No, it’s not about not allowing people that are lazy and inconsiderate to buy homes in your neighborhood. It’s saying if you are going to buy a home in this neighborhood, here are the rules. If you can’t abide by these rules, then don’t bother buying a home here. If you can, then welcome. If you decide to buy here and then don’t abide by these rules, then it’s going to be financially difficult for you.
It’s no different than restaurants that require a jacket for men to dine there. Got a jacket, come on in. Or a restaurant requiring shoes, or a big box store requiring a mask.
I was torn between “Little Boxes” and “Pleasant Valley Sunday” as theme songs for this thread, though neither applies exactly (for instance, an HOA would be unlikely to allow several clashing house colors or rock group practice), but here goes anyway.
I see that a lot of response are referring to single family homes in a neighborhood with an HOA. I live in a townhouse with an HOA and I really appreciate having it. The HOA makes sure the property is maintained–grass is mowed and trimmed, snow removal done promptly. The exteriors are kept in good nick, roof replaced, etc. I was on the board for several years. The HOA doesn’t have many rules, and generally boil down to don’t be an asshole. My one time upstairs neighbor (who was renting from the owner, and the HOA has a cap now on owner rentals) had 3 large dogs who barked. A lot. I nicely talked about it with the dog owner and offered to take her dogs out when she wasn’t home. Her response? The dogs are pains in the ass. So when she went away for 4 days, crated the dogs, had someone come in twice a day to let them out, the dogs barked for 4 days straight. I am not lying, it was constant barking. Just so happens that our HOA has a limit of 2 pets, so I called the HOA and the next day she got a letter saying one dog had to go. My HOA? Great experiences and they do their job and aren’t assholes.
If it were just about people being lazy and inconsiderate, we wouldn’t have stories of petty tyrants and HOA abuses, we wouldn’t have so many people being vehemently against the very concept of owning under HOA rules. Many HOAs go far beyond, into restricting people’s hobbies, their creativity, sense of aesthetics.
That’s where I get the tickle of “we don’t serve your kind here”. Yes, it’s more trivial stuff like wanting to rebuild a car in your driveway, paint your house purple, or grow tomatoes in your front yard, but it’s a significant restriction of people’s lives, and selecting out people who value these things, in favor of people who don’t.
I think people choosing who to live with is ok within certain bounds. I’m I think it’s totally ok for HOAs to ban wind chimes (as the first HOA I lived in did) while “Only persons of the caucasian race shall use or occupy any building on any numbered lot or park. This covenant shall not however prevent such use or occupancy by domestic servants domiciled with or in the employ of a white owner or tenant” (from my current HOA) is actively evil. I think it’s pretty easy to seperate the two though.
I don’t want people telling me what to do with my property so I don’t want to live in an HOA but for people who are ok being bossed around I’ve got no problem with them existing.
When my MIL died, a couple of years back, the deed to her cemetary plot had such a covenant. My wife said it was a tad incongruous presenting it to the cemetary’s office staff - which were 100% Black.
Our local Sunday paper has a real estate section, which includes a “condo” Q&A column. Reading that column is enough to persuade me to avoid such situations to the extent possible.
I live north of Detroit and there are many neighborhoods that appear to be segregated by non-whites. The auto industry draws people from around the world and I see what I mostly assume HOA neighborhoods that have nothing but Japanese, Indian or Muslim children waiting for the school bus in the morning. The kids often go to segregated schools as well according to the people I work with.
When I drove for Uber I went into a few gated communities in Dearborn that were predominantly Muslim. Very ,very nice houses and grounds. Impressive.
People want to live next to people like themselves, so is it wrong if a Muslim developer build a community meant for Muslims? Or a Japanese company builds a community with its own money to make its workers feel more at home? And if they require certain aspects of the neighborhood to reflect their beliefs can that be part of the HOA agreement to be there? Maybe they don’t like Christmas decorations or look on Halloween a an abomination.
Perhaps they cannot keep people out based upon religion or color but they can make the terms of HOA undesirable for people not of their kind to buy there as long as they don’t break fair housing laws, correct?
It’s possible to take an HOA to court, although courts tend to not want to get involved in those sorts of disputes and usually side with the HOA. Otherwise, they’d be inundated with nuisance lawsuits. We had one guy in our enclave who sued at the drop of a hat. He was a self-taught “lawyer”, sort of like a Simpsons character, and was constantly harassing people and the association. He won one of his torts, which, as I understand things, is very unusual. I remember talking to the association president at the time, who told me “If you see him having a heart attack, be sure to dial 119.”
Ya, it’s bad enough that we got a phone call from the realtor selling us our home about 30 seconds after he sent over the covenants explaining that that section had been removed and we didn’t have to worry about it. He was and is the HOA president too. We’re white and he was very embarrassed to have to send that to people, as well he should be.
Dunno for sure about the law, but if they are going to bind a purchaser, they would have to be mentioned in the contract and at least available for inspection.
My son and DIL bought a house this spring w/ a HOA. My wife and I are lawyers, and they asked if we would look over the contract. The development was all new build, and the HOA was among documents mentioned in the contract and available in the office. We urged them to carefully review all of them.
We didn’t want to discourage them about their new purchase, so we just said that they should review the HOA carefully, to make sure it didn’t prohibit something they were dying to do. I do not believe they did.
We travelled to visit them. Very nice home, if the development is a tad Stepfordish. One night they had a backyard fire, which caused a TON of smoke in neighboring yards. I asked if the HOA said anything about fires/smoke, and they had not looked. Later they told me it says nothing about backyard fires.
More recently, they mounted motion-detector lights/cameras, but then realized the HOA required approval of anything mounted to the front exterior. So they took them down, asked approval, and remounted them.
I have not reviewed the HOA, but my impression is that it is very specific about some things I wouldn’t care about, but is silent about some things I personally would consider quite annoying.
Apparently, as of now, the HOA is 100% the builder, but as more homes are built/occupied, it will progress to 100% owners. I asked them if they thought about being on the board. I can see plusses and minuses to either choice.
It is up to each state. In Virginia, where I live, the HOA documents must be provided upon ratifying the contract and the buyer has three days to review the documents and cancel the contract if they so choose.
If money is not a big consideration and you enjoy living under a strict set of rules in return for a nicer or more consistent neighborhood, go for it.
Rules, some you may agree with, some you may not. Too bad. Your neighbor gets away with having the wrong color paint or a sign in his yard. You don’t. At worst selective enforcement abounds, ruled by petty tyrants, and they charge you more and more for it each year.
The HOA I lived under was nice enough at first, but over time the board changed, the fees went way up, and the services went down. After several very angry meetings with members letting the board members know what they thought about their little country club aspirations but nothing being done about it, I left after 10 years or so and won’t live in an HOA again.
Isn’t that a shitty deal-Go through all the negotiation and financing hassle, all the pros and cons of living in the new abode, getting you all set to move…and then right after you sign on the dotted line they spring this on you?
That’s the law. However, the convention is that it would be discussed the first time you look at the house. A savvy buyer is going to ask at the same time they ask what are the schools and how big is the lot. A buyer could certainly ask to see those documents any time they want, and the seller should have them available as soon as the house is listed. The law just provides the minimum requirements. (My daughter is a Realtor®.)
I would think it would be in the interest of the realtor to inform the potential buyers of the covenants early in the process. If there are any showstopper issues, better to find out early when they can be addressed rather than at the end when they’ll cause the deal to fall apart after lots of work. For example, some covenants will state that you can only have X number of adult pets, like 2 dogs. If the buyer has more than the limit, they would have to give up some dogs to get under the limit or back out of the deal. I’m not sure that it would be advantageous to spring the covenants on people at the end. But I also have no doubt that slimy realtors and title companies will gloss over any issue with the hope that the buyer completes the deal and finds out about the problems later on.
Absent any other information, nay. I’ve read too many nightmare HOA stories and while I’m sure there are plenty of good ones out there, Russian Roulette is not my idea of a fun game.
First, I agree that the ‘whoa, that’s discrimination like keeping out blacks was’ argument is no good. I do want to point out, though, that I’m perfectly fine if neighbors want sitting arrangements on their front porch, to keep chickens, to keep a pool table in their garage, and to have a sound system (if they get too loud at odd hours, there are city noise laws to deal with them). The fact that someone wants to control what furniture another person is allowed to put in their carport just blows my mind, and I wouldn’t want that kind of person as a neighbor, much less to have ‘government-but-not-government’ like authority to issue fines against me to enforce their weird control ideas.
