>Florida ranks 1st of the states on HOA Spy for foreclosure suits brought by associations, with 10,296 of 14,168. The count depends on which courts are indexed in each state as well as on the associations, so it is a count of records, not a rate.
Florida is known for having the strongest "sunshine" laws in the country, that make government records transparent. That makes this statistic pretty useless.
It is GOOD that HOAs can bring foreclosure suits. Suits are the only way to get maintenance fees from some owners. Without maintenance fees HOAs decline and their owners' values decrease. Foreclosure also has the side-effect of removing a badly-acting owner from the association and replacing them with one who WILL pay their bills promptly.
HOAs shouldn’t exist. They have no justification for authority. The legal frameworks allowing their existence should be dismantled with extreme prejudice and at the expense of those who benefit from the current system.
Really? In fifty years of home owning, not once with the "benefit" of a HOA, I've yet to see an owned house value decline.
Some countries just bypassed this entire US obsession with redlining and keeping the others out. Maybe try working more on community and less on uniformity.
Court records are public everywhere. How companies like RealtyTrac get their stats/data, they grab records from county recorder offices. So what does that have to do with sunshine laws?
Same goes with the whole "Florida man" shtick--news channels and YouTube channels dredging for wild stories are more likely to get the info on Florida-specific misdemeanors due to sunshine laws.
This article slightly mixes condo and HOAs. HOAs are covered under 720 and it does not have the same rules (which are less stringent) than condo’s
Condo rules are much stricter than HOAs
State of Florida also puts caps on fines - the max is $100/day or $1000 for a single violation. But that’s after a period to cure and then due process meetings (made up of homeowners not board members) who may waive or not fine at all or defer.
A homeowner can also fix the problem and later have the same problem again but not be fined if they fix in time.
The foreclosures are for extreme cases and a lot of HOA attorney shops don’t charge a retainer but will tack on fees that are paid back to the HOA attorney and association.
I had the thankless task of being executor for my parents' estate. I distinctly remember the Florida HOA that made that so much worse.
After expressing their utmost sympathies and saying they'd help any way they could, mere weeks later they put a legal "estoppel" on the sale of the house due to some overgrown vines(?), which of course, were never mentioned by anyone.
This is not possible and maybe mixing terms. HOA has to disclose an existing violation as part of the estoppel process. Estoppel is just a disclosure certificate not a legal hold
I would never buy a house that was part of a HOA. For people that like them, more power to ya. But I don't understand the people who complain, just don't buy into an HOA then?
It’s extremely common for local governments to make an HOA a legal requirement for new developments. This lets them put things like road maintenance, park maintenance, and trash pickup in private hands so the local government doesn’t have to pay for them. (They’re still happy to collect property taxes from the new residents at full rate, of course.) The result is that it becomes harder and harder to find non-HOA homes.
I’d have no problem with their existence if it was a free market, but I have a big problem with them when they’re being legally mandated.
> Then people ought to be complaining about their local governments, not HOAs.
Complain all you want, but if all new homes in your city are in a HOA, you are going to be under the thumb of those 80-something HOA board members who have nothing else to do in life but nitpick your house violations. Is that a desirable outcome for anyone?
Too many old people in homes they don’t need. There’s a reason the term “day of the pillow” was getting popular around Covid. I really wish we did get those 3% CFR rates in boomers we were promised by Italy!
To your “happily collect taxes at full rate” comment, strongtowns.org’s whole message is that only the densest cities in the country bring in enough taxes to pay for the maintenance of streets, sewers etc.
“Full rate” is almost always subsidized through the windfall taxes on new growth and development, putting towns in a ponzi scheme like situation.
I just went to zillow and typed in my zip and tried two different filters for single family homes priced between $300K-$550K:
Listings:
No HOA fee: 32
up to $500/month: 62
I'm not going to bother because this is an HN comment but I think you can imagine what happens to the results when I specify newer than say 1993 (when my house was built).
I have an HOA, but it seems defunct. Everything we do to the house, if visible, can be interpreted to mean I must get unanimous agreements, in writing, from all my neighbors.
It turns out I managed to land right between two asshole neighbors (constant trespassing, dogs, etc)
I said it's a choice. At the end of the day people choose to live in these areas. Yes, it might be because the tradeoffs of not living there or moving away are severe and outweigh the headaches of an HOA, but it's still a choice they make.
If you want to buy swiss cheese and you have 17 supermarkets within convenient distance and none of them sell swiss cheese, you don't really have any options at all, despite the fake appearance of plentiful consumer choice.
Free markets (and the associated "invisible hand") only work when choice is truly available, not purely theoretical.
What is the best alternative to that choice? You can’t answer since you aren’t the one in that position.
Frequently it is the least bad among a bunch of choices.
Choosing to go into crippling debt to pay cancer treatment bills is a choice too, but only a moron thinks the blame should be laid at the feet of the patient for making that “choice”.
Do all houses available require an HOA, even the ones that don’t look so nice or aren’t in great neighborhoods? I don’t usually like to go around questioning people’s experiences, but I think a lot of people go around with ideas of what an acceptable street looks like that simply aren’t achievable without an HOA or extreme price segregation.
I used to live in Broward county, Florida, so I'm not surprised that it shows up as number one on the OP article's list. It's totally insane how much power HOAs have in that state. The idea that an entity other than a mortgage lender you owe can "foreclose" and seize the home you live in is total lunacy.
> The idea that an entity other than a mortgage lender you owe can "foreclose" and seize the home you live in is total lunacy.
What consequences are sane for a member who does not pay dues, water bills, etc., for a prolonged period? Turning off the water is illegal here. Liens get ignored. My HOA will avoid foreclosure for years, and has only resorted to it twice in twenty years, but it's the ultimate recourse. Should the other members just suck it up forever?
Then the risk, delay, effort, and expense of pursuing a now unsecured debt is transferred from one defector to 150 cooperators. Every month of delay increases the loss.
Our community well water system is owned and operated by the HOA. That and (all private) gravel road maintenance are the great majority of HOA expenses. There is no municipality to provide these services. Should members not have to pay for water and roads but still get to use them? That's not sustainable.
And when the building's (that you share with the deadbeats) roof leaks and there isn't the money to repair that shared resource, that's just tough luck?
An HOA isn't just about neighborhoods of freestanding houses, it's also about multi unit buildings.
The article does not distinguish between these two. Observe how the article talks about the laws requiring better maintenance result in higher hoa dues [1].
Nor do real estate listings [2].
And indeed, the grandparent post talks about missed water bills and other bills that fall on the collective rather than fines about incorrect colors or trash cans being left out.
So while legally there are differences between the two, the term "hoa" is almost always used as a blanket term to cover both. As they were in this article and nearly all of the discussion in this thread.
1 ... the laws that followed it require older condominium buildings to pass a milestone structural inspection (section 553.899, Florida Statutes) and to fund structural reserves on the strength of a structural integrity reserve study (section 718.112(2)(g), ...
The cost is visible in the dues. Redfin reported in August 2024 that median monthly HOA fees in the three months to July 2024, against a year earlier, rose...
I’ve always found it funny that many of the states that despise unions love HOAs.
For example, they’ve fought for the right to have a “right to work”, so that closed shops can’t be a thing — you cannot compel inclusion in a bargaining unit by nature of employment.
Yet restrictive deed covenants where you are compelled by the state to join a private association are fine.
The arguments for or against them are similar if you dig into them.
>Should the other members just suck it up forever?
given that an HOA is completely unnecessary... yes. you should suck it up forever. if you want to be part of an HOA and pay dues into it, good for you, go ahead.
if somebody else doesn't want to be part of your little club, why should you get to take their house away for that?
Typically the HOA's I've seen manage community resources. Where I used to live that meant the neighborhood parks, green spaces, 3 docks in the river, a pool, and a few lakes. No value seems a bit hyperbolic.
the HOA managing a pool is definitely not the norm. and if it is, it's a pool club - somebody doesn't pay their dues, they should lose access to the pool, not their house.
most HOAs manage a tiny amount of communal green space that should have been turned over to become city property, but was held back as HOA property to give the HOA a reason to exist.
> most HOAs manage a tiny amount of communal green space that should have been turned over to become city property, but was held back as HOA property to give the HOA a reason to exist.
You are just making this up at this point. Why do you think the city would accept property that they would have to legally maintain and be responsible for, when it is generally isolated and (largely) accessible to only a specific neighborhood?
Not OP, but that is exactly what happened in my neighborhood. It has parks and trails and several sports courts, two playgrounds, dog parks. It was all turned over to the city to be public land to avoid having a HOA.
> generally isolated and (largely) accessible to only a specific neighborhood?
No. It's just land around the neighborhood, easily accessible to anyone in town (or nearby towns).
Yes, that is explicitly and exactly the reason municipalities exist. In the U.S. they are typically made up of elected and appointed representatives and they manage public space and services in their boundaries.
Mostly I don't understand why an individual neighborhood would need it's own out of band election process (that typically allows people to gain tremendous power and authority without anyone voting for them), and representatives completely decoupled from the state or government but often times acting in parallel.
This is exactly what happens for many HOAs around the country.
Typically elections would take place during the annual meeting. Usually there is such low community engagement that there is no home owner quorum under the Covenants Conditions & Restrictions. Depending on the CC&Rs a property management or build rep will appoint the open board seats, or for example in the case of my HOA they will go by default to whomever is attending the meeting and wants the spot, assuming the current board doesn't object to that person.
For my association the board has basically been self appointing each other and their spouses for the last 15+ years. The current president has managed to obtain several proxy votes of rental property owners and the current board members use these to overrule any objections to them reseating themselves. They also squash any attempts to force a community wide vote, because again lack of quorum. Basically impossible to get enough people to actually attend the meeting to get the current board replaced, especially when they've gone all digital and tend to cancel/reschedule the meetings last minute and then provide very little notice of the new time.
It is common, though probably a minority. Pools are expensive to own but nice to have close to your house. If you live close enough to bike kids will use them, but the common city pool is too far for most kids even if it is bigger and better.
I think we have the wrong units of measure for government size. I live in a county where the lines made sense 200 years ago: Everybody in the county can ride their hose to the courthouse, file whatever they need and be home in time for super. These days everyone drives and can be there in half an hour or less. Instead what I care about is the metro area. I want a unit that ensures my transit system is a coherent whole, the water supply is cheaper to consolidate to one large entity vs many small ones.
There is one suburb near me where some people would have to drive 25 minutes to get to the city library - most of that is uncongested highway. I really need a smaller unit to own and run a library so kids are always in bike distance. That city does a good job of scattered small parks but there is one complex with large fields for softball - if you don't live close maybe you shouldn't pay for something you don't use. I want parks owned by a smaller area government that can bring my neighborhood something they don't have. - HOAs often serve that. They just have a poor legal structure.
If you own part of a shared walls building then a corporation is required to manage that. You have to pay your share of the share costs. However the corporation should be limited in what else it can do, but it must exist.
My HOA pays the buildings water and sewer and trash. Also fixes the roof over the condo building, cleans the common interior, and does repairs (typically on our shared plumbing), and the elevators.
These days many municipalities don't want to manage more streets and infrastructure so they heavily favor HOAs for new developments that will handle what should be the city's responsibility.
My city sales tax dollars should not be used to fund the maintenance of a fancy median in some neighborhood on the other side of town.
You can put in a special district, that's an HOA under a different name, with even more government powers and bureaucracy costs. For example, you vote on stuff via the general election, they can seize your home for unpaid property taxes, they can impose zoning laws, and in some places they can impose criminal ordinances (dog pooping in the park).
> 3 docks in the river, a pool, and a few lakes. No value seems a bit hyperbolic.
The typical HOA (and by typical I mean asymptotically close to 100% of them) do not maintain 3 docks in a river and a few lakes!
If a neighborhood has those kinds of resources, some kind of HOA fee seems reasonable, agreed.
Even in such a neighborhood, the HOA should be limited by law to managing those common area rivers and lakes, not allowed to have any opinion about what flowers someone plants in their yard or what color windoshades they install.
The typical HOA does not have rivers nor lakes. They only have bitter dictator-wannabe board members who look for ridiculous "violations" like your grass is 3/4" tall when their rulebook says 1/2" tall, so they can send eviction notices to flex their power.
I have literally never heard anyone speak positively about an HOA. The city pools where I live is well liked and maintained. With the exception of the local YMCA, the public pools are considered better than the other options in the area.
Mine is also pretty good. It's a beautiful place with a guard gate. I don't even like hoas, it kind of pisses me off that I can't do ugly customizations, but it's not really a big issue. The neighborhood was nice enough that I chose to buy there. If there were no HOA it would look like the rest of town which is shoddy.
If my neighbor decides to start blasting music at 3am for some reason, I don't have to suck it up for the next decade, I can just get the HOA to deal with it. Very peaceful.
This is true sometimes, but if you are upset at a specific HOA, look at your docs to see what it actually manages. HOAs exist to pay for community obligated costs; sometimes that is a pool, sometimes it's "water and gas bills", and sometimes it's an entire golf course.
Further, if you're talking about a condo building (which, yes, is technically a COA, but the two get combined all the time), it is literally paying for your roof and elevators to work.
Buying into a "little club" and agreeing to pay your share of expenses only works when everyone participates. If not, your neighbors are just paying upkeep on your property; why should they have to do that?
> Buying into a "little club" and agreeing to pay your share of expenses only works when everyone participates. If not, your neighbors are just paying upkeep on your property; why should they have to do that?
Neighbors in a HOA are very clearly never paying upkeep of your property, that's is nonsense.
A condo association is a whole different ballgame, since there is legitimate shared structural walls, roofs, elevators, etc. But single family home HOAs, there is nothing the HOA does to maintain individual homes.
Conceptually, HOAs seem to be similar to medieval guilds. They are private governments, where voting rights are based on a private right (property ownership) rather than involvement in the area the government controls (residency).
Such arrangements used to be common, but they have become increasingly rare in the past few centuries. Many were explicitly abolished by law when free markets started getting popular. Often for antitrust reasons, or because people thought it would not be in the public interest to have certain types of contracts the previous owner made also bind the new owner.
I can think of a few similar arrangements in Finland. For example, membership in student unions at research universities is still mandatory, as is membership in reindeer husbandry associations. Those entities perform government functions, and the actual government has chosen not to assume the responsibility for one reason or another. As a consequence, the entities and their officials are subject to the same regulations as the government when wielding powers used to justify mandatory membership.
Condos are another story. If the entire complex is a single property for legal or practical purposes, it makes sense to have a single entity in charge of it.
Not sure why I can't respond to your other comment. But this is in response to your comment:
> they should lose access to the pool, not their house.
To enforce this you have to be able to gate, secure, and prevent them and their guests from using this. That costs a lot more money just to ensure they pay in. The HOA is the least worse option to "consent" and ensure that they do. Taking away the house is a much later step after a letter, 2nd and 3rd warnings, fines, ignored fines+interest, and a lein is ignored.
> To enforce this you have to be able to gate, secure, and prevent them and their guests from using this.
Since presumably you're also preventing people from outside the neighborhood from using it, then it is beyond trivial to prevent the non-paying neighbor as well, using the same gate key mechanism.
Every HOA-ran pool I’m aware of has a gate with keys or key fobs to prevent non-residents from access. From a liability perspective this system would be a requirement in many areas unless only open with a lifeguard present.
HOA's are necessary when you have shared resources or have physical connections between units. Sure they make little sense if they exist just to control what color you paint your house but having a agreed upon method to have discussions/ manage resources is important.
If you don’t want to be a part of the HOA then don’t sign the contract. If you have to sign to buy the house then either sign or find another house. If they’re that bad then there ought to be lots of homes for sale that don’t come with an HOA contract.
In areas I'm familiar with, anything other than the largish single family house with big yard / garage / etc. gets built as strata title. Lots that ought to be wide enough to split either get duplexed or bare-land strata with two or more narrow houses ... for some reason, that's ok although freehold lots aren't.
Then "people want a house without dealing with strata" gets misinterpreted as "people want big houses on big lots". Not necessarily true, just that the premium for the BHoBL is the necessary price of not giving busybody neighbours power over your home.
If somebody else doesn't want to be part of your little club, then they shouldn't buy a house that belongs to that little club in the first place. Pretty easy.
You don’t seem to know how HOAs work. I’m not really a fan of how they currently work either, but you can’t just kick out a member when the legal “member” is the plot/home, and what would that even look like when you get kicked out, you are, e.g., still behind the gate benefiting from common elements. Do you get barred from, e.g., driving on the HOA owned and maintained street? Do you not get to enter the HOA controlled access gate?
Even if it’s a very low maintenance and amenity HOA on public roads, how do you resolve the fact that all the fees and costs have accumulated if the home were to be sold, you essentially end up at a similar end point where the home is sold. Usually these are also not individual circumstances, i.e., a person who has ignored all kind of warnings and letters and board meetings over usually years, also has many other issues going on and often they’re just letting the home go anyways and e.g., are just living there for “free” for about 1-3 years of HOA/bank legal proceedings.
> and what would that even look like when you get kicked out,
Very easy answer: they don't get access to the pool, river docks, common lakes (per peer thread) that the HOA maintains.
They of course must maintain full control and ownership of their private home.
If you answer that there is nothing they would lose access to (no pool, no rivers, no lakes) then that is a very strong answer stating the HOA has no right to exist.
Those are two different things. The union negotiates pay and benefits. What does the HOA negotiate?
Also I'm a firm believer that if you're at a union shop and decide not to be part of the union you shouldn't be able to use their pay scales and should have to negotiate everything for yourself. The same with HOA's, I guess. If they do something for the community, like the pool the other poster talked about, then you shouldn't have access. Easy.
They shouldn't be able to take your house for any reason.
My experience is they remove all character from a neighborhood in pursuit of bland stick and ball landscaping (tall yew, short yew) with too much grass in the yard that you have to waste water on and apply hazardous chemicals to, to keep it green and weed free year round.
>HOAs don't add value. All they are is an opportunity to power trip for those who have the most free time on their hands.
I'm sure the people who support right to work laws would also claim labor unions "don't add value". On the flip side I doubt HOA supporters think they "don't add value".
Nope, but what are the countermeasures for abusing this power?
Also, once in a decade is not a rare occurrence for events of this significance. Once in 20 years is OK, once is 50 is rare, but once in a decade is not.
Did you even consider why it's illegal to turn off the water? And maybe ask yourself how foreclosing on someone who can't pay for water only seems like a way to skirt the law and take water away from them in addition to their shelter.
I'm not sure how Florida has managed it's "free state" image. I've lived across the south and midwest my whole life and Florida was easily the least "free" state I've lived in.
Hi, previous neigbor! I’m in Broward too. It’s insane here but also in Miami-Dade. My condo maintenance cost went x2 over the last few years and the pool where the water isn’t yellow with you know has been shut down for at least 3 years. Meanwhile the “board” argues about the carpet patterns for about as long as.
There was a fairly crazy case in Georgia recently where a lady stopped paying her annual dues over a billing dispute. The amount worked out to be less than $3,000.
The HOA hired a law firm, forced a foreclosure, held a foreclosure auction where the HOA itself bought her house for THREE DOLLARS, and continued to charge her HOA dues (even though the HOA owned the home now) before evicting her later.
The HOA then sold the home to an employee involved in the foreclosure, whose partner was on the HOA board that had voted to foreclose, and voted to accept the three dollar ($3.24, to be precise) bid, though they hid this behind an LLC that didn't actually exist when they did it. The employee then reactivated her real estate license and sold the home to another family several months later.
There are fewer greater lunacies than HOAs, and the type of people drawn to run them.
> The HOA then sold the home to an employee involved in the foreclosure, whose partner was on the HOA board that had voted to foreclose, and voted to accept the three dollar ($3.24, to be precise) bid
And when I say they sold it to an employee involved after buying it themselves at auction for that $3.24, they sold it to the employee for one dollar. So this woman was out hundreds of thousands of dollars of equity because a self-dealing HOA and its law firm (tied by marriage to one of the HOA board) voted to foreclose on her home and accept a purchase price that couldn't buy you a drink at Starbucks.
The municipality that collects property taxes, utilities, contractors/mechanics liens, etc. have had the ability to foreclose everywhere since time immemorial, so it's not too crazy really...
That's cause Broward is a BLUE country unlike the north half of Florida that is RED. BLUE counties are the worst down here when it comes to HOAs. Almost every development or neighborhood has them and they are AGRESSIVE. In the northern RED areas of Florida, there are either no HOAs OR the HOA only has authority or the communal shared spaces (ie, club houses, pools, common esways) and leave the home owners themselves alone in terms of dictating their lives.
I came in here gung ho to defend HOA’s because I’ve seen neighborhoods without them and they’re never really stunning. That being said the ability or the power to foreclose on your home because of that should not be allowed.
By far the nicest neighborhood in town is ours, the one with no HOA. We have the most sports fields and courts, playgrounds, trails, dog parks, skate park, etc. No HOA, so we don't hoard, all facilities are shared to all. But across the street for us, making it a nice neighborhood.
Also, we have no HOA, so there are no ridiculous restrictions, which means the neighborhood has character. Every house is painted in unique colorful styles, instead of endless shades of dull beige. Every house has unique vegetation choices based on owner preferences so it is fun to walk around and sightsee. We have no HOA, so there are zero restrictions on decorations, so we are the Halloween capital of the county (coming up in a few weeks!)
It's a vibrant unique neighborhood full of facilities and character, precisely because there is no HOA to destroy it.
A similar neighborhood across town (we're a small town so across town is just a mile away) has a HOA, every house is a dull shade of beige and they have very harsh rules, like HOAs of course do, on decorations, so Halloween and Christmas are DOA over there.
> because I’ve seen neighborhoods without them and they’re never really stunning.
Most neighborhoods I’ve lived in have not had an HOA. They’ve ranged from okay to great.
I can think of a few neighbor situations where an HOA with teeth would have been welcome. The most specific involved someone getting a big angry dog breed, neglecting it, and then leaving their gate unlocked so it got out. That one was eventually dealt with by the city, though.
Meanwhile the one HOA I lived under was pretty boring and friendly. Didn’t really bother anyone but maintained a nice common area. HOA board members were friendly and reasonable, but then again so were all the neighbors so there wasn’t much to deal with.
I think the nightmare situation is a busybody HOA that starts going after things that don’t matter, which would be hell.
HOA’s kill any character an area has. The fees more than offset the economic benefits of joining one. The damming economics largely comes down to local governments skipping road maintenance without giving you a discount on your taxes.
Net effect you lose money living in a worse location.
I live in a neighborhood without an HOA, and any time someone comes over for the first time they all make comments about how nice the neighborhood is. Acceptance of an HOA is the pinnacle of Stockholm syndrome.
You have to pay for the community utilities, door people, elevators, exterior maintenance/repair, roof repair, and snow maintenance that people won't pay for as a group when given a chance. It's really the only lever that guarantees compliance the least amount of drama. The alternative is that you have to file civil suit to settle obligations. (You share a roof with your neighbors.. they refuse to pay for it because the roof isn't explicitly over them, they refuse to shovel and everyone gets fined.. etc)
In Chicago: you can get fined for not shoveling the sidewalk when theres snow. A lot of the people didn't want to pay 20-30k a season for the snow removal and suggested "owners can self do that." (Ignoring we have all ages, ability, and conditions.. also the fines start at 7am.. if they're enforced). But.. the fines would go to the association due to the markings of the area/easements.
In this context, do you still believe that dealing with this fine should involve the work, effort, resources, legal fees, court time, delays in court availability because healthy 40 year old Jim bob was late for work and couldn't shovel their portion of the sidewalk the last 10 times? Or that the Gen Z, not my problem because I don't think it's a problem.
If someone causes you to incur a fine and refuses to willingly reimburse you, then courts are the formal solution we have (there are other informal solutions most of which are illegal due to anti-loan-shark laws).
This is relative. You might not think native flowers and plants are stunning, and that a manicured lawn is, but I do! And lawn rules might prevent me from obtaining my version of “stunning”. This is something…you want to defend? A lack of freedom to do what one wants with something they own?
I dunno, I live in a neighborhood in LA without an HOA and it's great. Housing values have skyrocketed in the decade I've been here. There are a sprinkling of places that don't take great care of their yards: the bane of every Karen-filled HOA. This has done absolutely nothing to harm property values.
I would wager that the money residents might have paid for HOA fees have largely gone into their own home/yard improvements, and it shows. Adding an HOA in this place, and I think most places, would be a burden rather than a benefit.
To be fair though, the nicest neighborhoods in LA where the price floor is like 2 million are often HOA, old or new. Really the HOA doesn't do too much directly, but selects for the sort of people who don't care about an HOA fee along with the littany of other fees their lifestyle brings them, and that's enough to see home values and associated factors change dramatically from Hancock Park to parts adjacent only a couple hundred feet away.
There's probably a security aspect too with regular private security patrols in HOA areas that do enough to shoo away encampments from setting up. You don't have to look to hard to find encampments off vine north of melrose but you aren't going to find anything like that south of melrose in hancock park, thanks to the spend on private security, given it's the same LAPD in either case.
This has to do more with price of house, not HOAs. In Florida for example, some(maybe most?) counties require all new developments to maintain their own roads, which requires something akin to a CDD/HOA. Newer houses typically cost more and bring in people with money, not someone who inherited the house or has been living there for generations.
I could show you HOA neighborhoods that look like a warzone, and beautiful nonHOA areas of million dollar houses.
The fact that the government has washed their hands of dealing with pesky problems like maintaining streets is bizzarre to me. How far is too far with privatization?
is stunning even real though? who wants a picture when you can be alive. hoas tend to be more about the veneer than the spirit of their existence. the intent is nice but humans gonna power trip if they seek those positions of authority
Eh, I live in Berkeley, a lot of the neighborhoods here are amazing, and there are almost no HOAs (besides the kind that keep condo buildings running). It's nicer than the bast majority of American suburbs I've seen. If anything, the amazing yards and cozy houses are only viable because there is no HOA pushing down arbitrary top-down rules on aesthetics. Forcing people to have traditional lawns would have totally killed the place.
Berkeley is indeed a great example of how nice areas can be when the evil of HOAs is not present. I greatly enjoy walking the neighborhood streets of Berkeley whenever I'm there.
You forgot one important detail, the average price of homes in Berkeley. Anybody spending $1M on a 2/1 craftsman bungalow is going to also drop a few extra dollars on landscaping.
You have a very narrow experience of the world, then. The most bland, ugly, tasteless neighborhoods I’ve seen are all in HOAs. The most beautiful are all without HOAs.
But that’s all beside the point, because this article is about how HOAs are bad for people who need somewhere to live, not about what offends your (unusual) taste.
This is a good observation. When HOAs try to regulate appearance, they regulate everything to a uniform mediocrity. That leads to using draconic rules and enforcement mechanisms needlessly. Often enough, this becomes a cudgel for Karens to enforce cultural norms not everyone shares. It becomes a tool of racism and cultural domination. It seems as if HOAs themselves need to be curtailed by law and regulation, and limited to functions that can't be provided by municipal government nor by individual homeowners.
Exactly. In a HOA neighborhood every house is identical, same color palette with minor variations allowed, same yard. It is an extremely depressing dystopia.
Give me a neighborhood with freedom where every house is different, every yard is different. That's a community.
> I’ve seen neighborhoods without them and they’re never really stunning
I don't give a shit about a "stunning" neighborhood. If I own property nobody else should have a say about its appearance.
The only exception I'd defend is a historic neighborhood where the goal is specifically to upkeep a historically accurate appearance of centuries ago.
But no, I will NEVER support an HOA anywhere else. These consortiums of Karens that patrol modern housing communities can go to hell.
I will plant the flowers I want, have the Halloween decorations I want, and do whatever woodworking I want in my front yard. What's the point of ownership if I can't own it?
People love to hate on HOAs but not all are bad, and in general they are a good example of self-governance, when the alternative is having people who DON'T live in your neighborhood regulate your neighborhood. Which would you prefer?
The facts don't seem to support your implied claim that being governed by people who do live in your neighborhood is better. At least not in Florida.
My own personal experience from my wife having owned one condo and she and I having owned four houses is not very encouraging for your claim either. Of the four HOAs involved, the two that were run entirely by management companies (i.e., by people with no personal connection to the neighborhood, with little or no activity from the community members on the Board that we could see) were fine, they kept the common areas maintained and basically did nothing else that affected us. The condo association, while it had a management company, also had a Board filled with community members who had nothing better to do than harass everyone else, which they did with an energy that would have been amazing if it had been directed towards something productive. The other HOA had no management company, just the Board of community members, and was very intrusive, and from what we learned from neighbors, had been a mess for the entire history of the community.
So we now live in a neighborhood with no HOA, we only have to deal with the municipality. We like it.
That's a false dichotomy. Everyone has to comply with laws regardless of what neighborhood they live in. The only difference is that the HOA has more stupid rules than the city. I'd rather have fewer rules.
The microcosm of subdivision-level governance where Karens/Kens with too much free time relish in power-tripping over their neighbors... All things equal, I'll take state, county, or city government over HOAs.
The term "self-governance" has always seemed to me to be an oxymoron. On its face it means everyone governs themselves, and nobody governs other people. Which if the people are reasonable mature adults, works out fine. But the term is always used to refer to some kind of governing institution, which means some people are given the power to govern other people. That's not "self-governance".
Which is why Jefferson, who would agree with you, thought that a well-informed people (education) was critical and without it self-governance would fail. It's not an oxymoron - it just comes with caveats.
> "I think by far the most important bill in our whole code is that for the diffusion of knowledge among the people...whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government"
> "The most effectual means of preventing tyranny would be to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large"
No, he wouldn't, because he used "self-governance" to mean the thing that contradicts what it says on its face.
> It's not an oxymoron - it just comes with caveats.
The kind of "democratic" governance we actually have certainly comes with caveats, yes--caveats that have basically never been really dealt with. Jefferson's ideal of a "well-informed people" has never been achieved.
Jefferson did claim to believe that the US Federal government should be as minimal as possible--until he became President and found that it's actually kind of nice to be able to use that power to do things you feel like doing, whether they actually meet that minimal government ideal or not.
But in any case, none of that justifies describing the governance we actually have as "self-governance".
The implication is the people in my neighborhood know anything at all about what would make sense from a neighborhood regulatory standpoint. The sell is to drum up ancient peasant fears of the far away feudal lord vs local villagers gumptions, but the reality is usually denying genuine domain expertise besmirched by the mark of coming from a higher centralized government, in favor of rule by the loudest of the local bigots.
I'm not sure how much "genuine domain expertise" is actually embodied in most laws or regulations at any level of government. When I look at the US Code (or the Code of Federal Regulations), or state laws, or city or county municipal codes, I see some things that make sense, sure, but also a huge bunch of rules that are just arbitrary, and are only there because some special interest got a law or regulation written to benefit them at the expense of everyone else.
The one advantage of higher levels of government over HOAs is that they are generally impersonal. The faceless bureacrats that are processing your forms generally don't have any personal animus against you. They don't have to live next door to you and they don't have to care what your personal oddities are. They're just executing a bureaucratic process. Whereas with an HOA, every little petty personal grievance gets magnified, and so-called "governance" turns into endless feuding.
That is a risk you freely accept when choosing to buy in an HOA. Co-ops, which are related but distinct, solve for this risk by requiring the co-op board to vote to approve any new residents. You have a co-op as an option for your living arrangements, as well. Optionality is a good thing.
I, and I suspect many other people here, prefer to live in countries where there are no neighbourhood associations that can dictate the look of your house, what colour of paint you must use, etc.
I mean, where I live, there are no HOAs, but the city council instead mandates those kinds of things via zoning rules.
I think I still prefer that to HOAs, because
- The city is pretty good at taking care of public facilities
- I only pay city tax, not city tax and HOA fees
- The city has better things to do than walk around neighborhoods looking for violations, so enforcement is pretty lax
- The city government is subject to checks and balances
I prefer to spend $1.25mil on a house that won't drop in value because my neighbor is not allowed to put up demon statues and paint the house pink, etc.
Instead you chose a house that has significantly less value because of home buyer's preference for houses with a HOA and reduction in mortgage payment they can afford because of the fees.
> People love to hate on HOAs but not all are bad, and in general they are a good example of self-governance, when the alternative is having people who DON'T live in your neighborhood regulate your neighborhood. Which would you prefer?
The latter, because I can kick them out of office, and because silly rules will impact a much larger number of people, and a large number can have their voices heard.
When your HOA has only 20-30 members, variance is high. It's a lot easier for people to abuse HOA power for their own personal gains.
You can very easily run to be part of your HOA leadership, and it is significantly easier to do than kicking an elected professional-politician out of office. The biggest issue with most HOA/COAs is that basically no one (especially the people who might have some qualifications) want to participate. This leaves only the people who want to be, frankly, petty little shits. It is not hard to exert influence over a group of 20-30 despondent neighbors.
> You can very easily run to be part of your HOA leadership
Yes, and then you find out just how petty petty politics can be.
The inconvenient truth, at least for HOA advocates, is that a community of 20-30 people, or even a hundred or so, does not need to be governed at the level of the community. Most people are reasonable and will respond to reasonable requests from neighbors if there is an issue, without having to drag in a higher authority at all. Those who are not reasonable, are not going to be magically made reasonable by having an HOA--indeed, as you admit, they're precisely the ones who are going to end up running the HOA. On balance, you're better off not having "governance" at all until you get to a larger population, like a town or a city.
You definitely need that level of governance if there are common elements which need to be funded and maintained (pools, parks, the building itself for condos)
> You definitely need that level of governance if there are common elements which need to be funded and maintained (pools, parks
Sure. I think very few, if any, people dispute that. If there actually are common facilities like pools, it makes sense to have a common pot of money everyone contributes into, to maintain those facilities. Just about everyone will agree with that.
How do you make the huge leap from that, into saying a HOA has any kind of right to demand what kinds of flowers or windowshades or decorations someone installs into their private (not shared!) property?
You need an organization to manage the common elements, yes. But the only "governance" that's required for that is...to manage the common elements. Which isn't really "governance", it's just management, and oversight of whoever is doing the managing. There's no need at all for the rest of the intrusive rules and regulations that HOAs impose in the name of "governance".
Only in a very minimal sense. A management that is only empowered to maintain common areas of a community can't "govern" the community members except in the very narrow sense of enforcing whatever rules the community wants to have for the use of common areas. Which is just an aspect of the fact that the community as a whole owns the common areas and the owner makes the rules.
Such a management can't mess with community members about how often they cut their lawns, or what color they paint their house, etc. But that sort of micromanagement is what "governance" by HOAs ends up being when it goes beyond basic management of common areas.
Okay, well, nearly half of all HOAs are condominium communities which inherently have common elements. I’m not saying that detached SFHs with no common elements should be governed by HOAs; I was if anything implying the opposite
In the article, the associations that appear to be causing the most problems, at least in Florida, are condominium associations. So it might be worth reconsidering whether filling a "need" for such governance ends up being more trouble than it's worth--at least if it goes beyond just maintaining the common elements (which it seems like condo associations in Florida do).
> Okay, well, nearly half of all HOAs are condominium communities which inherently have common elements.
This varies widely depending on the city. In many cities, it's hard to find a detached house in a neighborhood (that isn't ghetto) that doesn't have an HOA.
I'm on my HOA board, and not because I want to be, I can tell you that.
I showed up to my first annual meeting where basically no one was there other than the president. He asked if I wanted to be on the board because they didn't have enough people participating. I asked what I'd have to do, and he said "just vote on things". I said OK, and he said the rules let him appoint members to vacancies (spoilers: the rules don't), so he "appointed" me on the spot.
At subsequent meetings, I discovered most of the board was completely disinterested in doing anything, other than the president who would probably fall under the "petty little shit" category, but he seemed like he knew what he was doing (spoilers: he didn't), so everyone pretty much just voted in favor of what he wanted to do. I was the only board member who worked from home, so I would be the only one on site to deal with things that involved vendors working on the property, so then I became the guy everyone expected to do everything.
The president got diagnosed with cancer and had to step down. He wanted me to be president, but I was like fuck that. The VP took the role, but she has pretty much done nothing and is clueless, so I keep being the one people expect to take the lead on everything.
I'm honestly tired of it and wished some competent people in the association would get on the board. There were massive mistakes I caught as a board member because I'm the only one who actually reads anything in the bylaws, CC&Rs, and all that shit. The HOA had been paying hundreds of dollars a year for decades on things that didn't need to be performed because our property management company misclassified us under some statute that didn't even apply to us, and nobody knew any better or even bothered to ask, "Hey, why the fuck are we actually doing this?"
I'll not say I'm a "good" board member. I don't care about enforcing house rules, and I don't want to get involved when people complain about their neighbors unless it's something that affects the association's financial health. The only reason I stay on is because I've done enough after-the-fact clean-up of the previous president's mess that I'm terrified of what insane things might happen if no one is keeping an eye on the other members. If you're in an HOA, I'd encourage getting involved to keep the crazies in check, at least for as long as you can stomach it.
> The biggest issue with most HOA/COAs is that basically no one (especially the people who might have some qualifications) want to participate.
That's an argument not to have HOAs, right?
> You can very easily run to be part of your HOA leadership, and it is significantly easier to do than kicking an elected professional-politician out of office.
In my so many decades of existence, I've yet had a reason to want to kick my mayor out of office. And none of the cities I've lived in have passed laws related to what I can do with my house that were particularly problematic.
At least for the HOA I was a part of, the CC&Rs were nearly impossible to change. Getting elected didn’t give you the power to change them. They were a contract signed with each individual homeowner - changing them required getting consent from every homeowner individually.
Being on the board gave you power over how budget was allocated within those CC&Rs. I.E. the maintenance and upgrade of shared spaces. Vendor selection for violation detection/enforcement. Etc.
I’ve owned three places, two in HOAs and the currently place doesn’t have one. The HOAs were fine. I don’t miss them at all. At their best they just provided services (trash pickup, landscaping, etc.) that I can easily contract for myself.
If you don’t need an HOA (because there are actually shared common elements that need to be maintained) then why would you want one? And if you do need one, why would you want it to do anything beyond what’s required to maintain the shared bits?
People love to take extreme positions, because they’re easy and satisfies an emotional itch they have, not because they’re correct. The same can be said about government regulation which is analogically similar. You have those who fallaciously infer that, because government regulation can go wrong, it is therefore bad (contra abusus non tollit usum). Others take opposing socialist views.
People should instead think in terms of ends. Human beings are social animals. We have obligations toward others (here, the community). That includes obligations that concern the environment that the community occupies. So the fruitful focus of energy and debate should be what this means for the community (what are these obligations, and why) and if and how to regulate them.
It often takes years between "HOA puts lien on house" and "house is foreclosed and sold", and during that time the house is in limbo, the owner can't sell it and buyers can't buy it.
But that waters down the argument to the point of meaningless. For instance, did the egg shortage make the housing crisis worse, because every potential homebuyer has less money to buy a house?
I mean, if someone legally forced the homeowner to pay sell the house to them because there was a clause that required the owner to pay tens of thousands of dollars for expensive eggs and then sold the house again after and hoped to recoup the costs, then sure
I (thankfully) live in a neighborhood without an HOA. Just one block away, there is an HOA. No reason to prefer that street (and home values aren't higher there).
This isn't an upper class neighborhood. It's mixed. Half of the residents are blue collar workers.
Over the years, I would think of reasons/annoyances where I'd say "Yes, while I'm glad I don't have an HOA, if we did have one it would take care of this or that annoying problem with the neighbor."
Then I spoke to friends who live in HOA neighborhoods and are on the HOA board. They told me clearly that "No, in practice, the HOA is not going to get involved in those (serious) matters. All they care about is the veneer (house appearance) and really petty rules." They also told me the purpose of the HOA was to justify its own existence. The owners get almost nothing for the funds they collect, other than a 3rd party company driving by and noting minor violations.
Another friend just had to spend $4000 to paint the front of his house. He's temporarily living in another state for a work assignment, and he and several others got notices that the HOA has decided to change the "look" of the neighborhood. Otherwise his house looked fine (not worn out paint or anything). I bet someone in the neighborhood has friends with a painting outfit.
I can stomach the idea of an HOA if they solved real problems (sanitation, etc), and not just appearances, but they don't. Even if it's in their bylaws, they don't enforce the serious stuff. Just the petty stuff.
Someone losing a home because they decided to have a window AC facing the street is plain immoral.
As someone who lives in an HOA, the purpose of it is to push responsibilities the city doesn't want to pay for onto us (even though we pay city taxes e.g. property and sales taxes). These include road maintenance and weed abatement. The predictable outcome of forcing a bunch of volunteers to be in charge of this stuff is that the final product is even worse than what the government manages, I.e. everything is constantly falling apart.
I am completely unfamiliar with a world in which HOAs fix roads.
I have also never lived in a city whose government got rid of weeds. What even is “weed abatement”? (Joke: Is this some slang for getting rid of the local marijuana grow houses?)
In one area I lived in, there were legally defined "noxious weeds". Mostly invasive species that have several undesirable attributes.
One example is Musk Thistle. It grows extremely rapidly, reproduces at a rate that's unbelievable, and is very difficult to kill. In this heavily farmed region, a few of them growing in a roadside ditch can turn into tens/hundreds of thousands of them within a year. Not only do they outcompete just about any other plant including crops, but they have incredibly sharp barbs that injure livestock.
In publicly owned spaces or abandoned fields/lots, the county has people that searches for them and sprays them with a herbicide. If they're spotted on your private land, usually they'll notify you that you have X days to cut them down (before they flower and seed) or they'll come do it whether you want them to or not. Some counties will send a bill for this, some fund it from property taxes.
If you haven't lived in an area where they vigorously grow it sounds like a huge overreaction, but left uncontrolled because one neighbor isn't taking care of it, it can become impossible to keep it out of your yard. According to wikipedia, a single plant can produce 10,000 seeds that disperse through the wind and remain viable for decades in the soil. Even the desire to not have a painful rapidly reproducing weed in your yard aside, they can do incredible damage to cropland.
It's a shame though, it's a kinda pretty flower. Imagine a vivid pink sunflower.
In WA we have enormous problems with Himalayan blackberries and scotch broom. When they get a toehold, they take over and leave a "dead zone" underneath. They're very hard to kill. The blackberries grow over 8 feet high and form a thicket that is a lot like razor wire.
Scotch broom seeds will also be viable up to 30 years.
Don't know if it's what gp is talking about, but in areas prone to wildfire, there are often laws about keeping brush and weeds a certain distance away from any structures.
Not only that but also a responsibility to build whatever fire breaks the fire department seems necessary on land the HOA owns. (This is land that can't be developed; land ownership becomes a liability.)
My HOA owns all the common area in the neighborhood, including the streets and parking spaces. So, all that upkeep (paint, seal, re-pave, snow removal, etc) gets paid out of a HOA dues. They also pay for landscaping of common areas, neighborhood lighting, and a few other things. The also organize trash collection (without which we'd have to buy individually and have a constant stream of trash trucks rolling through). And they have to carry insurance to cover that common property.
Who else is going to fix the roads? The county and state aren't going to, they don't own it. We seal the asphalt every 5-8 years and repave every 15-20 (I've only lived her 10 years, so those are very rough guesses).
> The also organize trash collection (without which we'd have to buy individually and have a constant stream of trash trucks rolling through).
That's not a given. I live in a non-HOA area, and everyone on my street has trash collection from the same company on the same day. Thursday night, we set our carts out. Friday morning, we bring them in.
There's a wide middle between HOA bureaucracy and pure chaos.
I lived in a townhouse community with an HOA for a few years. They handled paving the roads and all the lawn mowing and landscaping (which included weeding, as well as replacing the tree outside my unit when it died).
Not that I'd ever want an HOA again, but that was nice and your experience isn't canonical.
Hiring a landscaper that does a decent job and doesn't just collect a paycheck is surprisingly hard, especially on the budget that most HOAs try to get by on.
As far as the road part, I agree, doesn't mean that it's reality though.
There is no reason to stomach an HOA, even if they are solving real problems. If there are real problems that need solving the municipality can handle it or a local cooperative can in some special cases; these can exist without any enforcement or review board authority and they can handle everything else you'd need for a community/centrally managed for a neighborhood.
In my local area HOAs are apparently required by the city. We manage ours, a very small HOA, and recently were in discussion about removal. If we remove the HOA, the cost for each house will likely go up significantly because there's work needed to manage a detention pond that the city requires we manage. If the HOA dissolves, they city takes it over but charges much more for the same management.
Feels really odd, no one in our area actually wants an HOA. Yet i think people are going to flip when their HOA dues are suddenly required by the city and at much steeper rates (i imagine 2-4x the cost, our dues are quite small atm).
The idea is supposed to be that an HOA can be more efficient in taking care of problems. The municipality can be underfunded, etc, and take a long time to solve a problem.
In practice, HOAs generally don't do anything useful, though.
Our neighborhood actually saves the County money for property they don’t have to maintain (drainage/swales/mowing/etc) and provides community things like tennis courts, basketball courts, pools, playgrounds etc that the County doesn’t have to provide or maintain. It’s also cheaper for the HOA to do it
I'm all for paying dues for things like tennis courts, etc. These are truly common amenities.
My house, though, is not common property. Let the HOA rules cover only the common stuff.
Incidentally, local government where I live provides tennis courts, basketball courts, swimming pools and plenty of playgrounds. A few of these are within walking distance...
That’s the entire point of HOAs though; so that the city can offload those costs onto another organization AND collect the same revenue they would otherwise. At least where I live, it’s well understood among developers that the zoning and permitting process is how this is enforced.
The real, completely arbitrary thing that makes housing expensive is zoning. There is research on this. Zoning, especially in the long term, has enormous effects, including on things seemingly unrelated such as reducing construction productivity, reducing competition among construction firms (fewer contractors) and reducing housing supply (supply vs demand).
I think people generally don’t appreciate how restrictive zoning effectively is. It’s not just what you can build, but how big it is, layout things, and can even reach into aesthetics etc.
Friend of mine lives in an HOA that provides gym access to the community.
You'd think that means they have a gym on-site, but no; the HOA has a contract with a local health club to provide them with gym access. The club is owned by the builder's brother and the builder wrote the gym membership agreement into the HOA bylaws before turning it over to the community for management.
My friend is pretty understandably upset at this petty corruption, but every time it comes up, the HOA board would much rather deal with the "veneer" issues. Part of that is because the HOA board are busybodies, and part of that is because they're volunteers who have no desire to start a legal slap fight with the builder and his brother when they remove the (probably) unenforceable gym agreement from the bylaws.
You have the neighbors you have, and if you want to live in a "free country" then you have to accept that, that street goes both ways.
That doesn't mean, you can't invite your neighbors over pizza or coffee, be friendly and one day mention that you think X, Y or Z and you wouldn't mind helping, and if they they aren't interested you'll totally respect that.
Don't be a Karen. But being considerate the old school way can go far.
The rest you just have to live with :)
When you say "live and let live" it seems impersonal or mutually exclusive. Like "they do their thing, you do yours, never the twain shall meet".
I think GP is advocating exercising social skills rather than "live and let live" without interaction between you.
Get to know each other - BBQ or similar. Sure, you find out or confirm you hate some of their views/hobbies. But it also means you develop human empathy and usually find things you do agree on.
Maybe you hate their loud car. But you both hate the climbing vine on the fenceline and could spend a saturday morning fixing that together.
I can prompt an LLM to refute this and it would give me 5 reasons HOAs are making things better. Hard to read this and really come away with a sense of what the truth is. HOAs and homeowners have always been at odds but HOAs do provide some benefit in large communities. I hardly feel like they are making the “home crisis” worse.
You can prompt an llm and make it give you 5 reasons for any argument. LLMs are very good at writing highly convincing things that sound logical but may or may not be based in reality.
Would be better to say "I can run a research agent session and it can pull 5 data trends and papers that show the HOA are making things better" (I dont know if this is true and I did not do it)
I don't really think HOAs are the biggest driver of home prices/availbility one way or the other though.
And this is of the typical quality of what you’d get.
80% incoherent narration of random numbers, all down to the 1’s place so it looks super duper precise and impressive if you squint and don’t think too hard, like the “author” seems to have done.
To an extent they might make sense where there are shared facilities that need to be funded, like a swimming pool or something. Most of what they seem to do is just bullshit though.
You can accomplish this without an HOA, also. That’s just a non-profit. The idea that deed restrictions and dues are tied together is a serious overstep, in my opinion.
Yes. I lived in an HOA neighborhood in Texas that was fine. Dues were $25/month, and from that we got a nice community pool, and a legitimately nice Christmas party: they’d rent food trucks that were pre-paid, put up a Santa village, bring in VR rides, etc. All paid for from dues. They also really did not bother you if you were making an attempt at keeping your place looking decent.
Then I moved to one in North Carolina that was god-awful. Dues started at $65/month and went up every year. They’d send out neighborhood reminders that a pressure-washing service would be in the neighborhood next week if anyone wanted to hire them; anyone who didn’t got notices a few weeks later that they needed to pressure-wash their driveway and/or house. I also had to buy a specific brand and sheen of paint to repaint my mailbox; of course, the lettering was only available from a single supplier.
I now live on an acre lot that sits between two neighborhoods. I have no HOA, and it is glorious.
> Then I moved to one in North Carolina that was god-awful. Dues started at $65/month and went up every year. They’d send out neighborhood reminders that a pressure-washing service would be in the neighborhood next week if anyone wanted to hire them; anyone who didn’t got notices a few weeks later that they needed to pressure-wash their driveway and/or house. I also had to buy a specific brand and sheen of paint to repaint my mailbox; of course, the lettering was only available from a single supplier.
There really needs to be a way to harm organizations that do this. The HOA system is setup where the organization is protected and given the ability to make these kinds of rules. The only real option you have in that is you have to pawn the property off to some poor sucker that will also run into this issue later.
I live on a shared driveway with two other neighbors. The zoning laws in my town require an HOA for any shared driveways. So I technically live under an HOA. But we’ve all agreed to not fund it or bring it to life in any way. We just work out the shared responsibilities of the driveway informally over a bottle of whiskey.
>To an extent they might make sense where there are shared facilities that need to be funded, like a swimming pool or something. Most of what they seem to do is just bullshit though.
You can say the exact same about the government. To be clear, are you in favor of more liberty for homeowners, or are you in favor of the government stepping in to regulate HOAs?
The purpose of the system is what it does - providing retirees with even faker jobs than they gave up to go on vacation paid by the fools that still work.
> I can prompt an LLM to refute this and it would give me 5 reasons ... Hard to read this and really come away with a sense of what the truth is.
Are you arguing a meta point that there is no such thing as truth because LLMs can make you any counter argument to you want? That seems bleak. Argue against the actual points of the article.
Sorry, I'm not going to spend an hour reading every LLM article to figure out if its truthy, and then come up with the counter arguments against it, and on and on. The whole point of a human source is that depending on the source, I can already trust that they did some leg work to get the data and do the research, and they already have something to their name that I can trust. LLMs write in such a way that everything looks believable, so you spend 10x the time trying to find what is false.
We're just talking about one article here, but its an ocean of garbage being generated out there, yeah...go argue against all those and you'll waste your whole life.
What points? Does the article make any points? I couldn't find any. For instance, point 1 ends with
"A foreclosure suit is not a lost home — most end when the owner, or the owner's lender, pays — but the pressure is the point."
Which makes no sense whatsoever. I thought they were making a housing crisis worse by forcing foreclosures, but now apparently "the pressure is the point." The point of what, exactly?
I wouldn’t want to live in a neighborhood without an HOA, especially in the south. If you don’t have an HOA like 30% of your neighbors are going to have a lot full of junk cars, houses patchily painted lavender and shitty unmowed front yards. However, I very carefully read all the fine print for what the HOA enforces and how much it costs before each home purchase. Some of them can be insane. I’ve seen up to $500 a month.
What's wrong with lavender? Why does everything have to be a boring tan or grey? You sound like the exact reason I would never buy a house with an HOA.
But this is great...there is a market for homes with HOAs and for homes without HOAs. The reason is clearly because homes that are more cookie cutter with standard features retain their value because there are fewer people on the market who want a lavender house. The HOA is partly responsible for upkeeping the homogeneity by enforcing some of these things, thereby keeping values stable. Depending on the HOA, the board can also be full of people on a power trip, but that's pretty dependent on the geographical area(looks like Florida may not be great) and case by case basis.
The constant history lesson of what something was 80-90 years ago but they aren’t that way anymore but they were doesn’t advance the conversation especially when it has no impact on the actual topic.
Ah, so it's a delusional belief not based on facts or reality.
>that's just a fact reported by HUD
Categorically false claim not made in your source. The linked article makes zero claims about HOAs being "very frequently involved in racial discrimination suits for violations of the Fair Housing Act."
> HOAs exist as a way to enforce racial segregation
How do HOAs enforce racial segregation in monoethnic countries?
"HOAs are most frequently found in the United States, Japan, Canada, Australia, and the Philippines, and to some extent in other countries, such as New Zealand, Israel, Mauritius, South Africa, most of the countries of the European Union, such as Denmark, France, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, Ireland, Austria, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Greece, Sweden, Belgium, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Latvia, Lithuania, Cyprus, Luxembourg, Estonia, Slovakia and Slovenia, and some of the Latin American countries, such as Chile, Argentina, Brazil and Mexico."
The way to deal with a bad HOA is to get on the board. Normally, HOA boards attract the most petty minded people because most of the normal people living in the community are too busy but if a bunch of like-minded people get on the board, they can bring sanity back.
> if a bunch of like-minded people get on the board, they can bring sanity back.
This sounds good, but I don't think it generally works. The problem is that the petty minded people are also the ones who don't have anything else to do with their time, so they can expend all their effort on being petty. Whereas the normal people have other things to do with their lives, and simply don't have the time to deal with all the pettiness, and if they end up on the board, they now don't have a choice: their lives are basically hostage to the petty people who keep taking up their time with bogus issues that can't just be ignored because the structure of the HOA requires some kind of response.
Folks, I suggest before you comment, make it clear whether you're talking about HOAs for condos (shared structures), or detached houses. There's a big difference between the two.
Thanks to Governor Kotek, Oregon passed a bit of housing reform in 2025 that lets you build 'middle housing' despite anything an HOA says. I was really happy to go to Salem (Oregon's capital) to speak in favor of that.
Wait a gosh darn second... I was told, by our president no less, that only California had a housing crisis, and it was specifically caused by democrats. Is this the fake news I hear about?
Can someone explain to me (an European) what purpose HOAs serve? I mean do they actually have any benefits? I only know them from videos where people are being harassed by them
Look and feel of the house, paint, Pool Management, Park (if the community has one, and not the city managed one) Management, Yard Management (Trees, Plants, Mopping, Trimming), Trash (overflow vs contained, when to put trash out, when to take your trash can back, to keep it out of sight from street view and such) Regulations on whether a house can be given to AirBnb and such, Single Family staying vs multiple family, cars that can be parked on the road and you can ask Chatgpt for more if you want.
Overall, with America being a capitalist country (and Florida state being the best example of it), they want people to keep spending their money on something, and would never allow someone to just 'settle' and live a life without spending money. HOA, among other things property taxes and other city imposed taxes you are never "resting in peace" after retirement, but wait for your next notice to come - either from City or HOA.
That does not have to be the responsibility of HOAs. I have had a period where my previous gardener quit and I was looking for a new one; some weeds in the front yard grew too tall. The city sent me an official reminder. This was in a neighborhood without HOAs.
Because in many places, having things in your front yard is not a crime? It could be car parts, could be children's toys, could be trash. If you don't have a city that enforces that, HOA or a management company which the owner/renter goes into contract with is the best way to manage that.
A major strand in american conservatism is to believe, strongly, in laws being made as close to the people they apply to as possible. This is why there is such an undercurrent from that side of reducing the scope of the federal gov while allowing private entities to have their own rules on their areas.
The level to which German society proscribes behavior top down with the law simply wouldn’t be tolerated across the spectrum for the simple reason no one would agree what the rules should be, even if they share the European idea that everyone else should follow the rules they personally support.
Its laws in the way that a homeowner or renter signs a contract with the HOA that lists the rules that owners and renters must abide by or be penalized for breaking(fines, liens, not criminal I think)
That's different. They cant create new "laws", and they can't spy on you etc. Also that's just for one building usually (the building where you live in) not a whole community
HOAs can't create laws. They can create rules that are contract bound, but not anything criminal or physical based enforcement. (Taking away someone's home is civil)
Florida has a lot of people. The article never addresses the important questions - are these issues without merit?
If you want to live in an apartment, but - get the tax and investment advantages of owning then you need to do it via buying into a corporation of some sort. So they must exist.
If you are not paying on upkeep of your house they have to do something and that is going to be expensive, they have a right to get that money from whoever didn't pay not spread it out to the other owners.
While it isn't called foreclosure if you don't pay your property taxes your house will be foreclosed on. That an HOA can is just another entity.
There are a lot of people who live in Florida so I'd expect them to have a lot of HOAs. The only surprise is California doesn't beat Florida in this list, but that could well be a case of California has stupid laws and so you can't get the good parts of an HOA.
These is a lot to hate about HOAs. However the idea is sound and they can do good things. We need to stop the bad things that they do, but nothing that in the article points to anything bad.
Exactly. HOAs can be a pain in the butt but they aren't taking peoples homes away Willy nilly
The only way you get in that situation is by not paying your dues. Some HOAs may be more or less aggressive in handling it. But when you can't pay your dues, the other homeowners have to pay for your share
Dues are just a mandatory part of being in HOA that reflect the costs of the community
> The only way you get in that situation is by not paying your dues.
No, it isn't. You can also get in that situation by having the HOA cite you for a violation of its rules and regulations and you not fixing the violation.
An HOA acting in good faith will not do this unless it's actually necessary. But an HOA run by busybodies can cite you for things that aren't actually violations (and often what is or is not a violation can be subjective, because the language in the rules and regulations is often vague or ambiguous), but which you still have to take the time and energy to respond to--or else they can say you didn't fix the violation and put a lien on your house.
And if you do respond, now you're embroiled in an argument about whether what they cited you for actually is a violation or isn't, and you're arguing with bad faith actors who are not going to be reasonable. And who might put a lien on your house anyway--even though they're actually not supposed to do that if you're following the process established by the HOA (and often by state law) for disputes--and now you're faced with having to hire a lawyer and convince a judge that the lien should be dismissed.
This is the result if people generally mistrust their local governments, defund them and then create little private villages (HOA governed). Turbo-capitalism wins once again ;)
The problem is that municipalities absolutely love HOAs. They get all the tax revenue and get to wash their hands of most responsibilities involved with them. From their perspective, they get to found little vassal townships where they can say “it’s your problem” to little people problems like “there’s too many potholes in the road” and “that sewer lift station is making weird smells.”
Oh, but if you want to do anything, you still need to pay those permit and inspection fees! No, we won’t help you find a paver at a reasonable rate even though putting those contracts out to bid is what we do all day long.
What is really bullshit is that HOAs aren’t granted a property tax abatement for absorbing many municipal functions.
> From their perspective, they get to found little vassal townships where they can say “it’s your problem” to little people problems like “there’s too many potholes in the road” and “that sewer lift station is making weird smells.”
Roads and sewer are two things I've never seen an HOA have jurisdiction over; in every HOA community I've lived in, the municipality still owned the roads and the water and sewer infrastructure. The HOA was only responsible for things like mowing the grass in common areas and maintaining play equipment there.
I am a president of an association that handles all aspects of road maintenance (construction, sweeping, snow removal), a full commercial sewer lift station, stormwater drainage, trash / recycling, street lights, interfacing with utilities, forestry maintenance, and permitting along with general Q&A. We are a volunteer 3-person Department of Public Works.
I’ve lived in two HOAs and they both owned and maintained roads in the community. One of them was a new development, and making the roads private was probably a big reason the county required an HOA for it.
I understand why they do that though. Cities don't usually make enough money from property taxes to fund the infrastructure in the suburbs. That why they always seem to be on the verge of budget cuts, raising taxes, or bankruptcy.
Maybe HOA's are bad, maybe they're good, but the intellectual laziness required to shit this kind of garbage out onto the internet in place of genuine thought and analysis will fuckin kill us all.
That's actually the more dangerous situation. For instance, a meta-analysis of 394 blog posts suggests that 94% of LLM-written data presentations use spurious statistics. In addition, 2513 posts out of 3408 analyzed were found to use the same fabricated data. Click here for more info on singles near you.
At this point I trust statistics in LLM output about as much as I do policy position statistics from humans; that is: you need to double check things either way.
That is certainly a good method to maintain epistemic hygiene. All things indeed do need to be double-checked before confirmation into the net. However, would you say you read your spam section and double-check each email as much as you do those in your inbox? Or do you use heuristics to dismiss some things more than you do others? If you do, in fact, expend the same energy on all sources of data then I understand your resistance to the idea of classification by source.
Wait, I'm not saying "all things" need equal checking. I'm saying that in policy arguments, I double check stats (or heavily down-weight them) regardless of their origin.
At this point, I've done enough policy work with AIs that my concern about hallucinated statistics is... reduced? I don't know what the right word is. I know what kinds of extended setups will get them to say crazy things and I know what kinds of narrow questions will generate genuinely reasonable and interesting answers. Meanwhile, I also know that every policy position paper ever written by a human has abused statistics in one way or another. So: six of one.
Certainly if you had prompted the LLM that's a reasonable position. But you believe that the addition of an LLM to a human who would otherwise abuse statistics to produce outcomes they desire is to result in statistics that are more likely to be true? So if I took a spam email and passed it through an LLM this would make it more reputable?
It would seem to me that the addition of the LLM to the mix is likely to result in output that is more likely to be aligned to the human writing it and less likely to be aligned with me, as the reader, conditional on the human being the kind who abuses statistics one way or another.
But everyone's epistemics are different. Reality will tell us over time where we land with our methods.
Yea even reading the first couple paragraphs I can't really get a sense of what it's trying to say. Feels like generic claude output and doesn't really communicate what the "crisis" is or how it's getting "worse".
Home issue will never get solved unless houses are mandated by law to be a shelter, not an investment, or at least, an asset that depreciates over time same way japan did it. As long as housing is considered an investment, it will always go up to the point they become like now, their values become speculative rather than real actual cost, and that will open the doors for many monkey business to keep the speculative prices high. An authoritarian law to change housing to shelter rights will solve it, not a democratic one since majority of voters are home owners or who is in charge it’s in their interests to keep it that way. Will that happen? Not peacefully I assume, so many things are built on the current status, from banks interests and creating credits out of thin air, to countries economy based on keeping people near certain spots to milk more taxes, remember, one of the biggest reasons why WFH was attacked in such coordinated way is to protect the real-estate industry and the things built around it.
We all wanna blame HOAs. Nobody asks why HOA? The legal BS to set one up isn't free, so why?
The near universal proliferation of owner's associations and management groups and whatnot for developments larger than ~1ac (the EPA threshold, some states/towns have lower) is something you can lay at the feet of the Clean Water Act and it's implementation and precedents over the following decades.
Developers don't do anything that costs money, like set up an HOA, without a reason. The developers create the HOA because you need your >1ac residential development to pass stormwater permitting. While you theoretically could make each individual .25ac parcel you're putting a house on compliant as a standalone it's infinitely cheaper to just ignore all that, grade everything toward the road, dig a ditch, send the contents of the ditch through your stormwater treatment features, build in a little margin to those items, show the permitting authority the numbers that prove it passes with flying colors and when some jerk says "but what if X Y Z changes" you point to the excess you built in and tell them to GFY.
Now, where it really gets evil is when you start really pinching pennies or where the rules change over the course of the process making your numbers not work. Say you've got a lot of grade, a lot of rainfall, a lot of stormwater you gotta "treat". Well, you start adding rules to the HOA. Require certain parts of the lots remains grass or planter or whatever. Disallow patios, but do allow wood decks because the municipality considers those pervious, etc, etc. Or maybe the results you've got are marginal but you throw the bureaucrats a bone by saying you'll disallow car-ports and sheds in the HOA rules to prevent people from adding impervious surface. Or maybe you're uphill of some wetlands but not close enough to be regulated by default you promise to disallow working on cars and require people pick up their pet waste and not use lawn fertilizer or some other laundry list of certain things in order to make the local town's wetlands people comfortable not raising objection and claiming jurisdiction.
And of course, however these rules and plans shake out, the HOA is responsible for enforcing whatever those rules and requirements are in perpetuity so it's not like a pissed off majority can show up to vote "ok, this has gone too far, pack it in boys"
But nobody wants to talk about any of that because it's uncomfortable.
Short term renters, questionable people (thieves, renters who abuse the properties around them, people who use the property poorly [massive parties that bring guns + drunk loud people]), illegal activities (like off permit filming of commercial works), brings disproportionate problems to the neighbors. Airbnb is a lightning rod of people who do that. That's one of the reasons why hotels have weird rules in states and cities.
That is exactly what the people who live under HOAs want. I despise HOAs, but I'm happy that the kind of people who like HOAs have a community they can all congregate in. It keeps some of them from mingling with the rest of us.
I have a house. I have no HOA. I'm very happy with this situation and don't see any possible value that an HOA could add to this situation.
Funnily enough, there does seem to be a sort of wannabe HOA in my neighborhood that is always dropping things off in our mailbox asking for donations and telling us about events. I never give them any money, and never go to their events though, so either they don't provide any value or the value they provide apparently is not derived from them having any enforcement power.
Or maybe I'd be circumspect to recognize that my neighbors having rights is just the price of me having rights, just like I'm not in favor of a police state even if it means that sometimes people will commit crimes. Who knows!
And I have a house without a HOA but did go through a bunch of complicated (and expensive) easement agreements and survey definitions that LePage’s to a lot of loose-gooey hand shakes and outright mistakes over the years.
I am by no means a fan of JOAS in general but things like the maintenance of private roads including winter plowing do need to be dealt with and while a couple of neighbors can probably get agreements drawn up for “only” $10K each, that only goes so far if more people are involved.
Now I don't trust HOAs but some of this is deceptive weasally writing.
> They foreclose on their own members, over debts that start small
There are members who refuse to pay special assessments or fees for the community. Given that's Flordia, theres an above average population that would believe "they aren't required to" even though they accepted it when starting. (yes there are abusive HOAs and there are non-sense fines.. and sometimes those nonsense fines come from people neglecting the property in a very bad situation)
It's your job to handle it when it's a small situation. Moving to the stage of liens takes more time to do that and then resolving that usually happens on sale or refinancing.
Sure, but it makes sense to research one you're about to buy into and there's a lot more to the site than this post. I clicked around some.
This site seems to provide some data that's compelling. I see some gaps in California and a couple of liens that mention FL in Los Angeles. Maybe it's a starting point if moving though. This kind of transparency is a good thing. Some HOAs are abusive.
>Is Florida the worst state for HOA foreclosures?
>Florida ranks 1st of the states on HOA Spy for foreclosure suits brought by associations, with 10,296 of 14,168. The count depends on which courts are indexed in each state as well as on the associations, so it is a count of records, not a rate.
Florida is known for having the strongest "sunshine" laws in the country, that make government records transparent. That makes this statistic pretty useless.
It is GOOD that HOAs can bring foreclosure suits. Suits are the only way to get maintenance fees from some owners. Without maintenance fees HOAs decline and their owners' values decrease. Foreclosure also has the side-effect of removing a badly-acting owner from the association and replacing them with one who WILL pay their bills promptly.
HOAs shouldn’t exist. They have no justification for authority. The legal frameworks allowing their existence should be dismantled with extreme prejudice and at the expense of those who benefit from the current system.
> Without maintenance fees HOAs decline
Good.
> ... and their owners' values decrease.
Really? In fifty years of home owning, not once with the "benefit" of a HOA, I've yet to see an owned house value decline.
Some countries just bypassed this entire US obsession with redlining and keeping the others out. Maybe try working more on community and less on uniformity.
If you don't like a manicured public area that costs communal money to maintain, then don't buy a hoa property. Very simple
This is what city services are for. In most of the world you can get a public park without a weird sub-government
Court records are public everywhere. How companies like RealtyTrac get their stats/data, they grab records from county recorder offices. So what does that have to do with sunshine laws?
I was sort of wondering the same thing. It would be helpful to get a clearer picture of what's missing from the data.
Same goes with the whole "Florida man" shtick--news channels and YouTube channels dredging for wild stories are more likely to get the info on Florida-specific misdemeanors due to sunshine laws.
This article slightly mixes condo and HOAs. HOAs are covered under 720 and it does not have the same rules (which are less stringent) than condo’s
Condo rules are much stricter than HOAs
State of Florida also puts caps on fines - the max is $100/day or $1000 for a single violation. But that’s after a period to cure and then due process meetings (made up of homeowners not board members) who may waive or not fine at all or defer.
A homeowner can also fix the problem and later have the same problem again but not be fined if they fix in time.
The foreclosures are for extreme cases and a lot of HOA attorney shops don’t charge a retainer but will tack on fees that are paid back to the HOA attorney and association.
To get to that point takes a long time
I had the thankless task of being executor for my parents' estate. I distinctly remember the Florida HOA that made that so much worse.
After expressing their utmost sympathies and saying they'd help any way they could, mere weeks later they put a legal "estoppel" on the sale of the house due to some overgrown vines(?), which of course, were never mentioned by anyone.
This is not possible and maybe mixing terms. HOA has to disclose an existing violation as part of the estoppel process. Estoppel is just a disclosure certificate not a legal hold
It is possible I am mixing terms, as IANAL and also this was several years ago
Regardless, they made a simple issue (which was not disclosed at least to me) a legal hassle.
Yea understood it’s possible it went to your folks and they ignored it. Hard to say. Sorry for your loss!
I would never buy a house that was part of a HOA. For people that like them, more power to ya. But I don't understand the people who complain, just don't buy into an HOA then?
It’s extremely common for local governments to make an HOA a legal requirement for new developments. This lets them put things like road maintenance, park maintenance, and trash pickup in private hands so the local government doesn’t have to pay for them. (They’re still happy to collect property taxes from the new residents at full rate, of course.) The result is that it becomes harder and harder to find non-HOA homes.
I’d have no problem with their existence if it was a free market, but I have a big problem with them when they’re being legally mandated.
> It’s extremely common for local governments to make an HOA a legal requirement for new developments.
Then people ought to be complaining about their local governments, not HOAs.
> Then people ought to be complaining about their local governments, not HOAs.
Complain all you want, but if all new homes in your city are in a HOA, you are going to be under the thumb of those 80-something HOA board members who have nothing else to do in life but nitpick your house violations. Is that a desirable outcome for anyone?
Too many old people in homes they don’t need. There’s a reason the term “day of the pillow” was getting popular around Covid. I really wish we did get those 3% CFR rates in boomers we were promised by Italy!
I'm sure there will be things citizens ought to be doing all the way to the collapse of the empire.
To your “happily collect taxes at full rate” comment, strongtowns.org’s whole message is that only the densest cities in the country bring in enough taxes to pay for the maintenance of streets, sewers etc.
“Full rate” is almost always subsidized through the windfall taxes on new growth and development, putting towns in a ponzi scheme like situation.
> It’s extremely common for local governments to make an HOA a legal requirement for new developments.
This is true, and I'd never choose to live in an area like that.
I imagine a lot of people dont have the luxury to avoid entire areas
I mean, there's only so many hills you can die on before you become homeless.
The houses available in my area and price range all required an HOA. In general it’s not safe to assume all people have all options at all times.
Are you willing to share the general area? I’m curious.
Where I’ve bought houses, HOAs were rare. I’ve always heard about these places where HOAs are the only option but I fortunately haven’t run into one.
I just went to zillow and typed in my zip and tried two different filters for single family homes priced between $300K-$550K:
Listings:
No HOA fee: 32 up to $500/month: 62
I'm not going to bother because this is an HN comment but I think you can imagine what happens to the results when I specify newer than say 1993 (when my house was built).
I have an HOA, but it seems defunct. Everything we do to the house, if visible, can be interpreted to mean I must get unanimous agreements, in writing, from all my neighbors.
It turns out I managed to land right between two asshole neighbors (constant trespassing, dogs, etc)
It's still a choice being made. People choose to live where they live. They could choose to live elsewhere.
You should be allowed to complain about the choices available before you, even if you have an ordinal preference for one over the other
Because moving cities is free and frictionless, because everyone works remote, and their cushy corporate job will pay moving fees. Right?
I said it's a choice. At the end of the day people choose to live in these areas. Yes, it might be because the tradeoffs of not living there or moving away are severe and outweigh the headaches of an HOA, but it's still a choice they make.
If you want to buy swiss cheese and you have 17 supermarkets within convenient distance and none of them sell swiss cheese, you don't really have any options at all, despite the fake appearance of plentiful consumer choice.
Free markets (and the associated "invisible hand") only work when choice is truly available, not purely theoretical.
Ok.
What is the best alternative to that choice? You can’t answer since you aren’t the one in that position.
Frequently it is the least bad among a bunch of choices.
Choosing to go into crippling debt to pay cancer treatment bills is a choice too, but only a moron thinks the blame should be laid at the feet of the patient for making that “choice”.
Yeah sure man I could also choose not to have a job
Do all houses available require an HOA, even the ones that don’t look so nice or aren’t in great neighborhoods? I don’t usually like to go around questioning people’s experiences, but I think a lot of people go around with ideas of what an acceptable street looks like that simply aren’t achievable without an HOA or extreme price segregation.
I used to live in Broward county, Florida, so I'm not surprised that it shows up as number one on the OP article's list. It's totally insane how much power HOAs have in that state. The idea that an entity other than a mortgage lender you owe can "foreclose" and seize the home you live in is total lunacy.
> The idea that an entity other than a mortgage lender you owe can "foreclose" and seize the home you live in is total lunacy.
What consequences are sane for a member who does not pay dues, water bills, etc., for a prolonged period? Turning off the water is illegal here. Liens get ignored. My HOA will avoid foreclosure for years, and has only resorted to it twice in twenty years, but it's the ultimate recourse. Should the other members just suck it up forever?
We have other situations where you can end up owing a debt, you don’t get to foreclose. You go to civil court, get a judgment and then try to collect.
Then the risk, delay, effort, and expense of pursuing a now unsecured debt is transferred from one defector to 150 cooperators. Every month of delay increases the loss.
True. Another middle ground is a mechanics lean. You can't alter the title until you clear it, but they can't foreclose.
> What consequences are sane for a member who does not pay dues
None. No HOA should have any power over a private home owned by an individual.
Not sure how water bill is relevant, that is paid to the water agency. They'll shut off water if not paid for some months.
Our community well water system is owned and operated by the HOA. That and (all private) gravel road maintenance are the great majority of HOA expenses. There is no municipality to provide these services. Should members not have to pay for water and roads but still get to use them? That's not sustainable.
Yes, they should pay for water usage based on provisioning costs.
What does this have to do with a HOA being allowed to demand color of windowshades or what kind of flowers someone likes to plant in their yard?
> Liens get ignored. > Should the other members just suck it up forever?
Until the house is sold or refinanced. Yes, the HOA has to wait, but can eventually get its money with interest.
That can be years, and that prevents the money from going into interest based accounts which pays for regular, surprise, and longer term maintenance.
And when the building's (that you share with the deadbeats) roof leaks and there isn't the money to repair that shared resource, that's just tough luck?
An HOA isn't just about neighborhoods of freestanding houses, it's also about multi unit buildings.
That’s a condo association, which has different regulations. Both are foreclosing on properties.
The article does not distinguish between these two. Observe how the article talks about the laws requiring better maintenance result in higher hoa dues [1].
Nor do real estate listings [2].
And indeed, the grandparent post talks about missed water bills and other bills that fall on the collective rather than fines about incorrect colors or trash cans being left out.
So while legally there are differences between the two, the term "hoa" is almost always used as a blanket term to cover both. As they were in this article and nearly all of the discussion in this thread.
1 ... the laws that followed it require older condominium buildings to pass a milestone structural inspection (section 553.899, Florida Statutes) and to fund structural reserves on the strength of a structural integrity reserve study (section 718.112(2)(g), ...
The cost is visible in the dues. Redfin reported in August 2024 that median monthly HOA fees in the three months to July 2024, against a year earlier, rose...
2. None of the listings here distinguish between hoa dues and condo association dues. https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/273801_rid/ Nor do several other cities that I tried.
I’ve always found it funny that many of the states that despise unions love HOAs.
For example, they’ve fought for the right to have a “right to work”, so that closed shops can’t be a thing — you cannot compel inclusion in a bargaining unit by nature of employment.
Yet restrictive deed covenants where you are compelled by the state to join a private association are fine.
The arguments for or against them are similar if you dig into them.
>Should the other members just suck it up forever?
given that an HOA is completely unnecessary... yes. you should suck it up forever. if you want to be part of an HOA and pay dues into it, good for you, go ahead.
if somebody else doesn't want to be part of your little club, why should you get to take their house away for that?
> given that an HOA provides no value at all
Typically the HOA's I've seen manage community resources. Where I used to live that meant the neighborhood parks, green spaces, 3 docks in the river, a pool, and a few lakes. No value seems a bit hyperbolic.
the HOA managing a pool is definitely not the norm. and if it is, it's a pool club - somebody doesn't pay their dues, they should lose access to the pool, not their house.
most HOAs manage a tiny amount of communal green space that should have been turned over to become city property, but was held back as HOA property to give the HOA a reason to exist.
> most HOAs manage a tiny amount of communal green space that should have been turned over to become city property, but was held back as HOA property to give the HOA a reason to exist.
You are just making this up at this point. Why do you think the city would accept property that they would have to legally maintain and be responsible for, when it is generally isolated and (largely) accessible to only a specific neighborhood?
> You are just making this up at this point.
Not OP, but that is exactly what happened in my neighborhood. It has parks and trails and several sports courts, two playgrounds, dog parks. It was all turned over to the city to be public land to avoid having a HOA.
> generally isolated and (largely) accessible to only a specific neighborhood?
No. It's just land around the neighborhood, easily accessible to anyone in town (or nearby towns).
Yes, that is explicitly and exactly the reason municipalities exist. In the U.S. they are typically made up of elected and appointed representatives and they manage public space and services in their boundaries.
Mostly I don't understand why an individual neighborhood would need it's own out of band election process (that typically allows people to gain tremendous power and authority without anyone voting for them), and representatives completely decoupled from the state or government but often times acting in parallel.
> that typically allows people to gain tremendous power and authority without anyone voting for them
Come on, at least try. HOAs (typically, your word) have elections. Someone doesn't just walk in and declare themselves the association president.
This is exactly what happens for many HOAs around the country.
Typically elections would take place during the annual meeting. Usually there is such low community engagement that there is no home owner quorum under the Covenants Conditions & Restrictions. Depending on the CC&Rs a property management or build rep will appoint the open board seats, or for example in the case of my HOA they will go by default to whomever is attending the meeting and wants the spot, assuming the current board doesn't object to that person.
For my association the board has basically been self appointing each other and their spouses for the last 15+ years. The current president has managed to obtain several proxy votes of rental property owners and the current board members use these to overrule any objections to them reseating themselves. They also squash any attempts to force a community wide vote, because again lack of quorum. Basically impossible to get enough people to actually attend the meeting to get the current board replaced, especially when they've gone all digital and tend to cancel/reschedule the meetings last minute and then provide very little notice of the new time.
It is common, though probably a minority. Pools are expensive to own but nice to have close to your house. If you live close enough to bike kids will use them, but the common city pool is too far for most kids even if it is bigger and better.
I think we have the wrong units of measure for government size. I live in a county where the lines made sense 200 years ago: Everybody in the county can ride their hose to the courthouse, file whatever they need and be home in time for super. These days everyone drives and can be there in half an hour or less. Instead what I care about is the metro area. I want a unit that ensures my transit system is a coherent whole, the water supply is cheaper to consolidate to one large entity vs many small ones.
There is one suburb near me where some people would have to drive 25 minutes to get to the city library - most of that is uncongested highway. I really need a smaller unit to own and run a library so kids are always in bike distance. That city does a good job of scattered small parks but there is one complex with large fields for softball - if you don't live close maybe you shouldn't pay for something you don't use. I want parks owned by a smaller area government that can bring my neighborhood something they don't have. - HOAs often serve that. They just have a poor legal structure.
If you own part of a shared walls building then a corporation is required to manage that. You have to pay your share of the share costs. However the corporation should be limited in what else it can do, but it must exist.
My HOA pays the buildings water and sewer and trash. Also fixes the roof over the condo building, cleans the common interior, and does repairs (typically on our shared plumbing), and the elevators.
And all that makes perfect sense. I assume these are not single family (detached) homes.
Oh, no, a condo building.
These days many municipalities don't want to manage more streets and infrastructure so they heavily favor HOAs for new developments that will handle what should be the city's responsibility.
Seems like every subdivision in central Maryland has an HOA managed pool.
I’ve purchased (and sold) multiple single family homes in central Maryland that did not and do not have an HoA. Under 275k, with excellent schools.
It’s really not hard to find, though last time I bought was a decade ago and prices have increased, the HoA status (a lack of an HoA) has not changed.
I also explicitly refused to even consider an HoA neighborhood. Lol, fuck all that.
My city sales tax dollars should not be used to fund the maintenance of a fancy median in some neighborhood on the other side of town.
You can put in a special district, that's an HOA under a different name, with even more government powers and bureaucracy costs. For example, you vote on stuff via the general election, they can seize your home for unpaid property taxes, they can impose zoning laws, and in some places they can impose criminal ordinances (dog pooping in the park).
> 3 docks in the river, a pool, and a few lakes. No value seems a bit hyperbolic.
The typical HOA (and by typical I mean asymptotically close to 100% of them) do not maintain 3 docks in a river and a few lakes!
If a neighborhood has those kinds of resources, some kind of HOA fee seems reasonable, agreed.
Even in such a neighborhood, the HOA should be limited by law to managing those common area rivers and lakes, not allowed to have any opinion about what flowers someone plants in their yard or what color windoshades they install.
The typical HOA does not have rivers nor lakes. They only have bitter dictator-wannabe board members who look for ridiculous "violations" like your grass is 3/4" tall when their rulebook says 1/2" tall, so they can send eviction notices to flex their power.
Isn’t that was your local municipality in for?
If that's your persuasion don't buy a house in an HOA. You can go to the city pool.
I have literally never heard anyone speak positively about an HOA. The city pools where I live is well liked and maintained. With the exception of the local YMCA, the public pools are considered better than the other options in the area.
My HOA seems pretty good.
Mine is also pretty good. It's a beautiful place with a guard gate. I don't even like hoas, it kind of pisses me off that I can't do ugly customizations, but it's not really a big issue. The neighborhood was nice enough that I chose to buy there. If there were no HOA it would look like the rest of town which is shoddy.
If my neighbor decides to start blasting music at 3am for some reason, I don't have to suck it up for the next decade, I can just get the HOA to deal with it. Very peaceful.
I used to live in an HOA. Do I miss the value they provided? Not at all. They did nothing I can’t easily take care of myself.
> given that an HOA is completely unnecessary...
This is true sometimes, but if you are upset at a specific HOA, look at your docs to see what it actually manages. HOAs exist to pay for community obligated costs; sometimes that is a pool, sometimes it's "water and gas bills", and sometimes it's an entire golf course.
Further, if you're talking about a condo building (which, yes, is technically a COA, but the two get combined all the time), it is literally paying for your roof and elevators to work.
Buying into a "little club" and agreeing to pay your share of expenses only works when everyone participates. If not, your neighbors are just paying upkeep on your property; why should they have to do that?
> Buying into a "little club" and agreeing to pay your share of expenses only works when everyone participates. If not, your neighbors are just paying upkeep on your property; why should they have to do that?
Neighbors in a HOA are very clearly never paying upkeep of your property, that's is nonsense.
A condo association is a whole different ballgame, since there is legitimate shared structural walls, roofs, elevators, etc. But single family home HOAs, there is nothing the HOA does to maintain individual homes.
Conceptually, HOAs seem to be similar to medieval guilds. They are private governments, where voting rights are based on a private right (property ownership) rather than involvement in the area the government controls (residency).
Such arrangements used to be common, but they have become increasingly rare in the past few centuries. Many were explicitly abolished by law when free markets started getting popular. Often for antitrust reasons, or because people thought it would not be in the public interest to have certain types of contracts the previous owner made also bind the new owner.
I can think of a few similar arrangements in Finland. For example, membership in student unions at research universities is still mandatory, as is membership in reindeer husbandry associations. Those entities perform government functions, and the actual government has chosen not to assume the responsibility for one reason or another. As a consequence, the entities and their officials are subject to the same regulations as the government when wielding powers used to justify mandatory membership.
Condos are another story. If the entire complex is a single property for legal or practical purposes, it makes sense to have a single entity in charge of it.
Not sure why I can't respond to your other comment. But this is in response to your comment:
> they should lose access to the pool, not their house.
To enforce this you have to be able to gate, secure, and prevent them and their guests from using this. That costs a lot more money just to ensure they pay in. The HOA is the least worse option to "consent" and ensure that they do. Taking away the house is a much later step after a letter, 2nd and 3rd warnings, fines, ignored fines+interest, and a lein is ignored.
> To enforce this you have to be able to gate, secure, and prevent them and their guests from using this.
Since presumably you're also preventing people from outside the neighborhood from using it, then it is beyond trivial to prevent the non-paying neighbor as well, using the same gate key mechanism.
Every HOA-ran pool I’m aware of has a gate with keys or key fobs to prevent non-residents from access. From a liability perspective this system would be a requirement in many areas unless only open with a lifeguard present.
HOA's are necessary when you have shared resources or have physical connections between units. Sure they make little sense if they exist just to control what color you paint your house but having a agreed upon method to have discussions/ manage resources is important.
if somebody else doesn't want to be part of your little club, why should you get to take their house away for that?
Because they signed the paperwork saying they wanted to be part of the little club and gave that little club the power to take away their house.
If you don’t want to be a part of the HOA then don’t sign the contract. If you have to sign to buy the house then either sign or find another house. If they’re that bad then there ought to be lots of homes for sale that don’t come with an HOA contract.
In areas I'm familiar with, anything other than the largish single family house with big yard / garage / etc. gets built as strata title. Lots that ought to be wide enough to split either get duplexed or bare-land strata with two or more narrow houses ... for some reason, that's ok although freehold lots aren't.
Then "people want a house without dealing with strata" gets misinterpreted as "people want big houses on big lots". Not necessarily true, just that the premium for the BHoBL is the necessary price of not giving busybody neighbours power over your home.
If somebody else doesn't want to be part of your little club, then they shouldn't buy a house that belongs to that little club in the first place. Pretty easy.
You deal with it exactly the same way as if any other club member or customer don't pay. Not by giving something like HOA an unchecked power.
HOA should be allowed to kick out member. And people should be allowed to not be members of HOA.
You don’t seem to know how HOAs work. I’m not really a fan of how they currently work either, but you can’t just kick out a member when the legal “member” is the plot/home, and what would that even look like when you get kicked out, you are, e.g., still behind the gate benefiting from common elements. Do you get barred from, e.g., driving on the HOA owned and maintained street? Do you not get to enter the HOA controlled access gate?
Even if it’s a very low maintenance and amenity HOA on public roads, how do you resolve the fact that all the fees and costs have accumulated if the home were to be sold, you essentially end up at a similar end point where the home is sold. Usually these are also not individual circumstances, i.e., a person who has ignored all kind of warnings and letters and board meetings over usually years, also has many other issues going on and often they’re just letting the home go anyways and e.g., are just living there for “free” for about 1-3 years of HOA/bank legal proceedings.
> and what would that even look like when you get kicked out,
Very easy answer: they don't get access to the pool, river docks, common lakes (per peer thread) that the HOA maintains.
They of course must maintain full control and ownership of their private home.
If you answer that there is nothing they would lose access to (no pool, no rivers, no lakes) then that is a very strong answer stating the HOA has no right to exist.
I know how they work. I simply think they should not exist at all. Home is a property a thing. It is not a member.
There is no need for "HOA owned and maintained street". You do not need HOA to maintain streets.
>And people should be allowed to not be members of HOA.
Just like labor unions (ie. "right to work" states), right?
Those are two different things. The union negotiates pay and benefits. What does the HOA negotiate?
Also I'm a firm believer that if you're at a union shop and decide not to be part of the union you shouldn't be able to use their pay scales and should have to negotiate everything for yourself. The same with HOA's, I guess. If they do something for the community, like the pool the other poster talked about, then you shouldn't have access. Easy.
They shouldn't be able to take your house for any reason.
>What does the HOA negotiate?
At least in theory? Neighborhood "character" (and by proxy "land value").
My experience is they remove all character from a neighborhood in pursuit of bland stick and ball landscaping (tall yew, short yew) with too much grass in the yard that you have to waste water on and apply hazardous chemicals to, to keep it green and weed free year round.
But also I'm biased.
I do not see them as equivalent and I see the analogy as a bad faith analogy.
HOAs don't add value. All they are is an opportunity to power trip for those who have the most free time on their hands.
>HOAs don't add value. All they are is an opportunity to power trip for those who have the most free time on their hands.
I'm sure the people who support right to work laws would also claim labor unions "don't add value". On the flip side I doubt HOA supporters think they "don't add value".
Nope, but what are the countermeasures for abusing this power?
Also, once in a decade is not a rare occurrence for events of this significance. Once in 20 years is OK, once is 50 is rare, but once in a decade is not.
I mean, the idea is nice, but it involves humans.
Did you even consider why it's illegal to turn off the water? And maybe ask yourself how foreclosing on someone who can't pay for water only seems like a way to skirt the law and take water away from them in addition to their shelter.
I'm not sure how Florida has managed it's "free state" image. I've lived across the south and midwest my whole life and Florida was easily the least "free" state I've lived in.
There is an interesting parallel here with that state's dominant political party espousing 'freedom of speech' but only when it's in their favor.
Hi, previous neigbor! I’m in Broward too. It’s insane here but also in Miami-Dade. My condo maintenance cost went x2 over the last few years and the pool where the water isn’t yellow with you know has been shut down for at least 3 years. Meanwhile the “board” argues about the carpet patterns for about as long as.
There was a fairly crazy case in Georgia recently where a lady stopped paying her annual dues over a billing dispute. The amount worked out to be less than $3,000.
The HOA hired a law firm, forced a foreclosure, held a foreclosure auction where the HOA itself bought her house for THREE DOLLARS, and continued to charge her HOA dues (even though the HOA owned the home now) before evicting her later.
The HOA then sold the home to an employee involved in the foreclosure, whose partner was on the HOA board that had voted to foreclose, and voted to accept the three dollar ($3.24, to be precise) bid, though they hid this behind an LLC that didn't actually exist when they did it. The employee then reactivated her real estate license and sold the home to another family several months later.
There are fewer greater lunacies than HOAs, and the type of people drawn to run them.
This is one of those cases where suing would have had a better outcome and the 3k+legal fees garnished from her income would have been better.
I can't imagine that a good judge would accept that settlement to scam someone out of a house far below value and leave them with the debt.
> The HOA then sold the home to an employee involved in the foreclosure, whose partner was on the HOA board that had voted to foreclose, and voted to accept the three dollar ($3.24, to be precise) bid
And when I say they sold it to an employee involved after buying it themselves at auction for that $3.24, they sold it to the employee for one dollar. So this woman was out hundreds of thousands of dollars of equity because a self-dealing HOA and its law firm (tied by marriage to one of the HOA board) voted to foreclose on her home and accept a purchase price that couldn't buy you a drink at Starbucks.
The municipality that collects property taxes, utilities, contractors/mechanics liens, etc. have had the ability to foreclose everywhere since time immemorial, so it's not too crazy really...
That's cause Broward is a BLUE country unlike the north half of Florida that is RED. BLUE counties are the worst down here when it comes to HOAs. Almost every development or neighborhood has them and they are AGRESSIVE. In the northern RED areas of Florida, there are either no HOAs OR the HOA only has authority or the communal shared spaces (ie, club houses, pools, common esways) and leave the home owners themselves alone in terms of dictating their lives.
I came in here gung ho to defend HOA’s because I’ve seen neighborhoods without them and they’re never really stunning. That being said the ability or the power to foreclose on your home because of that should not be allowed.
By far the nicest neighborhood in town is ours, the one with no HOA. We have the most sports fields and courts, playgrounds, trails, dog parks, skate park, etc. No HOA, so we don't hoard, all facilities are shared to all. But across the street for us, making it a nice neighborhood.
Also, we have no HOA, so there are no ridiculous restrictions, which means the neighborhood has character. Every house is painted in unique colorful styles, instead of endless shades of dull beige. Every house has unique vegetation choices based on owner preferences so it is fun to walk around and sightsee. We have no HOA, so there are zero restrictions on decorations, so we are the Halloween capital of the county (coming up in a few weeks!)
It's a vibrant unique neighborhood full of facilities and character, precisely because there is no HOA to destroy it.
A similar neighborhood across town (we're a small town so across town is just a mile away) has a HOA, every house is a dull shade of beige and they have very harsh rules, like HOAs of course do, on decorations, so Halloween and Christmas are DOA over there.
> because I’ve seen neighborhoods without them and they’re never really stunning.
Most neighborhoods I’ve lived in have not had an HOA. They’ve ranged from okay to great.
I can think of a few neighbor situations where an HOA with teeth would have been welcome. The most specific involved someone getting a big angry dog breed, neglecting it, and then leaving their gate unlocked so it got out. That one was eventually dealt with by the city, though.
Meanwhile the one HOA I lived under was pretty boring and friendly. Didn’t really bother anyone but maintained a nice common area. HOA board members were friendly and reasonable, but then again so were all the neighbors so there wasn’t much to deal with.
I think the nightmare situation is a busybody HOA that starts going after things that don’t matter, which would be hell.
HOA’s kill any character an area has. The fees more than offset the economic benefits of joining one. The damming economics largely comes down to local governments skipping road maintenance without giving you a discount on your taxes.
Net effect you lose money living in a worse location.
I live in a neighborhood without an HOA, and any time someone comes over for the first time they all make comments about how nice the neighborhood is. Acceptance of an HOA is the pinnacle of Stockholm syndrome.
You have to pay for the community utilities, door people, elevators, exterior maintenance/repair, roof repair, and snow maintenance that people won't pay for as a group when given a chance. It's really the only lever that guarantees compliance the least amount of drama. The alternative is that you have to file civil suit to settle obligations. (You share a roof with your neighbors.. they refuse to pay for it because the roof isn't explicitly over them, they refuse to shovel and everyone gets fined.. etc)
I definitely believe it should be civil suits over liens for this particular situation.
In Chicago: you can get fined for not shoveling the sidewalk when theres snow. A lot of the people didn't want to pay 20-30k a season for the snow removal and suggested "owners can self do that." (Ignoring we have all ages, ability, and conditions.. also the fines start at 7am.. if they're enforced). But.. the fines would go to the association due to the markings of the area/easements.
In this context, do you still believe that dealing with this fine should involve the work, effort, resources, legal fees, court time, delays in court availability because healthy 40 year old Jim bob was late for work and couldn't shovel their portion of the sidewalk the last 10 times? Or that the Gen Z, not my problem because I don't think it's a problem.
Small-claims court exists.
Do you agree that you should sue your neighbor for not shoveling the sidewalk and causing a fine for the whole community?
If someone causes you to incur a fine and refuses to willingly reimburse you, then courts are the formal solution we have (there are other informal solutions most of which are illegal due to anti-loan-shark laws).
> never really stunning.
This is relative. You might not think native flowers and plants are stunning, and that a manicured lawn is, but I do! And lawn rules might prevent me from obtaining my version of “stunning”. This is something…you want to defend? A lack of freedom to do what one wants with something they own?
Yes, within some narrow bounds. I’m not forced to buy in a place with HOAs, it’s my choice if I want to sign up for community rules.
> I’m not forced to buy in a place with HOAs.
Narrow bounds would be one thing! The issue with this point is that you may unable to purchase a house _without_ an HOA:
* https://mediaroom.realtor.com/2026-01-27-Nearly-44-of-U-S-Ho...
* https://www.nahb.org/blog/2025/12/community-builds-are-on-th...
So it's not really about having a choice, it's about lack of one.
I dunno, I live in a neighborhood in LA without an HOA and it's great. Housing values have skyrocketed in the decade I've been here. There are a sprinkling of places that don't take great care of their yards: the bane of every Karen-filled HOA. This has done absolutely nothing to harm property values.
I would wager that the money residents might have paid for HOA fees have largely gone into their own home/yard improvements, and it shows. Adding an HOA in this place, and I think most places, would be a burden rather than a benefit.
To be fair though, the nicest neighborhoods in LA where the price floor is like 2 million are often HOA, old or new. Really the HOA doesn't do too much directly, but selects for the sort of people who don't care about an HOA fee along with the littany of other fees their lifestyle brings them, and that's enough to see home values and associated factors change dramatically from Hancock Park to parts adjacent only a couple hundred feet away.
There's probably a security aspect too with regular private security patrols in HOA areas that do enough to shoo away encampments from setting up. You don't have to look to hard to find encampments off vine north of melrose but you aren't going to find anything like that south of melrose in hancock park, thanks to the spend on private security, given it's the same LAPD in either case.
This has to do more with price of house, not HOAs. In Florida for example, some(maybe most?) counties require all new developments to maintain their own roads, which requires something akin to a CDD/HOA. Newer houses typically cost more and bring in people with money, not someone who inherited the house or has been living there for generations.
I could show you HOA neighborhoods that look like a warzone, and beautiful nonHOA areas of million dollar houses.
The fact that the government has washed their hands of dealing with pesky problems like maintaining streets is bizzarre to me. How far is too far with privatization?
They have just created another level of government. I'm fine with that in principle. However the details are often screwy
No, they've legitimized tribal justice.
is stunning even real though? who wants a picture when you can be alive. hoas tend to be more about the veneer than the spirit of their existence. the intent is nice but humans gonna power trip if they seek those positions of authority
Eh, I live in Berkeley, a lot of the neighborhoods here are amazing, and there are almost no HOAs (besides the kind that keep condo buildings running). It's nicer than the bast majority of American suburbs I've seen. If anything, the amazing yards and cozy houses are only viable because there is no HOA pushing down arbitrary top-down rules on aesthetics. Forcing people to have traditional lawns would have totally killed the place.
Berkeley is indeed a great example of how nice areas can be when the evil of HOAs is not present. I greatly enjoy walking the neighborhood streets of Berkeley whenever I'm there.
You forgot one important detail, the average price of homes in Berkeley. Anybody spending $1M on a 2/1 craftsman bungalow is going to also drop a few extra dollars on landscaping.
That's not true at all. The Bay Area is full of people with plenty of money but who don't care about aesthetics.
Yeah, but Berkeley‘s filter is that each house cost a couple million dollars that keeps out the riffraff.
You have a very narrow experience of the world, then. The most bland, ugly, tasteless neighborhoods I’ve seen are all in HOAs. The most beautiful are all without HOAs.
But that’s all beside the point, because this article is about how HOAs are bad for people who need somewhere to live, not about what offends your (unusual) taste.
This is a good observation. When HOAs try to regulate appearance, they regulate everything to a uniform mediocrity. That leads to using draconic rules and enforcement mechanisms needlessly. Often enough, this becomes a cudgel for Karens to enforce cultural norms not everyone shares. It becomes a tool of racism and cultural domination. It seems as if HOAs themselves need to be curtailed by law and regulation, and limited to functions that can't be provided by municipal government nor by individual homeowners.
Exactly. In a HOA neighborhood every house is identical, same color palette with minor variations allowed, same yard. It is an extremely depressing dystopia.
Give me a neighborhood with freedom where every house is different, every yard is different. That's a community.
have you ever like, gone to San Francisco?
> I’ve seen neighborhoods without them and they’re never really stunning
I don't give a shit about a "stunning" neighborhood. If I own property nobody else should have a say about its appearance.
The only exception I'd defend is a historic neighborhood where the goal is specifically to upkeep a historically accurate appearance of centuries ago.
But no, I will NEVER support an HOA anywhere else. These consortiums of Karens that patrol modern housing communities can go to hell.
I will plant the flowers I want, have the Halloween decorations I want, and do whatever woodworking I want in my front yard. What's the point of ownership if I can't own it?
People love to hate on HOAs but not all are bad, and in general they are a good example of self-governance, when the alternative is having people who DON'T live in your neighborhood regulate your neighborhood. Which would you prefer?
The facts don't seem to support your implied claim that being governed by people who do live in your neighborhood is better. At least not in Florida.
My own personal experience from my wife having owned one condo and she and I having owned four houses is not very encouraging for your claim either. Of the four HOAs involved, the two that were run entirely by management companies (i.e., by people with no personal connection to the neighborhood, with little or no activity from the community members on the Board that we could see) were fine, they kept the common areas maintained and basically did nothing else that affected us. The condo association, while it had a management company, also had a Board filled with community members who had nothing better to do than harass everyone else, which they did with an energy that would have been amazing if it had been directed towards something productive. The other HOA had no management company, just the Board of community members, and was very intrusive, and from what we learned from neighbors, had been a mess for the entire history of the community.
So we now live in a neighborhood with no HOA, we only have to deal with the municipality. We like it.
That's a false dichotomy. Everyone has to comply with laws regardless of what neighborhood they live in. The only difference is that the HOA has more stupid rules than the city. I'd rather have fewer rules.
The microcosm of subdivision-level governance where Karens/Kens with too much free time relish in power-tripping over their neighbors... All things equal, I'll take state, county, or city government over HOAs.
If HOAs are a good example of self-governance, I can only conclude that self-governance is bad.
The term "self-governance" has always seemed to me to be an oxymoron. On its face it means everyone governs themselves, and nobody governs other people. Which if the people are reasonable mature adults, works out fine. But the term is always used to refer to some kind of governing institution, which means some people are given the power to govern other people. That's not "self-governance".
Which is why Jefferson, who would agree with you, thought that a well-informed people (education) was critical and without it self-governance would fail. It's not an oxymoron - it just comes with caveats.
> "I think by far the most important bill in our whole code is that for the diffusion of knowledge among the people...whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government"
> "The most effectual means of preventing tyranny would be to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large"
> Jefferson, who would agree with you
No, he wouldn't, because he used "self-governance" to mean the thing that contradicts what it says on its face.
> It's not an oxymoron - it just comes with caveats.
The kind of "democratic" governance we actually have certainly comes with caveats, yes--caveats that have basically never been really dealt with. Jefferson's ideal of a "well-informed people" has never been achieved.
Jefferson did claim to believe that the US Federal government should be as minimal as possible--until he became President and found that it's actually kind of nice to be able to use that power to do things you feel like doing, whether they actually meet that minimal government ideal or not.
But in any case, none of that justifies describing the governance we actually have as "self-governance".
Democracy in the US has been withering together with the rise of the HOAs. An ironic correlation.
The implication is the people in my neighborhood know anything at all about what would make sense from a neighborhood regulatory standpoint. The sell is to drum up ancient peasant fears of the far away feudal lord vs local villagers gumptions, but the reality is usually denying genuine domain expertise besmirched by the mark of coming from a higher centralized government, in favor of rule by the loudest of the local bigots.
I'm not sure how much "genuine domain expertise" is actually embodied in most laws or regulations at any level of government. When I look at the US Code (or the Code of Federal Regulations), or state laws, or city or county municipal codes, I see some things that make sense, sure, but also a huge bunch of rules that are just arbitrary, and are only there because some special interest got a law or regulation written to benefit them at the expense of everyone else.
The one advantage of higher levels of government over HOAs is that they are generally impersonal. The faceless bureacrats that are processing your forms generally don't have any personal animus against you. They don't have to live next door to you and they don't have to care what your personal oddities are. They're just executing a bureaucratic process. Whereas with an HOA, every little petty personal grievance gets magnified, and so-called "governance" turns into endless feuding.
The implication is that you ought to move into a neighborhood with people who share your values.
How do you propose someone should vet a neighborhood, even allowing unlimited choices for housing availability? What universe do you even live in?
Buying a house is often a multi-decade commitment. A specific HOA might not be bad today, but what about 10 years from now?
That is a risk you freely accept when choosing to buy in an HOA. Co-ops, which are related but distinct, solve for this risk by requiring the co-op board to vote to approve any new residents. You have a co-op as an option for your living arrangements, as well. Optionality is a good thing.
As freely as you accept the terms of employment when you decide you need money to buy the food you eat.
I, and I suspect many other people here, prefer to live in countries where there are no neighbourhood associations that can dictate the look of your house, what colour of paint you must use, etc.
I mean, where I live, there are no HOAs, but the city council instead mandates those kinds of things via zoning rules.
I think I still prefer that to HOAs, because - The city is pretty good at taking care of public facilities - I only pay city tax, not city tax and HOA fees - The city has better things to do than walk around neighborhoods looking for violations, so enforcement is pretty lax - The city government is subject to checks and balances
I prefer to spend $1.25mil on a house that won't drop in value because my neighbor is not allowed to put up demon statues and paint the house pink, etc.
Instead you chose a house that has significantly less value because of home buyer's preference for houses with a HOA and reduction in mortgage payment they can afford because of the fees.
What's the problem? He gets the house at (what you think is) a lower price than could otherwise be had, and he gets to enjoy living even more
Opposition to HOA's appears to be growing, increasing the discount over time.
> People love to hate on HOAs but not all are bad, and in general they are a good example of self-governance, when the alternative is having people who DON'T live in your neighborhood regulate your neighborhood. Which would you prefer?
The latter, because I can kick them out of office, and because silly rules will impact a much larger number of people, and a large number can have their voices heard.
When your HOA has only 20-30 members, variance is high. It's a lot easier for people to abuse HOA power for their own personal gains.
You can very easily run to be part of your HOA leadership, and it is significantly easier to do than kicking an elected professional-politician out of office. The biggest issue with most HOA/COAs is that basically no one (especially the people who might have some qualifications) want to participate. This leaves only the people who want to be, frankly, petty little shits. It is not hard to exert influence over a group of 20-30 despondent neighbors.
> You can very easily run to be part of your HOA leadership
Yes, and then you find out just how petty petty politics can be.
The inconvenient truth, at least for HOA advocates, is that a community of 20-30 people, or even a hundred or so, does not need to be governed at the level of the community. Most people are reasonable and will respond to reasonable requests from neighbors if there is an issue, without having to drag in a higher authority at all. Those who are not reasonable, are not going to be magically made reasonable by having an HOA--indeed, as you admit, they're precisely the ones who are going to end up running the HOA. On balance, you're better off not having "governance" at all until you get to a larger population, like a town or a city.
You definitely need that level of governance if there are common elements which need to be funded and maintained (pools, parks, the building itself for condos)
> You definitely need that level of governance if there are common elements which need to be funded and maintained (pools, parks
Sure. I think very few, if any, people dispute that. If there actually are common facilities like pools, it makes sense to have a common pot of money everyone contributes into, to maintain those facilities. Just about everyone will agree with that.
How do you make the huge leap from that, into saying a HOA has any kind of right to demand what kinds of flowers or windowshades or decorations someone installs into their private (not shared!) property?
You need an organization to manage the common elements, yes. But the only "governance" that's required for that is...to manage the common elements. Which isn't really "governance", it's just management, and oversight of whoever is doing the managing. There's no need at all for the rest of the intrusive rules and regulations that HOAs impose in the name of "governance".
Management is governance. Someone needs to be empowered to make financial decisions and that requires rules for allocating that power at the minimum
> Management is governance.
Only in a very minimal sense. A management that is only empowered to maintain common areas of a community can't "govern" the community members except in the very narrow sense of enforcing whatever rules the community wants to have for the use of common areas. Which is just an aspect of the fact that the community as a whole owns the common areas and the owner makes the rules.
Such a management can't mess with community members about how often they cut their lawns, or what color they paint their house, etc. But that sort of micromanagement is what "governance" by HOAs ends up being when it goes beyond basic management of common areas.
The majority of detached houses have none of these.
Okay, well, nearly half of all HOAs are condominium communities which inherently have common elements. I’m not saying that detached SFHs with no common elements should be governed by HOAs; I was if anything implying the opposite
In the article, the associations that appear to be causing the most problems, at least in Florida, are condominium associations. So it might be worth reconsidering whether filling a "need" for such governance ends up being more trouble than it's worth--at least if it goes beyond just maintaining the common elements (which it seems like condo associations in Florida do).
> Okay, well, nearly half of all HOAs are condominium communities which inherently have common elements.
This varies widely depending on the city. In many cities, it's hard to find a detached house in a neighborhood (that isn't ghetto) that doesn't have an HOA.
I'm on my HOA board, and not because I want to be, I can tell you that.
I showed up to my first annual meeting where basically no one was there other than the president. He asked if I wanted to be on the board because they didn't have enough people participating. I asked what I'd have to do, and he said "just vote on things". I said OK, and he said the rules let him appoint members to vacancies (spoilers: the rules don't), so he "appointed" me on the spot.
At subsequent meetings, I discovered most of the board was completely disinterested in doing anything, other than the president who would probably fall under the "petty little shit" category, but he seemed like he knew what he was doing (spoilers: he didn't), so everyone pretty much just voted in favor of what he wanted to do. I was the only board member who worked from home, so I would be the only one on site to deal with things that involved vendors working on the property, so then I became the guy everyone expected to do everything.
The president got diagnosed with cancer and had to step down. He wanted me to be president, but I was like fuck that. The VP took the role, but she has pretty much done nothing and is clueless, so I keep being the one people expect to take the lead on everything.
I'm honestly tired of it and wished some competent people in the association would get on the board. There were massive mistakes I caught as a board member because I'm the only one who actually reads anything in the bylaws, CC&Rs, and all that shit. The HOA had been paying hundreds of dollars a year for decades on things that didn't need to be performed because our property management company misclassified us under some statute that didn't even apply to us, and nobody knew any better or even bothered to ask, "Hey, why the fuck are we actually doing this?"
I'll not say I'm a "good" board member. I don't care about enforcing house rules, and I don't want to get involved when people complain about their neighbors unless it's something that affects the association's financial health. The only reason I stay on is because I've done enough after-the-fact clean-up of the previous president's mess that I'm terrified of what insane things might happen if no one is keeping an eye on the other members. If you're in an HOA, I'd encourage getting involved to keep the crazies in check, at least for as long as you can stomach it.
Anyway, thanks for listening to my TED talk.
I was on a COA board for... close to 5 years. And definitely not because I wanted to be.
It's not a competition, but I'm pretty sure my "wow this is totally fucked up" stories beat yours ;)
So become president and disolve the HOA.
I mean.. you sound like a very awesome HOA board member! :)
> The biggest issue with most HOA/COAs is that basically no one (especially the people who might have some qualifications) want to participate.
That's an argument not to have HOAs, right?
> You can very easily run to be part of your HOA leadership, and it is significantly easier to do than kicking an elected professional-politician out of office.
In my so many decades of existence, I've yet had a reason to want to kick my mayor out of office. And none of the cities I've lived in have passed laws related to what I can do with my house that were particularly problematic.
But HOAs? The majority have clauses I dislike.
> The majority have clauses I dislike.
At least for the HOA I was a part of, the CC&Rs were nearly impossible to change. Getting elected didn’t give you the power to change them. They were a contract signed with each individual homeowner - changing them required getting consent from every homeowner individually.
Being on the board gave you power over how budget was allocated within those CC&Rs. I.E. the maintenance and upgrade of shared spaces. Vendor selection for violation detection/enforcement. Etc.
I’ve owned three places, two in HOAs and the currently place doesn’t have one. The HOAs were fine. I don’t miss them at all. At their best they just provided services (trash pickup, landscaping, etc.) that I can easily contract for myself.
If you don’t need an HOA (because there are actually shared common elements that need to be maintained) then why would you want one? And if you do need one, why would you want it to do anything beyond what’s required to maintain the shared bits?
People love to take extreme positions, because they’re easy and satisfies an emotional itch they have, not because they’re correct. The same can be said about government regulation which is analogically similar. You have those who fallaciously infer that, because government regulation can go wrong, it is therefore bad (contra abusus non tollit usum). Others take opposing socialist views.
People should instead think in terms of ends. Human beings are social animals. We have obligations toward others (here, the community). That includes obligations that concern the environment that the community occupies. So the fruitful focus of energy and debate should be what this means for the community (what are these obligations, and why) and if and how to regulate them.
How would foreclosing make the housing crisis worse? Wouldn't another family purchase the home thus creating a net zero?
It often takes years between "HOA puts lien on house" and "house is foreclosed and sold", and during that time the house is in limbo, the owner can't sell it and buyers can't buy it.
Between the foreclosure and sale, who is paying to bring the property up to HOA code?
The party who foreclosed the house and is currently selling it. Who else could it be?
Why would you assume that? There’s no prohibition on selling a home with code deficiencies as long as you disclose them.
Not only that, buying these types of HOA foreclosures can also come with other liens that are not disclosed at auction.
Right, but such things tend to knock down the sale price by approximately the amount to cure.
Maybe the buyer after the price is inflated by the extra cost that was unnecessarily incurred by the HOA
But that waters down the argument to the point of meaningless. For instance, did the egg shortage make the housing crisis worse, because every potential homebuyer has less money to buy a house?
I mean, if someone legally forced the homeowner to pay sell the house to them because there was a clause that required the owner to pay tens of thousands of dollars for expensive eggs and then sold the house again after and hoped to recoup the costs, then sure
(My comment is about detached houses).
I (thankfully) live in a neighborhood without an HOA. Just one block away, there is an HOA. No reason to prefer that street (and home values aren't higher there).
This isn't an upper class neighborhood. It's mixed. Half of the residents are blue collar workers.
Over the years, I would think of reasons/annoyances where I'd say "Yes, while I'm glad I don't have an HOA, if we did have one it would take care of this or that annoying problem with the neighbor."
Then I spoke to friends who live in HOA neighborhoods and are on the HOA board. They told me clearly that "No, in practice, the HOA is not going to get involved in those (serious) matters. All they care about is the veneer (house appearance) and really petty rules." They also told me the purpose of the HOA was to justify its own existence. The owners get almost nothing for the funds they collect, other than a 3rd party company driving by and noting minor violations.
Another friend just had to spend $4000 to paint the front of his house. He's temporarily living in another state for a work assignment, and he and several others got notices that the HOA has decided to change the "look" of the neighborhood. Otherwise his house looked fine (not worn out paint or anything). I bet someone in the neighborhood has friends with a painting outfit.
I can stomach the idea of an HOA if they solved real problems (sanitation, etc), and not just appearances, but they don't. Even if it's in their bylaws, they don't enforce the serious stuff. Just the petty stuff.
Someone losing a home because they decided to have a window AC facing the street is plain immoral.
As someone who lives in an HOA, the purpose of it is to push responsibilities the city doesn't want to pay for onto us (even though we pay city taxes e.g. property and sales taxes). These include road maintenance and weed abatement. The predictable outcome of forcing a bunch of volunteers to be in charge of this stuff is that the final product is even worse than what the government manages, I.e. everything is constantly falling apart.
> road maintenance and weed abatement
I am completely unfamiliar with a world in which HOAs fix roads.
I have also never lived in a city whose government got rid of weeds. What even is “weed abatement”? (Joke: Is this some slang for getting rid of the local marijuana grow houses?)
In one area I lived in, there were legally defined "noxious weeds". Mostly invasive species that have several undesirable attributes.
One example is Musk Thistle. It grows extremely rapidly, reproduces at a rate that's unbelievable, and is very difficult to kill. In this heavily farmed region, a few of them growing in a roadside ditch can turn into tens/hundreds of thousands of them within a year. Not only do they outcompete just about any other plant including crops, but they have incredibly sharp barbs that injure livestock.
In publicly owned spaces or abandoned fields/lots, the county has people that searches for them and sprays them with a herbicide. If they're spotted on your private land, usually they'll notify you that you have X days to cut them down (before they flower and seed) or they'll come do it whether you want them to or not. Some counties will send a bill for this, some fund it from property taxes.
If you haven't lived in an area where they vigorously grow it sounds like a huge overreaction, but left uncontrolled because one neighbor isn't taking care of it, it can become impossible to keep it out of your yard. According to wikipedia, a single plant can produce 10,000 seeds that disperse through the wind and remain viable for decades in the soil. Even the desire to not have a painful rapidly reproducing weed in your yard aside, they can do incredible damage to cropland.
It's a shame though, it's a kinda pretty flower. Imagine a vivid pink sunflower.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carduus_nutans
In WA we have enormous problems with Himalayan blackberries and scotch broom. When they get a toehold, they take over and leave a "dead zone" underneath. They're very hard to kill. The blackberries grow over 8 feet high and form a thicket that is a lot like razor wire.
Scotch broom seeds will also be viable up to 30 years.
Don't know if it's what gp is talking about, but in areas prone to wildfire, there are often laws about keeping brush and weeds a certain distance away from any structures.
Not only that but also a responsibility to build whatever fire breaks the fire department seems necessary on land the HOA owns. (This is land that can't be developed; land ownership becomes a liability.)
My HOA owns all the common area in the neighborhood, including the streets and parking spaces. So, all that upkeep (paint, seal, re-pave, snow removal, etc) gets paid out of a HOA dues. They also pay for landscaping of common areas, neighborhood lighting, and a few other things. The also organize trash collection (without which we'd have to buy individually and have a constant stream of trash trucks rolling through). And they have to carry insurance to cover that common property.
Who else is going to fix the roads? The county and state aren't going to, they don't own it. We seal the asphalt every 5-8 years and repave every 15-20 (I've only lived her 10 years, so those are very rough guesses).
> without which we'd have to buy individually and have a constant stream of trash trucks rolling through
Of course not, that's not how it works. The city contracts with a trash collector and they set a weekly schedule for each neighborhood.
> Who else is going to fix the roads?
Is this a trick question? The county of course. They own the roads.
HOAs have no purpose.
> The also organize trash collection (without which we'd have to buy individually and have a constant stream of trash trucks rolling through).
That's not a given. I live in a non-HOA area, and everyone on my street has trash collection from the same company on the same day. Thursday night, we set our carts out. Friday morning, we bring them in.
There's a wide middle between HOA bureaucracy and pure chaos.
In my (and most) neighborhoods, the city or county is responsible for all of that.
There is a single trash company serving our area. Everyone just has a contact with them.
I lived in a townhouse community with an HOA for a few years. They handled paving the roads and all the lawn mowing and landscaping (which included weeding, as well as replacing the tree outside my unit when it died).
Not that I'd ever want an HOA again, but that was nice and your experience isn't canonical.
In a reasonable place, the government handles the roads, and you can hire a landscaper pretty easily.
Hiring a landscaper that does a decent job and doesn't just collect a paycheck is surprisingly hard, especially on the budget that most HOAs try to get by on.
As far as the road part, I agree, doesn't mean that it's reality though.
If there is a gate then the roads behind the gate are privately owned and the HOA members pay thousands of dollars a year to maintain the roads.
Wrt weeds, I suspect you are simply unaware of all the maintenance tasks your city does. Consider yourself blessed!
There is no reason to stomach an HOA, even if they are solving real problems. If there are real problems that need solving the municipality can handle it or a local cooperative can in some special cases; these can exist without any enforcement or review board authority and they can handle everything else you'd need for a community/centrally managed for a neighborhood.
In my local area HOAs are apparently required by the city. We manage ours, a very small HOA, and recently were in discussion about removal. If we remove the HOA, the cost for each house will likely go up significantly because there's work needed to manage a detention pond that the city requires we manage. If the HOA dissolves, they city takes it over but charges much more for the same management.
Feels really odd, no one in our area actually wants an HOA. Yet i think people are going to flip when their HOA dues are suddenly required by the city and at much steeper rates (i imagine 2-4x the cost, our dues are quite small atm).
The idea is supposed to be that an HOA can be more efficient in taking care of problems. The municipality can be underfunded, etc, and take a long time to solve a problem.
In practice, HOAs generally don't do anything useful, though.
Our neighborhood actually saves the County money for property they don’t have to maintain (drainage/swales/mowing/etc) and provides community things like tennis courts, basketball courts, pools, playgrounds etc that the County doesn’t have to provide or maintain. It’s also cheaper for the HOA to do it
> It’s also cheaper for the HOA to do it
How?
The project can either be managed by a paid county employee in exchange for money or a volunteer HOA tyrant I mean member in exchange for power.
HOAs have direct control over spending and don’t need to meet the same bidding standards.
I'm all for paying dues for things like tennis courts, etc. These are truly common amenities.
My house, though, is not common property. Let the HOA rules cover only the common stuff.
Incidentally, local government where I live provides tennis courts, basketball courts, swimming pools and plenty of playgrounds. A few of these are within walking distance...
Where I live, it’s all within walking distance for the HOA to include a gym. You can also vote in the clubhouse
If it had a convenience store nearby, it would be like a little village
That’s always the pitch when privatizing government functions. It rarely works out.
Corruption that will get you sent to prison if your working for a muni is legal if you're running an HOA.
That’s the entire point of HOAs though; so that the city can offload those costs onto another organization AND collect the same revenue they would otherwise. At least where I live, it’s well understood among developers that the zoning and permitting process is how this is enforced.
The real, completely arbitrary thing that makes housing expensive is zoning. There is research on this. Zoning, especially in the long term, has enormous effects, including on things seemingly unrelated such as reducing construction productivity, reducing competition among construction firms (fewer contractors) and reducing housing supply (supply vs demand).
I think people generally don’t appreciate how restrictive zoning effectively is. It’s not just what you can build, but how big it is, layout things, and can even reach into aesthetics etc.
Friend of mine lives in an HOA that provides gym access to the community.
You'd think that means they have a gym on-site, but no; the HOA has a contract with a local health club to provide them with gym access. The club is owned by the builder's brother and the builder wrote the gym membership agreement into the HOA bylaws before turning it over to the community for management.
My friend is pretty understandably upset at this petty corruption, but every time it comes up, the HOA board would much rather deal with the "veneer" issues. Part of that is because the HOA board are busybodies, and part of that is because they're volunteers who have no desire to start a legal slap fight with the builder and his brother when they remove the (probably) unenforceable gym agreement from the bylaws.
John Oliver did a section on HOAs[0], and was brutal. They sound like a nightmare.
The segment ends with a funny "ad" about HOAs[1].
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrizmAo17Os
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrizmAo17Os&t=1273s
You have the neighbors you have, and if you want to live in a "free country" then you have to accept that, that street goes both ways.
That doesn't mean, you can't invite your neighbors over pizza or coffee, be friendly and one day mention that you think X, Y or Z and you wouldn't mind helping, and if they they aren't interested you'll totally respect that.
Don't be a Karen. But being considerate the old school way can go far. The rest you just have to live with :)
Not sure why you're replying to me. But mostly, sounds like you're agreeing with me!
Neighbors can and do do things that impinge on your life. Such as, playing loud music when you’re trying to sleep
(I have nothing to add to the HOA discussion, just saying that “live and let live” has limits)
When you say "live and let live" it seems impersonal or mutually exclusive. Like "they do their thing, you do yours, never the twain shall meet".
I think GP is advocating exercising social skills rather than "live and let live" without interaction between you.
Get to know each other - BBQ or similar. Sure, you find out or confirm you hate some of their views/hobbies. But it also means you develop human empathy and usually find things you do agree on.
Maybe you hate their loud car. But you both hate the climbing vine on the fenceline and could spend a saturday morning fixing that together.
I can prompt an LLM to refute this and it would give me 5 reasons HOAs are making things better. Hard to read this and really come away with a sense of what the truth is. HOAs and homeowners have always been at odds but HOAs do provide some benefit in large communities. I hardly feel like they are making the “home crisis” worse.
You can prompt an llm and make it give you 5 reasons for any argument. LLMs are very good at writing highly convincing things that sound logical but may or may not be based in reality.
Would be better to say "I can run a research agent session and it can pull 5 data trends and papers that show the HOA are making things better" (I dont know if this is true and I did not do it)
I don't really think HOAs are the biggest driver of home prices/availbility one way or the other though.
I think that's his point as this article reads like that exact prompt. Pure LLM garbage.
My whole point is that you can run this loop endlessly, come away with a lot of articles, yet be no where nearer to anything valuable.
And this is of the typical quality of what you’d get.
80% incoherent narration of random numbers, all down to the 1’s place so it looks super duper precise and impressive if you squint and don’t think too hard, like the “author” seems to have done.
To an extent they might make sense where there are shared facilities that need to be funded, like a swimming pool or something. Most of what they seem to do is just bullshit though.
You can accomplish this without an HOA, also. That’s just a non-profit. The idea that deed restrictions and dues are tied together is a serious overstep, in my opinion.
Yes. I lived in an HOA neighborhood in Texas that was fine. Dues were $25/month, and from that we got a nice community pool, and a legitimately nice Christmas party: they’d rent food trucks that were pre-paid, put up a Santa village, bring in VR rides, etc. All paid for from dues. They also really did not bother you if you were making an attempt at keeping your place looking decent.
Then I moved to one in North Carolina that was god-awful. Dues started at $65/month and went up every year. They’d send out neighborhood reminders that a pressure-washing service would be in the neighborhood next week if anyone wanted to hire them; anyone who didn’t got notices a few weeks later that they needed to pressure-wash their driveway and/or house. I also had to buy a specific brand and sheen of paint to repaint my mailbox; of course, the lettering was only available from a single supplier.
I now live on an acre lot that sits between two neighborhoods. I have no HOA, and it is glorious.
> Then I moved to one in North Carolina that was god-awful. Dues started at $65/month and went up every year. They’d send out neighborhood reminders that a pressure-washing service would be in the neighborhood next week if anyone wanted to hire them; anyone who didn’t got notices a few weeks later that they needed to pressure-wash their driveway and/or house. I also had to buy a specific brand and sheen of paint to repaint my mailbox; of course, the lettering was only available from a single supplier.
There really needs to be a way to harm organizations that do this. The HOA system is setup where the organization is protected and given the ability to make these kinds of rules. The only real option you have in that is you have to pawn the property off to some poor sucker that will also run into this issue later.
I live on a shared driveway with two other neighbors. The zoning laws in my town require an HOA for any shared driveways. So I technically live under an HOA. But we’ve all agreed to not fund it or bring it to life in any way. We just work out the shared responsibilities of the driveway informally over a bottle of whiskey.
Seems like an excellent way to resolve shared responsibilities.
>To an extent they might make sense where there are shared facilities that need to be funded, like a swimming pool or something. Most of what they seem to do is just bullshit though.
You can say the exact same about the government. To be clear, are you in favor of more liberty for homeowners, or are you in favor of the government stepping in to regulate HOAs?
The purpose of the system is what it does - providing retirees with even faker jobs than they gave up to go on vacation paid by the fools that still work.
> I can prompt an LLM to refute this and it would give me 5 reasons ... Hard to read this and really come away with a sense of what the truth is.
Are you arguing a meta point that there is no such thing as truth because LLMs can make you any counter argument to you want? That seems bleak. Argue against the actual points of the article.
Sorry, I'm not going to spend an hour reading every LLM article to figure out if its truthy, and then come up with the counter arguments against it, and on and on. The whole point of a human source is that depending on the source, I can already trust that they did some leg work to get the data and do the research, and they already have something to their name that I can trust. LLMs write in such a way that everything looks believable, so you spend 10x the time trying to find what is false.
We're just talking about one article here, but its an ocean of garbage being generated out there, yeah...go argue against all those and you'll waste your whole life.
What points? Does the article make any points? I couldn't find any. For instance, point 1 ends with
"A foreclosure suit is not a lost home — most end when the owner, or the owner's lender, pays — but the pressure is the point."
Which makes no sense whatsoever. I thought they were making a housing crisis worse by forcing foreclosures, but now apparently "the pressure is the point." The point of what, exactly?
I can prompt and LLM to prove this and it gives me 5 reasons HOAs are making things worse.
Sorry, looks like OP already did that, I guess you'll need to find a new topic.
"HOAs and homeowners have always been at odds" might be the most succinct description of the problem that modern "homeowner associations" constitute.
That's not a reason to change your mind ... LLMs can refute anything you ask them to without thinking.
I wouldn’t want to live in a neighborhood without an HOA, especially in the south. If you don’t have an HOA like 30% of your neighbors are going to have a lot full of junk cars, houses patchily painted lavender and shitty unmowed front yards. However, I very carefully read all the fine print for what the HOA enforces and how much it costs before each home purchase. Some of them can be insane. I’ve seen up to $500 a month.
> houses patchily painted lavender
What's wrong with lavender? Why does everything have to be a boring tan or grey? You sound like the exact reason I would never buy a house with an HOA.
But this is great...there is a market for homes with HOAs and for homes without HOAs. The reason is clearly because homes that are more cookie cutter with standard features retain their value because there are fewer people on the market who want a lavender house. The HOA is partly responsible for upkeeping the homogeneity by enforcing some of these things, thereby keeping values stable. Depending on the HOA, the board can also be full of people on a power trip, but that's pretty dependent on the geographical area(looks like Florida may not be great) and case by case basis.
You care about unmowed frontyards? No wonder your country is going to shit if this is what you’re worried about.
That’s not an HOA thing, that’s a poverty thing.
Barring any guardrails, AI would tell me that the Holocaust had redeeming qualities if I asked it.
They are not truth or judgment machines.
Right...so why would I read something trying to convince me that HOAs are making the crisis worse, and actually be swayed by it?
Because you're a human and you can reassess judgements after absorbing information?
I guess you could be in a LLM, in which case you'd have to wait for retraining.
[flagged]
How does this add to the conversation?
The constant history lesson of what something was 80-90 years ago but they aren’t that way anymore but they were doesn’t advance the conversation especially when it has no impact on the actual topic.
Adding some context, that they were started out with pretty harmful intentions, to the discussion about how they are harmful today is very on topic.
> 80-90 years ago
Today's HOAs are very frequently involved in racial discrimination suits for violations of the Fair Housing Act.
>Today's HOAs are very frequently involved in racial discrimination suits for violations of the Fair Housing Act.
No they're not.
Sorry, that wasn't my opinion I was trying to debate, that's just a fact reported by HUD[1].
[1] https://www.hud.gov/sites/dfiles/FHEO/documents/FHEO%20Annua...
>Sorry, that wasn't my opinion
Ah, so it's a delusional belief not based on facts or reality.
>that's just a fact reported by HUD
Categorically false claim not made in your source. The linked article makes zero claims about HOAs being "very frequently involved in racial discrimination suits for violations of the Fair Housing Act."
Even if I accepted the premise that racial segregation was the sole reason for their creation, if that's no longer their purpose, why does it matter?
you dont need to accept premises. As the "kids" like to say, go do your own research.
> HOAs exist as a way to enforce racial segregation
How do HOAs enforce racial segregation in monoethnic countries?
"HOAs are most frequently found in the United States, Japan, Canada, Australia, and the Philippines, and to some extent in other countries, such as New Zealand, Israel, Mauritius, South Africa, most of the countries of the European Union, such as Denmark, France, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, Ireland, Austria, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Greece, Sweden, Belgium, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Latvia, Lithuania, Cyprus, Luxembourg, Estonia, Slovakia and Slovenia, and some of the Latin American countries, such as Chile, Argentina, Brazil and Mexico."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeowner_association
The U.S., Canada, South Africa, Australia, and Brazil are not mono-ethnic countries.
No. The Democratic Party exists as a way to enforce racial segregation.
Thats no longer the reason they still persist. But their creation was nothing but.
The way to deal with a bad HOA is to get on the board. Normally, HOA boards attract the most petty minded people because most of the normal people living in the community are too busy but if a bunch of like-minded people get on the board, they can bring sanity back.
> if a bunch of like-minded people get on the board, they can bring sanity back.
This sounds good, but I don't think it generally works. The problem is that the petty minded people are also the ones who don't have anything else to do with their time, so they can expend all their effort on being petty. Whereas the normal people have other things to do with their lives, and simply don't have the time to deal with all the pettiness, and if they end up on the board, they now don't have a choice: their lives are basically hostage to the petty people who keep taking up their time with bogus issues that can't just be ignored because the structure of the HOA requires some kind of response.
Folks, I suggest before you comment, make it clear whether you're talking about HOAs for condos (shared structures), or detached houses. There's a big difference between the two.
Thanks to Governor Kotek, Oregon passed a bit of housing reform in 2025 that lets you build 'middle housing' despite anything an HOA says. I was really happy to go to Salem (Oregon's capital) to speak in favor of that.
Wait a gosh darn second... I was told, by our president no less, that only California had a housing crisis, and it was specifically caused by democrats. Is this the fake news I hear about?
It is republicans making the housing crisis worse. Grow up and eat your own shit for doing this to the rest of us.
Can someone explain to me (an European) what purpose HOAs serve? I mean do they actually have any benefits? I only know them from videos where people are being harassed by them
Look and feel of the house, paint, Pool Management, Park (if the community has one, and not the city managed one) Management, Yard Management (Trees, Plants, Mopping, Trimming), Trash (overflow vs contained, when to put trash out, when to take your trash can back, to keep it out of sight from street view and such) Regulations on whether a house can be given to AirBnb and such, Single Family staying vs multiple family, cars that can be parked on the road and you can ask Chatgpt for more if you want.
Overall, with America being a capitalist country (and Florida state being the best example of it), they want people to keep spending their money on something, and would never allow someone to just 'settle' and live a life without spending money. HOA, among other things property taxes and other city imposed taxes you are never "resting in peace" after retirement, but wait for your next notice to come - either from City or HOA.
As a fellow European, preventing the value of your house dropping because your neighbors didn’t clean up their front yard.
That does not have to be the responsibility of HOAs. I have had a period where my previous gardener quit and I was looking for a new one; some weeds in the front yard grew too tall. The city sent me an official reminder. This was in a neighborhood without HOAs.
but why would you need an HOA for that? If your neighbor drops their junk on the street you can just call the cops on them yourself
Because in many places, having things in your front yard is not a crime? It could be car parts, could be children's toys, could be trash. If you don't have a city that enforces that, HOA or a management company which the owner/renter goes into contract with is the best way to manage that.
If you want a simple one-sentence description, I would HOAs are an example of the old saying about a beautiful theory being spoiled by an ugly fact.
Same function as the laws about when you can mow in Germany, simply at a sub municipal level.
So they are able to enact their own laws? That's pretty different from Germany, where a municipality cannot override laws from higher courts.
A major strand in american conservatism is to believe, strongly, in laws being made as close to the people they apply to as possible. This is why there is such an undercurrent from that side of reducing the scope of the federal gov while allowing private entities to have their own rules on their areas.
The level to which German society proscribes behavior top down with the law simply wouldn’t be tolerated across the spectrum for the simple reason no one would agree what the rules should be, even if they share the European idea that everyone else should follow the rules they personally support.
So what's stopping people from creating their own indivicual law, everyone for him/herself? That would be the closest you can get to the people ;-)
Its laws in the way that a homeowner or renter signs a contract with the HOA that lists the rules that owners and renters must abide by or be penalized for breaking(fines, liens, not criminal I think)
In part it's the result of the American antigovernment tendency, at least in certain communities.
There are HOAs in Europe. The Wohnungseigentümergemeinschaft comes to mind.
That's different. They cant create new "laws", and they can't spy on you etc. Also that's just for one building usually (the building where you live in) not a whole community
HOAs can't create laws. They can create rules that are contract bound, but not anything criminal or physical based enforcement. (Taking away someone's home is civil)
They empower grumpy assholes to play police and impose their will on you.
Florida has a lot of people. The article never addresses the important questions - are these issues without merit?
If you want to live in an apartment, but - get the tax and investment advantages of owning then you need to do it via buying into a corporation of some sort. So they must exist.
If you are not paying on upkeep of your house they have to do something and that is going to be expensive, they have a right to get that money from whoever didn't pay not spread it out to the other owners.
While it isn't called foreclosure if you don't pay your property taxes your house will be foreclosed on. That an HOA can is just another entity.
There are a lot of people who live in Florida so I'd expect them to have a lot of HOAs. The only surprise is California doesn't beat Florida in this list, but that could well be a case of California has stupid laws and so you can't get the good parts of an HOA.
These is a lot to hate about HOAs. However the idea is sound and they can do good things. We need to stop the bad things that they do, but nothing that in the article points to anything bad.
Exactly. HOAs can be a pain in the butt but they aren't taking peoples homes away Willy nilly
The only way you get in that situation is by not paying your dues. Some HOAs may be more or less aggressive in handling it. But when you can't pay your dues, the other homeowners have to pay for your share
Dues are just a mandatory part of being in HOA that reflect the costs of the community
> The only way you get in that situation is by not paying your dues.
No, it isn't. You can also get in that situation by having the HOA cite you for a violation of its rules and regulations and you not fixing the violation.
An HOA acting in good faith will not do this unless it's actually necessary. But an HOA run by busybodies can cite you for things that aren't actually violations (and often what is or is not a violation can be subjective, because the language in the rules and regulations is often vague or ambiguous), but which you still have to take the time and energy to respond to--or else they can say you didn't fix the violation and put a lien on your house.
And if you do respond, now you're embroiled in an argument about whether what they cited you for actually is a violation or isn't, and you're arguing with bad faith actors who are not going to be reasonable. And who might put a lien on your house anyway--even though they're actually not supposed to do that if you're following the process established by the HOA (and often by state law) for disputes--and now you're faced with having to hire a lawyer and convince a judge that the lien should be dismissed.
It’s unfair not to pay your dues, but it’s also unfair to lose your house over a four-figure debt.
This is the result if people generally mistrust their local governments, defund them and then create little private villages (HOA governed). Turbo-capitalism wins once again ;)
This is an ad to buy free public records.
The problem is that municipalities absolutely love HOAs. They get all the tax revenue and get to wash their hands of most responsibilities involved with them. From their perspective, they get to found little vassal townships where they can say “it’s your problem” to little people problems like “there’s too many potholes in the road” and “that sewer lift station is making weird smells.”
Oh, but if you want to do anything, you still need to pay those permit and inspection fees! No, we won’t help you find a paver at a reasonable rate even though putting those contracts out to bid is what we do all day long.
What is really bullshit is that HOAs aren’t granted a property tax abatement for absorbing many municipal functions.
> From their perspective, they get to found little vassal townships where they can say “it’s your problem” to little people problems like “there’s too many potholes in the road” and “that sewer lift station is making weird smells.”
Roads and sewer are two things I've never seen an HOA have jurisdiction over; in every HOA community I've lived in, the municipality still owned the roads and the water and sewer infrastructure. The HOA was only responsible for things like mowing the grass in common areas and maintaining play equipment there.
I am a president of an association that handles all aspects of road maintenance (construction, sweeping, snow removal), a full commercial sewer lift station, stormwater drainage, trash / recycling, street lights, interfacing with utilities, forestry maintenance, and permitting along with general Q&A. We are a volunteer 3-person Department of Public Works.
Interesting. I wonder how common this is (as I said, I've never seen it, and I've owned homes in 3 different HOA communities in two different states).
I’ve lived in two HOAs and they both owned and maintained roads in the community. One of them was a new development, and making the roads private was probably a big reason the county required an HOA for it.
I understand why they do that though. Cities don't usually make enough money from property taxes to fund the infrastructure in the suburbs. That why they always seem to be on the verge of budget cuts, raising taxes, or bankruptcy.
And Florida plans on making it worse by cutting property tax limits.
Sweet f'kin christ that website is unreadable.
Maybe HOA's are bad, maybe they're good, but the intellectual laziness required to shit this kind of garbage out onto the internet in place of genuine thought and analysis will fuckin kill us all.
The main purpose of HOAs is to privatize government and taxes into managememt company hands
LLM written.
I'd rather not read LLM output, but this post is mostly a data presentation, not a written argument.
That's actually the more dangerous situation. For instance, a meta-analysis of 394 blog posts suggests that 94% of LLM-written data presentations use spurious statistics. In addition, 2513 posts out of 3408 analyzed were found to use the same fabricated data. Click here for more info on singles near you.
At this point I trust statistics in LLM output about as much as I do policy position statistics from humans; that is: you need to double check things either way.
That is certainly a good method to maintain epistemic hygiene. All things indeed do need to be double-checked before confirmation into the net. However, would you say you read your spam section and double-check each email as much as you do those in your inbox? Or do you use heuristics to dismiss some things more than you do others? If you do, in fact, expend the same energy on all sources of data then I understand your resistance to the idea of classification by source.
Wait, I'm not saying "all things" need equal checking. I'm saying that in policy arguments, I double check stats (or heavily down-weight them) regardless of their origin.
At this point, I've done enough policy work with AIs that my concern about hallucinated statistics is... reduced? I don't know what the right word is. I know what kinds of extended setups will get them to say crazy things and I know what kinds of narrow questions will generate genuinely reasonable and interesting answers. Meanwhile, I also know that every policy position paper ever written by a human has abused statistics in one way or another. So: six of one.
Certainly if you had prompted the LLM that's a reasonable position. But you believe that the addition of an LLM to a human who would otherwise abuse statistics to produce outcomes they desire is to result in statistics that are more likely to be true? So if I took a spam email and passed it through an LLM this would make it more reputable?
It would seem to me that the addition of the LLM to the mix is likely to result in output that is more likely to be aligned to the human writing it and less likely to be aligned with me, as the reader, conditional on the human being the kind who abuses statistics one way or another.
But everyone's epistemics are different. Reality will tell us over time where we land with our methods.
It’s literally like 90% text, and it’s not an insignificant amount of text.
It's text presenting data, for the most part, not text trying to emotively persuade, which is the norm in pieces like this.
Yea even reading the first couple paragraphs I can't really get a sense of what it's trying to say. Feels like generic claude output and doesn't really communicate what the "crisis" is or how it's getting "worse".
This comment effectively places a lien on the article - check the article to see the analogy!
The debt was the accusation. The frustration was the catalyst.
Home issue will never get solved unless houses are mandated by law to be a shelter, not an investment, or at least, an asset that depreciates over time same way japan did it. As long as housing is considered an investment, it will always go up to the point they become like now, their values become speculative rather than real actual cost, and that will open the doors for many monkey business to keep the speculative prices high. An authoritarian law to change housing to shelter rights will solve it, not a democratic one since majority of voters are home owners or who is in charge it’s in their interests to keep it that way. Will that happen? Not peacefully I assume, so many things are built on the current status, from banks interests and creating credits out of thin air, to countries economy based on keeping people near certain spots to milk more taxes, remember, one of the biggest reasons why WFH was attacked in such coordinated way is to protect the real-estate industry and the things built around it.
We all wanna blame HOAs. Nobody asks why HOA? The legal BS to set one up isn't free, so why?
The near universal proliferation of owner's associations and management groups and whatnot for developments larger than ~1ac (the EPA threshold, some states/towns have lower) is something you can lay at the feet of the Clean Water Act and it's implementation and precedents over the following decades.
Developers don't do anything that costs money, like set up an HOA, without a reason. The developers create the HOA because you need your >1ac residential development to pass stormwater permitting. While you theoretically could make each individual .25ac parcel you're putting a house on compliant as a standalone it's infinitely cheaper to just ignore all that, grade everything toward the road, dig a ditch, send the contents of the ditch through your stormwater treatment features, build in a little margin to those items, show the permitting authority the numbers that prove it passes with flying colors and when some jerk says "but what if X Y Z changes" you point to the excess you built in and tell them to GFY.
Now, where it really gets evil is when you start really pinching pennies or where the rules change over the course of the process making your numbers not work. Say you've got a lot of grade, a lot of rainfall, a lot of stormwater you gotta "treat". Well, you start adding rules to the HOA. Require certain parts of the lots remains grass or planter or whatever. Disallow patios, but do allow wood decks because the municipality considers those pervious, etc, etc. Or maybe the results you've got are marginal but you throw the bureaucrats a bone by saying you'll disallow car-ports and sheds in the HOA rules to prevent people from adding impervious surface. Or maybe you're uphill of some wetlands but not close enough to be regulated by default you promise to disallow working on cars and require people pick up their pet waste and not use lawn fertilizer or some other laundry list of certain things in order to make the local town's wetlands people comfortable not raising objection and claiming jurisdiction.
And of course, however these rules and plans shake out, the HOA is responsible for enforcing whatever those rules and requirements are in perpetuity so it's not like a pissed off majority can show up to vote "ok, this has gone too far, pack it in boys"
But nobody wants to talk about any of that because it's uncomfortable.
HOAs are great. They keep the AirBnB trash out.
Might as well just say "I want to control what other people do with their private property"
Short term renters, questionable people (thieves, renters who abuse the properties around them, people who use the property poorly [massive parties that bring guns + drunk loud people]), illegal activities (like off permit filming of commercial works), brings disproportionate problems to the neighbors. Airbnb is a lightning rod of people who do that. That's one of the reasons why hotels have weird rules in states and cities.
That’s not really a controversial idea and nearly everyone who owns a home where you can see your neighbor’s house wants to do that to some degree.
If you live in close proximity to other people, you should not be allowed to do whatever you want on your private property.
Pretty much every municipality already has laws that limit you in that manner.
If you live in an area covered by an HOA then you signed up for it, literally, like your signature is on the paperwork. I have zero sympathy.
I want to live in a neighborhood that doesn't allow short-term rentals, along with others who think the same way.
That is exactly what the people who live under HOAs want. I despise HOAs, but I'm happy that the kind of people who like HOAs have a community they can all congregate in. It keeps some of them from mingling with the rest of us.
You already can't do what ever you want with your own property.
I have a house. I have no HOA. I'm very happy with this situation and don't see any possible value that an HOA could add to this situation.
Funnily enough, there does seem to be a sort of wannabe HOA in my neighborhood that is always dropping things off in our mailbox asking for donations and telling us about events. I never give them any money, and never go to their events though, so either they don't provide any value or the value they provide apparently is not derived from them having any enforcement power.
If you have wonderful neighbors, HOAs are unnecessary.
If you have horrible neighbors you will wish you had one.
Unless those horrible neighbors are part of the HOA's board.
Or maybe I'd be circumspect to recognize that my neighbors having rights is just the price of me having rights, just like I'm not in favor of a police state even if it means that sometimes people will commit crimes. Who knows!
I have horrible neighbors and no HOA. I do not wish I was apart of an HOA.
And I have a house without a HOA but did go through a bunch of complicated (and expensive) easement agreements and survey definitions that LePage’s to a lot of loose-gooey hand shakes and outright mistakes over the years.
And you think that the solution to having to deal with other people making claims about your property is to just fully cede the jurisdiction of them?
I am by no means a fan of JOAS in general but things like the maintenance of private roads including winter plowing do need to be dealt with and while a couple of neighbors can probably get agreements drawn up for “only” $10K each, that only goes so far if more people are involved.
Now I don't trust HOAs but some of this is deceptive weasally writing.
> They foreclose on their own members, over debts that start small
There are members who refuse to pay special assessments or fees for the community. Given that's Flordia, theres an above average population that would believe "they aren't required to" even though they accepted it when starting. (yes there are abusive HOAs and there are non-sense fines.. and sometimes those nonsense fines come from people neglecting the property in a very bad situation)
It's your job to handle it when it's a small situation. Moving to the stage of liens takes more time to do that and then resolving that usually happens on sale or refinancing.
Sure, but it makes sense to research one you're about to buy into and there's a lot more to the site than this post. I clicked around some.
This site seems to provide some data that's compelling. I see some gaps in California and a couple of liens that mention FL in Los Angeles. Maybe it's a starting point if moving though. This kind of transparency is a good thing. Some HOAs are abusive.
> Now I don't trust HOAs but some of this is deceptive weasally writing.
No surprise, it reeks of being written by an LLM.
Highly suggested that it's influenced by forums who have reported poor situations by people that have been in them.