In my case its the HOA that cares.
There's also noise and odor/smoke pollution. An HOA is pretty much the only mechanism to ensure that a group of people who don't smoke marijuana can band together to live in marijuana-smoke-free air. (Yes, some people smoke enough potent skunkweed for the stink to carry multiple houses away. No, the police don't care.)
Most of the things HOAs care about are indeed idiotic, though. IMHO, the HOA's right to dictate what I'm doing ends where my property begins. The point of the HOA is to control/constrain the externalities you have on other houses/communal properties. If you put a garden gnome on your lawn, there's no externality.
Actually, the HOA’s right to dictate ends with whatever you agreed to by contract when you bought the property. And the HOA can enforce that contract in court, to the point of foreclosing on your home if necessary.
So, yeah, when you buy a house in an HOA, read those covenants before you sign. They are usually at the bottom of the 90 page stack of papers when you close.
HOAs created out of regular separately-developed SFH dwellings are the latter kind, and what I was referring to in my previous comment. (I kind of forgot that the baked-into-the-property kind existed for a moment. Oops!) In the voluntarist kind of HOA, it really is up for debate where the HOA's right to tell you what to do ends, because ultimately the HOA's power in such a voluntarist contract derives from the other members' willingness to shun you, annoy you, or at most refuse to give you access to communal resources like tennis courts, for failure to comply.
1) Optional -- This puts the onus on the HOA to actually serve its residents, because if enough people dislike it enough to leave (after, say, a few elected residents go on a power trip), it will collapse.
2) Give access to neighborhood amenities (e.g. a pool or clubhouse)
3) Provide neighborhood services (e.g. snow removal or tree trimming, extra trash collection)
4) Are NOT in the business of mandating minutiae such as grass length, paint color, approving remodel plans, handing out fines, etc
5) Are NOT part of a private developer's subdivision (usually goes hand in hand with point 4) so much as a collection of residents which formed organically
Basically, I like the idea of HOAs if they're more similar to Los Angeles's Neighborhood Councils than LAPD: Home Edition (although, for so many other reasons, I think LA's Neighborhood Councils are unrepresentative and ineffective at serving the wider community's best interest so much as they benefit exclusively the homeowner's interest). Otherwise, I strongly believe they cause more harm than good -- not to mention they can easily be weaponized against a minority homeowner moving into a majority-white community.
Unfortunately, it seems like HOAs as described above are in the vanishing minority.
Large parts of the country have very little housing stock, especially newer housing, that isn’t HOA-encumbered.
In Europe the middle class generally moves into cities and not out of them where you're for the most part left to your own devices rather than being bullied around by activist neighbours or your church parish or what have you. I mean just take a look at fiction, from Steven King's small town horror, to the Truman Show, or PK Dick, this sort of provincial clampdown on people is quite uniquely American. Between boyscouts and girlscouts and the cheerleading team there's not that much freedom left.
I noticed this most in my encounters with American college students abroad. They're like oversized children. It's quite striking how managed American life is. From school until the evening to clubs and on-campus living, into the nuclear family and then retirement in Florida.
And then there is The Addams Family. The 2019 film addresses their conflict with American suburbia quite well. In the end, the neighborhood accepts them. Sometimes art does not imitate life.
Of course, most companies' monitoring is pretty shallow and reasonable, but there are exceptions, and I certainly wouldn't choose to work for one of the exceptions.
If a company has a commercial kitchen, it seems reasonable to be to prohibit employees from running their own food delivery startup out of the kitchen... If you get access to a company car (I.e. travelling salesman), the company should reasonably expect to be able to take action against you if you use ot to go drag racing, or for a personal vacation.
Likewise, the notion that an employee should expect to have free reign over a company computer and company internet access is just strange to me.
Given that Germany has a much healthier employee representation than the US, it's much more difficult for management to slide in surveillance under the radar. (It's also rather painful if they get caught)
In some US states, for example, an employee who commits a crime using his employer’s computer has opened up his employer to civil liability. If the employer can show that the employee actively sidestepped the employer’s controls, the employer can make a good case against liability.
I wonder if anything like that can happen in Germany. If not, then employee privacy on employer-owned devices makes sense.
I always find this reasoning strange and inconsistent . Companies give company cars to employees which could injure people. Or I could stab somebody with an employer provided knife.
Interestingly data privacy (more precisely the "Recht auf informationelle Selbstbestimmung") is not named explicitly in the constitution, but has been "created" by the German constitutional court in 1983 in the context of a law suite against the German census of 1983 [1].
Historically I would argue all of this is the result of the experience 1933-1945 and also the (what was known at that time) experience in East Germany, the communist German Democratic Republic.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informational_self-determinati...
The American body politic's focus on rights as the defining feature of the social contract isn't shared everywhere else. For example, in many countries, the focus is on the material benefits the government can provide for you ("development"). And because of that, there's less reflexive distrust in government as an institution able to benefit your life, in principle. Parts of the American citizenry absolve themselves of the expectation that government can, even in principle, improve your life.
America is living in the long 18th century - Enlightenment liberalism worked out over three centuries.
One of the values I've found is that it does provide a way to collectively prevent certain eyesores. I don't really want to have someone with 5 cars in the street on in their driveway for extended periods of time. Having a BBQ party? Sure - have 15 cars there for a few hours. Want to collect cars and work on them and leave cars 'in repair' out the street for weeks at a time? I'd rather you didn't, and would rather there be some agreed upon process to resolve those disputes.
I do understand some HOAs have people that get power hungry - grass being a 1/4" too tall, etc. That's generally bullshit, and I think there's probably other things going on in those cases where the HOA issue is the public face of some other private neighbor disputes going on.
Oh, we did have a letter once or twice about "your lawn is not kept properly". We have a lawn service and they got delayed, then it rained heavy for 3 days, and they were backed up again, and... we had really long grass. It was cut the moment someone could cut it at that point. Nature happens. If the worst that came out of that was a $50 fine or something... meh.
Not to mention they save me all the time I'd spend on arranging various home services, from window washing to roof cleaning to pest removal to repaving driveways. Having an HOA means I worry about what is inside my walls and nothing else.
The cost of resisting is too high, so people end up picking their battles.
These are, in fact, battles you can pick. HOAs feel like living in an apartment but you're also the superintendent.
In some sections of the US, you can’t buy a single-family home built after 1980 without being part of an HOA.
I’m not sure what that has to do with walkable neighborhoods?
Like any human collaboration they can be awesome or terrible. A good HOA can manage resources for ammenities like pools and sports courts, they can help homeowners settle disputes over things like fencing and street parking. Like many volunteer orgs, they're run by those willing to volunteer - which are not usually the most capable at the job.
At the end of the day HOAs do get a lot of heat because they often enforce community guidelines on things like mowing your lawn and not painting your garage door to be the nazi flag. Like anything, this is a tradeoff - you may want to run a ham antenna in your backyard and be told you're not allowed.
Most HOA's are formed when a developer plats a subdivision. They attach the Covenants and other deed restrictions at the property at that time. They do it so they can maintain control over properties they have already sold until they have sold every property in the development. They want to maintain that control so they can cultivate the image for the neighborhood that maximizes their ability to profit from it.
This notion that HOA's get created for altruistic reasons is almost universally false, and should go away. Yes, some HOA's survive in a way that isn't toxic, but even that is really in the eyes of the beholder.
Sounds like a good use-case for sortition. Require that people "submit to the potential for being drafted for HOA service" as part of the purchase agreement of the houses built in the development. Then at least the HOA will mostly be composed of harried people who don't want to do the job and want to get it over with as quickly as possible; rather than busybodies with idle hands.
[1]: https://www.fcc.gov/media/over-air-reception-devices-rule
I guess it is the 'community' aspect.
Most homes that do not have HOAs are on busy streets, which are less desirable.