Modnote: Please don’t insult other users anywhere but the Pit.
This is insulting. Please do not do this again.
What kind of HOA is it? Where I live , there are homeowners associations with dues of less than $100/year- but they are nothing like the HOAs with rules about garages and flagpoles and holiday decorations. Membership isn’t mandatory and it’s more of a civic association ( as are the similar “residents associations” and “property owners associations”) - they organize neighborhood events and meetings with city officials. If one of my neighbors let their front yard fill up with trash , the HOA couldn’t do anything other than put pressure on city officials to issue violations.
We’re a real enough HOA. Every property owner is automatically a member, and paying the dues is required. We can back that up by late fees, interest, and if the total owed gets high enough, liens.
And in the only egregious case we’ve had while I’ve been on the board of someone failing to keep up their property, where one property owner basically let their yard turn into a jungle (and I’m not talking just letting the lawn grow a foot high; I’m talking stuff like wild raspberry canes and baby trees starting to grow where the front lawn should be), we paid a landscaping company to cut all that growth down, added it to their bill, and put a lien on the property.
But other than nonpayment of dues, that’s the only enforcement sort of thing we’ve had to do during my three years on the board.
I think it was his HOA since he claimed they would no longer allow him into the HOA pool until the lawn was mowed as well.
In the late 80s a kerfuffle between an HOA in Plano, Texas and a homeowner made the news. The HOA required that all roofs have wood shingles on them but one homeowner decided to replace his with standard asphalt shingles. He wasn’t trying to be contentious, there was a drought in Texas at the time and there had been several houses with wood shingles that caught fire.
Denial of access to the common amenities is one of the few enforcement levers available to HOAs. The details vary by state of course.
Sounds like you dodged a major bullet.
Smart man.
Bought a house without knowing there was an HOA–nothing in the paperwork at the closing. It was run by an attorney. One rule was no subdividing property or building new houses (It was semi-rural, with most houses having at least 5 acres.) This one poor woman asked permission to put up a trailer for a 2-3 months for her mother, who was dying of cancer. The HOA voted no and threatened legal action.
Nice people. 
How is this legal?
I have the opposite “problem” in that I live on a street where there are no HOAs, the town has few (if any) “quality of life” ordinances, and basically anything goes. I’ve seen neighbors hang deer carcasses from their trees and leave them there for weeks. I can count on two hands the number of inoperable vehicles on driveways and/or lawns within ten houses of me either way. Children’s play equipment in various stages of disrepair is scattered everywhere. Kids’ pools filled with algae. The list goes on.
Just so as not to seem superior, similar wrangles can happen here, but with the local government and its planning rules. When that happens, it’s not unknown for thwarted owners to paint the house in outlandish colours:
https://www.walkermorris.co.uk/publications/real-estate-matters/planning-saga-continues-infamous-candy-cane-house/
On the other hand the “Headington Shark” did get permission.
No horror stories here, but I did rent a condo in Irvine, CA for a few years with an HOA that just seemed dumb. One time we all got notices that, effective immediately, no vehicles over 2,000 pounds would be allowed in the carport. Uh, guys? Did anyone bother looking up the curb weight of their own compact or sedan before drafting this rule? It was never enforced, but it left a bad taste in my mouth. There were a lot of other little things like that, all of which contributed to my eventual conclusion that most people are far too stupid to govern.
The answer might be to get enough people active in town government to draft ordinances to curb at least the worst behavior.
The last place I lived was in a township where certain rules were in force, including getting a permit before building a privacy fence to enclose the back yard (it would’ve been nice if the builder had told me about this beforehand). We had a neighbor a couple doors down who evidently operated some kind of repair business out of his home or garage, behind a similar fence. It got a bit noisy at times during the day and if we’d wanted to make a stink we could’ve sicked the township on him, but didn’t. The point is that you don’t have to subject yourself to micromanagement by HOA cliques in order to have a decent quality of life.
In general, it seems that city/township ordinances are less arbitrary and restrictive than HOA rules, it may be easier to vote jerks out of office, and local governments generally do have a degree of oversight from the county or state.*
*example being the village of New Rome, Ohio, where the local regime (and by extension, politicians) was funded by through aggressive and highly dubious speed trap enforcement and other traffic cop abuses. After protests got loud enough, the village was ordered dissolved by a county court.
I have no idea. We (my now-ex and I) thought surely it couldn’t be but looked into it, and it was.
I appreciate the advice, but I don’t think that’s going to fly. This is rural Missouri. We don’t need no stinkin’ quality of life ordinances.
Besides that, I rather enjoy launching fireworks from my front driveway! 
The last time I was passing through Missouri and buying fireworks they told me they only allowed shooting them the month around July otherwise I’d have to shoot them off in Kansas or something.
I wonder the same thing. nelliebly, are you sure you didn’t just miss a disclosure somewhere in the paperwork? Where did this happen?
I want to live in a Utopia where a Lotus Elise is the most rational purchase I can make and my neighbors drive Smart cars, '90s Geo Metros and '80s Honda Civics. The gregarious families whose houses always smell like pot are driving air-cooled Beetles and '60s microcars. Maybe there are a couple of iconoclasts with a stripped out '92 Miata or homebuilt Lotus 7 replica. .We all trade tips on how to pack an Ikea trip’s worth of stuff onto a roof rack made for bicycles.
Well sure, that’s what they tell you at the merchant (CYA and all that). But in a rural area, on private property, in a town where the cops look the other way…
This was in Wyoming. My dad was an attorney and a judge, so I went over everything carefully before signing. After we found out about the HOA, I went through all of it again line by line, sheet by sheet. Nada. I checked Wyoming statute and found nothing there. Also contacted Realtors.
About a year after the heartless incident, the president moved away, and while the HOA didn’t dissolve, it was no longer active. For the record, the woman put up the trailer and ignored the legal warnings, figuring rightly that by the time the HOA could force her to take it down, her mother would be gone. She was right. Still, that incident angers me.