If you also think about the damnable aesthetic sameness of many of these developments, it’s kind of a recipe for disaster.
In the early days, the developer benefits from the ‘picture-perfect’ quality of these little boxes made of ticky-tacky and the elysian, Norman Rockwell-esque existence that they portend.
But that sameness makes anything and everything else stick out like a sore thumb: long-ish grass, a different color paint, a basketball backboard over the garage, curtains [EGADS!] instead of blinds, that work truck, your beloved 1972 Ford F100 into which you have poured blood, sweat, and tears, and which is nearly Pebble Beach worthy, leaving your garage door open during the day (think of the children !!), etc., etc.
Having eight floor plans and five paint schemes doesn’t look like diversity when you drive past it. Having street after street of “which house is ours ??” is a uniformity that pays dividends to the builder (fewer SKUs = cheaper construction costs) but:
- Nobody ever expresses a preference for vanilla-appearing houses, and
- Nothing says those savings are passed along to the buyer in a market-driven economy, and
- Once you own, you have to live with it, and some neighbor is bound to obsess over the exact Sherwin-Williams color that you used to stain your back fence, even though 99 out of 100 people would swear it looks like all the others.
Look around at older, more established, pre-HOA neighborhoods. There’s no end of diversity. It’s just harder to spot individual differences because of the surfeit of differences, large and small.
And that’s if we don’t get into the notion that – much like government – HOA governance often attracts the wrong kind of people.
You want good, decent, ethical, objective, fair-minded, responsible, rational, thoughtful, and relatively seasoned people on the Board of Directors for the HOA in your neighborhood.
But not only do those people tend not to volunteer; they also tend not to even attend meetings, which far too often look like the unmoderated comments section on your local newspaper’s website.
And … yeah … municipalities salivate at the thought of collecting property taxes from all of these homeowners – people who are also paying HOA fees – and not having to deliver services to them.
Often, the municipality washes their hands of the whole community, even on things that are commonly Police non-emergency matters or City Code Enforcement issues.
“Take it up with your Homeowners Association” is a common refrain.
And then there’s the perverse influence of industry lobbying organization, Community Association Institute and the work they do to further enhance the judicial advantages of the associations over the individual homeowner.
Things like the Business Judgment Rule which was originally promulgated to protect corporate officers from charges of malfeasance by raising the bar. You had to prove that they acted in bad faith in order to prevail.
But the Business Judgment Rule has been applied to HOA Boards as “Judicial Deference,” meaning that Courts in many states refuse to 'substitute their judgment for the judgment of an HOA Board."
HOAs can be exceedingly difficult to beat in Court, regardless of how meritorious your claim.
Meanwhile, your community hates your guts.
And Norman Rockwell is nowhere to be found.
My mother’s mired in one of these things right now. A 50 year old complex that didn’t bother to squirrel away any reserves for galvanized plumbing with a lifespan of 30-50 years.
And the leaks just keep on coming.
And the HOA is being shockingly unreasonable, preferring to just “deal with the leaks” as they arise, rather than bite the bullet and put a plan in place to re-pipe the complex, that requiring the cojones to face your neighbors and admit that – somebody, somewhere, at some point in time (maybe including the speaker) – fucked up, and didn’t plan for this.
But, hey: how about those reasonable monthly HOA fees, eh ?
Which causes immeasurable pain for the affected homeowner – pain, money, time, stress, and – in my mother’s case – being dropped by your insurance company for “excessive claims and the general lack of appropriate upkeep of the property’s common areas (ie, the plumbing).”
If you don’t like the way a company in which you’re invested is run, you click the mouse a few times and sell your shares.
Bam. You’re out.
Getting out of your home for similar and substantive reasons is profoundly more difficult – nigh unto impossible for some.
And I won’t bother with the long list of investors who make it known that they’re ready to snap up properties for cash when a homeowner is in default. The HOA model is rife with perverse incentives.
If you’re in an HOA that is running smoothly, count your blessings. It could easily change tomorrow, though.