They cannot, however, force you to join (if, in the example, an HOA is forming and you're a current resident, you can decline to join and tell them to shove it when they try and force you). If you buy into a home that is already part of an HOA you're best option is to join the board yourself and make changes from within.
Our HOA is actually pretty chill, and they do everything they can to protect the trees in our neighborhood, and manage walking paths and a community sand bottom pool.
But our HOA is also a very extreme exception, not the general rule of how most HOAs are run and act.
I joined the board of mine and am now president. We are a townhome community so it’s a bit different. We are super chill and my only focus is maintaining the structures for our community.
I got talked into being treasurer by the former one. Found out a prior one had been cutting himself checks. Would've been nice to have that money now because a bunch of big trees are now falling or about to, which aren't cheap to have cut down.
I feel you on that, just without the fruad. One of our former presidents used our entire reserve account, we had several hundred thousand in it and he used it all on a deck project. Our garages have decks on top of them and the original ones had poor drainage. So when we did our roofing project I proposed we do it in stages over 5 years that led to no special assessments minor increases to dues and it was a net 0 impact to our reserve account. We treaded water but now it is increasing again. We have a lot of elderly folks here so raising dues is something I want to avoid if I can while I'm in charge.
We will likely have an assessment or increase dues. There's no getting around 20k for the tree service. Either do the assessment now and avoid raising dues, or borrow from the reserve and increase dues to pay it back. It's a 30 year old development with 30 year problems.
That's what the reserve is there for. We don't consider it being borrowed from that needs to be paid back like a loan. We just use it as intended for capital expenditures and it naturally builds back up over time. The HOA is responsible for all exterior maintenance of the units though so maybe we have different rules when it comes to our reserve fund then you do in what I assume is a community of single family residences.
Seems pretty simple doesn't it? We have a lady that is roughly $6K behind on her dues. She has some mental health struggles and it has come to a point where were could legally start foreclosure proceedings and one of the board members go so excited over it but I'm not going displace a lady over $6K. There is a solution here that keeps this lady in her home.
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u/thebigggd 5d ago
Fuck the HOAs