American land of the free is being able to bring a gun to school but getting a fine because your grass is too tall. These HOA type stories are always so funny. It blows my mind people buy in places with rules like these.
Put plainly, this is the freedom to form groups that govern the behavior of their members. A group could be a dinner party, a study group, a book club, a circle of friends. It can also be much more serious. It could be a corporation, a union, a church, a political party, or a religion. Or it could be an HOA, or a town, or a state. If you like one or more of those types of groups then it is important to protect the freedom of association, even if you don’t like any of the others.
Every group has rules, even the most informal. When you invite your friends out to dinner you probably don’t sit down and vote on the exact rules your dinner party will follow, but your party has rules regardless. And every group punishes violations of the rules somehow. If you get drunk and dance naked on top of a table, then you will suffer some form of sanction by the other members of the dinner party. At the very least you probably won’t be invited back. More formal groups like HOAs, corporations, and towns tend to have written rules and proscribed punishments for violations. They also have built–in ways of changing those rules.
Ultimately some HOAs are useful while others are petty and run by vindictive idiots. An HOA that was useful for 50 years and never created any drama could turn bad next year when they elect some new board members. An HOA that is bad today _could_ elect new board members and then become drama–free and stay that way for 50 years, even if it seems unlikely. People who end up in a petty HOA usually regret it, and come to see joining any HOA as a big mistake. People in a sane HOA often wonder what the fuss is about.
But here’s the truth: true freedom includes the freedom to make mistakes, even big mistakes.
The freedom of association allows us to join any group we want, but sometimes joining will be a mistake. You can’t prevent people from making those mistakes without limiting their freedom. You can’t even reliably predict which mistakes they’re going to make, so you would end up preventing them from doing things that wouldn’t be mistakes too.
There's some very significant differences between freedom to associate in a book club and freedom to associate in an HOA. If you don't like a book club, there is no scenario in which you are contractually obligated to join it and pay membership fees indefinitely. And the bookclub doesn't have broad legal authority, backed by the courts, to dictate how you maintain, use, and sell your personal property or even aspects of your lifestyle.
I don’t think anyone would argue with their regulation of common property; it’s their petty interference in private property that’s the rub.
Freedom isn’t the same as lawlessness.
Also, if your neighbor asks you to vote to create an HOA, vote against it.
That some dead previous owner can unilaterally say 'none of that' and it be binding on subsequent transfers and heirs is opposite the freedom of association.
You are free to not buy the land of course.
Legally speaking one is often not buying the land but rather buying the unit. The land on which the unit sits is owned by a corporation (HOA), and as a condition of the lease you must abide by the corporation's rules.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leasehold_estate
If you don't want to live by an HOA's rules then don't live on the HOA's land, but rather your own land:
It’s the freedom to choose an HOA, or alternatively, anything else you like.
Also, while HOAs might make decisions stupidly, I don’t think they do it randomly.
to compare with europe: as far as i know germany or austria don't have the equivalent of a HOA, but what is allowed and what isn't is defined by local law. the closest example i could find are rules a landlord is allowed to impose on their tenants. for example, if i rent a house with garden, then the landlord can demand that i take care of the garden, but they can not specify how often i am supposed to mow the lawn or how high i let it grow.
if not even a landlord can make such rules for their own property, then a HOA would have even less chance to make such rules for homeowners.
that said, local laws can be quite far reaching, especially when it comes to aspects that affect the character of a neighborhood which includes rules on the outside design of the house and the front yard. not something i am happy about myself. beyond that these rules are mostly about things directly affect and cause problems for the neighbors. otherwise a homeowner has the right to do whatever they want on their property.
as for the freedom to choose an HOA. no such freedom exists. because my choice of where i live is not defined by the HOA but by other considerations like location and cost and most importantly, availability. the argument that i could have moved somewhere else if i didn't like this HOA is not really reasonable given the housing shortage in most places.
the right to live somewhere trumps the freedom of association
Freedom of association is the freedom to associate with whoever you choose and not to associate with anybody you choose not to. You can’t have feeedom of association without the freedom to discriminate against people you don’t want to associate with.
> the argument that i could have moved somewhere else if i didn't like this HOA is not really reasonable given the housing shortage in most places.
Less than a third of US households are a part of HOAs, with most of them being apartments (where that type of regulation is typical almost everywhere in the world). Your argument that HOAs are monopolising housing supply doesn’t stand up to the facts.
So I should be free to leave an HOA? No wait, I can't without selling my house as well. Restricting the right to free association as a condition for purchasing housing seems onerous.
Freedom of association isn’t a magic ability that means you can never regret entering a contract.
HOA control is simply a covenant written into the deed of certain properties by the original developer that is then inherited in perpetuity by future deed holders.
The deeds of all properties on certain blocks in my neighborhood have a similar covenant saying that your building must be set back 14 feet from the curb in order to create a luxury boulevard-width sidewalk.
A homeowner can’t sell me the right to build up to the curb or the right to ignore the HOA because they can’t sell a right they never owned in the first place.
Freedom of association is not relevant here.
To modernize an old sawhorse, those don't-lie-down-here spikes on flat surfaces make it impossible for millionaires and the homeless alike to sleep in many places. That's not so much of a problem for the millionaires.
A fun John Oliver video on how corrupt HOA's are: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrizmAo17Os
I've never understood why we allow that to be legal, just like neighborhoods or complexes that are age restricted, but we allow it none the less.
1. Most homes aren’t in an HOA, so you have plenty of options if you don’t like it.
2. It prevents all sorts of tragedies of the commons.
3. HOAs would have no power at all if you could opt out. It has to be part of the contract. They can be dissolved entirely, but that’s the only mechanism for getting out.
4. We believe in individual freedom, which includes the ability to chose to trade freedom for certain benefits. I trade my freedom to leave a rusty old boat in my driveway for the benefit of not having my neighbors do that. Most of us don’t have or want the sorts of things that bring down property values and don’t want to suddenly find ourselves living next to people who do.
This is perhaps a symptom of a larger problem: homes are very expensive. If homes were cheap and moving were easy, perhaps HOAs would never have been invented. But for most Americans who own one a home is a substantial portion of their net worth. We want to protect it.
People who complain about HOAs existing are the same as the people who complain about EVs. If you don’t want one, don’t buy it.
It may not have been the reason for their invention (I can't find information on that), but they certainly exploded in popularity in an effort to restrict people from selling their homes to non-white people (see: Racially Restrictive Covenants). It's kind of ironic to see people laud them as a form of "freedom" while their history as a tool of blatant racial discrimination is available for all to read.
==People who complain about HOAs existing are the same as the people who complain about EVs. If you don’t want one, don’t buy it.==
Doesn't this act as a type of restriction on housing supply thus increasing the upward pressure on housing costs by limiting options? Not to mention the actual costs of funding the HOA, which directly increases housing prices.
Most HOAs don’t even have the right to screen tenants, if you can purchase the house and will sign the contract you’re in and have the same voting rights and responsibilities as the other residents.
It is a verifiable fact found across the country [0]. Many of the covenants still exist today, although they are legally unenforceable. That said, I have read many comments on this site about how non-competes have long been considered legally unenforceable, but can still have a chilling effect on those impacted (Thankfully, this has recently changed).
I think the more interesting aspect, in regards to today's world, is how HOAs lead to even higher housing costs during a housing affordability crisis. This happens through both explicit expenses (monthly HOA dues) and implicit expenses (lawn maintenance, regulation of architectural changes/additions, rental restrictions, etc.) on homeowners.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2021/11/17/1049052531/racial-covenants-h...
That'd be an interesting stat to see, I assume it varies greatly by location.
> 2. It prevents all sorts of tragedies of the commons.
How so? Collective power can make tragedy of the commons problems worse. While a single family likely wouldn't buy up an adjacent piece of woods to clear for a neighborhood park, an HOA may be able to do that before someone else buys and develops the woods.
> 3. HOAs would have no power at all if you could opt out. It has to be part of the contract. They can be dissolved entirely, but that’s the only mechanism for getting out.
HOAs have whatever power the community gives them, there's nothing saying an HOA couldn't be optional. I actually lived in a neighborhood outside of Seattle with an optional HOA, it worked just fine.
> 4. We believe in individual freedom, which includes the ability to chose to trade freedom for certain benefits. I trade my freedom to leave a rusty old boat in my driveway for the benefit of not having my neighbors do that. Most of us don’t have or want the sorts of things that bring down property values and don’t want to suddenly find ourselves living next to people who do.
And that's totally reasonable. My point wasn't that there aren't incentives for homeowners to make that choice for themselves, only that it has always felt like an infringement of rights to legally bind a property to HOA governance.
> People who complain about HOAs existing are the same as the people who complain about EVs. If you don’t want one, don’t buy it.
I'm not sure where you're getting this anecdote, but here I am complaining about HOAs and I own an EV. This analogy really doesn't fit, one person's decision to buy an EV has no impact on other's right to choose what to buy where as an HOA does.
An optional HOA would just be opted out of by the worst offenders. If the whole goal is to keep your neighbors from ruining your property value, the ones who do would just opt out. The guy with the car on blocks can just sell himself his own house to get out of it.
How is anything you get into willingly an infringement on your rights? Nobody ever had to buy a house that had to remain inside an HOA. They chose to and can choose not to.
That’s what I meant by the EV thing. You’re complaining about a choice other people made willingly. Why not just not make the choice and let others do it?
> How is anything you get into willingly an infringement on your rights?
Sure, once you sign the contract you've agreed to it. My point is just that it seems unreasonable for an HOA to effectively claim authority or ownership over a piece of property. I once lived in an HOA neighborhood that was in legal proceedings with a neighbor who refused to play along, the neighborhood was pretty damn close to foreclosing on the property before the owner finally sold and left.
The EV example is still very different though. Buyers can choose to but any vehicle they want, there is no higher authority attempting to claim authority over some vehicles and requiring you submit to their rules and pay a membership fee. Buy an EV or don't, its totally up to the buyer. Additionally, when an EV owner wants to sell they aren't limited to the pool of buyers willing to join a private club, you just sell the car.
My point about the EVs is people who hate EVs and do ridiculous stuff like block chargers are simply getting mad about other people’s decisions that don’t effect them. I don’t want an EV so I don’t own one, but I’m in no way angry that they exist or that you do.
Hating your own HOA I totally understand, there are days I hate mine, but hating the idea that someone else is in an HOA willingly I do not.
If we are talking about suburban/urban homes, some large percentage are in an HOA. Most people who own instead of renting do have to contend with HOAs. There are not plenty of options. In many cases, there are no other options at all.
> It prevents all sorts of tragedies of the commons.
What sort of "tragedy of the commons" does it prevent, exactly? That because I was laid off and had to take a lower-paying, higher-houred job, my house goes unpainted a little too long, and now the paint's peeling and chipping? That because of weather, I had to wait 3 extra weekends to mow the lawn (can't do it when I go home after work, not allowed to do it after 6pm or whatever) and now it's too tall?
These aren't tragedies.
> HOAs would have no power at all if you could opt out.
Exactly. But you never bothered to ask why they should ever have power at all. The people who have these powers are people who should never have power under any conceivable circumstances. If there were a way to somehow discover people who craved to be on HOA boards, I would support a constitutional amendment to rescind their voting rights.
> We believe in individual freedom, which includes the ability to chose
Spoken by the sort of person who cheers on as the non-HOA choices dwindle to nothing.
I have a compromise that just occurred to me. If, for instance, only 1.2% of homes within a given region (perhaps legislative districts) could be included within an HOA, and if the HOAs had to bid on an HOA license, such that they're competing with each other to be included in the HOA... then the true cost of HOA apologism could be factored into the market. If you want to live in one, and if that HOA has to pay for a $12 million annual license (they could easily be bid up this high, and if you're honest with yourself you know I'm right), then who am I to tell you HOAs are bad? You're paying a premium for it and it's restricted to a tiny fraction of all available homes.
> If homes were cheap and moving were easy, perhaps HOAs would never have been invented.
Not even close to how this works. The people who favor HOAs are emotionally invested in how others manage their own households. They're not the kind of people who are easily chased away. Quite the contrary, they want to chase others away. You know, the wrong kind of people.
> People who complain about HOAs existing are the same as the people who complain about EVs. If you don’t want one, don’t buy it.
Funny that example, you belong to a political constituency that is doing whatever they can to make it illegal to sell any non-EV.
You might say that I didn't sell the ball. I sold a bundle of rights regarding the ball, but I retained some other bundle of rights.
Your gym membership accords you some rights, but not all rights to the gym equipment. Do you think that should be illegal?
As long as a contract clearly delineates which rights are included and excluded I don't understand why you would want this to be illegal.
You might question why somebody would buy a car that contains a radio but the purchase of the car doesn't include the radio and the new owner is not allowed to manipulate the radio. It may not make sense to you. But that doesn't make the arrangement illegal.
That being said I live in a condominium, but it's an apartment-style one. It's the only way I can afford to live in the central city. In that case there needs to be some setup to maintain the elevators, overall structure, and other common elements. But if I owned a house with actual land, the only restrictions I'd want are on actual nuisances (mostly continuous noise - a party once in awhile is fine) or safety.
Local laws supersede HOA rules where they conflict and often cause “grandfathering” when HOA rules change. For instance, my condo board tried to get me to remove my grill. I pointed out that nowhere in the condo bylaws was a grill mentioned. They said something about city fire codes, so I got a note from the fire department. They were unable to force me to do anything.
HOAs in my city have passed rules saying owners may not use their condos for short term rental. But my city law says that changes do not apply to people who owned their rentals before the rules changed. So new owners may not but old ones still can.
Rule of law still applies, and everything is agreed to when you buy the property. You could simply buy a home outside of an HOA, so this is, squarely, freedom of association.
Nobody was implying that other countries do not have this freedom, in fact, he said the fact that they do is why he did not need to justify it.
In many jurisdictions within the United States, an HOA can assess fines for exceedingly trivial violations, then after the fines remain unpaid for a time period as short as 6 weeks, file to sell your home at auction to pay the fees. They can take your home from you, evict you from it, and this is deemed perfectly legal. Do they have to provide proof, for instance, that your grass was actually one half inch too tall? No, there is no adversarial process where they would have to prove that were the case.
> I pointed out that nowhere in the condo bylaws was a grill mentioned. They said something about city fire codes, so I got a note from the fire department. They were unable to force me to do anything.
It must be very thrilling to be able to be an amateur lawyer and win a case. Have fun, because those people tend to hold grudges. My experience is that you'll never have a week of peace for as long as you live there again.
They can only assess you fines for violations of rules you agreed to. And fines are usually small. For instance, in my last HOA, they fined me $15 for having A flag holder. I ignored the warning because it was there when I bought the place and I didn’t really want it anyway, and then when the fine came, I simply removed the flag holder and paid $15. Most of the cases were the end up confiscating somebody’s property is because they are simply egregiously not doing something they had already signed a contract saying they would do. I am sure there are cases, they always are, but it isn’t a legitimate problem.
This. I live in a drama-free HOA and appreciate it for what it is and does. I had to review and agree to the covenants of my HOA as a condition for closing. The rule most likely to be in violation here is something along the lines of “only operational automobiles in good condition are permitted to be parked in the driveway; any boats, recreational vehicles, broken down or unsightly vehicles must be behind a fence”. The whole point is to maintain a clean, safe, attractive, and ultimately desirable neighborhood so as to protect property values on behalf of the association’s members.
Although this homeowner’s actions are characteristic of malicious compliance, I believe the net effect is precisely in line with the stated purpose of the HOA: in compliance with the rules, an elegant mural depicting a pristine boat now adorns a new fence that restricts sight of and access to a boat of unknown condition. Anyone driving by looking to buy might come away with a chuckle and the sense that the neighborhood is committed to maintaining a safe and attractive environment for homeowners.
This is very idealistic, but not quite how it works. HOA boards can and do constantly violate with impunity the rules they are supposed to follow. Most often to embezzle funds but also to enforce their personal will.
You can contest this of course, you can go to court. It takes pretty deep pockets to pay for lawyers and years of persistence. I know multiple people in years-and-years-long legal battles with HOAs. Those who have enough money to see it through often usually win, but it takes a lot of patience and money. Most people don't have that kind of cash to blow on fighting corrupt HOAs.
By the same logic, how about a freedom for the government to limit your speech? Now censorship is freedom and free speech is a restriction.
I don't like HOAs, but the ability to form or join a HOA is definitely a part of individual freedom.
Just like the ability to eg enter into a non-disclosure agreement or any other kind of contract.
I see a dichotomy of "associations with oversight" and the converse (associations with no oversight). If your HOA forces you to build a fence, there is no appeal process similar to if a government entity charges you with a crime (e.g. appeal to a state/federal circuit court and ultimately to a supreme court). Within each is an enforcement mechanism that may or may not work. In your dinner party example, which is an association with no oversight, a naked table dancer may simply crash the subsequent gatherings. In all levels of government, there are those who continue to hold their position regardless of the misdeeds and accusations levied against them.
Perhaps that is the essential trade-off of freedom, to be free to associate with any group of people despite the possibility of being victimized by them (now or in the future).
Would it be better to compare current, non-totalitarian governments, such as EU, Australia, or the like? It kind of sounds disingenuous to use extreme examples. (No dig to you or your opinion, just don't see how using those examples helps.)
This is somewhat counter-intuitive because one might think that if e.g. every resident of a nation had to obey a singular and simple set of national rules, that would promote freedom more than having governments and rules differ between regions.
I wont go deeply into the underlying mechanisms of why the more chaotic choice promotes freedom while the more orderly choice reduces freedom but it has something to do with organisations competing for members and members being willing/free to move between those organisations.
[1] HOAs, school districts, unions, chapters, guilds, bars, insurances
All hail Singapore!
and i am not buying the whole argument. if we accept a hierarchy of governing structures, from the HOA at the bottom, and let's go all the way, the united nations at the top, each level has a a certain set of responsibilities and powers. the difference in the levels is determined by how centralized or distributed those are. but there is no escaping the levels.
the problem is that it is unclear who is responsible to deal with overreach. in the US HOAs are largely unregulated, and so there is no protection against overreach. and in particular, they are not government but private organizations.
i am of the opinion that mandatory membership in an organization makes that organization an extension of government, and thus it should be bound by the rules local governments must follow.
Do we do so by smashing HOAs (and giving the responsibilities to someone else)? I believe this is the wrong approach because it will destroy any potential for this localist (and thus inherently good, imo) system to heal. You're basically passing the baton onto another entity that might do a better job off the start but will inevitably fail because it is even less capable of evolving.
I'd rather try to discourage rigidity/complacency and incentivise innovation in the HOA-space which is much more complex to implement but better than smashing HOAs.
Regarding your point about "not buying the whole argument": I think it would be foolish to organise a military or pandemic-prevention-force on a municipal level. The levels need to exist and some higher levels have responsibilities that the lower levels don't have. I absolutely believe that this is good.
In conclusion, somehow communities of a certain region need to be organised if they want to be organised, especially when the region is densely populated. I'd rather organise these communities through self-emergent associations than top-down mandated government. And yes, the self-emergent association-type HOA is broken. I'd rather fix it than replace it with a inherently worse alternative.
for the most part i actually agree with you. i too favor a localist/federalist approach. and where i said you can't escape the levels, i might have added: nor should you want to. because as you say, the levels need to exist.
one of the problems i see in the US is that while the system is doing relatively well at the federalist approach, not enough is done to protect the weaker individuals from those with power over them. especially at the local level.
so while i agree that experimentation is good, certain basic rights need to be safeguarded.
another thing is fixing vs replacing HOAs. again that comes down to what fixing or replacing mean.
it is important to me that organizations that govern my life in a community are actually considered government.
an HOA currently only involves homeowners, but not those who rent there. that's the first thing i would fix. so HOAs become neighborhood councils. and beyond that it is just a matter of levels. so if you mean that replacing local HOAs with a community council covering a larger area is a bad idea, then i agree with you. i mean to replace it with a different democratic structure at the same level, with largely the same responsibilities but with more clear restrictions to protect individual rights and freedoms.
interestingly, i just came across this democracy index:
https://www.democracymatrix.com/online-analysis/matrix#/char...
and it shows that "guarantee of rights" is the weakest, which fits my feelings
Philosophically, freedom has, among other dimensions, the dimension of negative and positive freedom: being free from something and free to do something.
Freedom usually refers to individual rights against the state. Freedom to have private contracts is part of what distinguishes socialism from capitalism.
What you describe regarding group associations is correct. Others are correct, too, when they appeal to freedom as the right to be spared from something.
Freedom to form groups does not mean being forced to join them. That's the point here. HOAs are partly like cartels, in my view.
A tech analogy comes to mind. We freely choose to host our workloads in a Server Owner's Association (sorry, cloud service provider), and we take on the risk that the provider may change the offering and impose restrictions that we don't like. They will tell us that we are free to leave at any time, but switching clouds can be non-trivial to say the least, leaving us feeling trapped and decidedly unfree.
The freedom to enter into private contracts is the freedom to bind oneself.
And if all that is too tiresome then yea, sell your property and buy a house that isn’t in an HOA. Most houses aren’t.
I’m sure this is true nationally, but does it hold locally for areas with good employment prospects? And once you remove apartments (which don’t have HOAs but are subject to the tyranny of the landlord instead)?
Genuinely asking because I can’t think of too many areas in NoVA that don’t have HOAs.
Correction… There are areas of older housing without, but any subdivisions built since the 80s seems to have one. The areas without tend to be older “downtown” areas (Arlington - very expensive) or on the outskirts (Fairfax Station - very expensive).
On the one hand that makes a lot of sense. If you want your neighborhood to have a park, but you also want the streets built so that they lengthen all trips in and out of the neighborhood, then the park is really only going to be usable by people who live there. It is therefore unfair for people on the other side of the city to pay for maintenance of that park.
On the other hand, HOAs can turn into drama factories. Too many people vehemently hate their HOA for being petty tyrants.
On the gripping hand, city governments can be pretty annoying too. San Francisco apparently takes an average of three years to approve building permits. A few years back my favorite restaurant (not located in SF) was being remodeled, and the owner took the opportunity to replace the front door. The original was 40 years old and wearing out, so she replaced it with a virtually identical steel and glass door, the kind you can find on commercial buildings from here to Vladivostok. The city spent an extra month hassling her about it, worried that she was destroying the historical character of the town. Madness.
Selling your house and buying a different one that isn't in an HOA isn't as trivial as you make it sound. And in some parts of the country, it's rather difficult to find a house that isn't part of an HOA - in Texas, many neighborhoods get built with an HOA built-in.
I'm ambivalent about an HOA, but my father's neighbors probably wished they had one when they were selling their house (he had two broken cars and one broke down lawn mower in the driveway for years).
But on the other hand, housing supply is limited. Sometimes your choices are "a decent house close to a decent school with an HOA" or "I guess we'll move seven hours away from everyone we've ever known" or "The neighbor's meth lab probably won't detonate this year, right?"
I've seen corporate firms that run HOAs professionally where they run a much more proactive/activist HOA, but in the case of my neighborhood we didn't like the results so we fired them. It was too much hawkishness about rules and the fees were heading through the roof. The more leisurely neighbor-complaint model seems to work better unfortunately. It's more efficient, even though it's quite a cowardly system if you ask me. It's better than the alternatives such as having anarchy.
You are often not buying a piece of land when you move to a HOA-linked residence, rather you can be buying a particular unit, but there are also 'common areas' that are the property of the legal entity of the HOA.
If you do not want to be part of an HOA then you have to purchase what is called (at least in Canada) freehold land.
> While most people hear the word “condo” and think of an apartment style unit, that’s not always the case. Some townhouses (and even certain detached homes) are considered condos too.
* https://teamkate.ca/difference-freehold-condo-home
* https://www.squareyards.ca/blog/freehold-vs-leasehold-regart...
* https://wowa.ca/freehold-meaning
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freehold_(law)
If you do not want to be part of an HOA tell your real estate broker that this is one of the criteria for where you want to live.
Yes, tell your realtor "I don't want to look at any of the properties you have for sale, or any properties within the greater [insert city here] metro area, or for that matter any geographical location within 100 miles of here". He'd look at you less strangely, and might even chuckle instead of telling you to go fuck yourself and to not waste his time.
And the best part of all is that these two requests are essentially identical.
I would never consider any house encumbered with an HOA, and I would fire any realtor who ignored my wishes by showing one - but it's never been an issue, here in Seattle.
I for one would not only not by an HOA encumbered home but I’d not move to an area where that would be an issue
In those situations the HOA could be seen as government imposed rather than purely “freedom of association”.
I own a 100 year old home so there is no HOA but it’s difficult for most people to afford such homes since there’s a limited supply and they’re often either in highly desirable or blighted city centers.
That is, if your only option is to buy a house within a HOA or not but that house, you're not really free...
Any legal system always has to balance individual liberties and the tyranny of the majority (or a law-giving minority).
> An HOA that was useful for 50 years and never created any drama could turn bad next year when they elect some new board members.
That's why countries for instance have constitutions, so the system is hard to change even when someone new takes power.
> true freedom includes the freedom to make mistakes, even big mistakes.
That's pretty much the reason why we don't have "true freedom" and we want to stop people from making really terrible and easily avoidable mistakes, like eating food that kills them.
Limiting HOA against petty bullshit requirements (with more freedom for an initial set of bullshit requirements) at least is one of these limitations.
I'm pretty sure that freedom of association is strongly tied to being able to quit the association freely. I don't think that the condition of having to change home to quit an association is a reasonable term.
We used to have local government deal with local governance. But local governments decided they didn't want to do that anymore, so they started encouraging the creation of HOAs to deal with all of those pesky local governance issues.
If all thar mattered was free association, the fix would be very simple. Enshrine into the the right to leave an HOA. But states won't do that, because once people leave, they will except their local governments to start providing the same services the HOAs do, and all of those local governments are going to complain to the state government.
So, I had to choose between 1) Spend 30 years paying the mortgage for a house no one can use. 2) Turn around and sell the house I just bought.
However, the market turned downward later and I think the buyer sold at a bigger loss after five years or so. So, could have been worse.
The usual remedy to protect people from freely making the mistake of entering into associations that harm them is regulatory, of course.
Employment regulations place certain rules on what you can expect when you choose to throw yourself into association with a company as an employee, to prevent you accidentally finding yourself at the whim of an abusive employer.
Regulating what kinds of things HOAs can demand is a perfectly reasonable thing for governments to do to make it safer for people to purchase houses with confidence they won’t be subjected to egregious restrictions.
So we do end up limiting freedom of association. You can’t join up into an HOA with your neighbors that bans any of you from selling your house to a black family.
Others understand freedom from the perspective of the individual. Americans understand freedom from the perspective of the state.
In the first case, you're free if you can practically do something. In the second case you're free if the government doesn't ban it, regardless of whether you can actually do it.
Take for example the issue of ads on Smart TVs. There's no law that says you have to have ads on them, but in practice it's impossible to buy a TV which doesn't flood you with ads.
People in the first case consider that if a law is passed to ban embedding ads on TVs, then that increases the freedom in the world. Americans consider that banning such ads is a horrible government overreach which hurts the feelings of poor billionaires, and that if people want, they can always buy TVs with no ads, even though no such TVs exist.
They prefer an imaginary freedom to a practical one.
When you have an HOA with regular single family homes, it generally has to have been setup by the contractor, who build the entire planned community. These mass produced planned communities are also typically cheaper and lower value than individual one-off single family homes, as they are built to a price point for a profit.
In low-trust societies you wish for an HOA and would gladly pay 10x your property tax to be in one that has rules and enforcement teeth.
Even something as simple as forcing the guy who keeps smoking and talking on speakerphone next to your window from 4pm to 1am to stop doing that.
Question - Have you ever lived in a high-density environment? apartment block, terrace row etc.? Someone who has will have a different stance on what is acceptable regulation to someone that's only lived in the density of typical US suburbia.
Could just be that are used to different rules but I would not say we have more rules in the cities.
OK. So you have your own rules, which you enforce on others? That's swell but I can imagine it could lead to problems. Maybe some form of committee where people can settle disputes and agree on standards?
So - as a society we've tried multiple different strategies to make it easy for people to live in close proximity and they all have different success rates and different trade-offs. Pick your poison.
You are positing an individualist solution (don't be a "gaping asshole" by some vague standard) to a society-level problem (people disagree on behavioral norms, and even if they agreed not everyone would comply). This doesn't work and is tantamount to just pretending the problem doesn't exist - a pretty common failure mode in the conservative mindset. See also: gun control is unnecessary because all you have to do is not shoot people...
The system we use in rural countryside where police basically don't exist, ultimately, is a direct jury of your peer neighbors. It's better if you don't like those decisions centralized to some far away assholes with even less aligned motives.
I personally think it's a thorny problem with no easy solution - which is why I'm not a libertarian.
If I buy a house in a nice neighborhood and I pay extra because it's a nice neighborhood - I want to know that everyone has some standard of maintenance.
There’s always something. sigh
I'll take a small town politics over an HOA any day, because the few local HOAs are far more likely to make weird and obnoxious requests.
I live on a dirt road in the woods. I don't care whether my next-door neighbor cuts his lawn or what color he paints his house, or whether he decides to start keeping goats. The landowner across the street is running a tiny part-time farm, and I'm a fan. I know most of my 20 closest neighbors.
I don't mind the occasional HOA for people who want that sort of heavy community control. For me, it was an automatic "no" when buying a house.
Some local politics sucks, some does its job with minimal fuss. The difference is not made by the label you put on the political entity.
HOAs are basically private pseudo-governments, and most of the ones around here seem to impose far more stringent rules about how people use their land than the towns do.
[1] If I were operating on a scale beyond an individual homeowner or a small farm, the town would pay more attention. Want to keep a dozen goats or turn 5 acres into a truck farm? Go for it. Want to raise 1,500 pigs with a manure lagoon? You'll need to go through a permitting process.
The odor externality from the manure piles/lakes usually riles such characters right up, but that is the least of it. Even when the manure management challenges are properly mitigated (and there are no such CAFO feedlots that can mitigate to only 2-3 incidents per year, it is more like 20-30 per year for the average one), neighboring properties like your parent commentator's are adversely impacted with sharply increased pathogen and contaminants control in their groundwater. As rural properties like your parent poster's usually rely upon well water, this becomes a pretty acute issue for neighbors.
Fracking operations also are frequently very sloppy with their adverse impact upon groundwater, even though they are very diligent upon staying on their property. Redress that makes whole including judicial system interaction expenses is difficult, expensive even for single-digit liquid assets millionaires, and rare.
At the end of the day, this has many characteristics of a classic engineering modeling problem, subject to unperceived historical biases. People who hold absolutist property rights interpretations like your parent poster are generally historically biased to a time period when such interpretations were couched in an energy-poor and population-sparse time of our civilization. Back then, as long as one was within approximately human- and animal-power scales of energy over the generational time span, and rural population densities, externalities from large scaling scenarios were rare for most people, and mostly theoretical. With our current access to energy and ability to rapidly densify neighboring properties, the available externalities to present materially change, and the interpretations (which are actually the mental models we work with) break down in the face of a engineering-like scaling step change that requires categorically different solution spaces.
I'm personally very sympathetic to your parent poster's position, but realistically, my personal experience has informed me of the dynamic I've shared, and I've since substantially modified my position.
I forgot to mention that the lack of forest now means I can see floodlights from the local high school sports fields 20 miles away and can hear the freeway traffic that passes through the nearby town, also 20+ miles away. It’s not deafening just annoying and persistent instead of wind blowing through thick forest.
I don’t give a flying fuck that you don’t give a flying fuck about your neighbhors. I want neighbors that care about me and ask if they can have a stick of butter or borrow my table saw or carpool my kids to school. My neighborhood is a true community. We help each other. We organize with each other. We raise kids with each other. All from our huge McMansions with perfect lawns adorned with labradoodles who don’t bark at strangers. It makes my life better and I have never once gotten worked up about some bullshit notion that the HOA is treading on me. It’s possible to like conformity while eating suburban Chipotle while reading Kant. You can be a free thinker while also agreeing to not park your car on your lawn. If you want a pink mailbox and want to use your chainsaw in your birthday suit at 6am go right ahead, in any thousands of neighborhoods or hermitages that allow it in the land where the ratio of eagles to hamburgers is nearly equal. I’ll be in my garage with my neighbor smoking weed with our shirts off, making sawdust, listening to Steely Dan. Oh the tyranny
These don't even exist for the standard reasoning any longer. It's turned into a financial grift for developers to avoid paying for improvements, and municipalities to expand the tax base without having to pay for infrastructure. Plenty of "communities" out there currently having their cake and eating it too - at least for the first one or two generations of owners. It's about as sustainable as you'd expect such arrangements to be the more you look into them.
If you want suburban new home construction in my area you have had to buy within a HoA for the past 30 years. It's getting to the point where only the older "city core" and inner ring suburbs come devoid of a HoA. So it's either exceedingly expensive dense urban living or a 2 hour drive from a rural property. Such "choice" indeed.
HoAs kill freedom more than they offer it from my experience. They also slowly suffocate any future development forcing everyone into exceedingly hard to break covenants of the past. The ossification and hollowing out of middle class America continues.
It’s great this country is large enough to accommodate all types.
I interpret such actions as what to normally expect in a lower trust society and culture. We pay for such settings in many different ways.
And never mind that the main value add of leaf blowers (over the traditional rake) is to coat your neighbors with debris and dust, thus necessitating even more cleaning (inside too, if they dared to have their windows open).
Also I'd say it's your characterization of freedom that is a narrow misunderstanding. I'd define freedom as the ability for individuals to make their own choices in the presence of society. Being the only person for miles and thus being "free" to do whatever you want isn't some sensible ideal of freedom, rather it's a pathological case that has made freedom irrelevant. In other words, freedom itself directly depends on tolerance. And by the time a city is forcing someone to build yet another ticky-tack fence to hide the mere sight of a perhaps-ill-advised boat it's clear that there is very little tolerance aka respect for freedom.
In contrast, here in Mexico (where I am from) you need a HOA (or the equivalent) to avoid all sorts of crazy neighbours. From people blasting music and shouting at 1am, people leaving their trash out in the sidewalk permanently, parking their cars in front of your garage. To really making dangerous modifications to their house that will undoubtedly affect their neighbours.
Surely in the individualistic land of the free, it should be a fundamental right?
This goes back to the construction company/realtor investing to build the entire suburb and putting down the roads and such.
You have the right idea, but there isn’t a contract that a buyer has to sign.
A restrictive covenant is attached to a property when a developer (e.g., of a condo complex or subdivision) deeds a subject property to an initial buyer. The restrictions “run with the land” and are enforceable against any subsequent buyer. (The restrictions are a public record kept with the county recorder, so any buyer is on “record notice” whether they actually knew about them or not.)
Also, the way most HOAs work, there is no joining just as there is no opting out. You are a member if you own a subject property. That’s it.
I mainly know about California, but it should be similar in other states.
Note: I'm using phrasing local to me, I expect there may be minor differences but the same gist.
We don't have that concept in my country. Or, we do have associations that make it so that houses in an area share the upkeep of communal stuff like a park, playground, organize events etc. All things I would think a "normal HOA" would be, but without the ability to impose fines or stuff like that. So I would feel a house with that kind of neighborhood here would be a net positive, as in costs can be shared among more.
Boomers mostly worked one job between two people, and had the silent generation to take care of their kids so they had a lot of time for masterbatory lawn care/putting trashcans away the second the trash truck pulls away/nonsense.
Now they are retired and have even more time, but also authority over people far busier than they ever have been.
Here in the UK the boomers were able to work one job, get a house on an easy mortgage and now they’re old and have nothing to do they campaign against any development that might slightly inconvenience them or reduce their house price (spoiler, most developments wouldn’t)
https://www.financialreporter.co.uk/income-to-house-price-ra...
The very real problems with affordability of housing in the UK have a number of causes but the key issue is supply. Successive governments have simply failed to build sufficient housing to meet demand. NIMBYism alone can't explain this lack of investment.
"Blame boomers" has existed for perhaps a decade if we're being generous.
1989:
- Interest rate: 14.5%.
- Average house price: £58k.
- Monthly repayment: £650 (90% LTV, 25 year term).
- Average pre-tax income: £10k.
2024:
- Interest rate: 5.25%.
- Average house price: £282k.
- Monthly repayment: £1500 (90% LTV, 25 year term).
- Average pre-tax income: £35k.
So in 1989, an average mortgage was about 80% of an average gross income. In 2024, an average mortgage is about 50% of an average gross income.
I specifically chose 1989 because it was a year of high interest rates, but you can repeat the calculation for other years if you wish. I don't think the results will support your assertion.
The 2nd group can't "refinance" all the extra principal they owe.
In 1989 interest rates were at record highs and mortgage interest relief was still a thing. Despite interest rates hovering between 8-12% for the rest of the 1980s, mortgage repayments were consistently a much lower proportion of income.
In 2024 there's no interest relief and we're exiting a period of record low rates. The rise to 5.25% already puts us in a worse position than when rates were at 10%, 14.5% would disastrous.
It is worth looking at the mid-2000s numbers (post-MIRAS, but pre-crash) and comparing them to today's numbers. They're really not so different.
No argument on the relative leverage: 10% would be impossible and 15% would probably precipitate a revolution.
1. ...and no, I'm not a Baby Boomer either.
... or pour oil in the fire of the great culture war, here in the secondary frontline of young vs. old, and accomplish nothing.
Always remember: If it's in the news it's not the norm. Whatever you hear about a country via the news is the opposite of what that country typically is.
We meet once a year to vote on crap. Key is to not have a group of people with nothing better to do.
Yup. I can’t imagine what an HOA would need to be doing to meet monthly, let alone delegate decision making to a board.
The latter is simply incorrect. Condo associations and co-op boards are separate creatures, in part due to there being an existential necessity to their existing. (You can't have people dismantling structural members their unit abuts.)
HOAs are far more voluntary in nature. That said, I agree that we need a better framework for distinguishing those functioning as direct democracies from those where an elected board gets to appoint itself powers.
These companies are incentivized to find infraction to fine, and drive around regularly to make sure every rule is strictly adhered to. Trash bins out too early or late? Fine! Fence painted the wrong shade of soulless beige? Fine!
> When the town of Seaside, California ordered homeowner Etienne Constable to build a fence to conceal the boat in his driveway, he erected the fence all right. And then he hired his neighbor, artist Hanif Panni, to paint a mural on the fence—realistically depicting the boat itself.
So all the discussion about contracts entered to into freely with respect to HOAs simply don't apply here: this is the government imposing the requirement to build a fence.
What's wrong with bringing your gun to school? It was common (up until the 1970s, I think) to have shooting sports at school. That's how kids learned gun safety.
Except for Texas, I have not heard of being forced into an HOA. You choose to join one when buying a property in a neighborhood that has one.
What's the story with Texas?
They don't. For all the power an HOA might have in their street or apartment block, outside of that very small boundary they're nothing. We're not talking about Boeing or Morgan Stanley or PG&E here.
HOAs are actually popular by choice - developers wouldn't set them up for "80% of available houses" if the houses were more valuable without them.
2% of people have horror story experiences with corrupt HOAs pocketing their cash. 23% of people just get poor value for money where some asshole changes a lightbulb and charges 100 residents $1 each. 75% of people have a tolerable experience, and quite like the fact their neighbour can't park an RV on their driveway and rent it out on airbnb, and if that means limiting what people are allowed to do on their own driveway, so be it.
C'mon mate, exchange some culture!
The stereotypical Jackie is not like a Karen. Where I'm from a Jackie is a lady who's usually a little older and working class, great conversation IRL, very inappropriate, the type who says stuff in her back garden and you roll your eyes and close the windows so your kids don't start repeating it.
The cultural collision is that Jackie is not as much fun on Nextdoor, because something about the anonimity and having to write out the things she says out makes them sort of horrible, and she very easily slips into being a bit of a bully.
For what it's worth I think the UK equivalent of a Karen is Sandra, whose husband is Terry -- whereas Jackie is obvs with Barry.
When you really examine them, stereotypes are weird.
Your analogy instantly brought me up to speed, and spells out just how bad it would be.
Thanks very much!
On the other hand we did have guns in my school in the UK (only for use on the rifle range).
That said, I think it is very weird that Americans accept this level of regulation on what they do on their own property.
I’m not sure of any states / places that allow a student to bring a gun to school. A lot of schools have a police officer present, and I imagine they would typically be able to bring their gun. And some states are debating (or have authorized) allowing faculty to bring a gun to school; the caveat being (in most instances I have seen) said faculty would have to pass enhanced gun safety training.
Those two groups are somewhat prone to having conflicts with each other and HOAs let both be happier than if they were to be annoyed by living next to each other.
I’m guessing there was a particular (white flighty) period of time and kind of people who really wanted these things. Neighborhoods built before this time don’t have them, and newer buildings (at least where I live) don’t seem to have them either. So these may be mostly phenomena of a specific period.
When you buy a condo anywhere in the US, you also get a (sometimes huge) document of all the rules and regulations. You're also required to pay fees every month.
My parents are elderly and live in one. They have there share of stories, some of which are pretty bad. People have moved out solely due to conflicts. They kind of hate it actually. But I asked my dad if he agrees with all the enforcement and he said basically, well you don't want someone to paint their house purple. Which I think illustrates the preferences of people who seek these communities.
Edit to help those confused about U.S. and states' laws: The 1990 Gun-free School Act doesn't apply to concealed firearms. 32 states allow teachers and school employees to bring guns to school (with some restrictions). States that explicitly allow concealed firearms in schools in some form or another are Alabama, Alaska, Idaho, Illinois, Michigan, Missouri, New Hampshire, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming.
Armed (and trained) adults are very different from "gun-toting high-school students", which is what seems to be implied here.
When you're discussing our gun laws with foreigners, I guess you're right that it's always necessary to spell out the fine details, like the fact that we have separate rules for gun-toting people who are over 18 and gun-toting people who are under 18, because from their perspective it's almost certainly just one big jumble of insanity.
Teachers/staff - depends on state/local laws.
I'm assuming the OP meant the lack of overall regulation that leads to be people illegally bringing guns to school (and using them).
For example, my oldest daughter is involved on the trap team (a shotgun sport). Her firearm is cased and unloaded except on the shooting range itself, and practice is outside of normal school hours. In practice, that means she only has it in my vehicle when I'm taking her to practice or picking her up from practice. It's a non-issue.
As of about five years ago, when I went through instructor training for shooting sports, there had never been in an injury caused by youth shooting sports in our state in the ~100 year history of the program. Further, the group I was working with, 4-H, had a perfect safety record nation-wide. To muy knowledge that is still the case.
What choice do they have? Their job is nearby, and long commutes are not so far off from a prison sentence. Literally hundreds of hours per year trapped in a tiny space that you can't leave.
Only so many houses/homes are for sale, and every time a critical mass of busybodies manifests, they can vote in a new HOA which is effectively immortal. They're simply easier to create than they are to uncreate. Until we get where we are today, and you may very well not have any non-HOA choices.
There are, of course, pluses and minuses to either.
I bought an expensive home in a nice suburb, no HOA. My neighbors, who were there before me, suddenly decided to fill their back yard with old rusty cars on blocks they were “working on”. And get a fake deer for target practice. This cost me then of thousands of dollars when I sold my house.
No HOA restrictions I’ve ever dealt with were worse than that so I’m now fairly pro-HOA. I have plenty of freedom and opportunity to buy a house without one but I likely won’t again.
Meanwhile an HOA deed restriction is you giving a private non government organization the permanent and irrevocable right to remove you from your home and sell it if you do not comply with whatever extra-legal discrimination they make up to impose on you.
Plain and simple, HOAs are not a country or a government. They are a scam.
Is this sarcasm?