My mom was just telling me today about the adult children of some friends of hers, who spent $30k on what basically amounts to a shed. (Apparently you can wire it for electricity, but it doesn’t come that way, and forget about plumbing.) They plan to make it a home office now that they’re both working from home with two young kids and not enough bedrooms. It’s presumably cheaper than the alternatives of divorce or murder, but it didn’t sound like that great a deal to me-- can’t you buy a trailer that’s already set up to be livable for that kind of money? But maybe they have neighbors who would frown on that sort of thing.
Yep. Lots of neighborhoods require RV, boats and those things in covered enclosed garage type buildings.
Even the Tiny homes things are being regulated to the max. You can’t just throw up a shed and toss Granny in there.
I know someone who was gonna buy her Mom a real, but small manufactured home and put it in her back yard. The neighborhood balked. She wasn’t able to get clearance to do it, even though she owned a double lot in her sub-division.
Mom went to a elder neighborhood and rented til she died.
I hate neighborhoods and HOAs.
In California, due to the shortage of affordable housing, towns are being encouraged to update their zoning rules to allow “auxiliary dwellings” (aka “granny flats”, “mother in law apartments”, etc). My town just recently changed their rules to make such dwellings easier to build. I’m not sure if a trailer or tiny home in the backyard would be allowed under the new rules.
If it isnt your house, it isnt your business.
If a sufficient number agree with you, then yes. Front-entry garages are completely forbidden in my neighborhood. All driveways are required to wrap around the house, with the garage at the back only. It can have a side entrance instead of rear, but the plans must be approved by the HOA prior to construction. And as an errant neighbor of mine discovered, they will place a lien on your house and force a partial tear-down if you bypass them. The original covenants forbade all street parking as well. A car left in front of your house would earn you a visit from “the committee” and an eventual tow. But after the city annexed us, their laws overrode the HOA’s so street parking is permitted.
For the RV, I don’t think they’re ugly but the HOA does. They forbid any parking of trailers or RVs at all. There’s small time allowance to load up, but anything visible overnight is likely to earn you a nasty-gram. I have used mine as a temporary guest room for family, but I have a very tall fence and could hide it in the back yard. Recently the HOA has become even more aggressive, so I wouldn’t try that today. Once I parked my utility trailer with the 4 wheeler on it in the driveway overnight. Even though I left early the next morning for hunting, the HOA had already sniffed it out and I returned home to a letter scolding me for my transgressions. Never underestimate the determination of bored, retired people.
Look, it’s very simple. Wild HOAs do not roam the countryside taking over neighborhoods. Nobody has an HOA forced on them against their will.
If you want an HOA move into a community with an HOA.
If do you want an HOA move into a community without an HOA.
But what if I DON’T want an HOA? 
This the kind of stuff that pisses me off about HOA’s, even just reading it. ISTM, if you’re that concerned about what your neighbor’s back yard looks like or what’s parked in their driveway, you’d be better off moving to a different neighborhood where people feel the same way, instead of moving to one where people are forced to feel the same way as the HOA board.
I’m always surprised they’re even legal. Not that it’s legal for some random person to enforce a contract you signed, but that you can buy a house and be forced to join an HOA.
It would be like buying a house and finding out it falls under the jurisdiction of the apartment complex across the street and you’re therefore required to abide by their rules. No painting the walls, no stains on the carpet, no pets, advanced permission if a guest stays more than a week. If you bought a house, why does someone else get to control what you do there?
How do you know if a community has an HOA before you move in? Does someone have to disclose it to you? In which case, I’d remind the viewers at home that it’s things that are typically considered bad that are required to be disclosed, good things are advertised.
Where I live, HOA is one of the things on the standard disclosure form a realator (or is that Realator?) gives you when you look serious about a house.
As to your good/bad statement - so people like living in an HOA because they do the social pressure thing to keep the place up to standard (whatever that standard may be). I’m in an HOA, and it is fairly innocuous. It contracts for snow removal and mowing of common areas, and (mostly) stays out of the way beyond that. A lot of that MYOB is down to the current board, of course - previously we had a guy who liked to drive around and find infractions. He mostly just dropped notes in mailboxes, and people kind of just ignored him.
There is a scaling issue. One person renting out a tiny house in their backyard is great. If every lot in the neighborhood does it, there needs to be infrastructure added: where will these people park? Do we need more schools? Do we need more garbage trucks, more frequent street repairs?
These are answerable questions, but it’s a not a little thing. We are on smallish lots here (like, 75 x 130 ft). I wouldn’t be happy if both my neighbors added a second family in the backyard. That would feel very crowded, and it’s hard to imagine life wouldn’t be more noisy.
I think another issue specifically with RVs and trailers is that they are like boats: they are always falling apart unless you are fighting against it. Once you’ve decided you don’t care if the RV ever rolls again, there’s lot of things you may stop caring about, regarding maintenance. So it’s not long before the RV looks bad–they show dirt easily, and if they start to get saggy and dirty, it is pretty unattractive. So yeah, if I was touring a house to buy and overlooking my own backyard was a decrepit looking RV that I was told the neighbor used as “an extra room, and for guests”, I would keep looking.
That sounds, to me, what is generally taken care of by the city. If you have common areas, that the city doesn’t maintain, it sounds like either the entire neighborhood is privately owned (which would be a different situation) or the neighborhood has reached out to the city and agreed to take on these things themselves, likely in return for lower property taxes.
Again, isn’t that a city issue? If there’s people living in your backyard, they’re going to bump the population of the city, which in turn will add to the budget for the items you listed. Plus, if people are building actual tiny houses or putting on additions (as opposed to just sticking an RV back there), their property value will go up, which means they’ll pay more in property taxes.
I’m sure this isn’t the case for all municipalities, but plenty of them have various laws on the books that make it possible for them to deal with inoperable or abandoned vehicles on private property.
So you don’t object to organizations telling people what to do with private property, you just think those should be municipal instead of local?
Yes. The law requires that you are given all of the documents, usually something like 30 days before closing.
I created a new thread about HOAs to take this hijack to its own thread.
Not to me it doesn’t. If there’s more than one person in a house, surely one of them might want some peace and quiet at the same time another might want to do something that makes noise. Depending on the size and layout of the house, it can be tough to accommodate both desires, but this seems to me like a great way to do it.
My only concern for the RV sitting in someone’s yard is how the sewage is being handled.
Moderator Note
The HOA discussion is relevant, but it’s becoming a bit too much for this thread. If you want to discuss the pros and cons of HOAs, please take that discussion to another thread (see the link that CookingWithGas posted to a new thread created just for this purpose).
I don’t like cleaning, so I could see the appeal of cleaning the house once, with mild upkeep like dusting, and living like a slob in the RV. My occasional guests could marvel at how clean my house is. Just don’t look in the RV.
a lot of people park their RV or boat at a place with mini storage units. I don’t know if you have to rent a unit to also park RV there, probably not.
I actually think its rather clever, especially now. I don’t care how much you love someone, after a while, you learn that there really is such a thing as too much togetherness.
I wouldn’t think that parking a RV in a yard for Grandma to live in would be such a good plan. RV’s aren’t designed to be lived in permanently so the heating and cooling costs would be pretty high.
I used to live down the street from someone who had a small Airstream camp trailer in his back yard. He said it was his “Fortress of Solitude” and he bought it when his first (of 4) daughter went into puberty. \