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Comment by mvieira38 | Hacker News Reader

The piece of paper you are pretty much forced to sign if you want to live in any neighborhood at all. That's not really the full consent you are implying it is, most people are forced into joining an HOA

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https://ipropertymanagement.com/research/hoa-statistics

> 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

Interesting, wonder if new construction tends to be bulk construction on subdivided farmland and such, and there is some reason for HOAs to make sense there. Maybe it makes it cheaper to pay for landscaping and similar services which in turn makes more profit for the developer?

Existing municipalities tend to require HOAs for new subdivisions because it reduces the administrative overhead on their end. The services a HOA provides are mostly things which would otherwise have to be done by the city.

Do you have examples of what HOAs provide for the city when it is composed of single family homes?

Park and tree maintenance and stormwater drainage are the most common. Sometimes they also take care of things like road maintenance, garbage service, and street sweeping.

Around here the vast majority of new construction comes in shape of "A/B unit", a single lot with two SFHs. This is organized as a HOA of 2 members.

In my state you don't sign the hoa (covenants). Instead it is just something a dead guy signed 40 years ago, encumbered on the land for infinity*, and recorded somewhere. Maybe the title search will turn it up, maybe it won't, but either way it is enforced whether you know (or even could know) about it or not.

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.

No one is forced into joining an HOA. If you don't want to be bound by one then don't buy property bound by one. If there's property you want not bound by an HOA them's the breaks.

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