It seems like the Homeowner’s Association (HOA) is America’s favorite bugaboo/punching bag these days; an evil presence that knows no bounds and doesn’t care if you’re Republican or Democrat - it will still find a way to ensnare you, if you are foolish enough to belong to one.
I do not, as there aren’t any in my little lower-middle-class Ozark Mountain mining town; and indeed, so bereft is our town of quality-of-life regulations (or basic manners) that I’ve seen rotting deer carcasses hanging from trees. And as I look towards moving to St. Louis in the next decade or so, I am specifically avoiding listings that have an HOA. I don’t want the expense or the headache.
You, Dopers: do you belong to an HOA? Does it suck? Or have you done like me and deliberately avoided living in them?
I’m in one. I like it.
I knew what it was going into it and I’m fine with it’s restrictions. I’m not all that interested in “doing what I want because it’s mine” to the outside of my house and property and I do like that my neighbors share the same philosophy.
Our development had an HOA from the beginning and everyone building or moving in is well aware of it’s existence. It does get annoying to be on the neighborhood facebook page and find people complaining about it when they want to build a pole barn out back, or park their boat on the driveway all year, or decide not to mow their lawn for a month, and they want to start a mob with “hey, how many votes do we need to get rid of the HOA!”
I used to live in a condo with a very small HOA, which for a while I liked - the people on the board were fixated on minor issues and lacked the cohesion to do anything really stupid. They would argue about what flowers to plant, etc.
But then the handful of people who could actually get something done (paying bills, setting up insurance) left the board and everything went downhill due to neglect.
I recently moved to another state, another condo and a new HOA. Much bigger organization and so far it seems to be well run. One of the factors that attracted me is that several basic utilities, such as heat and water, are included in the HOA fee.
Ironically, my problem now is that the heat is too high even when on the lowest setting. This is the opposite of what I lived with for many years in my other place. So this winter I’m going to be opening windows I guess. First world problem.
I live in a community with an HOA. The HOA works with a management company to collect a monthly fee from every household, which they use to hire a crew that cuts the grass and removes the snow. I think they also pay the electricity for the street lighting.
Once or twice a year they have a Zoom meeting open to all the households to go over all of this. About half attend. There is a Board of homeowners who interact with the management company.
That’s about it really, as far as i know. All quite banal.
Our 2 previous houses were in HOAs. Our current one is not. The HOAs weren’t evil but the herding cats aspect got old. If your chair doesn’t adhere strictly to Robert’s Rules of Order meetings can be interminable. Plus, me being in construction it was inevitable that I would be on the design review board. Now we have 18 acres and can more or less do whatever we want.
I’ve always been of the opinion that all HOAs are inherently evil. I would never leave my Christmas lights up year-round, or have a broken down pickup sitting in my front yard, or paint my house bright pink. But, dammit, I won’t have some uppity organization telling me I can’t do these things to my house.
When my wife and I were first-time buyers ten years ago, we couldn’t afford a house in the area, so we decided to buy in a townhome complex, and put up with the HOA. It mostly hasn’t been that bad, until the last couple of years. Way long story, but less than a year ago, we (and everyone else in the complex) narrowly escaped being hit with a $70K assessment. That’s per unit, not the total. We decided to GTFO before the HOA rears its ugly head again. Our place has been on the market for three or four months, but the HOA fees are so outrageously high, we’re not getting many bites.
I have only lived in one HOA and I think they are HIGHLY dependent on the people running it. When I first moved it they were awful. I literally once saw them in my front yard once with a ruler measuring my grass. They tried to fight me on the small satellite dish I got when I moved it which they were not legally permitted to do. After being issued multiple fines and emails back and forth were I cited the law to them, I finally did what I should have started with and forwarded all the emails to the cable company and let their lawyers handle it.
I went through the same thing when I got solar panels installed on my roof with solar city except I let them handle it from the beginning. I found out from a friend on the committee that a neighbor who was the chairmen tried to get everyone to agree to levee a fee on the HOA so they could hire a lawyer to fight it. (He was a Republican who didn’t believe in global warming and said solar panels on my house would reduce his house’s property values.) Of course that is moronic. Ask any realter and they will tell you the more your neighbors houses rise the more yours will rise.
The stupidity of the proposed fee and his actions got all of the committee except for my friend removed at the next election. From that point on the HOA worked as intented. They only interfered if it mattered. They no longer used rulers on grass. ie if you need a ruler than obviously the grass isn’t long enough to matter.
Our HOA is unique. Membership and dues are optional, but adhering to the covenants is required.
This setup works pretty well IMO. Strutting little Napoleons who try to wield too much power tend to bankrupt the HOA that year, since every resident they annoy stops paying. Once the control freaks either settle or leave, the residents return to paying.
It forces the HOA to stick to policies that please everyone, without the idiotic stuff like measuring grass height that I hear about elsewhere. Example: One house on the next street decided to let their relatives stay out front in an RV – for months. HOA got involved and the eyesore (with leaking sewer tanks) was quickly removed. Parking your RV for a few hours or even overnight for loading doesn’t rate a response. They seem to navigate a reasonable path for the most part.
I’m in one. I used to like it. There is currently a power struggle between lifelong residents and new arrivals. It’s making everyone suffer. I moved here because it is a lake community and the amenities allow me to store and use my sailboat at no additional cost. I have no intention of leaving, because that is still important to me. But I’m a lot less open to socializing with and helping out my neighbors than I was a few years ago. I’m hoping the storms will pass and things will change for the better. I’m also prepared to become more of a recluse if I have to.
The OP is right that it is very popular these days to gripe about them but the reality is they are mostly fine and most people in them are fine with them.
I live in an HOA but because I live in a hi-rise that is a necessity. There really is no way to have a thousand people all live in one building without one. If there are any shared things that need maintaining (common areas, road maintenance and so on) an HOA is almost a requirement.
Eh. I grew up in a community with no HOA but a covenant, only occasionally an issue in the neighborhood.
I now live in a house (not condo) in an HOA neighborhood, and they’re pretty chill. There’s a pretty large exterior house color palette and the front yard gets mowed and edged. The HOA was helpful in the neighbors’ court case against the drug-dealing house with graffiti all over it, and addicts crashing there, stealing, and threatening the neighbors. The only complaint I’ve seen against the HOA was that the city (not the HOA) towed a guy’s truck and the HOA was somehow to blame. People pointed out that the truck had moss growing inside it, blocked view of an intersection, and had been stationary for months, so I can’t get too exercised about that. Our build doesn’t have solar panels or enclosed porches, but others around us do, so at some point we’ll probably ask to do those projects. Meanwhile, the HOA just dedicated some funds to a community project and asked us first to come up with ideas, then to vote on the feasible ones.
I feel like HOAs are a microcosm of everything that’s wrong with US democracy:
Everyone pays, but not everyone’s viewpoint is fairly represented
There’s little actual participation in the demographic process and incumbents just tend to stay in power and create good-old-boy networks
The incumbents are too often micromanaging “Karen” types who enjoy authoritarian freakouts
The leadership structure strongly favors non-representative homeowners who have the extra time and resources to play yard politics, vs working households too busy to deal with that bullshit
Enforcement is selective and subject to nepotism
It subjects individual households to a tyranny of a (largely silent) majority — nobody cares much until it affects their individual home, so nobody speaks up for anybody else
HoAs only work if your neighbors don’t suck. But if your neighbors didn’t suck, you wouldn’t need a HoA to begin with. Adding the grass mafia into the mix won’t magically fix that…
I live in a condo, in a 30-unit building. We have a management company that collects the money and is responsible for day-to-day payments, maintenance and repairs, and in lieu of a board, we have a representative called Moshe who’s been trying to quit for years and we keep on begging him to stay on. Condo owners hold a meeting very six months, where the two crazy cat ladies shout at Moshe and we all vote on stuff like re-paving the parking ramp, painting the building and changing the elevator maintenance company again.
There’s no micromanagement by anyone and no politics (despite what the crazy cat ladies claim). Anyway, it’s an apartment building. What can they criticize, our front doors? Flags in our windows? I’d lie to see someone try.
The heat is on from October 1 through May 1 and it is a “hydronic system”. It’s supposed to shut off automatically when the ambient temp is above 65 F, and the recommendation is to not have it turned completely off in your unit so the mechanism doesn’t get stuck.
First time I’ve seen this sort of system. So I have it set as low as possible, but it’s pretty warm. Maybe it will be better when the temps drop in the winter. But again, I prefer this problem to what I used to have.
The overwhelming majority of HOAs are benign and needed for the specific neighborhood. My ex-wife lives in a condo complex with landscaping, an area with a pool and a hot tub and connected units with shared roofs. The fees go to maintain those shared things. Trees get trimmed, lawns get mowed, the pool gets treated and repaired and occasionally the roofs are replaced. You couldn’t do that without someone managing it. All of the units look the same and I suppose you couldn’t paint yours purple but they moved into a place with sameness and that’s the expectation.
Gotta disagree. As others have mentioned I live in a condo and condo HOAs are 100% necessary. My complex has several five-story buildings with over 300 units total in a cluster with garages, a pool, a gym, tennis courts, a clubhouse, community gardens and an extensive carefully landscaped, irrigated footprint that needs to be regularly attended to. All of that external infrastructure requires a bureaucracy to manage it (in this case to pay for and oversee a contracted management company for the hands on stuff, as well as do long-term planning) and needs the regular funding to do so. Night-time security patrols, gardeners, maintenance crews to haul garbage/recycling and clean and maintain community areas like lobbies and halls. Coordinating state mandated in-unit checks like laundry vents (every three years I think) and sprinklers/fire alarms (annually). The list goes on and on.
In that context my HOA is a.) quite expensive (but it includes the garbage, recycling and water bills) b.) pretty well-managed. Are there times I disagree with the decisions made? On a small scale, sure. But overall they’re financially responsible and do a good and slightly thankless job. I’ve heard little or nothing in the way of targeted harassment or petty martinets. Considering much of the community is actually retired or close to it, there are no shortage of people with free time to turn on the HOA committee and lynch them if they became tyrannical. But there are no struggles for power because they frankly can’t get enough people to volunteer to serve in the first place. The elections just serve as the necessary quorum to legally elect the only people bothering to run. My brother who has owned several condos thinks this complex is one of the most financially transparent and best run ones he’s seen (he and his wife just bought a unit with eyes towards eventually retiring in it).
So do you need HOAs? Sometimes, yes. Can you have good ones? Sure. Are bad ones pretty bad? Oh, fuck yes.
Is there a difference then between HoAs for condos/apartments/complex, vs neighborhood HoAs for single-family dwellings with few if any shared resources?
Of course. Though the lines can blur. In CA there are many, many, many planned communities ('little boxes, little boxes’) of single-family homes where it is a gated community with security and community-maintained green strips, roads, artificial water features and such. In those there are shared resources as well, just fewer of them. Some of them (particularly the wealthy ones) are nice enough, many are boringly sterile little anthills.
But of course a big reason for single-family community HOAs is the maintenance of property values. It is harder to sell a house and you will get less for it when the neighbor has two junked cars on the lawn with an upside down pentagram spay-painted in red on the side of their neon-purple home with flaking paint and hole in the roof. So the HOA was born to reign in that phenomena. As usual the cure can be nearly as bad or at times worse than disease. One person’s harmless convenience becomes another petty tyrant’s potential blight. What do you mean I can’t park my car in my own driveway?
Myself? I don’t think I’d prefer to buy a single-family home in an HOA unless I was a.) so rich and a well-enough known celebrity such that I needed the minor added security of a gated community or b.) I was certain it was a very mellow and well-run HOA. Generally I’d probably rather avoid them otherwise. But it’s not a deal-breaker so much as just another thing to research and consider.