Comment by vineyardmike | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vineyardmike | Hacker News Reader

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It’s in the deed so owning the property means you agree to follow the rules of the deed. The HOA can sue you for enforcement.

At a high level, anyone can sue you to enforce a deed term, as long as the organization/person with an interest is around to do it and knows to do it. As an easy example, a long time ago people added racist stuff to deeds, but those family descendants no longer enforce it. HOAs don’t die like people and collect dues so they don’t run out of legal fees.

You can try to get dead HOAs removed from a deed, and you can try to get a living HOA removed from a deed. Obviously one is a lot easier because it doesn’t fight back. You can also get the residents to vote to dissolve an HOA. Some HOAs expire after so long if the residents don’t renew.

TLDR you can’t buy the house without agreeing to the HOA.

> you can try to get a living HOA removed from a deed

I'd be curious about people's experiences and successes with this. Has anyone successfully pulled that off with a still-existing HOA?

Not entirely the same, but here in Canada (still common law), any housing covenants applied to a deed can be struck down if they are illegal. There were a bunch of houses with ancient unenforceable covenants like not selling homes to certain ethnic/religious groups and they were granted the right to no just ignore, but actually remove those causes from the deed. Transitively, I imagine any deeds for HOA rules and regulations that are illegal under the law could also be challenged under similar merits. I've got no examples of this though, so who knows.

That definitely seems like the easy case, sure.

I'd be extremely interested in cases of any modern HOA being successfully removed from a deed and thus rendered moot, ideally administratively without a massive legal battle.

You have to get all parties to agree to remove the restriction. I've heard of it happening.

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