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Comment by reacharavindh | Hacker News Reader

I never understood how the idea of HOAs became acceptable. I used to live with a friend in the US for a few months - standard suburb house in a community and cul-de-sac. I kid you not, the HOA imposed fines on my friend who owns the house that their trash bins were 12cms too tall for the shrubs to hide them. He had to move the bins away from the front side of the house or pay a recurring penalty. It's absurd what people can live with, and spend their time on.

Ironically, this is the land that screams "freedom" at every opportunity they get :-)

I tell my wife that if we ever decided to move stateside, and think of buying a house, it must be an independent house that is not part of any pesky HOA BS.

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This is the number one fascinating thing about the USA. Yes it's freedom, but freedom only means that whoever owns the land, whoever organizes something like a suburb or a festival, is free to impose whatever rules they want on the people utilizing it.

This scales up to the world of business, it's really a dog eat dog system, the most anarchic system in the world I'd say. While simultaneously being very undemocratic in each individual cell of influence and power, depending on who is in charge. I'd be willing to bet there are HOAs in the US that are very democratic and hold regular meetings where every member is heard and has influence. Maybe in oregon... ;)

Simply put, if you want consistency and fairness imposed then you need bigger government. But even that couldn't change the mentality of the United States citizenry. We have bigger government in most of europe, for better and for worse. It doesn't solve all problems but I still prefer it.

It is very important to preserve the freedom of people with slightly more power to fuck with those with slightly less power!

In the US, there's many doctrinaire refusers of anything with the "government" label so the exact same societal function and role is carefully reinvented without using that scary "g" word that leads to wobbly knees and couch fainting and so we have things like HOAs and a slew of other institutions.

There's even privately run versions of it like the Irvine Company, which built centrally planned cities by a board of unelected bureaucrats - but you see that's privately owned, so it's great! Just don't call that the "g" word otherwise the blood vessels in many Americans foreheads are likely to pop while they scream about public libraries and the post office being a communist menace.

And that's the mentality part that is a wildcard. On paper we might have good solutions in Europe, but the question is if those fundamentlists in the US will tolerate our solutions if they require government regulation.

There is just no sweet way to sugar coat it for them.

As an amateur anthropologist I can't help but wonder where this hard line mentality stems from. Because you can draw parallels with Australia, being virgin land, colonized very recently, vast spaces, but when they had a massacre and decided to take everyone's guns away, they were met with very little resistance.

So clearly there seems to be some difference in the mentalities of people between Australians and Americans. US Americans are truly a unique breed.

This history takes more than can be said in a single comment but it was a number of intentional campaigns starting around the 1950s.

In the US, after the radical republicans and proto-communists fled europe in 1848, they came to the US and helped form the republican party which led to a civil war which was fundamentally about worker's rights. After that there were decades of skirmishes and unionization pushes that are celebrated everywhere but in the US (such as May Day). There were radical anarchist and socialist led efforts that brought about the 8 hour day, minimum wage, and weekends through armed violent struggle.

This led to the professionalization of police (example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_and_Iron_Police) and the earliest propaganda outfits which came out of WW1.

Anyway, fast forward to after the war, the right wanted to not deal with that for another 100 years so they got to work on trying to flip the script. (for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_for_Economic_Educat...)

Clergy went from left wing to right wing, rural people went from bomb throwing anarchists to flag waving conservatives, the american spirit that led to the Burlington, Haymarket, and Railroad strikes, Battle of Virden Mines, Pullman Strike, Colorado labor wars, blair mountain, Harlan county war, all of these were redirected - redirected to scapegoats; women, government, gays, immigrants.

For instance, modern country music came from folk music, which had a bunch of left wing songs (such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzvH5UZVQU8 or pre-ww2 folk singers like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Hill_(activist) ). It was re-invented, intentionally, as troop-worshipping, flag waving super-patriotism.

It looks so weird as an outsider because it's a manufactured flip. The fundamental culture didn't change, it's just that propagandists can communicate their lies faster and more convincingly than those who constrain themselves to material reality.

Scammers win because they're trying to convince, while honest people are trying to have integrity.

> I never understood how the idea of HOAs became acceptable.

I do.. it is the canonization and highest wish of all the what we call a https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spie%C3%9Fb%C3%BCrger in Germany :D

"A Spießbürger is a derogatory term for a narrow-minded person who is characterized by mental immobility, pronounced conformity to social norms and aversion to changes in the usual living environment."

Yeah, but do not forget how we are even codifying quite narrow-minded views about how someone should build their house in Bauordnungen (building code). My parents had to sue to build their house with a pitched roof, even though one neighboring house already had the same. And do not get me started on Denkmalschutz (monument protection?) ...

Yea here the government removed a mural from a hostel facade because it 'disturbed' the monument protected building adjacent to it.

https://www.rbb24.de/panorama/beitrag/2024/04/berlin-hostel-...

To be fair, the Germans have a word for everything

Look, a man with a duck on his head

We Germans have a word for that: Quacksalberaufdekopfmann

To be fair, German form such words just by writing the whole sentence without any spaces or hyphens, like "Amanwithaduckonhishead"

Get the point, but no, actually not, we join nouns, not sentences ;) (but english does, too, just with spaces between?)

Further especially that word few germans could tell you why it is called like that:

Spieß is spear, so Spießbürger/Spießer is just a spear citizen, or a speary?! ;)

(One explanation is the medieval simple citizen that could not afford a better weapon than a simple spear. Not even sure if the only explanation attempt though..)

the funny thing is that a Spießbürger is someone who in english could be described as having a stick up their rear.

> I never understood how the idea of HOAs became acceptable.

They became popular in the US as a means of redlining - early ones overtly stated which race of people were allowed to live there. That practice was banned, so now there's just a residual tendency to extreme conformism as a way of keeping out "undesirables".

>never understood how the idea of HOAs became acceptable.

I suppose it's the same way that the idea of gated communities and redlining became acceptable. I live near one which once was such a place. While their online history has been written up to abhor their regrettable past practices, they still maintain a very large lakeside park that you need a keycard to get into that costs a pretty penny each year.

They can't afford a manor in the country, poor things.

For the international readers:

HOA = Homeowners' Association

I always assumed it was about "there goes the neighborhood" style racism/xenophobia.

In many cases now it's primarily about shifting the tax burden on the cost of public roads/sewers ect.

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