Hacker News Reader

Comment by jl6 | Hacker News Reader

It's an interesting tradeoff of freedoms when you consider how free a person is to leave a HOA. Purely legally speaking, they are free to leave at any time if the HOA starts to enforce unjust restrictions - but practically speaking, moving house is onerous and many are not in a position to do it. This is essentially a contract where you enter freely, but the other party has the ability to vary the terms unilaterally, and your only recourse is to exit.

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.

View on HN

This is a great analogy. I can think of one area in which it might be different though. In smaller HOAs such as mine, the HOA almost never takes any action of its own volition. It's almost always the result of some neighbor making a complaint forcing the HOA's hand, then the neighbor hides behind whatever action they compel the HOA to make. The HOA becomes the boogeyman and goes on the news, while the actual complainant gets to remain safely anonymous.

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.

I would say that your first recourse is the ability to read all the financial documents. As a property owner in an HOA you have every right to read the contracts that your HOA has signed, to audit the books, and to otherwise verify that the HOA board is doing their job correctly. Second recourse is to vote in the elections. If you elect petty tyrants, you get petty tyranny. Third is to run for the board yourself to make sure things are being done correctly.

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.

Most houses arent

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).

I don't have any statistics ready to hand, but my recollection is that most households are not in an HOA, but that most newly–built houses are. It is my understanding that cities have started to rely on HOAs to own and maintain infrastructure that would once have been the domain of the city, and that cities are doing this to avoid raising taxes.

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.

Isn't this just the "if you don't like it, leave" argument?

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.

There's a disconnect in these comments that suggest a homeowner is forced into an HOA; for the vast (vast!) majority of cases, the HOA (and it's publicly available rules) are pre-existing to the home purchase. The rules can be annoying, but the primary purpose is the preserve the sale value of the properties.

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).

Well, that's true - nobody is forced to buy a house. (Though, sometimes, they inherit one that's hard to sell due to an HOA.)

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?"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com