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Comment by RajT88 | Hacker News Reader

I sat on the board of an HOA for a small condo building where I had purchased a unit. The board was comprised of owners.

The HOA was our only way of ensuring bad owners didn't abuse their ownership rights. It was an old building, so all the water was shared on the water bill and the HOA let us split this up based on square footage. Units which had excessive numbers of people living there also liked not to pay HOA dues of any sort (doubling the water bill problem for other units).

At one point a unit was running a brothel! This was wild to find out about, because it wasn't in a bad neighborhood or anything - it was the historic district.

HOA's have their uses, but also like any positions with power, they attract people who want to give meaning to their own insignificant existence by lording it over the less powerful (insignificant in the sense that most of our lives are insignificant).

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There's a categorical difference between a single building with owned units that needs a legal entity for the common stuff (i.e. the structure) and a 1+ acre development of N-family homes that needs an entity on record as responsible for maintaining their legally required stormwater plan in perpetuity.

I don't think we fundamentally disagree: HOA's exist for a good reason, for all the hate they get (and often have earned).

My point is that the suburban HOA literally can't allow you to put a shed where you want or a patio larger than X or pave your driveway different because 20yr ago the developer had to include a bunch of asinine stipulations that "lock in" various features of the properties that in the initial covenant in order to get the engineering numbers where they needed to be in order to get the stormwater calcs to result in numbers that the local authority wouldn't be breaking the rules to approve. Yeah there's gray areas, and theoretically probably legal avenues to get stuff changed but that's a huge uphill battle that won't happen unless there's huge money on the table (e.g. allowing ADUs).

And it's not just HOAs and stormwater, you see this to varying extents with damn near every regulated subject relevant to the development of land and is a large part of why you see stuff either built in 1s and 2s, maybe 3s, or you see entire neighborhoods with dozens of houses all at once, in case anyone was wondering.

But are the rules actually the same as those imposed 20 years ago for regulatory reasons, or are they now stricter without good reason? Are there really good regulatory reasons for restricting exterior paint color and other things that HOAs do?

SFH HOAs do not exist for a good reason.

How have you not come across SFH HOAs when there are so many of them?

https://www.calassoc-hoa.com/about-us/our-objective-hoa-data...

You misunderstand. Of course they exist, but not for good reason.

I think the point is that not all HOAs exist for a good reason, but some do. As OP points out, it's important to distinguish between HOAs that act as stewards of a shared building or shared infrastructure, and HOAs that try to govern what individual homeowners do with individual plots of land with individual homes on them. Unfortunately we use "HOA" to describe both of them.

>Unfortunately we use "HOA" to describe both of them.

That's not an accident anymore than the name of the patriot act was an accident.

Historically "HOA" sounded way less scary and conjured up images of condo/apartment building associations. If you're a developer who had to trade way your customer's freedom to use the product in order to create the product in the first place marketing it that way is just a no brainer.

It's only now after decades of HOAs that have way too much (morally speaking, they have just the right amount from a law and compliance perspective) power attracting people who use of that power does the term have any negative connotation.

Is there anything stopping one kind from turning into the other kind after the fact though?

The fact that you can't turn a condo into a development of single family homes, and vice versa?

I looked at the rules for dissolving an HOA in lived in. There were a couple of procedural barriers, but the biggest one was that it required 75% of homeowners to sign a petition within a 3 month period. That’s a pretty high bar and lets a minority perpetuate the HOA.

American HOAs simply have too much power. In Canada HOAs exist, but their ability to levy fines or put liens on property is much more limited[1] and usually requires actual damage. This effectively eliminates a lot of the ridiculous rules about the size of someone's shed or the species or grass because there's no real way to enforce them.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/legaladviceofftopic/comments/acd767...

What I don't understand is why it isn't the municipality's responsibility for this kind of thing

For one, lots of suburban municipalities are not generating enough tax revenue to maintain the infrastructure they already have. Letting a developer and HOA take care of road and storm water infrastructure frees up tax dollars for other uses. It’s a win-win for municipalities.

But owners are paying one way or another, and it's almost certainly going to be more efficient to have administration centralized rather than each subdivision's HOA separately managing a tiny section.

Having the HOA pay for it preserves the illusion of "low taxes". When taxes go up to pay for necessary services, politicians get voted out of office and people vote en masse to lower taxes again; when HOA fees go up, people suck up and pay it.

In practice HOA’s are just another level of government in that they hold elections, get policing power, provide services, and collect taxes.

right, if you must pay either way (and you must), it makes sense to push it off to government, which is more representative (generally) and has larger scale (so should be able to do it cheaper). I suspect local governments tend towards less corruption than HOAs as well (fewer large contracts to a brother-in-law, or at least, a public bidding process so you can see what happened)

That is strong towns's position, but it never checks out - towns have mostly been doing that for decades now.

there is a lot of room for variation in quality of service and towns don't have a way of taxing those who want the town snow service more than those who don't.

Most of the suburbs where I live aren’t old enough to need sewer/storm and street replacement yet. It can take 60+ years for major infrastructure projects to become necessary, I expect to see municipalities fail as the infrastructure burden cripples their budgets.

Suburbs that had the foresight to develop commercial and industrial areas won’t suffer as much, but bedroom communities that aren’t wealthy will suffer once their infrastructure starts aging. There’s a massive deferred maintenance backlog pretty much everywhere.

The first suburbs were built in the 1880s (the streetcar enabled them). They have a long history of adding and replacing infrastructure as needed. It takes 60+ years, but not everything comes due at once and so it isn't a sudden bill all at once, it is spread out over decades. Roads tend to need significant work after 15-20 years.

It should be, except that a lot of people demand taxes too low for that municipality to function if it actually did everything, so legally required HOAs get used as a shitty stopgap because the work still has to be done.

IMO an HOA that exists just to provide storm drainage services should be dissolved into the local municipality. If the municipality doesn't want to maintain basic infrastructure for a few blocks' worth of single-family homes because it'll be too costly long-term, they shouldn't permit (literally, as in issuing permits) for the development to go forward in the first place. Whether it's written down anywhere or not, they will be ultimately responsible for that infrastructure.

>O an HOA that exists just to provide storm drainage services should be dissolved into the local municipality

Don't forget snow plowing and sidewalk maintenance and the cluster of mailboxes down by the gate where the driveway meets the main road and the pool and and and and and and....

It's like the touchscreen in a goddamn car. Once you have it you get lazy and use it for everything because it lets you cheaply add "premium" features.

I agree that a lot of these HOAs should be dissolved, but like everything else involving real-estate it's less painful in the moment to keep on bending over and taking the status quo and hoping you can pass the buck to the next sucker.

If you really want your blood to boil, a some of the larger stormwater features (for example those drainage ponds commonly found in certain regions beside the highway or on the outskirts of strip malls and other large commercial development) wind up getting regulated as wetlands, they are constantly wet after all, and the legally implied setback and permitting requirements can push over the property line depending on the details. And that's assuming they build them right, that water being returned to the ground affects the height of the water table, with potentially huge negative affects on nearby properties.

It is more than storm drainage. I am fine clearing my own snow, I don't want the city doing it for me at a cost. However not everyone is.

> an HOA that exists just to provide storm drainage services should be dissolved into the local municipality.

The problem in many cases is that it's against state law to do that.

Also, once the HOA is in existence, it starts accreting other powers that have nothing to do with storm drainage, simply because it can.

That is why some local governments create Community Development Districts (CDDs). The master developer installs the infrastructure and it becomes part of the tax burden for homeowners. The what developers play the fee until they've attained critical mass and then the taxes become the homeowner's responsibility. Sucks if you're living on the edge and the escrow portion of your mortgage goes up by hundreds of dollars per month.

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