> Without maintenance fees HOAs decline

Good.

> ... and their owners' values decrease.

Really? In fifty years of home owning, not once with the "benefit" of a HOA, I've yet to see an owned house value decline.

Some countries just bypassed this entire US obsession with redlining and keeping the others out. Maybe try working more on community and less on uniformity.

Same goes with the whole "Florida man" shtick--news channels and YouTube channels dredging for wild stories are more likely to get the info on Florida-specific misdemeanors due to sunshine laws.

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.

> It’s extremely common for local governments to make an HOA a legal requirement for new developments.

Then people ought to be complaining about their local governments, not HOAs.

To your “happily collect taxes at full rate” comment, strongtowns.org’s whole message is that only the densest cities in the country bring in enough taxes to pay for the maintenance of streets, sewers etc.

“Full rate” is almost always subsidized through the windfall taxes on new growth and development, putting towns in a ponzi scheme like situation.

> 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.

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.

It's still a choice being made. People choose to live where they live. They could choose to live elsewhere.

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.

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.

> What consequences are sane for a member who does not pay dues

None. No HOA should have any power over a private home owned by an individual.

Not sure how water bill is relevant, that is paid to the water agency. They'll shut off water if not paid for some months.

> 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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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

And when I say they sold it to an employee involved after buying it themselves at auction for that $3.24, they sold it to the employee for one dollar. So this woman was out hundreds of thousands of dollars of equity because a self-dealing HOA and its law firm (tied by marriage to one of the HOA board) voted to foreclose on her home and accept a purchase price that couldn't buy you a drink at Starbucks.

By far the nicest neighborhood in town is ours, the one with no HOA. We have the most sports fields and courts, playgrounds, trails, dog parks, skate park, etc. No HOA, so we don't hoard, all facilities are shared to all. But across the street for us, making it a nice neighborhood.

Also, we have no HOA, so there are no ridiculous restrictions, which means the neighborhood has character. Every house is painted in unique colorful styles, instead of endless shades of dull beige. Every house has unique vegetation choices based on owner preferences so it is fun to walk around and sightsee. We have no HOA, so there are zero restrictions on decorations, so we are the Halloween capital of the county (coming up in a few weeks!)

It's a vibrant unique neighborhood full of facilities and character, precisely because there is no HOA to destroy it.

A similar neighborhood across town (we're a small town so across town is just a mile away) has a HOA, every house is a dull shade of beige and they have very harsh rules, like HOAs of course do, on decorations, so Halloween and Christmas are DOA over there.

> 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)

> 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?

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 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.

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?

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.

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 implication is that you ought to move into a neighborhood with people who share your values.

That is a risk you freely accept when choosing to buy in an HOA. Co-ops, which are related but distinct, solve for this risk by requiring the co-op board to vote to approve any new residents. You have a co-op as an option for your living arrangements, as well. Optionality is a good thing.

I mean, where I live, there are no HOAs, but the city council instead mandates those kinds of things via zoning rules.

I think I still prefer that to HOAs, because - The city is pretty good at taking care of public facilities - I only pay city tax, not city tax and HOA fees - The city has better things to do than walk around neighborhoods looking for violations, so enforcement is pretty lax - The city government is subject to checks and balances

I prefer to spend $1.25mil on a house that won't drop in value because my neighbor is not allowed to put up demon statues and paint the house pink, etc.

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.

The party who foreclosed the house and is currently selling it. Who else could it be?

> 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 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.

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.

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)

I think that's his point as this article reads like that exact prompt. Pure LLM garbage.

My whole point is that you can run this loop endlessly, come away with a lot of articles, yet be no where nearer to anything valuable.

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.

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.

Sorry, I'm not going to spend an hour reading every LLM article to figure out if its truthy, and then come up with the counter arguments against it, and on and on. The whole point of a human source is that depending on the source, I can already trust that they did some leg work to get the data and do the research, and they already have something to their name that I can trust. LLMs write in such a way that everything looks believable, so you spend 10x the time trying to find what is false.

We're just talking about one article here, but its an ocean of garbage being generated out there, yeah...go argue against all those and you'll waste your whole life.

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?

Sorry, looks like OP already did that, I guess you'll need to find a new topic.

> 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.

That’s not an HOA thing, that’s a poverty thing.

Right...so why would I read something trying to convince me that HOAs are making the crisis worse, and actually be swayed by it?

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.

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

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.

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

So they are able to enact their own laws? That's pretty different from Germany, where a municipality cannot override laws from higher courts.

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

> 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.

It’s unfair not to pay your dues, but it’s also unfair to lose your house over a four-figure debt.

I am a president of an association that handles all aspects of road maintenance (construction, sweeping, snow removal), a full commercial sewer lift station, stormwater drainage, trash / recycling, street lights, interfacing with utilities, forestry maintenance, and permitting along with general Q&A. We are a volunteer 3-person Department of Public Works.

I’ve lived in two HOAs and they both owned and maintained roads in the community. One of them was a new development, and making the roads private was probably a big reason the county required an HOA for it.

And Florida plans on making it worse by cutting property tax limits.

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.

It’s literally like 90% text, and it’s not an insignificant amount of text.

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.

I want to live in a neighborhood that doesn't allow short-term rentals, along with others who think the same way.

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.

If you have wonderful neighbors, HOAs are unnecessary.

If you have horrible neighbors you will wish you had one.

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.

Highly suggested that it's influenced by forums who have reported poor situations by people that have been in them.