What authority does my homeowner’s association have if I go ahead and build a backyard shed 12 feet high, after they told me it could only be a maximum of 10 feet high, and I get it built before they notice?
I believe they’ll have the law on their side to force you to tear it down, or, if you refuse, to hire someone to tear it down and bill you for the cost.
Would they do it? You know them better than I do. They might.
People try to buck the HOA’s all the time re rules and regs they don’t like and the vast majority of the time usually wind up getting their asses handed to them. In this case you’d have to replace or rebuild the shed and pay their legal costs for having to go after you. Unless a HOA reg is illegal or discriminatory in some fashion you’ve got to live by what you agreed to.
The home owners associations I have met were composed of nit-picking controlling conservative freaks (calm down now, she says to self). My next door neighbor, who’s husband was on the “Architectural Control Board” was wont to whine “If you can’t afford to landscape, why did you move here?” This to a group of people that were “required” to sod both their front and back yards prior to moving in.
(rant on) Not only can they force you to remove your shed if not built to approved specs, they can have it removed, bill you for it, and charge you any lawyers fees that ensue. And you can bet that some looney toon will be at your house measuring to insure your compliance to the inch. In one neighborhood we lived in you could only have your garage door opened 30 minutes per day, not have a dog fence, not have a dog house, not hang out laundry, not park on the street for longer than two days running and on and on. Most people were cool with relaxing the rules, buuuuuut there are always the nuts who want to enforce every rule to the letter. IMHO if the only thing you have to do is time garage door openings you really should check out, you are not using the life allotted to you. (rant off)
I’ve never owned a house, so forgive me if this is ignorant. Why on Earth would I choose to join a HOA? Are there local laws requiring it if I buy a house in certain areas?
Because they will keep people from moving in, tearing up your neighborhood, painting their house pink, and lowering the value of YOUR property.
They will also have access to cheaper garbage services and snow removal.
They also have more leverage if you need potholes fixed by the county soon.
Again, are there laws mandating this? Otherwise I can’t imaging how agreeing to paint my house blue would stop someone else from painting theirs pink. And what if I’m the one who wants pink? Can anyone stop me from buying a house without joining the local HOA?
You don’t have a choice about joining a homeowners’ association if one is in force in the subdivision/neighborhood you’re looking at; buying the house in that neighborhood means accepting the terms set by the homeowners’ association. You can’t opt out of it (except by not buying a house in that neighborhood, of course). And yes, those terms ARE legally enforceable. So before you buy a house, you need to know if the house is in a neighborhood governed by homeowners’ association, and if it is, you need to carefully read the regulations the homeowners’ association has passed and make sure you can live with them before you decide whether or not to purchase the house.
If you buy a house in a neighborhood that has an HOA you are automatically a member. In the neck of the woods where I lived you were not entitled (by law) to receive a copy of the regs until you had bought your house. This is like (as we like to say in the hood) buying a pig in a poke. And it’s not like you had a choice, because all of the homes were in some sort of HOA or other. In many of them there is a pool and club house that you also have to become a member of whether you use them or not. Welcome to life in the burbs in the twenty first century.
You need to find out if the homeowner’s association has any legal power that you are required to respect. Membership in Condo associations typically is required as a condition of purchasing a unit; if yours is that type, read the bylaws and related legal documents. You may have already agreed to some things and it is doubtful if you can get out of them if they are clearly spelled out.
But if membership in the association is voluntary, it may have no powers at all other than as a watchdog group or an entity that can jawbone or twist arms to bring about changes. (It may be primarily social.) IANAL, but I happen to be on the board of one of these groups, the Glidden Drive Association. We have no power to force a member or a non-member to do anything other than expel them, and if we tried more, the legal costs would exhaust our treasury very quickly. We do try to persuade and we do bring members together to discuss issues and we do lobby local government to see things our way but only if that is the majority view of our membership.
We could try to enforce civil covenants that are often violated in our neighborhood, but we would not have the power of a goverment entity enforcing a law or a zoning regulation.
Not necessarily. I bought a house in such a neighborhood, and I was not a member for many years until I was voluntarily asked to join, and I could leave at any time.
But my house is not part of a planned unit development or a condo. Those may be quite different.
Thanks for all the replies! Maybe I shouldn’t build it higher afterall. When I moved here, I had to sign the HOA agreement before I could close on my house. I do appreciate the HOA here, it just sucks when you want something that is not allowed.
Thanks for the info, all. I’ve seen HOA lawsuits in the news from time to time but never looked into 'em that closely. Now those suits make sense.
(For example, an Albuquerque homeowner was sued some years ago by her HOA because she Xeriscaped her yard to take advantage of a city tax credit. The homeowner won, I’m pleased to say.)
Aha! That’s the clincher. You have a civil agreement, and unless it specifies something illegal, it is a valid contract. If you violate it, you will not be hauled into criminal court, but you might be hauled into a civil one.
Of course the association might look the other way at your towering 12-foot structure, but don’t count on it.
See if you can get a variance prior to building the shed. I would think an exceptions process is written into the bylaws. Your efforts may be helped by your inviting association board members over for dinner, wine and dessert.
If you’re in a Planned Unit Development (P.U.D.) it’s not just any civil agreement, either… it’s built right into the warranty deed. Any sale of any property within a PUD, by definition, is encumbered by some sort of property association or another. And the only way to get out of it is to not own any of property in that PUD.
Now, here’s another possibility as far as your homeowners’ association’s authority goes: they may not need any, because the restriction they’re telling you about may be a part of the city’s zoning ordinance! Pretty much any single-family residential zoning district in the United States is going to have height restrictions on your home, as well as “setbacks.” Setbacks tell you how close to your lot lines you can build things. Your zoning ordinance may also have specific restrictions on the height of sheds, or what type you’re allowed to build, or whatever else. Some zoning ordinances can be highly detailed…
It is also possible that such restrictions are built directly into your PUD. Usually, you’ll find them printed on the back of your subdivision’s “plat map.” These restrictions carry the same weight as municipal zoning ordinances, and may even be enforced by municipal code enforcement officers.
Now, if you’d like to know exactly what restrictions there are on what you can build, I’d first check and see if there’s anything like that built into your PUD (there most likely is). A visit to the county courthouse will tell you… subdivision “plat maps” are often kept with the County Clerk, though you may have to ask around because no two counties are alike. The plat map for your subdivision is a matter of public record, and they’ll be more than happy to let you look at it (and probably also have the capability of making a photocopy for you for a nominal fee). Again, the restrictions are probably printed right on the back of the map.
If there are no restrictions explicitly stated on the map, more than likely they simply rely on the same restrictions of your zoning district… most PUDs have an “underlying zoning district” whose restrictions you must follow in the absence of any more severe restrictions on the part of the PUD. Either your city or county government probably administers zoning, and you’re probably looking for an office with a name like “planning and zoning” or “urban planning” or “community planning” or something like that. They should be able to tell you what your underlying zoning designation is (probably something like “R-1 Single Family Residential”) and give you a list of various restrictions.
Man, that’s probably way more than anyone needed to know…
As others have mentioned, you might have been given a copy of the agreement, or the covenants, either at closing or sometime before/after. Were you?
Nobody’s forcing you to make the truly foolish error of buying a house in one of those little martinet neighborhoods. I live in a neighborhood without such idiocy as a “home owners’ association”, and it’s quite nice. Of course, I’m not a socialist, so things like a “home owners’ association” would be quite intolerable for me in the first place.
You signed a contract. You are bound by contract law.
Around here, the yards are large enough and sufficiently well-treed that it would be hard to notice without doing some zoning violations first.
City handles that on general budget basis–no specific charges on the tax bill for it.
Heh. Not in this one-horse town of Indianapolis, they don’t. It’s pure nepotism.