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Are condo HOAs typically run by insane petty dictators who will demand absolute perfection in lawns, house trim, and the shapes your car leaves in your driveway?

https://www.idahostatesman.com/news/nation-world/national/ar...

In our case, it's a bunch of senior citizens who stand outside and stare down anyone who walks in and immediately call the police if someone parks in a reserved spot.

I am genuinely amazed at how petty they are. They also upgraded the part of the complex they live in for 3 years in a row and keep postponing the other areas.

They write hilarious monthly updates cheering how much damage their new tall speed bumps have done to cars.

I would be pretty pissed if I actually owned one of the condos, but as it stands, its pretty funny.

HOAs are not restricted to condos. Many newer SFHs are governed by neighborhood HOAs also, and they are famous for putting onerous restrictions on residents.

Also, not all condo HOAs are a mess like you describe. I'm part of a 3 unit HOA on subdivided infill lot. It's dense, but no shared walls or structures. The low HOA fee covers the shared insurance policy and nothing more. Within my exclusive use area I'm free to do anything reasonable with landscaping, etc. Only structural changes to my unit require HOA approval

The dysfunction of some HOAs is more a function of the misplaced priorities of the members, as in the example you gave, not with the idea of shared ownership itself.

The laws regarding exactly what plays out when an HOA(condo board) doesn't pay its bills likely changes drastically by jurisdiction, but higher level you are highlighting an important point - "The Tragedy of the Commons" is a very significant issue with condos, only takes a few bad actors to make things really bad for everyone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

You're talking about the HOA as if they are a third party. Isn't the HOA just the group of condo owners? Who were the two parties in the grisly court battle?

> You're talking about the HOA as if they are a third party. Isn't the HOA just the group of condo owners?

No, in the same way that a corporation is not just the group of stockholders; it's a distinct legal entity operationally controlled by it's own management (either employees or a contracted management firm), who is accountable to a board, who is normally accountable by election to the condo owners. Owners, or groups of owners, suing HOAs are just like shareholders suing corporations, it's not an uncommon thing.

Also, lots of HOAs are actually structured to be effectively controlled by the original developer until certain time and/or unit sales triggers move them out of a privileged role, and may have rules set in place during that time that place high procedural bars on changes that would provide effective control to the actual homeowners even if the homeowners have nominal control.

HOAs are a hotbed of principal-agent problems.

While all that is true, as an HOA member and major stakeholder in the HOA, it's incumbent on the members/owners to actually read the quarterly financial updates, attend HOA meetings, vote, etc.

Certainly easier to do in a neighborhood-run HOA for a small building or TH cluster than a high-rise, but the point still stands, I think.

54 people couldn't cough up $20k?

54 people couldn't pay the bare modicum of attention to their HOA's budget to stop them from spending on meals and vacations that have nothing to do with the HOA's role?

I've lived in HOA neighborhoods before; the power any individual resident has over the HOA is nearly nil. You'd basically have to run around to all the neighbors and convince them to vote for someone else at the next board election; it's just like regular government politics that way.

Yes, that's a pretty bare modicum of effort.

Convincing your neighbors to vote a certain way is "a pretty bare modicum of effort"? If that were true, we wouldn't have our current democracy in such a terrible state. Billions of dollars are spent on every election to try to convince voters of how to vote, and look where it gets us. How do you think one person running around to his neighbors is going to convince them to vote for genuinely good HOA board members? Remember that the bad members are also going to be running around trying to get votes.

And who would you have them vote for anyway? Yourself? I don't know about you, but I have no time or inclination for such a job. Frequently, HOAs turn out this way because the people who do have time for that crap are the people who really are a problem. This is a strong argument in favor of professional property management in fact (which is what my condo has, and doesn't seem to have any of these problems).

The "bare modicum of effort" in that case as the average person would be at least paying attention to the folks running around trying to get votes, and paying attention to what they are telling you. Billions of dollars are spent trying to convince voters to vote, because the only real winner in most general elections, whether HOA or national, is "apathy" as most votes are undecided or not even cast.

Also, things like meeting minutes and annual budgets are generally required to be transparent in most HOA founding documents (constitutions, articles of incorporation, bylaws). You don't have to want to be a board member to review meeting notes (or directly attend meetings in most cases), and especially to review an annual budget of how your money is spent. 54 different people in the example above had an opportunity to review the budget? Did they just not care? Was it "creative accounting" fraud? (If so, why weren't the people responsible personally liable for fraud? White collar crimes are still crimes.)

My HOA maintenance fees include major utilities so we all assume year-to-year increases, but just about everyone in my building still seems to take a fine tooth comb to the annual budget every year in the hopes of avoiding an increase or finding a possible decrease.

(Also, property managers are generally orthogonal concerns to HOAs given they have different goals and most property managers still report to an HOA. You can still have good property company reporting to a bad HOA. There are also plenty of horror stories of bad property management companies out there. My HOA has already been through a small handful of property management companies trying to find a good one. We seem to have lucked out with the current one, at least, given all that we are going through.)

>because the only real winner in most general elections, whether HOA or national, is "apathy" as most votes are undecided or not even cast.

That simply isn't true. As bad as voter turnout is in the US, it's still over 50%. The winner is ignorance, as so many voters actively vote against their own best interests (e.g., poor people voting for the party that passes tax breaks for millionaires).

>why weren't the people responsible personally liable for fraud? White collar crimes are still crimes.

Now this is an excellent question here. I have no idea what the answer is, but it seems like the US is really bad about this kind of thing, and not just with HOA management. It seems like prosecutors here just don't want to bother with cases like this, maybe because not enough money is involved?

>There are also plenty of horror stories of bad property management companies out there.

Yes, but at least here, as you found out with your case, you can just hire a different company when you need to. It seems like the best case is what your HOA has going on: an HOA composed of owners, acting mainly as overseers for the professional management company that does that bulk of the work of managing the place. The HOA horror stories I've seen (and experienced) seem to involve HOAs which do their own management, so basically some busybody in the neighborhood who has time and interest gets voted in along with a few of his cronies, and then mismanages the funds badly.

Voter turnout only goes over 50% for presidential elections. It isn't even that high for midterm federal elections, let alone local ones. A school bond failed in the next county last week because an overwhelming number of votes supported it - but they didn't have enough people vote to make it a legal quorum (or whatever it's called).

https://www.fairvote.org/voter_turnout#voter_turnout_101

I'm on my HOA board, so yes, all of your objections appear to me as "I don't want to do anything at all". And comparing "talk to your 50 shared neighbors" to "organize an election with hundreds of millions of voters" is just off the charts hyperbole.

Again, you didn't answer my question. Who exactly are you going to get them to vote for, if you don't like the guy who's running the place now?

And yes, talking to 50 neighbors sounds like a big PITA to me, when you aren't even on the board and don't have a way to contact everyone and arrange a meeting; you'll have to go door-to-door and hope to catch people when they're home. That's a significant project. You don't have to do this in neighborhoods that don't have HOAs. And finally, again, WHO will you have them vote for, if you can convince them to not vote for the other guy who's mismanaging funds? Are you volunteering to spend all your free time on this payless, thankless job?

What do you mean, I didn't answer your question? I am volunteering, yes. I literally already do this. I would tell them to vote for me. I am very aware of what being on a HOA requires because I already do it and yes I think it is not that hard. So to be clear: ME.

(I might use magical technology like mailboxes to facilitate asynchronous communication if I didn't already have access to the email address of every homeowner, which as a member of the HOA you should have)

>I would tell them to vote for me. I am very aware of what being on a HOA requires because I already do it and yes I think it is not that hard. So to be clear: ME.

Maybe you're willing to volunteer your time for another job, but I'm not. Moreover, I'm under no illusion that people would vote for me; I'm not highly charismatic.

So who is someone like me supposed to get people to vote for? Where's this magic person in every subdivision who has the time and talent to take on this thankless job? Your solution doesn't scale.

$20K each, most likely.

1 million dollar sewer repair bill? unlikely.

Another "tragedy of the commons" thing. It's only about $370 per person (or unit), but they're probably not all trying to sell at the same time, so you probably can't get them to all agree to it. So there's probably 5 people trying to sell at the moment and the rest refuse to pay up just to help those 5 sell, and they probably think that this might come up again in the future thanks to even more mismanagement.

I had a friend go through a roof replacement in his condo complex that cost $13k for each condo owner. I know nothing about plumbing but maybe it was per owner?

It's also just the cost. A condo is appealing to me because they're cheaper and I don't need a big place, but when you add in the HOA fees (SFH don't have HOAs around here), they start to look pretty close in price.