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Comment by kstrauser | Hacker News Reader

No kidding!

> “You don’t have the leverage anymore to get people to change bad behavior,” Zepponi said. A neighbor who leaves their RV parked on the driveway in violation of association rules might just eat the $100 rather than pay for RV storage that is more expensive, he said.

Yes, god forbid someone have the legal right to park their vehicle at their own house. I'd prefer my neighbors not do that, but I'd also like to have that right for myself if I ever needed to.

And a friend had a ration of hassle when he replaced the back door on his house with one that wasn't an approved design. I'm certain he'd have been delighted to say "whatever, Karen, here's your $100 and STFU."

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I've lived next to two different households who leave campers in their driveways all summer, between uses. I have never given a shit nor can I comprehend the mind of someone who does.

I'm convinced HOAs are a product of privileged brains so used to things going their way that they have to make some shit up to act annoyed about.

Have you ever lived in a townhome or condo? I feel the need to note that those HOA are responsible for the maintenance, repair, and upkeep of everything outside the drywall. Owner overfills dumpster? HOA is fined by sanitation. Owner dumps water on sidewalk, water freezes, neighbor slips and falls? HOA may be liable. You might celebrate, because “down with the HOA!” but when the roof needs to be replaced, it’s paid for by the HOA bank account. If that’s empty, either the roof is left to leak or you are paying a special assessment.

I’m a bit biased, I’ll admit, as I once served on such an HOA that was near the brink of insolvency and wrestling with owners who would dodge their share of funding basic maintenance for years at a time.

Most of the ire, perhaps, is really directed at single-family HOAs, however.

Sounds like a poorly managed HOA fund. If they can’t make repairs without fees

Correct. Owners protested any time raising dues was proposed, and so the old board did not raise dues by any meaningful amount for a few decades while costs rose and the exteriors aged. Unfortunately, while this was clearly a mistake in retrospect, the milk was already spilt.

In California the board can raise fees 20% a year without requiring a vote.

A community fund to pay for basic shared necessities is one thing. I know people who chip in to support a shared local swimming pool. I think that sort of thing for HOAs is beautiful. It's basically a hyper-local government where you're voting to pay extra taxes to have nice quality of life things.

And then their are HOAs who have strong opinions about which species of grass your lawn can have. That's that craziest, power-trippingest thing I can imagine. I'm glad the state is telling them to get out of the law enforcement business.

Yeah, I think letting HOAs regulate too much is actually bad public policy because it encourages petty conflict that does more harm than any good that could from houses having RVs in their driveways or whatever.

We have a neighbor with two campers, and a boat. They move them around every 10 days so they don't get a ticket.

They also have 7-8 vehicles, and to top it off the person who lives there is a mechanic that works out of his home garage so there's always all kinds of random cars parked there as well.

That may be a zoning issue if they're illegally operating a business in a residential neighborhood. Forget the HOA. The local city government is probably the right jurisdiction to address that.

What bearing does this have on your life? Genuine question.

I do not at all understand how these things exist. I read that the argument is it drives up property values. But how many people just avoid buying under such ridiculous rules? Doesn't that just lower value?

It looks trashy. Just like Christmas lights left up after the holidays and pink flamingos in the yard.

Communities should be empowered to self-regulate.

One man's trash...

That but also it's a fire hazard and it causes spillover of parking into the streets.

That's all a matter of opinion. Some people like lawn flamingos. I don't, but why should I have the power to tell my neighbor they can't put a flamingo in the yard they own? At the moment, I have a sign supporting a sports team my wife and I like. My neighbor can have a lawn flamingo I don't like, and I can have a team sign they don't like.

Any other way seems like absolute madness to me.

Because part of the agreement to buy the house includes agreeing to the HOA. Your neighbors have a reasonable expectation that their neighbors will abide by the community rules. If one wants to do their own thing, they should live somewhere that doesn’t come with built-in rules.

That's one of those things that sounds good on paper, as through it were plausibly true. It's not, of course, because HOAs have infected so much of new housing that they're nearly impossible to avoid unless you want to live out in the middle of nowhere.

Yet in other parts of the world you don't have this problem... maybe you need to teach people etiquette and "style" rather than use HOAs to try to correct people by force

You say regulate, I say discriminate. The few people who are in HOA boards have power to decide what the rules should be, and if they don’t like it then sucks to be you. That’s not regulation, that’s discrimination.

> few people who are in HOA boards have power to decide what the rules should be

Depends on the HOA. My HOA board is an executive council. They don't have rulemaking authority.

I have Christmas lights year round for a decade now, in a city but outside. I find them pretty. What's so offensive about them in a private house? And what's next? Restricting the amount of lights in the house? Their color temp?

You do you. I think they're pretty, too. If they weren't common labeled as seasonal lights, they'd just be nice-looking decoration. I have little glow lights alongside our sidewalk. There's no objective reason why mine are tasteful and elegant but yours are tacky or trashy. They're both just decorative lights.

Just about any neighborhood built since the 1970s in the USA has an HOA so they’re really hard to avoid unless you live in either very old inner suburbs, downtown, or in a rural area. The majority of the middle suburbs have HOA’s.

>Just about any neighborhood built since the 1970s in the USA has an HOA

This is a knock on effect of the wetlands protection act (or maybe it's the clean water act, I forget which). Someone developing >1ac of houses (or duplexes or apartments or whatever) has to do stormwater management permitting BS. This probably means they leave one lot at the end and do like a stormwater catch pond in it or something (there's technical terms for this stuff I'm not using. The owner(s) is obligated per federal law to maintain whatever this solution is in perpetuity. This likely means some sort of HOA to handle that. And if you're gonna do that then why not have the HOA do more.

The market is speaking. If the prices for 2br in an HOA is higher than in a non-HOA, well, it means more people prefer the HOA.

And I think the evidence is generally that the prices are higher in well run HOAs.

Are those in the same or equivalent neighborhoods?

> I do not at all understand how these things exist.

It might help a bit to understand that their origins where to exclude blacks, asians and jews from owning homes in a neighborhood [0].

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeowner_association#History

There is leverage. I am not sure why HOAs in California are not using the foreclosure option for failing to pay fines. It’s not a fast process.

I'm on the board of smallish HOA (townhouses and condos), a few points:

1. 90% of enforcement is a result of someone's complaint. HOAs can be sued by belligerent owners for not enforcing rules and it will cost everyone in the association a shitload of money.

2. Of those complaints probably at least 80% are totally legitimate grievances because the owner is doing something that's negatively affecting all of their neighbors like say park their RVs in the driveway and then 5 more cars in the shared parking spaces around the neighborhood so nobody else can park when having guests.

3. Every time we decided not to fine someone to force compliance we ended up regretting it - that just resulted in more complaints, sometimes escalations and serious damages, threats of lawsuits, and in the end we had to fine anyway.

4. These days when someone complains i just tell them there's nothing we can do because we really can't and just bug their state legislators, who seems to be living on a different fucking planet.

tl;dr - most people complaining about HOAs just have no fucking clue what they are talking about and they never served on the board. Well guess that also applies to every other issue discussed on the internet.

Yep, once again why I will never, ever, EVER, live some place with an HOA.

You don't have much of a choice if you want to buy a condo. Also have fun dealing with your neighbors craziness on your own, i'm sure most folks here are well equipped for that judging by comments...

I am on a HOA Board and our fines are so low that it would take a long time before we can foreclose on the property. Most correct the issue but then re offend. The way the rules are written we can’t make it more stringent like some homeowners would like unless there is a majority vote. We can’t even get people to attend monthly meetings or utilize the website.

You can't foreclose on hoa fines in my state (CA). You can't even charge late fees as I was explained by our council. It’s totally toothless already even without the $100 cap

Sounds like this is going to be great for you for #1. Now you can get belligerant owners off your back: "look, the state says we can't do anything more to enforce these stupid rules, so take it up with the government."

For #2, you can still fine them $100 per incident, which I'd imagine would include every new time a homeowner takes up all the parking, or dares to store their property on their property.

For #3, see #1. Now you're off the hook because the state said this is nonsense and you can't be responsibile for meeting their power-tripping demands anymore.

For #4, see? Perfect! You can tell them to get bent, because elected representatives said those complainers should mind their own freaking business on how people enjoy their own homes.

It can work for a time but just makes everyone pissed at you and in the end if you get sued everyone loses. Those are not powertripping demands those are official rules which required majority vote. Ime folks like you love to say this shit until you’re the one on the receiving end of it

A lot of those are absolutely, positively powertripping demands, even if a bunch of people showed up on voting night and decided to enact them. My friend installed a door that had a round arch over it instead of a square arch, and the HOA lost their mind because it wasn't on their list of approved designs. No one was harmed by his choice of doors. It didn't "lower property value". It wasn't a health or safety issue. It didn't prevent his neighbors from enjoying their own properties. It was a victimless crime, and yet still turned into a total fiasco with an insane HOA board who wanted to levy daily fines until he ripped it out and replaced it.

It is literally impossible to convince me that such things benefit anyone except the bored sociopaths who charged themselves with enforcement.

If an HOA wants to maintain the sidewalks, build a pool, and pick up trash, right on. If that's what the neighbors want, then go for it. But when they want to dictate the harmless ways people can live, I lose all interest.

And yes, I lived next door to a guy who liked to park his fishing boat next to his driveway. I wasn't thrilled about it, but that was his right. He bought and paid for a house with a driveway, and if he wants to use part of the pavement he owns to park his own personal boat, darned if I can imagine any right by which I can say he shouldn't be allowed to do so.

It’s obviously a matter of precedent. If hoa allows that and then someone else decides to do something crazier, then association is liable for selective enforcement.

Your neighbors could buy a remote lot with no neighbors or even unincorporated land and just knock themselves out. Instead they (presumably) read the rules, put their signature on it but then decided that actually they are special and the rules dont apply to them

> If hoa allows that and then someone else decides to do something crazier, then association is liable for selective enforcement.

"Oh, no, the Torkelsens put in a bay window!"

> Your neighbors could [...]

Oh, come one. We both know that's not realistically possible. I think in most cases HOAs are tolerated as something nearly impossible to avoid, and buyers weigh how likely they are to run afoul of the dumb rules. And as I've said elsewhere, governments appropriately limit the kinds of onerous conditions a contract can inflict upon you. That's something we've elected them to do for us so that people with an unreasonable power advantage can't railroad everyone else into agreeing to their bad ideas.

Yes similarly how sf voters elected government to appropriately limit the kind of onerous police enforcement and now their city is a dump. Also just fyi - 100% of fines that i can recall over past 5ish years went to rented properties. So it’s not even active members of the community that are doing this crap - just absentee landlords who offload their costs to their neighbors

> It’s obviously a matter of precedent. If hoa allows that and then someone else decides to do something crazier, then association is liable for selective enforcement.

The obvious solution is to make it illegal for HOAs to have any say whatsoever in individual private property.

Shared spaces, shared amenities, common areas, sure. That's what it's for.

On private property, no absolutely not, that needs to be illegal.

I just think HOAs tend to favor the vocal minority. If you’re really active and just be very nosy, you can have more influence. I would be livid if someone told me (outside of city/state regulation) what I can do and can’t do after I make a purchase worth hundreds if thousands of dollars.

I know many who lived in HOAs - one of them got fined for having plants by their condo door, another for putting something on their patio, etc. Who makes up these dumb rules?

And it costs $500/mo easy. This is why most people hate HOAs.

> tl;dr - most people complaining about HOAs just have no fucking clue what they are talking about

People (most sane people anyway) don't randomly hate things they haven't experienced.

That so many people despise HOAs is because they have personally witnessed the horror show that is a HOA.

Most people never get fined for anything. Ime it’s very few that actually cause problems and have complaints from multiple other members. Without the enforcement part especially for condo/townhouse properties it’s actually most people who are getting screwed. What you’re seeing in this thread is not most people

> cause problems

Let's be very clear that "cause problems" in the context of HOAs means things like planting flowers on their private property that the HOA psychopaths don't like, or painting their house the "wrong color" or parking "unapproved vehicles" on their very own private property.

HOAs are a cancer on society and need to be outlawed, except for the very limited case of maintaining common areas.

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