Hacker News Reader

Comment by susiecambria | Hacker News Reader

My HOA recently approved an environmental stewardship policy and plan. Among the requirements: plant natives first. You'd have thought the people supporting the plan were proposing to kill members' grandchildren. The rhetoric was unreal for such an issue that no one had ever really thought about.

It doesn't help that local hardware stores and the biggies sell fewer natives than non-natives.

Both the policy and the plant sales significantly matter here: we are in Virginia a stone's throw from the Chesapeake Bay. Doing right by the environment (plants, wildlife, water) is important in its own right but the beauty of the environment is also why so many people moved here to retire.

View on HN

I recently visited Kennebunkport, Maine (yes, the fancy town where the Bush family lives), and they apparently had some kind of wildflower initiative that was incentivizing people to grow native wildflowers instead of the typical manicured mulched gardens I see in the northeast. Not only was it more beautiful than the usual, but it seemed to enhance the quaintness of the place (especially given how overrun by tourists it was).

People are ridiculous. So afraid of change!

> My HOA recently approved an environmental stewardship policy and plan. Among the requirements: plant natives first.

It’s quite possible that people were objecting to the general expansion of powers/policies of the HOA and the “environmental stewardship policy” rather than this specific clause. (I’m not the type to willingly buy in an HOA area, so I can sympathize, even if I’m fine with this one clause.)

> I’m not the type to willingly buy in an HOA area

The problem is that there's a hard trade-off between private property ownership and walkability. If you want to live somewhere where you can walk and bike to restaurants, houses inherently need to be close together. And when houses are closer together on smaller lots, there is more value to having communal property, and to keeping private property cohesively managed. In short, the more walkable a neighborhood you want to live in, the more game theory pushes you toward forming HOAs, co-ops, etc.

We’re in a part of Cambridge, MA with relatively small lots. I’ve supported every neighbor’s application for a permit or variance, even when I really didn’t like the aesthetics of what they were building.

I don’t think it’s my place to care what windows you have, what color your door is painted, if your hedges are trimmed to the regulation height, or whatever other ridiculous policies HOAs can dream up.

There’s a sidewalk out front. If you don’t like the look of my house, I invite you to look at something else while you walk past; I’ll do the same.

This makes absolutely no sense to me. Every great walkable neighborhood built before the mid twentieth century (in other words 99.9% of them) have no HOA.

As a matter of fact, I wound say the exact opposite. The HOA is more likely going to keep out the bars, cafes, restaurants, and groceries that actually make a neighborhood walkable.

> You'd have thought the people supporting the plan were proposing to kill members' grandchildren.

That's crazy, considering that policy is likely adding an absolutely insane amount to everyone's property values. When NYC re-landscaped The Highline to make it exclusively native plants, property values in the area literally went up 10x.

I live in a HOA, and the first thing I did when I moved in was to dig up all the forsythia along our driveway and replace them with grafted pawpaws. Planting nice trees is the only home improvement you can make where you can spend $50 and add $100,000 to your property value. The returns are literally like getting a chance to go back to 2011 and buy Bitcoin.

> When NYC re-landscaped The Highline to make it exclusively native plants, property values in the area literally went up 10x.

Any source on this?Because it seems like Highline-adjacent properties probably would’ve seen a pretty good ROI over the past 10 years regardless of what plants were up there.

> Planting nice trees is the only home improvement you can make where you can spend $50 and add $100,000 to your property value. The returns are literally like getting a chance to go back to 2011 and buy Bitcoin.

Any source on this one? I work with arborists and even they’re not quite so gung-ho on promoting this kind of return. And $50 is getting you a sapling that’s going to take (maybe) decades to maximize any return.

https://www.mansionglobal.com/articles/the-high-line-s-halo-.... Talks about an apartment that went from $350,000 to 3.15M.

As a more general principle, try to buy any good pawpaw cultivar. If you look peacefulheritage.org, which is probably the top grower in the country, they go one sale 1 day a year and completely sell out in 20 minutes. You need to license the same software that people use to scalp PS5s to even have a chance to buy one. There literally isn't any consumer product on the market that has this high of an asymmetry between supply and demand.

If you go to the estates of any wealthy families, e.g. the Rockefeller estates or the Getty estates or whatever, the one thing they all have in common is really nice trees. Picking out trees for the new Apple campus was the last thing Steve Jobs did before he died. If it's an exaggeration to say that being able to buy nice trees is the entire point of having money, it's probably not by much.

> Talks about an apartment that went from $350,000 to 3.15M.

$350K in 1997 to $3.15M in 2016. Probably hard to find a property in lower Manhattan that didn’t appreciate like that.

> If you go to the estates of any wealthy families, e.g. the Rockefeller estates or the Getty estates or whatever, the one thing they all have in common is really nice trees.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc.

Yeah, I'm sure it was the native plants and not the 100s of millions spent in re-development.

I wonder if everyone who supported the policy ripped out their Kentucky bluegrass, fescue, and perennial ryegrass lawns because they’re not native. (I’m guessing they did not.)

If they had ripped out their lawns, would that have been an HOA violation?

Does the plan apply to homeowners' private property or only to HOA property?

It's an HOA, their job is to tell people what they can do with their private property.

HOAs basically allow you to pay a monthly fee for the right to dictate what your neighbors can do on private land they own, in the name of preserving property values.

Some love them; I think it goes without saying I'm not a fan.

It was just a question. I know that HOAs can tell people what to do with their property. However, many HOAs own substantial tracts of land in their own right. It could be that this rule OP describes pertains only to the HOA property and not to the private property of the homeowners.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com