When the Homeowners Association Comes for Your Home
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
As with anything when it became impossible to enforce a race-based segregation they simply do it in other ways. HOAs should be abolished in my opinion or their power greatly curtailed and deed restrictions largely removed. Especially given that many HOAs or at least the ones we hear about a lot are quite abusive with the power that they have and they are selectively abusive in that power. Likable neighbors that have the same minor offenses never get fined for them but undesirable neighbors get harassed constantly. One thing to fix the abusive HOAs would be to have it so that if covenants are not enforced equally they cannot be enforced to anyone. Even in the situation where they rely on people reporting violations they can only accept the report if they do a complete audit of all properties to ensure the same violation does not exist elsewhere. If it does they must cite everyone equally even not citing one person means that all the citations are invalid. This would get rid of the buddy system that HOA is used to abuse undesirable people in their neighborhood.
That retelling of HOA history rooted in racism is common but it's not a persuasive explanation for the new HOAs created today. In other words, there can be _2_ independent motivations and they both end up with an "HOA":
- motivation #1 : roundabout way to keep black people out --> leads to HOA
- motivation #2 : maintain baseline property values --> leads to HOA
You have to look for the counterfactuals that eliminate reason #1. E.g. Places up North like Anchorage Alaska and Calgary Canada didn't have a massive "white flight" and yet the suburbs up there also have HOAs.
Another counterfactual is this list of majority black wealthy neighborhoods: https://spotcovery.com/the-best-affluent-black-neighborhoods...
Those neighborhoods also have HOAs. Maybe it's for reason #2 -- protecting property values.
The immoral HOA motivations in the 1950s don't necessarily dictate the same motivations for creating an HOA today. Sometimes there's really no threat of "other races" and instead, people really do want to collectively protect their property values.
In contrast, my current neighborhood does not have an HOA but we do have a "neighborhood association" that's entirely voluntary and mostly exists to support a collection of streets with activities, clean up drives, etc.
If you don’t pay my taxes or my mortgage, you get no say on what color I can paint my shudders. And the only ones who can kick me out are the bank (until I’m done paying) or Uncle Sam, not the bored authoritarian neighbor down the road who doesn’t like that I don’t have an immaculate yard or doesn’t approve of my mailbox.
So many of us Americans pretend to care about property and liberty until suddenly it possibly puts a small dent in own your property’s value.
You might struggle if you're looking to buy a new house in a brand new subdivision.
(have also had poor experiences with HOAs and refuse to live in one)
I'd say an HAO def fits that bill. I've been in both chill HOAs and draconian ones. If you don't like it, join the board and motivate all the other like minded folks and get things changed.
Moreover, your analogy falls apart because HOAs are not governments and the people aren't protected from them the way they are a government. As much as I disagree with the city of Portland politically, I can post whatever messages I want outside my non HOA home and the city can do jack shit about it, because, as an American government they are unable to patrol my speech.
If HOAs were governments then I would have a different opinion (I would be somewhat in favor). However they are not.
As a final point of difference. A foundational principle of conservative governance is that governments are formed for and BY the people. However, HOAs are formed by development companies typically. Corporations are not people (and are not legally treated as such, despite widespread belief). Corporations have no right to form a government that the future residents cannot modify. HOAs are much harder to get rid of than a city. Thus, we have an example of an alleged American government that was never formed by a group of residents and cannot be modified or eliminated by them. That's problematic and un American
Either that, or I'd have to assume that the auction was not properly publicized, and the HOA is somehow profiting from the sale due to that fact. (eg, feeding info about the auction to people that bribe them, board members buying forclosed homes and selling them at a profit, etc).
I also assume most people who let their house go into foreclosure don't keep up with maintenance.
> Bauman says since [the new law's] passage, HOAs have had to spend more on certified mail, postage and legal counsel associated with the notification process.
Imagine the entitlement that this person thinks postage stamps are an issue worth whining about when foreclosing on a home and removing the occupants.
You've not run into many HOA sorts, then. They have this sliver of POWER and they are going to use it as much as they possibly can. And if you're in their way, well, you shouldn't have been in their way! They're the HOA parking enforcement agent and, golly, it sure looks to them like you haven't moved your car often enough (I solved this at one point by parking worse and no longer trying to keep my vehicle far enough forward on the street that someone else could park behind me in a section).
I mean, the people they're notifying are basically violating human rights by having damaged local property values, per the HOA way of thinking.
It's horrifying at all levels.
Also, the bill of rights has nothing to do with race and doesn't make any mention of it.
This alone smells as a fraudulent scam. Let me guess -- the person who bought the house is a friend of the HOA board and will flip the house shortly.
>Americans
That's quite a large and diverse demographic to make generalizations with.
>Then you invent HOAs to remove those same freedoms, levy fees instead of taxes, provide services that really should be handled by the city, and are more oppressive? I just don't understand.
I can live in that same city without an HOA. I can't live in that same city without the high taxation and oppressive government. It's about options, I suspect.
I'm starting to feel like treating homes like a investment that will continue to accumulate value instead of a place to live that everyone requires is starting to backfire.
The people running the HOA almost always are accountable by polls, even more local polls than municipal elections.
The HOA is a contract which may include binding arbitration. You might not be able to bring it to court or appeal.
There wasn't any binding arbitration clause in any HOA bylaws for any house I was looking at buying, so suggesting that's some standard thing doesn't seem accurate to me.
I've got a super basic question. I'm sure you can give an exact answer to. What time does the restaurant close?
Meanwhile, everyone else can clearly understand the point that government interactions have the court system to make challenges, writs to compel the government to act, and so on.
Have a good rest of your day.
> You are deliberately ignoring the point with extraneous details.
I'm just trying to showcase how nonsensical your question of "how do you challenge HOA fines?" is and how you never actually expected a real answer from it.
If your point was that some HOAs have binding arbitration clauses, and you think those are generally bad, you maybe should have just said that instead of asking a question one couldn't possibly answer completely or wholly accurately. I didn't even know that's what you were going after with your original question, as once again every HOA bylaws I considered didn't have it in there. If my answer was entirely based off the bylaws I have in my drawer, binding arbitration would have never even come up. If you didn't want someone to actually answer the question you probably shouldn't ask it. A better first reply to my comment would have been something like:
"But sometimes its difficult challenging HOAs due to binding arbitration clauses."
Which, sure, can be true. Then we'd be talking about binding arbitration and its pros/cons instead of talking about questions which practically can't have specific answers without more details.
Suggesting disputing HOA fees means binding arbitration is like saying it costs hundreds of dollars to register a car. Sure, maybe in some jurisdictions that's true. But it only cost me $75 to register a car here. You can't possibly answer the question "How much does it cost to register a car?" accurately without further details. If you're wanting to talk about how some jurisdictions have high fees, just say that instead. See my point?
I have. When I lived in the Seattle area, I would ask people about why they preferred HOAs.
The conversations always went the same way, and mostly ended the same way. They brought up the unthinkable horrors of someone working on a car in their driveway ("What if the car was up on blocks for months?"), or leaving a trash can out too long, and their trump card, oddly enough, was asking the question about the Lovecraftian horror of suburban owners: "But what if your neighbor painted their house purple?" - as though this were self evidently the most awfully awful thing someone could ever do (I wouldn't paint my house purple, but I know of a number of them, and they don't bother me in the slightest). The conversations usually ended, after a few more questions, with some variant of "Really, HOAs are designed to inhibit people like you." Because I didn't see anything wrong with working on a car in your driveway, and I'm as likely as not to wander over with a couple beers and go BS about cars. I've done a lot of automotive maintenance in apartment parking lots that forbid it, because I had no better options.
There's this set of people who really value outside appearances on houses and properties, and react with horror to people who don't see the same problems they do. They tend to like HOAs.
I currently live somewhere that very much has no HOA. I'm sure they'd be utterly horrified by my old tractor and stuff that wanders the property, but that's why I don't have an HOA. :)
I wonder also if some of this is pure herd perception. Like, what if nobody personally cares that someone paints their house purple or works on their car. What if they just want to stop it because they think OTHER people won't like it and therefore won't put a bid on their house if and when they sell it. But in reality those buyers don't care either. Nobody cares, but everyone pretends they do because they think that everyone else does.
I don't live in an area with an HOA currently. I do agree HOAs can often go extreme on code enforcement. However I do think people should respect each other and not just say "its my property I'll do whatever I want with it!" Because, yeah, sure, its your property, but your actions affect other people. You might feel painting your house pink with purple polka dots doesn't hurt anyone, but it does affect other people. You're not an island, you live in a community.
And that's just my street. Another neighborhood down the road has someone with rusting cars with busted windows parked in their front yard. Not the drive way, the actual yard. It's one of the first houses you drive by when you enter the neighborhood.
HOA's have a place but that space is narrow and people like to push out of that space when they get an ounce of power.
If the buyer paid $25K for a free-and-clear title (i.e., the bank took the auction proceeds in lieu of the loan balance), then the former owner should take that deal, because it means her mortgage is now gone!
(The article is unclear which kind of foreclosure this was -- did the buyer take title and assume outstanding debt? Or did the bank just wash its hands of the whole thing when it unloaded the property at auction? The low sales price suggests it's the former, rather than the latter. But stranger things have happened.)
That said, in this case you're correct: the article's subjects live in Colorado, which does not allow non-recourse mortgages.
Something is fishy with this HOA. I suspect they may have something against this guy specifically and want him gone from the neighborhood. That reason could be good (running a brothel out of his house or something crazy), or very bad (they don't want Latinos in the neighborhood).
Oh look, there's something later in the article about it:
> Patterson, who is now working with residents to reclaim their homes, says that most of the Green Valley Ranchers he’s met who have been foreclosed upon recently are working-class homeowners of color, many of whom speak English as a second language.
- Most of the board were immigrants of some stripe, particularly Latino, but also Eastern European and Indian.
- The one tenant we had which we considered foreclosure for was someone who was himself Latino. The issue was he refused to pay the HOA fees - ever - not one cent since he bought the home a few years before. He also had a huge number of people living there (which was by itself not a problem for anyone), but there was only 1 water meter so the water bill was divided among the building based on square footage and his unit made up around half the building's water bill (!) based on historical billing records.
- The foreclosure proceedings were intended as leverage to get him to start paying his overdue HOA fees. Nobody wanted to actually turn the guy out on the street. It worked, and he started paying, and even though his unit still (at the time I sold my unit) was using up more water than the rest and people were footing the bill for it, he was at least paying HOA fees and everyone was grudgingly fine with it.
- I don't think we ever progressed to filing the paperwork for the foreclosure.
This is not surprising. Denver is 45% "of color" [1], and the recent arrivals likely more so. It is those recent arrivals that would be over-represented among new home buyers that get snared into whatever this new HOA type that steals houses is.
But a bigger component of HOA financing is maintaining common infrastructure. The pool, party house, signage, etc. Those actually require upkeep. If the HOA doesn’t have a recourse to collect those obligations the cost of that upkeep falls unfairly on the people paying their bills.
I’m all for strict regulations on notification and making foreclosure difficult but if you sign up for an HOA it seems like you ought to understand and comply with your obligations and the HOA should have some teeth to collect.
I loved that neighborhood. All of the neighbors became friends. It was the closest nit neighborhood I've ever lived in, aside from my college dorm. Property values did not suffer when the guy across the street and one over painted his house pink, nor did they suffer when my neighbor's parents visited in their RV and parked in front of his home for 2 weeks every summer.
Despite that, the head tyrant in charge just pushed through an ultra-low priority parking lot painting project. Not like parking lot was bad, it just bothered him I guess.
More often than not (anecdotally of course) they're just Napoleonic power trips for the select few that are bored and no-life-having enough to devote their whole lives to it.
More realistically I’d spend my last Penny on billboards saying houses can be stolen in this neighborhood.
Meanwhile other members of the HOA are filing lawsuits against the HOA for not sufficiently enforcing the rules. I'm just glad I can afford to not live in an HOA (of course if you can afford that, you probably also can keep up on your payments and not have a lien taken out).
What amazed me was that the neighborhood was full of tea-party conservatives with "Don't tread on me" bumper-stickers, who were always complaining about government overreach. Yet they ceded the right to even begin repairs on their own house to a bunch of busybodies.
I vowed to avoid HOAs after that experience (except when they are unavoidable, like when owning a townhome).
Somebody managed to open a half-way house for addiction recovery just down the street from me, and my neighbors were very upset. I think they finally used a regulation preventing more than a handful of unrelated people living together and managed to get the halfway house closed months later.
Right... So they only care about money, not people. That says it all. Because this is absolutely all about putting someone out of their house.
Try this one: https://ghostarchive.org/archive/neBsg
2023:'public-dns'1) Every 4 years HOAs must conduct a renewal vote. At least 40% of members must actively vote to extend the CC&Rs (meaning that at least 40% of homeowners must a cast a vote in favor of continuing the HOA. Not voting is effectively a no-vote). Upon a vote resulting in the dissolution of the HOA and/or CC&Rs, the HOA executive board shall conduct a second vote 6 months from that date to validate the result under the same conditions. If an entity owns or controls more than 1 property, they shall be restricted to a single vote (meaning that property developers or multi-property owners only get one vote.)
1a) If HOA vote fails, it will continue for one year and conduct another vote. If that fails, the HOA will be dissolved. If the HOA owns community property, it will convert into a property maintenance organization and be able to collect funds solely to fund the maintenance of community property. It will not be able to levy fines or restrict individual properties in anymore.
1b) PMOs may re-adopt a new set of CC&Rs. To do so, a petition must collect the signatures of 60% of property owners within a 6 month period. They PMO must then notify all property owners of an election. 75% of property owners must agree to reformation of CC&Rs.
2) HOAs and property maintenance organizations (PMO) may not begin foreclosure proceedings on a property until the amount owed is at least 1/5 of the value assessed by the county. HOAs must follow the same procedures as the county government for foreclosure, with additional requirements listed below.
3) HOAs and PMOs must collect phone and email information for property owners, unless the property owners opt out. The HOA must remind property owners annually to update their contact information.
4) Notices of delinquency must be sent to all available contacts.
5) If properties are in arrears by more than 3 months the HOA/PMO must post notice on the property physically (not just mail). After 1 more month, and only if necessary for the maintenance of community property, the HOA/PMO may seek and be granted a tax lien to borrow against on the delinquent accounts. Notices must continue to be sent to all available contact mechanisms and posted on the property monthly
6) The HOA/PMO shall have a fiduciary duty to act in the best interest of both the HOA/PMO and the individual delinquent member. In the case of a foreclosure, they must seek the highest price possible, not just enough to cover the delinquency.
the level of yankee spite i have on this particular thing is really quite enormous.
not at all defending abusive HOA here, not at all.. AND you sign something and you need to know what is in there, or do not sign until you do..
Oh. Any change to the by-law need to be unanimous.
The "it wont happen to me" mentality is poisonous. Read the rules. If they are absurd, the HOA is run by insane people.
When viewed in a lens of their history (ie, as a means of segregation and exclusion) it would make sense why they were "off limits" to legislators.
However, I think it could be a popular thing to regulate them now - most homeowners hate their HOA random fees and correction requirements. And you have examples like the Revolt at the Villages [1] where HOAs take money from one group of residents to fund expansion elsewhere.
[1] https://theintercept.com/2023/02/05/ron-desantis-florida-vil...
> Care to elaborate why this gets downvoted?
There may be more people living in HOAs who don't have issues with their HOA than you anticipate. Such a person might well view the statement "HOAs are just pure evil" as incorrect, even if they are aware that HOAs can be a problem.
By way of example, I watched an HOA, as a community, successfully resolve a complex and potentially expensive legal matter involving multiple residents in a way that was beneficial to all parties. Part of this resolution involved the community as a whole, under the bylaws, amending the bylaws to address a situation the original drafters should have anticipated but did not. One side effect of the amendment was to reduce the demands the HOA itself could make of homeowners, lowering what were already quite reasonable limits.
"HOAs can be evil" and "HOAs can have over-reaching clauses" are different statements than "HOAs are just pure evil".
For example last time I was looking for a house I looked at one where the water supply for that house and three others came from a private well. It was the best house I'd seen so far, but I couldn't find any binding agreement on how well maintenance would be paid for so I passed.
An HOA for those four houses specifically to cover operation and maintenance of the well would have been a very good thing to have.