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Comment by ajsnigrutin | Hacker News Reader

The problem is always with the extremes.

On one side, you have someone creating a car junkyard in his frontyard with a car tire bonfire behind his house and on the other, you have a random karen neigbor measuring your lawn greenness and soil humidity to see if you're not watering the lawn enough and fine your for that.

Take the power from a few powertrippers and make it more democratic and you solve both issues... turn every issue into a mandatory vote, require some kind of above-majority vote (eg 70%), and you're done. If the issue is so bad, that 70% of your neighbors actually come to a meeting and vote against what you're doing, it must be something really bad.

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Getting people to vote on things for their own Benefit is surprisingly hard. My parents’ condo association is constantly fighting each other because increasing monthly dues requires 70% vote and people have been refusing year after year. And what does increase year after year is maintenance requirements. First the nice to have amenities stopped. Then the elevators stopped. Now it’s 24x7 running water because the association doesn’t have money to fix the motors. Now they’re all trying to get the building to be sold so that it can be developed into an even bigger apartment building and that is also failing because it requires 75% vote. Imagine you voting against getting a brand new apartment in 3 years that’s larger in size and you get your rent paid while it’s being built.

Cities and counties have code enforcement to deal with the first case. You don't need another level of unaccountable private government between you and the county.

I lived next to a guy who would do maintenance and repair on his motorcycle which had “pipes” until nearly midnight.

I would’ve killed for an HOA back then.

I live in a neighborhood with an HOA, next to a guy who works on his motorcycle all day, loudly blaring his awful music, and then waking us up at 5 AM every morning when he drives the bike to work.

The HOA will break down my door about grass that is not strictly manicured, or about some algae on my front siding, but you know the one thing they will not lift a finger about? Noise complaints. Funny, that.

Why not kill the guy with the motorbike and cut out the middleman?

It's the libertarian dream. Unfortunately, the state has an outrageous monopoly on violence.

Outrageous government overreach. Why can't you just choose the corporation to pay the weregild? It would be far more efficient!

If we can put it on the blockchain and power it with genAI, I’ve got a term sheet for you!

Your city/county police don't take noise complaints?

> If the issue is so bad, that 70% of your neighbors actually come to a meeting and vote against what you're doing, it must be something really bad.

Two dangers with that.

First, mandatory votes are ... difficult. They exclude a lot of people, particularly those that gotta work two jobs to make ends meet, thus giving more power to those people who have lots of free time (i.e. pensioners, SAHM busybodies).

Second, tyranny of the majority. The original intention of HOAs was to keep out Black and Asian people and, in some cases, Jews [1]. Getting the majority of 70% in a majority white 'hood is an open invitation for harrassment.

If there is bad behavior, such as someone working on "car projects" at night, or letting junk pile up in their front yard, the solution is zoning, noise ordnances and environmental protection laws. Not HOAs.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeowner_association#History

I believe the modern purpose of HOAs is for the developer to keep the neighborhood looking good long enough to sell all the homes and make a return on their investment. Fair enough. Then it gets turned over to the residents and they go batshit crazy.

HOAs are a huge problem in Florida. It’s hard to find places to live without one. We escaped one that was controlled entirely by one family. Ten years later, they are still in charge of that HOA.

Now, we live in a neighborhood without an HOA. It’s not without a few minor problems, but people are generally more willing to just talk to each other and the city steps in with code enforcement if something ever gets really bad.

I think a lot of people here have PTSD from living in other places with an HOA. Last year, we had a newer resident get a little bit aggressive in trying to start an HOA. He was going so far as patrolling the neighborhood in a golf cart and calling code enforcement on people for all kinds of petty reasons. We ran him out of the neighborhood pretty quickly after that.

I will never live in a place with an HOA again unless it’s a shared building where you kind of have to have something.

But that's exactly why you need the 70% (example number).

The current situation is, that you have pensoners, SAHM, racists and others bothering with HOA and then bothering the neighbors. The HOA board might be full of them, or consist only of them, but they don't make up the (eg.) 70% of total inhabitants of whatever neighborhood (except maybe in some extreme cases).

To get such a majority, even "the others" would have to be bothered by <something> so much, that they would be willing to go out and vote (voting can be done in a way that even people with two jobs can do it, especially if vote secrecy is not required). If some Karen is bothered by a slighly brownish lawn during a draught, most people wouldn't bother and getting 70% of them to vote would be impossible. If it was a serious issue, then people would bother more.

> To get such a majority, even "the others" would have to be bothered by <something> so much, that they would be willing to go out and vote

Forcing mandatory attendance for HOA votes won't work out, that's the thing. Too many cases of remote landlords, properties stuck in inheritance limbo, or even First Amendment issues (can you be compelled to make speech, aka participate in a vote?). Requiring a "70% of all owner shares" would flat out kill most HOAs, and requiring a "70% of present owner shares" perpetuates the status quo of giving disproportionate amounts of power to the usual suspects.

So, no vote then, no action, same as in every other non-HOA neighborhood.

But if something bothers 70%+ of people enough to come and vote, it gets resolved HOA-style.

That sounds suspiciously like democratically enacting local government ordinances.

No idea why you're being downvoted, as this is 100% correct.

HOAs are one of those things that seemingly no one likes, but then people look to buy a house and think it's just some weird coincidence that all of the "nice" neighbourhoods have HOAs. Everyone loves HOAs stopping their neighbours from doing obnoxious things, but are sure that the things they do should be immune from HOA influence.

And FWIW, I live in Canada and here HOAs are very uncommon in subdivisions (though of course condo towers and townhouse complexes with common property and needs have strata/boards that are basically HOAs), because instead municipalities usually have many of the same sort of rules regarding how you upkeep your property, inoperable cars, etc, even if it impinges on "property rights". Indeed, exactly the same stories happen where there are tearjerker stories about how mean the city is bugging someone about their unkempt lawn or junkers in the laneway, when the city in question is coincidentally one of the most desirable cities to live in. It's like people think these are just unrelated things, when the former often follows from the latter.

The “nice” neighborhoods often have HOAs because the government requires new developments to have HOAs as a condition for approving construction. They do this because it saves money by having the HOA maintain things instead of the government.

I live in a delightful neighborhood with no HOA. There are great non-HOA neighborhoods all over for miles around. You know what the real common denominator is for nice neighborhoods? Wealth. That’s it. If you want a nice place, have money and move somewhere other people have money too.

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