The paper specifically included the costs and is saying that homes with HOAs cost 4% more than the equivalent without – that there is 4% overhead.
It’s also pretty clear that it varies a lot by region.
As @hajario said early on, an HOA is necessary for any shared spaces (roofs, greenery, driveways). Some of those spaces, like a pool or tennis court, are extras and should cost more. But as @Ann_Hedonia said sometimes you end up paying for something twice, like snow plowing.
One thing that makes it hard to uniformly regulate HOAs is that there’s a lot of ground covered by that term. An HOA can be anything between the legal agreement governing three people who each own one floor of a triple-decker, and a quasi governmental agency that overseas the esthetics of a development with hundreds of free-standing houses. It seems pretty inappropriate for the former to be required to hire an independent parliamentarian, for instance.
It all works on paper til one smart ass pulls a fast one and slips in a meeting so he can stay president.
Or his friend on the board walks the neighborhood looking for minor infractions to ding folks on.
Of course there is gonna be the bad neighbor who breaks all the rules.
No one died if a truck was parked on a drive overnight. Or a trash can stayed on the curb 20 minutes late.
The HOAs need to have some power but maybe some leeway to a homeowner who’s never broken the rules and was sick and couldn’t get to the over full mailbox. That one time.
You might be interested…
Two things.
@CaveMike : I’ve been skimming that paper you linked. It’s fascinating. I would equate the quest the authors were on with Randomized Controlled Trials in medicine – the very best we have, but relatively weak sauce where individual physiology is infinitely variable.
Some issues that caught my eye so far, basically copied verbatim from my ‘notes in the margin:’
Importantly: I think the authors took A Big Swing at an incredibly complex and multifactorial question and did an excellent job. I’m wholly unconvinced, though, that they succeeded in adequately handling the innumerable confounding variables.
But I’m not all the way through the paper yet 
The second issue is ‘double taxation.’ @Dinsdale : I came across a couple more sources:
The 3rd and 4th sources are the TL;DR options
Amen.
This is the very definition of an edge case, but I knew this woman. Her death was totally preventable:
Low probability.
High consequence.
About trash cans.
The HOA industry trade group likes to tout satisfaction number that include the “neutrals” as basically all happy campers.
But – as in politics – there’s generally a division (among Independents): leans left, leans right.
Absent that granular division, ‘neutral’ HOA homeowners are like Schrödinger’s Homeowner – can be thought of as being either happy or unhappy.
If, as the trade group does, I lay claim to the neutrals, then about 33% of HOA homeowners are either very unhappy, unhappy, or neutral.
Which leaves a whole lot of room for improvement.
And why is that such a scary proposition?
I agree heartily, yet those people persist in maintaining that HOAs are evil!
Even the HOA in the OP allows for rule changes if enough people are bothered. Sure, it is a high hurdle, but if everyone thought the board as bad as the complainants, they COULD change things. And eventually, there will be an election for the board. So if so many people disfavor the current board… So there is the possibility that the individuals who complain about their HOAs are not in the overwhelming majority - even within their development. Maybe some people don’t care for people doing woodworking and car repair in their garages. (If the guy were doing those things with the garage door closed, I wonder how those activities were visible from the street?)
Of course, the property owner is not even living in the house. So the owner’s ability to enjoy their property isn’t being affected. Sure, I’ll just accept his word, rather than imagining the remote possibility that a tenant might not be using/maintaining the property in the manner desired by the majority of the owner-residents.
For some reason some folk do not care for the option of resorting to courts. I don’t understand the helplessness suggested in the owner’s statement that, “I don’t know who to turn to, other than going to a lawyer.” Hey, guess what. If I have some dispute with a neighbor that my city is not willing to resolve in my favor, “I don’t know who to turn to, other than going to a lawyer.” Or filing pro se in small claims court. Darn this lousy system in the US, where people actually have access to the courts to obtain redress for disputes…
Gee, the article quotes the dead woman’s husband - whom I guess couldn’t be troubled to haul the trash cans out for his impaired wife.
And what is wrong about feeling neutral about one’s HOA/government? 89% are very happy, happy, or neutral. Sounds pretty good to me.
Interestingly, when I started a thread here about applying the rules about a nitpicky ruling in swimming the overall consensus was the rule exists, they need to be applied every time to be fair.
Yet some in this thread think the rules should be enforced at a whim (or not at all). Where are the lines drawn? Who decides when and what rules will be enforced? If a rule is unpopular then vote to amend or delete the rule.
11% actively unhappy is actually pretty high. It might be time to better regulate HOAs.
My neighbors put our their trash a day in advance, and take it in a day late. So there are often trash cans on their curb. And that doesn’t impact me at all. Except that their putting it out sometimes reminds me i need to deal with trash…
Is it? I dunno. When I saw 67% happy.very happy, I thought about presidential/Congressional approval rates…
My City government is fine. They do/don’t do a few things in the manner I would prefer, but I don’t presume that the entire community ought to be run exactly as I prefer. And there are likely a couple of things I might do otherwise than I do if I did not know certain activities were prohibited.
Is the best solution government regulation or the people in the HOA participating in its operation, going to HOA meetings and amending the rules to conform to what they collectively prefer?
There are a lot of controls around how municipalities are run. There are few controls around how HOAs are run. HOAs have enough power and can screw you over badly enough when they misbehave that maybe there should be more controls.
I’m not claiming they routinely misbehave. I think most do a decent job plowing the roads and enforcing rules i don’t want to have, but maybe other people are willing to accept. But there are an awful lot of horror stories it there, and not a lot of redress for homeowners.
Who are the busybodies roaming these neighborhoods looking for violations? They must be fun at parties.
No, that’s nearly impossible. At least, the ones I’ve seen are set up with crazy high requirements to change the rules.
I shopped some condos in NJ. I commented to the agent showing it to me that the HOA rules forbade pets, and i had cats. The agent said, "well, these are the rules now, when it’s owned by the developer, but once most of the units are sold the owners can change them. " So I looked at the provisions for changing the rules. Something like 75% of owners needed to agree. It’s hard to get 75% of people to vote at all, let alone vote for a change. And surely, some of the buyers WANTED to live in a place without pets. So i moved on.
But the idea that “you can just change the rules” seems misguided, if not actually an outright lie.
I had friends who bought in that complex. They said that lots of owners had pets in violation of the rules, and lots of others poked through the trash, looking for evidence of pets, and it led to a lot of intercommunity stress.
I think people can like and dislike their HOA at the same time. They like the fact that their HOA has a clean appearance, but they don’t like when they get nastygrams about their own violations. And the reality is, most HOAs just send warnings for the violations. They don’t hit people with a fine when their can has been out 1 minute past trash day. They send them a letter saying that cans have to be stored after trash day (or that lawns have to be mowed, or that cars can’t be left on the street, or whatever). The fines are assessed if it’s a chronic problem.
Are there HOA agreements that are set in stone and cannot be changed? That would seem unlikely to me but maybe there are some. That would be madness but crazier things happen.
By default, the husband had to assume nearly every single responsibility for the family.
Andrea was doing her level best to stay productive, maintain dignity, and contribute to the household in any way she could despite the recent onset of a pretty serious and disabling condition.
But none of that matters if somebody who’s actively trying TO see her garbage cans CAN see her garbage cans, despite a privacy screen.
No accommodation – no matter how trivial – can EVER be considered reasonable.
Because then the terrorists will have won.
In somebody’s inexplicable view of the universe.
Her vindictive neighbors could’ve helped her instead of ostracizing her and kicking her off the Facebook page.
How UN-neighborly can you be karen?