You can be against any and all aesthetic rules and regulations. Others are not. So long as these aesthetic rules and regulations aren’t simply code for “no blacks”*, I don’t see the problem. You are free to live in a community that prefers more variation (and in fact it wouldn’t surprise me if at some point some communities spring up where they specifically WANT your house to be quirky and exotic). That’s all well and good.
*you may argue that such rules and regulations may be “de facto” anti-minority. That’s true, but in a more equal society, it wouldn’t be. Let’s get to that more equal society so that everyone chan choose the kind of community they want to live in.
not my problem. Unless they are blocking the use of the street, in which case municipal regulations about parking, etc., can help you.
Have you talked to your neighbor about this?!!
This is not an HOA problem, this is an animal welfare problem. I’d start by addressing it with the neighbors, but move up to the humane society or the police (noise laws?) if that doesn’t help.
I really don’t care if my neighbor leaves junk out on the porch. Not my problem.
Heck, the house across the street has been knocked down and is being replaced. We have a giant hole surround by berms of rubble right now. It will be “ugly” for months. The noise bothers me (although it falls within legal guidelines), the visuals, not so much.
No, but it because you value uniformity over choice. Sounds like an HOA is a good fit for you. I prefer a live and let live attitude.
My town has laws about health and welfare. If the neighbor has trash on the lawn that is attracting rats, or produces a stench, that’s against the town ordinances. If their trash is blowing onto my yard, or into a waterway, that’s actionable, too.
A townhouse where you don’t own, control, or maintain the exterior is a different beast from a private home with an HOA. There are advantages and disadvantages. At the moment, I feel the disadvantages outweigh the advantages for me, but as I age that might change.
I also read your post as a lot of reasons to avoid HOAs. What if the president is unreasonable? What if the reasonable president moves, or passes along the torch to someone else? You have listed all sorts of unreasonable things an HOA has the power to do to its members.
What you mean by that, I infer, is ‘you should have the time to maintain your property to my standards’. And it doesn’t have to be the hours worked. Maybe, I’d rather mow my lawn twice a week instead of three times a week so I have time for something else instead of worrying that you’ll consider it too long.
That would run afoul of already existing laws. Call the police or city hall and let them take care of it. Why should I have to pay money to an HOA (and possibly the police as well) because some garbage blew on your lawn.
Then you call the city. The health dept, nuisance control, code enforcement, police etc all already have laws in place to deal with this.
Why do you feel the need to be the one in charge of dealing with it in your neighborhood instead of letting the city take care of it, like they do everywhere else?
I value both, to an extent, and I think you do as well, though we may draw the line at different places. For example, I don’t want every house to be a carbon copy of the next. At the same time, I don’t want my next door neighbor to have a barn and a dairy cow in his backyard. At the same same time, I have an uncle who lives in a very charming village right next to a dairy. Right place for a dairy in his neighborhood, wrong place for a dairy in mine.
I think it is great if communities of both types exist. I think it would be every better if people of all races and backgrounds could actually afford to live in a much wider variety of communities. And I don’t particularly value the communities which costist of rows and rows of huge multimillion dollar estates in the hills, because no one needs to be THAT wealthy
Honestly, I would be DELIGHTED if my next door neighbor had a barn and a dairy cow, despite the flies and odor that would produce. I’ve fantasized about doing it myself, but it’s too much work.
Again, that’s almost certainly illegal and if a neighbor does that, the city will deal with it.
Most of what you’re saying here are things that would already be illegal. Which makes it seem to me like you want an HOA to make the rules even more restrictive. If that’s the case, what are the restrictions that you want? Most people, in most cities, don’t need an HOA to deal with their next door neighbor getting a cow or having so much garbage that rats are becoming a problem.
No, I mean that you should have the time to maintain your property to some minimum level agreed on by the community. For example, I mow my lawn every other week I’m not here with a ruler measuring your lawn; I’m just asking that it not be dead (or that if you go with a desert friendly lawn – which is great! - it is at least not overgrown with weeds or simply a patch of dirt).
So is your problem with the specific logistics of an HOA vs a city ordinance? I dont feel the need to take care of it myself in either scenario; in both cases I am happy to pay a reasonable fee and let someone else do it!
that’s great. Like I said, my uncle lives right by a dairy, and his place is charming. However, you can understand that it would be valid for someone else not to want to live by a dairy, and that therefore when buying a property it would be best if it was clearly defined by zoning rules* whether a dairy could be built right by their house in the future?
*and it would also be best if zoning rules were made while thinking of the welfare of the people living there, not the property development companies or the oil tycoons who just struck it rich next door.
This is a false dichotomy, since as others have noted, there are generally municipal restrictions and/or zoning laws that restrict what you can do on your property.
We recently bought a place that’s out in the country, in an area that’s a mix of working farms with livestock* and homes on large tracts of land. There are no HOAs in the area of which I’m aware, so my neighbor across the road can truck in rock and fill to put in the giant hole on the eastern side of their property that they dug for god knows what reason, and I can plant trees to block my view of them and vice versa. If one of us decided to start a hog-feeding operation, the county would get involved pretty quickly.
If people are comforted by living in a place with strict rules about house color, landscaping and what you can or can’t park in your driveway, that’s OK with me. As to whether it’s “racist” to require a well-maintained property: it seems racist to me to assume that minority homeowners are not interested in or incapable of keeping a place up and mowing the grass.
*there is a certain bovine odor that wafts our way when a herd is camped out nearby, but nothing unbearable.
**lots of stories exist about people who grow unconventional gardens (“weeds” to some) and get harassed/taken to court by overly aggressive municipalities. One doesn’t need an HOA in order to be targeted. The home we’re in the process of selling has green stuff, some of which is grass, carpeting the soil in front, which has never in our tenure been subjected to herbicides, and hardly ever to fertilizer. An HOA probably would’ve been on our ass long ago. The buyer hasn’t objected though.
I answered that question earlier. I think its fine if different communities have different rules. If one community wants grass that’s cut twice a week and a specific shade on every wall, that’s fine, though not my cup of tea. If another community wants to mandate that all houses are painted a neon color (now that I think about it I think there are some beach towns like that here in Cali) then that’s fine too, but again, not my cup of tea. I’d prefer a place that leaves you alone for the most part but gets on your case if you have trash visible from the street or if your lawn is dead or overgrown.
Agreed. I hate bad HOA’s. That’s I have always made the effort to get on the HOA board of every community I’ve lived in.
I’m really in favor of minimal intrusion as far as the maintenance of each individual’s private property. I don’t like some HOA board dictating the way my front yard looks. I expect minimal maintenance but I’ve always been into the “wild garden” look and I hate highly trimmed trees and bushes.
And as a board member, I can argue against and vote against intrusive policies. If the asshole contingent ( every board has at least one) gains the majority at least I have advanced warning and I can work on changing the power balance.
I don’t really like HOA’s, but since they are a fact of life for me - I’d didn’t pick my house- I inherited it and their are factors that make selling it and moving unfeasible- I’d rather be on the inside than the outside.
ETA- I also really like some of the features that can only be found in an HOA community, the pools and parks in my neighborhood are communally owned and managed by the HOA.
Substitute “City Council” and “town enforcement agency” into your sentences and you have the exact same problem.
The fix is the same too: vote out the bad folks who’re elected and complain to the elected officials about the bad employees and appointees.
In many ways cities & HOAs are opposite reactions to the same problem. Many city / county code enforcement agencies simply don’t enforce. They’re too underfunded and too overstretched. And frankly suck at doing the things many HOA detractors glibly assert the local government will take care of for them. So HOAs spring up to make up the difference between what the local statute book promises and what the local code enforcement people actually deliver.
The problematic HOAs come from people who want to make enforcement their hobby, especially in retirement. And that is, or can be, a legitimate problem the legitimately needs to be solved.
What problem is solved by regulating
mailbox height, or garage door color, or political yard signs, or hanging plants, or holiday displays, etc, etc, etc.
For what it’s worth, I would estimate that the 20-30% of the homeowners in my suburban HOA community are black.
This is probably in large part because my neighborhood, by definition, has no long time residents. The oldest homes are just under 15 years old.
Now this is anecdotal, but the black residents are the ones that seem to have the most concern over things like lax maintenance of neighboring properties.
At our last meeting one of them gave a rehearsed speech on the importance of enforcing maintenance measures, describing in detail what can happen when the community gets rundown and goes into a downward spiral.
I thought her concerns were a little overblown but she appeared to be speaking from personal experience.
I’m sorry, wanting to live in a clean and attractive neighborhood is not a “white” value. I’m not buying it, and I’m really not buying the idea that my black neighbors have “internalized white supremacy” or something because they don’t pile rusty appliances in their front yard.
Market value of your house. To some people that alone is worth having an HOA, it’s asserting some level of control that the homes in your neighborhood will not go down significantly.
Myself I would never live in such a community that had an HOA, but I understand why some people do. I specifically moved into the city I have been in for 15 years because they have city ordinances and enforce them. Ordinances that I reviewed before I bought my home. New ordinances that I get to vote on. Buying and maintaining a home is a major decision, so you should pick the locations that fits your lifestyle and needs. No one is forcing people to buy a house in a neighborhood that has an HOA.
We currently own a home in an HOA and while I’d prefer not to, so far it hasn’t been particularly onerous. We had to have them approve a new deck railing and it took less than two days.
In concept, the idea of a neighborhood-level government is a good one. There are 100,000 people that live in my city, so there’s a decent chance that city-wide decisions on various things aren’t going to match what people in different neighborhoods want. If the city says you can park 40-foot RVs on the street but you want to live in a neighborhood where that’s not allowed so kids can ride their bikes around and be visible to cars, great, go make that rule. If the city says you can paint your house any color and you want to live with a bunch of people who all prefer the same seven prescribed tones of beige, more power to you!
The biggest problem that I see is that HOAs aren’t organized by neighborhoods. They’re organized by housing developers who use them to keep things boring and show-ready until they manage to sell all the units, and then the structure of the HOA is calcified and hard to change.
I could certainly imagine a very garish garage door; would prefer my neighbor not hang a massive “Trump 2020” flag on his driveway (I’ll tolerate a normal sized sign as I would expect to tolerate my Biden sign, but a massive flag? Nuh-uh). And I’d prefer my neighbors don’t leave their holiday display up months after Christmas, still blaring jingles late into the night.
