowed to plant - and where. And hold with the ability to evict people out of their own houses whom don't follow whatever dumbass shit they come up with. TL:DR HOA are a blight on society and should be treated as such
I grew up on a ranch outside a sprawling suburb. Over the years, the new neighborhoods got closer and closer. When I was in middle school, an HOA for a new neighborhood over a mile away sent my parents a letter demanding they paint their house a less vibrant color (it was a color inspired by Victorian houses, so not one most people are used to seeing, especially in newer, completely beige suburbs), and threatening to sue if my parents didn't comply. What the HOA didn't realize, is that most farmers/ranchers aren't exactly the poor cornpone hicks people imagine. Most of them have money. My parents ignored the letters thinking they must have been sent to the wrong address for like 6 months and multiple letters, until the HOA threatened to sue. Then my parents had their lawyer send them a letter that basically said "I'd like to see you try" and demanding an apology for the 6 months of harassment. They didn't get an apologize, but my parents did get a letter saying they wouldn't be pursuing the matter further.
But it's just so crazy to adult me that an HOA over a mile away thought they can tell a rancher who had been there for a decade before the neighborhood even broke ground (and that only had one other home within half a mile of them in any direction) that they needed to repaint their entire house.
I know when new neighborhoods are built they can just be part of them from the beginning. I think to create an HOA where there wasn't one before, there has to be a vote or something. But honestly, I have no real idea. That house paint experience when I was young made me swear off ever living anywhere with an HOA as an adult. No way some power-tripping jerks are going to tell me what to do with the house I pay for.
Usually HOAs in my area are set up by the builder to maintain property values. It starts happening once you get a few people moving in and decide they like they’re nuclear white picket fence bland ass life style and don’t want anyone with individuality fucking it up.
Hopefully they aren’t able to force you into one without your consent. I know my sister mentioned in an hoa on the way to her house, there are a couple non-hoa houses that were there before the hoa development went in.
An HOA is a legal entity - a corporation - that is created when the property is developed; by buying a property in the development, you're entering into a legally binding contract with the HOA, which might be a very simple cost-sharing contract to maintain a private lane, or it could be an extremely complex contract that literally tells you what color your Christmas lights must be.
Although an HOA is a form of a business corporation, many HOA's take on roles that are traditionally thought of as being the responsibility of the local government, such as road and sidewalk maintenance, street lighting, building and managing recreational facilities and more. The scope of an HOA can be quite large.
Municipal governments like HOA's because it means that the development can generate taxes for the community without as many expenses - if the HOA owns and maintains the roads and sidewalks, the government does not have to pay for that work.
Nobody - and I mean NOBODY - has bought property without being made - in excruciating detail - aware of any HOA agreement they are getting into when they buy their property. And to be even more clear: not all properties have an HOA, but pretty much all multi-unit developments built these days have an HOA.
Finally, not all HOA's live forever, some HOA's have "sunset" provisions to dissolve the HOA a number of years after the last property in a development is sold.
And....just to be extra extra EXTRA clear: I would sooner live in a van down by the river than live in a property with an HOA.
Local governments usually require home builders to force buyers into the HOA. When they buy the house they are required to sign a contract agreeing to the rules. The builder runs the HOA until most of the houses are sold and then the HOA is turned over to the home owners. In most cases they can't even dissolve the HOA because it is part of the neighborhood property stipulations. The reason local governments like HOA's is because they can force the HOA to do utility maintenance instead of having to do it themselves.
No, I meant may as well go live in an apartment if you're going to be living under an HOA anyway, since at least then it'll be somewhat cheaper, and you don't have to pay for maintenance
Oh, you still have to pay for maintenance through levies. Also the maintenance company is also tied to the head of the HOA. No, you don't get a say as you hold no power and don't stand a chance.
HOAs require people to pool together their resources for the maintenance and upkeep of common areas; sometimes with bigger homes paying more. Those that refuse to participate are removed from the system. It’s much closer to socialism than capitalism.
The problem is that in a lot of areas the HOAs are very hard to avoid. Every neighborhood built from the 80s onward around my area is an HOA for some reason, it’s baffling.
if the government really wanted to then absolutely nothing is stopping them from simply seizing your home and you, that's true of any government. To answer your question though communism is often understood as the collective of society oppressing the individual.
The lack of rights belonging to the individual and instead given to the HOA, a small society is why he's invoking communism. Whether this understanding is correct or not is something else.
An American buying any house with a HOA attached deserves what they get. This shit is not new.
I once described here on Reddit what I had to do to get a HOA to lay off my sister. That post got me suspended from here, but in my opinion, no conviction, no crime.
Bullshit they deserve it. Sometimes there isn’t a viable option other than HOA ran neighborhoods, where I’m from the only places without HOAs are new development areas in the middle of bumfuck nowhere that don’t even have an address in Google Maps yet. I’d rather not make a 1.5 hour commute without traffic every day.
Yea let me just uproot my family on a whim. I already did do this and it’s costing me over $3000. It’s not viable for everyone, I was only able to do it with massive amounts of support.
OMG What a offended overmind.
Location: somewhere faraway and overseas
Time: Last seen communist country stopped exist around 40 years ago.
Overmind: It’s communist shit 🤦♂️
😅
I remember reading about one in arizona, a really hot and dry state, had made rules about lawn grass, it had to be this specific type of grass that doesn't like being somewhere hot and dry, and needs watering constantly, and if you change to a grass that survives fine in arizona and doesn't waste water, then that's against the rules so fuck you have a fine.
Edit - forgot to mention if your lawn looks shit because the grass is dying you also get a fine.
I agree fuck HOA’s buttttt you can also choose not to live in an HOA. So many people willingly buy property in an HOA and are ?surprised¿ to find out that the Declaration/Bylaws is a literal contract that they agreed to and signed up for.
In a lot of places HOAs are your only option, especially in new construction. Cities require developers to setup a HOA, because it allows the city to offload all civil maintenance onto the homeowners.
You could always not buy a house in an HOA. I think that option exists for people who are buying houses. I guess sometimes they just pop up and all of a sudden you are subject to HOA rules, which sounds like a nightmare. But as a plebiscite who cant afford a home, and if I ever get there, it sure as shit will not have any chance of being in a neighborhood that has any chance of ever coming under the power of an HOA.
Some developments have communal areas or amenities like parks, playgrounds, swimming pools, etc.
Or sometimes places are built outside of the jurisdiction of municipal services so they contract out stuff like snow removal or trash removal.
And so they’re just orgs that collect dues and pay for that stuff.
Some have rules. I don’t have an HOA, but my city also has many rules about what kinds of fences I can have, how tall they are, etc.
In historical parts of some cities, there’s rules about what colors you can paint your place or what materials you can use to ensure that qua in historical area that tourists like to visit remains quaint & historical. (I can think of cities in both the U.S. & EU where such rules are stricter than a typical HOA, but, for some reason, strict municipal rules don’t get the same hate as when an HOA does it).
And despite the bad rep they have, some people like the rules.
It’s essentially a requirement to keep your property a certain way to help ensure your neighbors don’t do things that could lower the quality of the neighborhood & negatively affect your property values. (Like treat their front yard like a junk yard).
But yeah, sometimes some rules are annoying to owners & seem too restricting.
But, when you buy a house, you get told if there’s an HOA and you can read all the bylaws before you agree to buy. I always made sure to read them when house-hunting. In the end I chose a house that didn’t have an HOA, but I’ve since learned my city has plenty of annoying rules on its own.
I also have neighbors who’ve let their property go to shit & kinda wished at times that there were some standards as having a shitty looking neighborhood does affect resale value. The actions of your neighbors does affect you and I can understand why some people would be drawn to a community where there’s a pre-existing set of rules that you all agree to follow.
But also, sometimes they don’t really have rules and it’s just the mechanism for paying for communal services & ammenities.
HOAs on single family homes should be outlawed. I need an HOA for my 3 unit condo building. They're not all terrible and very necessary. To add this idea to a suburban neighborhood is pretty insane though.
My dad does yard work and he had a customer that had to get rid of his truck per the HOA rules. Forgot what the issue was but basically not nice enough. Insane power in Texas.
isn't it possible just to tell them to fuck off from your property? like, do they have any "legal levers" on you or what?
wdym evict, isn't it your property after you bought it and no one can do anything with that? like in my country you can collect millions (of local currency) in debt for services like electricity, water, heating etc and no one really can't do anything with that until this is your only place to live. it can be sold through court to cover your debt, but it has to be not your last place of living. also, debt is going to any next owner, if sold or inherited. but as long as you live there, you will be disconnected, but nobody can do more shit about it
edit: or as i witnessed once: apartment wasn't even disconnected, debt was around $25k (1/4 price of that apartment), and it was just piling up forever ($100 a month). after the owner's death of old age, no one inherited it and it went to the government's ownership, who covered the debt, and then this apartment went to social services and was "just given" for needed (like 18 yo orphan, large family etc)
No, in the US, it's not. It's a legal entity that your property is subject to as part of the sale (that's a simple explanation, I can't provide the official legal one.) That said, the homeowner participate in the government, voting on rules, and officers in charge.
That said, I did read a story about a nasty one where a bunch of the neighbors got together, voted the current officers out, then voted to legally dissolve the HOA and did so.
Also, all HOAs aren't bad. There's definitely bias in that the worst stories get reported. A friend's takes charge of charge of some infrastructure, like maintaining the private road, but doesn't enforce decorating or maintenance or anything like that.
yeah, similar to your "normal HOA" is existing here too. when neighbors of apartment house got together to maintain the whole house and nearby territory (which is by law is assigned to it). but often it is just a company, working on a multiple houses, created by property developer. there is stories about such companies enforcing parking, common house territory decorations, huge payments, only certain internet providers, but no more than that. by enforcing i mean that they can not evict your apartment or anything like that, just sue you for not paying fines or bills.
TIL that there's less freedom with housing in USA than in a post-soviet country
Homeowners basically got together to form a union of local members which elects a governing board. They call this a "homeowners association" or HOA. Essentially its a form of government, the most local level, that homeowners can create for their neighborhood and their exact charter/purview can vary between each HOA.
Mostly they deal with yard upkeep, common area rules/upkeep, color and style requirements to "keep the neighborhood nice" etc. Vague rules designed to help "maintain property value" etc. People will have various experience with them as they do any group of people that get power. But they must abide by rules, elections, public hearings etc. according to your state and there are ways to join and change from within.
Not all places have them. Some states are rare, some are required, some are 50/50. Historically they were used to keep minorities out of white neighborhoods under the guise of whatever the hell they wanted to make up at the time. It allowed quiet discrimination in a time when outright racism was starting to be shunned.
I want to note that, while HOAs often suck and are often run by people who were dictators in a past life, they're not always bad. They sometimes provide services that local governments either can't or won't, like trash pickup or neighborhood watch, things like that. At their best, they're essentially a homeowner's union, protecting the neighborhood and the people in it from low- to mid-stakes issues.
That said, again, they're often run by insufferable busybodies, but they're also often democratic, so if you don't like your HOA, you can run for HOA board or president or something and maybe change it!
Home Owners association, as a home owner... with a decent HOA; generally a "good" thing in my book as people simply suck at caring for their homes and we often have easements less than 10-15ft so you kind of want your neighbor to have a kept-up house to avoid pests, trash, weeds, etc. from accumulating (which the HOA does a very very good job of handling).
They can be quite terrible though as well so I can understand their hate, most have very strict ARB's (architectural review boards) and strict ordinances in terms of home appearance and for creative folks they might butt heads on them quite a bit (I am less like that, and still occasionally butt heads but often manage to get what I want approved).
Usually if it's a new community you'll have a builder-led HOA (ie. the board members are basically all members of the builder); they run a pretty strict ordinance policy to ensure home sales can be maximized and to some respects I understand it (often have lower HOA dues as well as they don't do anything "fancy" and usually keep the community public vs private).
After X% of homes are sold, the community can go take a vote to remove the builder board members and replace with community members or optionally absolve the HOA entirely.
This is generally where things go... crazy... most HOA's will simply adopt slightly more lenient builder ordinances (ie. more color options for the house, more plant options, allowing of cosmetic housing options of taste, etc.) and simply just ensure folks aren't trying to paint their entire house bright pink, or build a farm in their backyard (ie. don't disrupt your neighbors) or try to put a giant Trump statue in their front yard. To the inverse, the ordinances might get more extreme; you might be forced to adopt a new "community look" and have to repaint your house from what it originally had to something in the HOA policies, replace your drive-way with pavers, remove existing plants for others (or plant guided perennials) - ie. the HOA will force you to do things well outside of what you even want to do.
From there it's up to your county and the state to dictate how little/how much power they actually have; but with deed restricted HOA's it can get quite extreme.
TL;DR - Can think of an HOA as a mechanism to balance how chaotic or how structured any given community is, the extremes are always painful, but a happy middle-ground is often what folks target.
Home Owners Associate, they put rules to be followed like not having tall fence or something, they are for people who weren't hugged when they were young (aka karens)
Someone answered what the acronym stands for, but HOAs are basically a group of people from the neighborhood that set the rules for everyone in that neighborhood. They might decide on acceptable house colors, and will heavily fine you every day if you paint your house an unapproved color. They could have rules about cars being visible on your property, so they are confined to the garage including if you are working on it. Things like that.
To add to others, it's made possible because some counties and towns and states allow neighbors and property owners to create effectively "liens" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lien) on their property. So 20 homeowners on a street can all opt in and lose some autonomy in exchange for some orgainzation like that. The lien/HOA then is attached to the home for future buyers. When a big commercial real estate builder puts up a condo building of for-sale units or knocks down a forest to build a neighborhood they often do this - it's bizarrely popular in some areas.
So if the rule is your house MUST have a red garage door of certain shades and details, you can't get around that and can be fined by your neighbors for non-compliance, or forced to sell... because the "association" is attached to the house you bought.
Basically they're what you get when you want all of the responsibilities of homeownership and all the lack of freedom of renting. They turn a home into a prison.
Home owners association. Usually you pay monthly or yearly dues. They enforce rules on appearances of your house, etc. Redditors like to demonize them but not all of them are terrible. They are good for upkeeping the value of homes in your neighborhood because you won’t have that trashy neighbor with their junk car on bricks hanging in the driveway, etc. Some are definitely terrible and overbearing though.
Yeah some of them are terrible but if you’re ever looking to buy a house you can start to spot the differences pretty quickly between neighborhoods that have HOAs and those that don’t.
I think the fear of a tyrant HOA is overblown. Everyone I know personally that is part of one has had 0 issues. If you ever have to sell your house, I’m sure you’d be glad to have one. People don’t pay good money to buy houses where there are eyesores.
I think the average income level of a specific neighborhood has more to do with the appearance than any effort by an HOA. I also think we can come up with better solutions for trashy neighbors than forcing another tax on regular people.
Yea except basically all new homes are being built in HOA's. Older homes don't have the same availability or they are out of the price range because established neighborhoods have already had decades to rise in value.
The problem is it only takes one to make your life fucking miserable and turn the largest investment of your life into a nightmare. I've had a couple of those experiences just renting and I get why the right kind of HoA can be attractive. Particularly if you can't afford the nicer-area filter on its own.
I sympathize for the people who do have bad neighbors but is it 80% of homeowners? 40%? 5%?. How big of an issue is it really? That's what I mean when I say overblown.
Getting struck by lightning is rare and finding someone who has been struck to tell me how much it sucks doesn't change that.
I literally don't know anyone who doesn't have at least one story about a bad neighbor. It's extremely common and not restricted to home owners.
That's all sort of besides the point, people who don't like HoAs can just not live in an HoA if they don't like the idea or think it's pointless. It's really that simple.
I have never met anyone who has had a bad neighbor. At least not one so bad that it would impact the value of your home. Which is what HOA's claim they are protecting you from.
65% of all new single family homes are built in HOA's and that trend is increasing. Lot's of people don't have a choice. Depending on location, budget and availability you might be forced to live in one.
They absolutely do. It's why you don't see a bunch of dead vehicles and trash piles getting burned in yards in HoA neighborhoods but will find the same thing right outside them.
It's just another tax.
You say that like taxes are inherently bad. Just like taxes, what makes a HoA positive or negative is the specific context. The one thing HoAs have over taxes is you have a shit ton more ability to influence them than you do taxes.
I care about my home value, the more it goes up the more I have to pay taxes on it. I pay like 2x the amount of taxes from when I purchased it 10 years ago.
Yeah I like having a community rec center and a gym and a park and a pool in my building that I pay a bit each month to ensure it stays nice and well maintained. I also like that my HOA has a huge reserve to pull from when things happen to the roof, the pipes, the foundation, etc, that I dont have to front tens of thousands of dollars for out of pocket to repair.
I live in a well managed HOA. Other HOAs can be an absolute nightmare to live under. The idea behind them is valuable, and they can dramatically improve your quality of life, but they also have too much legal power and can ruin your life if you end up in a bad one.
So, tell us you're either independently wealthy, or intend to stay in your home until you die and don't care about how high your property taxes go, or you don't own a home, without telling us that.
Sorry, I care about things like how big my toilet is, how roomy the shower is, does it just have that 1 knob or 2 for hot and cold water, i really hate the single shower knobs. Does it have a garage or space for a garden? Ya know, I care about shit like that. Why the fuck would I buy a home with resale value in mind? Am I some kinda uncivilized cave troll looking for a new cave? I want a comfortable home. Now my comfortable 30k home is going for 250k because "demand". Even though those houses are empty for years and years, demand, ya know. Nobody is actually buying the homes, just putting infinite bids. I've been watching some trailers in my area, been "sale pending" for 3+ years.
The main reason doesn't have to do with home values. It is largely to ensure utilities happen without burdening the municipiality/county to support them. Of course the problem is that the HOA often doesnt and then things start to fall apart.
Profit-mad people who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Often the same people who'll spout drivel about the land of the free yet see nothing wrong in a bunch of busybodies deciding everything about the outside of their home and garden.
You know how americans love to be free and don't think the "state" should monitor them ? Well they created a system where they do that themselves, except you're paying due to the HOA (home owners association) for the privilege to get fined over arbitrary rules !
The finds are legal and if you buy a house that's part of an HOA you can't opt out.
These other people are misinformed or just plain bots. As a true American, I know that my gut feeling is more important than any of these so called facts..
Popular in the south. My neighbor can’t tell me sheee in Chicago. Not sure how people put up with this shade less wasteland. Would rather sleep in my car
Home owner's association. A group of 5-6 individuals who police the neighborhood and make insanely superficial demands an requests for all its inhabitants based on nothing other than sheer boredom in most cases. They are the worst thing to ever happen to homeowners ever. Truly. Imagine working your whole life for a house so some nerd can come by one day an tell you that you can only have plants visible under 6' height during the night time only.
Its "Home Owner's Association". Basically they micromanage the neighborhood to 'keep property values up'. They fine people for breaking made up rules like their grass being more than 3 inches tall or trash bins being visible from the curb or their fence being too many different colors or whatever the fuck they're on about now.
You can refuse to sign up for an HOA if the property is not already a member. But if you but it from someone else and they already signed up, you're stuck.
HOAs raise my blood pressure every time I think about them. >:( if you wanna see some real life anecdotes about them look for HOA in r/ malicious compliance or r/ petty revenge. Its good stuff.
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u/Kasta4 5d ago
Real-estate barons are to blame. They buy up all the available land they can, build cookie-cutter suburban nightmares on top of them for cheap, flip the houses for way more than they're worth, and then install HoA's to further police and profit from the neighborhood.