Ultimately, yes. Racist and classist. There is zero morally and ethically valid reason for one to take an interest in the appearance of a neighbor’s property, and put the burden on the neighbor to meet your aesthetic standards. The desire for uniformity is an oppressive instinct, and one that was created by white supremacist culture.
I live in one. Not only will I not live in an HOA in my next house, I doubt I will live in a neighborhood proper.
If I want an RV, I damn well ought to be able to have one.
If I want a shed in my back yard, I damn well ought to be able to have one.
If I want a small trailer for hauling stuff…, etc. etc.
Other than keeping these “blights” out of the neighborhood, and keeping the houses looking very uniform. I can’t see any benefits to living in an HOA. Ours, at least.
I won’t quibbles with the history of HOAs in America because, like the history of anything else in America, I’m sure they do have a long legacy of racism. That said, the above seems like a stretch to me. The desire for uniformity may be an oppressive instinct, but if so it was created by human nature, not white supremacy. That same desire for conformity exists in every culture and nation on the planet.
I’ve lived in an HOA for twenty five years and I love it. It is a townhouse community, and this means I don’t have to do any exterior maintenance. They take care of the yards, the parking lots, the roofs, the tuck-pointing, the sewers; everything outside my walls. The downside? A modest monthly fee and they tell me what color to paint my front door. Works for me.
That’s not the way all neighborhoods for all time in all human societies worked. Many cities and towns and neighborhoods developed organically, with poor and rich living next to each other, with trashy and classy properties abutting each other.
During many times, only the absolutely fabulously wealthy could escape to grand estates, where they didn’t need to see the poor. It’s only really in the post-war, automobile culture that white American culture created the uniform suburbs, and the advertising at the time emphasized the racial uniformity as a new selling point.
This kind of segregation of taste, class, aesthetics, race, imposed by the standards of residential neighborhoods was and continues to be one of the tools of white oppression, and one of the things that divides society and makes reform more difficult.
I’m not saying that the Suburban lifestyle is perfect and should continue eternally, but realistically with the way the US is structured and with home ownership being one of the only ways to give your children a better life than you had, getting minority home ownership rates up is a major key for healing the wealth gap. Unfortunately what’s happening instead is that more and more homes, even single family homes, are being snatched up by big businesses that own thousands of homes.
That sort of thing is a problem, but I doubt we will be solving it by crowding back into the cities. With automation on the rise, and this pandemic proving that teleworking is a lot more effective than many companies feared (my own company was resistant to teleworking at first, but for the last few months all employees have been remote with no issue) I think we will see even more diffuse living. Why buy a home for 700,000 in LA when you can buy the same home for 300,000 out in the boonies if both you and your spouse work remotely anyways?
I don’t disagree with your socioeconomic analysis, but
Those terms are orthogonal, not opposites. A modest or low-priced property can be kept trash-free just as well as a “classy” (expensive?) one. The issue about appearance of your neighbor’s home isn’t “I don’t want to live near a person who is beneath my level” but rather “I don’t want to live near a person who takes no care in maintaining their property.”
We know there are whites who want to keep their neighborhood white, but I don’t know how a modern HOA might do that legally, unless they ignore the rules for whites and use harsh enforcement for people of color. The rules in my HOA are about just basic maintenance. For example, a school dress code that permits long hair on boys but prohibits dreadlocks is racist on its face. A dress code that prohibits any type of head covering on girls is biased against Muslims. But a dress code that prohibits bare feet is pretty neutral.
Halflings and Hobbits disagree.
“Maintaining” a property is a classist, and by extension, likely a racist, standard. Maintaining requires time and money, and different people in different situations might have different priorities for their time an money. Insisting that everyone around you share those same priorities effectively maintains social segregation.
They can’t, other than pricing out brown people and hoping that works. Ironically, the “nice neighborhood” near us is chock full of Indians (doctors, IT professionals, ect.)
Look at the results. America is as segregated as ever. In the absence of explicit segregation, we have come up with these indirect methods, which are “equal” on their face and whose enforcement is “equal” on its face, but it turns out is very effective in producing the same results. And that’s no coincidence.
That’s certainly a bad neighbor situation. But those neighbors are limited to annoying you from their property.
A HOA lets your bad neighbors annoy you on your own property.
Well, if this example is your idea of a home that looks like this because the residents are socioeconomically disadvantaged and lack the time and money to “maintain” their property, then I guess we’re not going to agree on anything else.
It sounds like you’re running a HOA in as good a way as is possible. But even here I’m seeing signs of future problems.
What’s going to happen in your community when you’re not President and somebody else is running the HOA?
That’s one reason I oppose HOAs as a general principle. Even if it’s the best HOA in the world, how do I know it will still be good in ten years?
Oh, please. Everyone should have the time to maintain their property. If, in order to survive, you have to such long hours that you cannot maintain your home, then that is a flaw in our society that should be fixed (by paying everyone a living wage and ensuring that the profits that come from the American laborer producing 4X what he used to are split far more equitably than they are now), not by saying “well the lowest members of our society can’t help but live in rundown properties, therefore it is OK for properties to be run down”.
If you want to say “rundown and unmaintained properties are a symptom of poverty, and we can’t just pass draconian measures to get people to tidy up without considering the situation that led to their mess” then I’d 100% agree with you. But that doesn’t mean that unmaintained properties are racist and classist. That’s like saying Healthcare is classist because only some people can afford it. OUR Healthcare SYSTEM is classist, but the concept that everyone should get healthcare is not.
By that same logic, arguing that everyone should have a safe, clean, and well maintained place to live; that part of that maintenance may be their own responsibility; but that, if so, then we need to live in a society where everyone can afford the time to care for their home (and their own health, EG by being able to afford healthy food and having time to excersize, and their children). But the goal is still that everyone have a nice place to live, not that we just accept rusted tin sheds as adequate dwelling.
It’s just not your business to impose your aesthetics or your desires or your preferences on your fellow human neighbors. The very fact that you allow your opinion of this property to be elevated to the level of a desire to control it is the moral crime.
Are you giving someone a nice place to live? Or are you trying to dictate how they spend their time an resources and their preferences? I don’t see what part of this constitutes giving as opposed to imposing.
Saying everyone “should” have the time to maintain their property constitutes a huge assumption of how people should value their time and money.
Erm, no, there are practical considerations to not hav I no trash everywhere. What if it blows onto my property? What if it washes into a creek or river? What about when rats breed in the trash pile and come onto my property at night? What about the smell?
Sure. Are you also against everyone paying their taxes? Sure, everyone SHOULD value the proper functioning of the government, but what if I don’t?
Are you against environmental regulation? What if I just value my time and money differently then you do and therefore decide it’s not worth the effort or cost to stop pumping sludge into the river or CO2 into the air? The very fact that you allow your opinion of my factory to be elevated to the level of a desire to control it is the moral crime.
At the point those “what ifs” mature into actual foreseeable risks, then governmental health and safety and environmental standards should kick in. But, please tell me, how many H.O.A. rules do nothing more than hew to such health, safety, and environmental considerations? The one that dictates what color you paint your house, for example? Because as soon as that imposition does even one iota more than that, the argument is invalidated.