The Cult of the American Lawn
noemamag.com
noemamag.com
Solution - Refuse to purchase property subject to an HOA. I realize this might not be a tenable solution for some people, and I find that to be a very unfortunate situation. We should really educate our friends, kids, neighbors on the perils of these often-broad and legally binding agreements that seem to be sneaking into real-estate contracts/deeds at an alarming rate nationally. If you aren't comfortable with each and every provision being enforced upon you, don't purchase!
Regarding the grass lawn situation, there are alternatives like mixing in clover varieties which actually fix nitrogen (e.g. improve soil health) while requiring considerably less water than most lawn grass to survive. Here in urban Denver my wife and I have opted for a 100% "mini clover" lawn in both the front and back yards. It's already green and growing while neighboring yards are still dead winter brown grass. It also stays nice and green well into the late fall after most grass is dormant/dead.
I realize this doesn't do a lot to address the biodiversity angle the article took on, but it's a potential alternative for those seeking options. If you allow it to grow a bit you'll get flowers that are helpful for pollinators in addition to the healthier soil. I can attest that after you give the clover seed 6 weeks or so to set roots and sprout (no walking on, keep it moist) it will serve you for years. We're on year 4 at our house. No regrets.
A federal opt out would be a huge intrusion into contract law, IMHO.
It's pretty easy to avoid HOAs, they have to be disclosed. It may be hard to buy where you want to buy and avoid HOAs though. But my parents' house doesn't have an HOA (but does have pretty picky city code enforcement), and the two houses I've owned didn't either; although the first did have a dry covenant that everyone I talked to said is unenforcable and I found amusing. Tends to mean older lots or more rural, because new developments like to setup HOAs, presumably because the buyers of new homes don't reject them.
Some sort of association is also more or less required if there's any form of shared responsibility, like in a condo.
This is why I always cringe when my neighbors on social media bitch about HOA. It just floors me that there are people who simply do not read HOA covenants before they buy their homes.
> It may be hard to buy where you want to buy and avoid HOAs though.
Gotta fully accept the tradeoffs you make.
I swore I’d never buy in an HOA community angain after that, but around me, non-HOA communities are crap. I want to maximize value and opportunity to resell so, HOA it is.
If you know the tree is going to immediately start dying, you're just going to find the cheapest, least healthy sapling at the nursery. Had they let you wait until the tree is more likely to survive, there's a better chance you'd be willing to spend a bit more to buy an older/larger sapling that'll look better and provide more shade from the start. Plus, the temporary tree slowly dying would probably be less visually appealing than an empty spot for a few months.
There are reasons why we plant street trees: improved aesthetics, increased home value, shade along the street and sidewalks, traffic calming effects, etc. By ignoring the reason behind them and just focusing on checking the box, your HOA was just begging for some malicious compliance that undermined the benefits of the replacement tree.
Land is a limited resource. We are not making any more of it. Sometimes just looking farther away is an option but often times it isn't.
HOA's being required on certain properties is bonkers to me. It feels like extortion. Either agree to these onerous terms or get nothing.
It's 100% true that you can avoid HOAs by simply not buying into one. No need for bureaucrats in DC to parachute in to run everyone lives for them. If you want to "opt-out" you can easily do so by not buying in an HOA. That's what the majority of people do. Having the government mandate the ability to opt-out is simply another way of denying others the ability to freely come together and decide rules for themselves instead of having people in DC decide for everyone.
It's entirely possible for someone to buy a property which is subject to an HOA, a well run respectful one. Then over time as "leaders" change, the HOA could become a poorly run one.
Particularly it looks like if you want a new home, it is harder to avoid a HOA
I have also heard of badly run and even fraudulent HOAs, that take money and then don’t use it for the good of the homeowners. But I doubt this is the norm.
Suburban HOAs essentially function only to browbeat everyone into maintaining their property according to arbitrary standards. While usually well intentioned, initially, because these standards are arbitrary, they often result in abuses of power.
In either situation, condo or suburban, the politics of an HOA often result in the HOA becoming dominated by bad actors, increasing the propensity for abuse.
I rent in a city now, so I have very little lawn exposure these days, but is this experience similar for others in the North East (or maybe East coast in general)?
HOAs are a completely separate beast entirely. I can't imagine spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a home only to pay an additional fee for the privilege to do what someone else tells me. I don't care if my neighbors have a project car that's half built sitting in the drive way or a dead lawn.
The HOA sent letters, telling us to water, so we told them to foot the water bill through the water district first (which was a HOA change made a few years ago, thankfully). They STFU pretty quickly after that.
The concept in american jurisprudence of 'the government is less likely to interfere with contracts between private parties' meant refusing to sell a home to a person of the global majority, while being illegal in some ways, is no longer illegal if it's backed by this fictional entity called "a home owner's association".
The belief in political authority, and indeed any sort of authority, is sometimes hard to view as anything but a dangerous superstition.
The real ecological dead zones are the fake grass “lawns”, that are both nutrient free and heat islands, and for some reason get tax breaks to install.
Isn't that reason "water"?
The home I grew up in up in the Northeast had 1 acre lot and not a sprinkler in sight.
The perfectly manufactured, 100% single grass variety, that takes lots of chemicals, water, and mowing? Terrible.
Grassy area that has some clover and dandelions, gets mowed 2x month, and doesn't need watering or chemical treatment? Fine by me.
Personally, I'd rather have some bushes and perennials that I trim 2x year, add much in the Spring, and that's it. And that's the way yard has been going over the last 5 years - the grass portion is smaller every year. I might just pull the plug on grass this season, dig it up, add some fresh soil, and plant some plants.
Ideally, there should never be requirements to have a "well groomed" lawn. And incentives should be aligned to discourage overly manicured lawns (higher water costs, taxes on fertilizer, whatever else works).
Obviously the HOA resistance to anything different is bad, but less than 30% of homes in the US are in a HOA. Most homes with a yard without an HOA still have a green lawn.
This is such a perfect encapsulation of actually-existing libertarianism that I would call it a mean-spirited and uncharitable parody if it wasn't quoting a real person. "The government should stay out of your business, except when I hold you at gunpoint until I like your lawn."
(And you can't even blame this part on HOAs, this was a city councilor talking about a municipal regulation for lawn standards)
I think there is a much better approach. I'm lived around the Middle East, where most residential planning is around walls and courtyards. It's a wonderful use of space. I would always prefer a house with a courtyard over the traditional American open layout, lawn or no lawn.
They make perfect sense in warm, sunny regions like the Mediterranean because they provide a shaded and comparatively cool area on hot sunny summer days.
The courtyard giving shade is a negative in England since it seldom gets very hot and so people are actively trying to enjoy the sun, not hide from it. And as a double whammy a courtyard means more exposed walls so a home that’s harder to heat in colder winters.
Of course plenty of Americans live in places much hotter and sunnier than England - but their English heritage has left them with standard building practices unsuited to their environment.
As recent events showed, this position is purely an aesthetic one for most. Americans are actually very keen on dictating to others what they should or shouldn't do.
On the one hand you can look at America. It ain’t very densely populated. And it takes active effort to get rid of dandelions. Are we really that good at mowing lawns and paving over nature?
On the other hand Georgia is a big piece of land.
If I were an American I would say screw it, let’s just
1. Ban sickeningly green residential lawns in arid climates
2. All lawns that remain are required to have at least 1/3 dandelion per square feet
Would that help the bees and the water shortage? Maybe. But at least opinion-makers would stop complaining. (And move on to the next thing.)
[1] I wrote all of this and then a Ctrl+Shift+W fatfinger killed it, thanks Chrome. Reminds to use a “notepad” before posting.
[2] And cars play a role in that. And who made countries like America massively car-dependent? Joe Parkingspace who has to live one hour by car from work or two hours by bus? (This is ill-informed. I’m not American so I don’t know what the ratios are on the ground. And it will differ from Philadelphia to Vancouver, WA.)
It won't be "homogenous" look but IMHO I think that's even prettier.
Convincing people to care about the future is the hard part though, and I have no solution for that.
For some odd reason that has made me much happier to see a lawn full of dandelion flowers
If your HOA requires grass, you've gotta have grass, even if you want a garden. As someone that has had the poor fortune of being on an HOA board neighbors like these might say they're well meaning but really they're just breaking a promise and not willing to do the hard work to convince the HOA to amend their bylaws.
Having a lawn can be great - it's hard to play soccer or toss a frisbee in a rain garden. Having a garden or letting it go "natural" is also cool and a lot of people do it in the US - but not if you've signed a piece of paper saying you will keep your lawn a lawn.
No, it isn't. It's a simple statement of contractual obligation. They signed a deed under the authority of an HOA so they are bound to obey the rules of the HOA. If you don't like that don't buy property beholden to an HOA.
When it brings up the story of the home owners unknowingly breaking their HOA agreement in the beginning, the point isn't that it's unreasonable to expect people to follow rules that they agreed to. It's really two things; it's that A.) They didn't even realize they agreed to those rules and B.) Those rules are, in our opinion, stupid and arguably harmful, and we don't have to allow them.
Now you might argue, "Tough shit, their fault for agreeing to something without paying attention." I don't know if you guys happen to be homeowners, but I would dare you to even try to enumerate the number of obligations you've agreed to throughout the journey of buying a home. The enormous stack of paperwork you have to deal with is not exactly the easiest to digest, especially if you aren't a legal professional. It is fully understandable that someone would fail to grasp what they're getting into when they sign their HOA agreement, which I'm sure to many uninitiated people, is just another formality of home ownership. Most people are only aware of the practice of HOAs because of the pushback from normal people who assume when you buy a house and own land you generally are allowed to do what you want on it subject to some fairly basic legal requirements. And that's crap you have to read and understand in addition to hundreds of other such documents and contracts in your life. Cue the HumancentiPad episode of South Park here.
And even if you do know what you're getting into, it might not exactly be something you want to get into. The housing market is not always in your favor, and these HOAs are quite prevalent in some localities. So while it's technically an agreement, it's often a begrudging one. People who wind up here often won't be caught by surprise by an HOA rule, like the case at the beginning of this article, but that doesn't mean they're any happier.
The good news is, there is precedent here. We don't just let people agree to whatever they want, because the dynamics of some kinds of relationships are too ripe for abuse and negative outcomes for society. Just like how labor laws can restrict what employers can ask you to do, the law can also restrict what HOAs are allowed to enforce, and that's what we're after here. The rationale here is pretty straightforward; I don't give a shit about people's desire to live in neighborhoods with lawns that look like golf greens, but I do care about the ecological disaster that American lawns can be, especially depending on where you live.
Now if you disagree with that premise, then fine, nobody says you have to agree with the article, and I'm not trying to convince anyone to either, but this line of argument is offensively missing the point. I promise you, nobody is misunderstanding how an agreement works.
I was particularly enraged that even in unpopulated desert wasteland ( not even roads to get there ) 9 of 10 properties I looked at were encumbered by this nonsense, usually by a dead boomer who was afraid of anything but a mansion next to his mobile home pig farm. Several times I was lied to by everyone and only discovered it during title search and only because I sifted through hundreds of pages of ancient scanned documents.
It is truly a poison on the land and by design the proportion of encumbered land ratchets up with no way to reverse.
* Theoretically the law requires them to have a way to be removed but clever lawyering makes it next to impossible for a regular person.
> 82.4% of new homes sold in 2023 were part of HOA communities
Not sure if this is AI-generated but this almost contradicts it on the same page (though it is constructed vs sold.)
> 64.7% of newly constructed homes were part of HOA communities in 2023, down 2.1% year-over-year (YoY)
> 77.1 million Americans live in HOAs, condominium communities, or cooperatives in 2024; this number represents 22.7% of the 2024 total U.S. population
Of course, not everyone buys new homes.
https://www.nahb.org/News-and-Economics/Housing-Economics/Na...
> Key Findings about the home buyers in the 2021 AHS:
> 7% of home buyers purchased a new home
You can keep supporting it. if we were hanging out IRL I would clock[0] you (unhappily, regretfully) as someone supporting supremacy.
a belief in authority can get real dangerous, real fast.
Update:
[0] I mean "clock" in the "to note the flaws of" sense. Urban dictionary gives one definition which sounds right-enough:
> used in gay vernacular especially among drag queens
> to call out someone's flaws, to uncover or reveal the truth in a situation or one's true gender
Here's a few quotes about HOAs, zoning, and policing from https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2020/investigations/p...
> If the targets, their family members or associates wouldn’t speak to deputies or answer questions, STAR team deputies were told to look for code enforcement violations like faded mailbox numbers, a forgotten bag of trash or overgrown grass, Rodgers said. “We would literally go out there and take a tape measure and measure the grass if somebody didn’t want to cooperate with us,” he said. Rodgers said people sometimes would fail to pay the fine, which would result in a warrant being issued for their arrest.
So, the gap between HOAs and police (deputized slave patrols) exists only for the people that want to imagine it as existing.
mountain out of a mole hill? perhaps.
Let me understand you - you would assume that the individual in question knows for certain how HOAs have been used against minority groups, and then you would physically attack them before asking them if they were even aware and trying to enlighten them to the issue?
Edit: And at the risk of pushing HN's guidelines, I'll point out that this is what you've put on your personal website:
>I value coherence, meaningfulness, compassion, and kindness.
One of these things is sure as hell not like the other. Yikes. Maybe go get some fresh air, bud...
Edit 2: And I say all this as someone who very much hates HOAs and will never own a home that is in one.
That thing being "you operated inside of a HOA without noting the easy-to-encounter truth about how HOAs function/have functioned."
yeah, I'll update the wording in the original post.
Update: Wording updated. indeed, I value the things I said I value, I appreciate you pointing out the other common ways the word 'clock' is used. I normally don't use such loose language.
You're probably right about a walk - my co2 meter shows the current level in this room with an open window is 818 - pretty fine, but movement and sun is always nice. It's cloudy, but I was about to head away from my desk for the day anyway.
There are people who live like that, and the quick social shaming response is not a bad one. "you said you care about people {here}, and you are now behaving in a dehumanizing way. how interesting"
I simply used a word that means one thing to me, and I use it in spoken language often enough, but it happens to have an equally prominent alternative usage that means directly 'to hit'.
No apologies needed or received. I think apologies are useful for some mistakes, but in some cases, if it seemed like you're witnessing online bullying... I say keep on keeping on.
Me saying "i'd hit you in person if you said this" is straight-down-the-middle bullying. Me saying "I'd sadly think less of you, if you said this in person" is not bullying, IMO, so I say we're both right. how nice.
now i wanna take my frisbee for a walk in the local park but it's as bit too windy for good throwing... hm.
Which given how unpopular that is now, goes to show that it is so impossible to reverse covenants you can't even remove wildly unpopular stuff like the exclusion of blacks. Thankfully such covenants are not enforceable.
Clauses like "by purchasing this property you promise to sell it only ever in the future to a white person" are sprinkled like salt across legal documents from certain eras.
Everyone was saying the whole thing out loud.
They are not enforceable, per se, today, but they still remain like landmines or unexploded ordinance in the landscape. Where there were clauses like that, that are currently unenforceable, something else might be close-enough to enforceable that it matters.
I simply ask people involved with these institutions something like "Do you know the racist/supremacist underpinnings of (HOA's|zoning|road design standards) in America?"
and usually the first half-second of their next facial expression correctly telegraphs how it'll go.
Every industry I've worked in, I read with fascination the lurid writings of those who hate the industry, either as insiders or outsiders. That an institution in the USA is _soaking wet_ in supremacy, and exists purely to propagate the concept of 'race' into the future is so banal to me, it's not really a hot take, though I remember when I thought something like this was improbable.
Anyway, HOA's are one of 'em. The hold up as ideal the concept of the suburb, which existed as "the alternative" to all things 'ethnic'.
That ideal uses threats of violence to expunge all things 'ethnic'. Sometimes under the guise of displaying class conformity/'not looking poor', but, lets be honest, that's an anti-ethnic sentiment.
It hurts to behold, all of this.
I would never buy a house with an HOA. I realize that some places people don't have much choice, and I sympathize with their plight.
I have a shop on a couple of acres that I let get pretty unruly because I don't really give a shit how it looks. After picking off quite a few ticks and dealing with raccoons constantly trying to get into the building for a while, I just started knocking down all the bushes and kept the grass real short. No issues since.
Additionally, the HOA rules aren't there to stop well meaning homeowners who want a more natural yard, they're there to stop completely untamed blight. The latter case is significantly more common than the former and it is absolutely a problem. As much as it pains me to say (I think HOAs are one of the saddest, most pathetic parts of American life), lawn rules are reasonable at their core, even though the enforcement is overzealous.
If the HOA just wants to combat "untamed blight" then the rule should be about untamed blight. Don't write the rule such that it demands a specific species of grass, with a length requirement specified to the centimeter.
This is just a lot of local zoning ordinances. Sometimes it's stupid and annoying but like 95%+ of the time it's fine and not terribly important to expend any energy changing.
I don't need any convincing that HOAs do it in the most power hungry freak way possible, but so much of our lives runs on letting things be a little loose, and that's a good thing.
Very cool. Do you want a medal? Should the ruminants who need grazing land be allowed to bulldoze your stapled together plywood or is that unreasonable?
After I sealed up the building and knocked down the shrubbery, they just walked a mile down the road to the nearest wooded area and set up shop there. They're fine, man.
You're being awfully snide for somebody who very clearly has no idea what you're talking about. You wouldn't tolerate raccoons where you live for a second if you realized what letting them do whatever they want actually entails.