Yeah, why can’t there be subdivisions where the HOA is a “Hippies Okay” Association?
eta: I think I like “Hipness Obigitory” Association better…
As someone in the real estate industry I’m well acquainted with awful HOA stories, but just to provide some balance to this discussion (and it’s a common one) I do like to point out a few things about HOAs:
-
If you have a home in the city, local ordinances can be passed that might be just as onerous as any HOA rule, and some of these will be enforced by municipal code enforcement officers and can even escalate to criminal fines (which can escalate to being arrested for non-payment.) Unlike a HOA it can be even harder to change the city council composition and repeal these ordinances.
-
It is very common for housing developments to be built in unincorporated areas. This has many advantages with permitting and often from a tax perspective for the residents. However it frequently has serious disadvantages. Namely no municipal government to handle the roads, so these streets are functionally privately owned by the collective homeowners. Without a HOA these communities would have trouble existing at all, if you don’t have a mandatory HOA that can collect road dues, how do you keep the roads maintained? You can get the county to do it sometimes but usually you have to give something up for that, and any nearby municipality to take over the roads or the water or anything else is usually going to demand you vote to be annexed into the town so they can expand the tax base. This then makes all the property subject to city building permitting and zoning, which is often more onerous than in unincorporated areas. There isn’t an easy path to a home that has both no restrictions on how you use it and services most people expect. The big exception is true rural properties on traditional county roads, but these are often old farm properties or truly rural homes that have to accept a lot less in terms of guaranteed services than the sort of professionals who are looking to buy in subdivisions usually expect.
-
If you live somewhere that doesn’t have a HOA and is either unincorporated or has a lax municipal government, you can have some real bad shit go down. Like a neighbor who operates an open air rusted car collection or amateur junkyard, or any number of other crazy things that might make it nigh impossible to easily sell your home without losing a ton of money.
-
Finally, in my experience most HOAs I’ve been involved in from a professional standpoint don’t do a whole lot other than make sure the roads are maintained and plowed in winter, and only intercede on homeowner “behavioral” stuff when it gets to extremes ala someone building a rusted out car collection in their front yard.
Here in Maryland, the buyer is supposed to be provided with the HOA documents several days (I’m not sure how many; the title company gets to deal with that) ahead of time in order to have the opportunity to review them before closing. And I guess potentially back out if they don’t like the HOA rules, though that’s something we haven’t had a problem with.
Shouldn’t the rural/unincorporated area HOA be requiring some kind of agreement with the nearest municipal fire department?
Wyoming doesn’t like having a bunch o’ rules, so I’m not surprised there are no provisions like there are in civilized states like Maryland.
It’ll depend. Lots of homes in the United States exist outside of a professionally managed fire district. Some are covered primarily by volunteer fire departments, and sometimes professional firefighters from neighboring areas will come in on a per-call basis. Note that both VFDs and special call outs of nearby professionals, typically do charge for their services. They won’t typically make you hand over cash as your home burns, but you’ll face collection action from them after. Lots of rural homeowner’s policies cover a pay out for this up to a certain point, but it can be a real issue. It’s also a rea issue with the departments not being paid in a timely fashion as well as many people refuse or fight attempts to collect the charges.
Rural areas not infrequently have rural fire departments. Here in Kansas, for example, they are typically organized along township lines, civil townships being a unit of government below the county and responsible for road maintenance, fire service, cemeteries, and other such functions outside of incorporated cities. Some can be fairly large departments staffed by full-time professionals (Shawnee Heights Fire District has its own water rescue team, e.g.); others are tiny and strictly volunteer.
People who seek out homes in unincorporated/rural areas often are looking for a lack of onerous rules and regulations (as applied by anyone) and are willing to accept the “risk” that a neighbor will have a truck tire planter in his yard or raise chickens, or that they’ll need a four-wheel drive vehicle to reach the highway in the uncommon event of a heavy snowfall.
As a “professional looking to buy in a subdivision” (assuming my old neighborhood qualified as a subdivision), I was pleased to be able to plant a row of fast-growing arborvitaes in the front yard to screen us from the road. Having a typical HOA would likely have made that impossible. Detrimental to neighborhood uniformity, y’know.
I think there’s a difference in the type of ordinance that city councils can pass - yes, they can pass rules about parking on the street and what time you can put your trash out but with the exception of historical districts, I’ve never heard of city ordinances about what color your front door can be painted and I’ve never heard of any local laws that required the garage door to be open or closed , or that the business name must be covered on any vehicle parked in the driveway. And I’ve certainly never heard of a city ordinance requiring that all window treatments be white the side facing out while that appears to be a common rule in HOAs.
This actually helped my daughter find her house. One couple put in a contract on the house. They read the HOA rules that specified that they couldn’t fence their property, so they backed out. For whatever reason, this particular neighborhood didn’t want to become a series of boxed-in houses - it’s more of houses-in-the-woods. But she did get the documents and there was nothing extreme within - even the dues are reasonable for what they cover - like trash pickup and clearing the roads of snow as required.
I’m in Missouri, Warren County, and we shoot fireworks year round. Now Warrenton, the town, has an ordinance restricting such activity, but in the county it’s a free fire zone so to speak.
I, as well as my neighbors shoot firearms on our property as well. Oh the horror.
I would agree HOAs often have uniformity rules and other things that municipal code won’t cover. But I have been involved with cities that place restrictions on style and size of signage, length of grass and things of that nature. A big one is they also almost universally regulate ownership of any animals that are considered livestock, to the chagrin of a lot of people who want to get in on small scale chicken keeping (this is something some municipalities have been dialing back in recent years, at least as far as I keep up with it.)
I’d also say that the % of HOAs that enforce things like paint scheme, fence vs no fence, and the strict “every house has to look the same” are probably lower than many of you would suspect. I’m familiar with a tremendous number of subdivisions built in unincorporated Virginia where there is none of that at all, but there is a HOA that handles road maintenance and plowing.
I think to some degree there is a bit of a definitional confusion–a lot of you when you say HOA mean exclusively “Planned Communities”, as someone who works in real estate I can tell you there’s a huge number of HOA-covered homes that are not part of planned communities. This means that the homes weren’t all built around the same time by the same architect/builder to look the same way, and aren’t even marketed as a community. Many that I’m familiar with there is no indication the series of plats is even a HOA at all.
I also think some of the HOA complaints are regional, a major, major impetus for the formation of HOAs in unincorporated areas of VA is the maintenance of roads (including plowing in the winter), and very little else. Master planned communities in Florida are designed from day one to be very “intentional” communities, with very intentional setups and goals, and the type of people who move down to Florida to live in them (i.e. old white retired people) are frequently the type of people with nothing better to do than get elected to the HOA board and become petty tyrants.
I’m sure there’s definitional confusion - because I have a question. You say there are huge numbers of HOA covered homes that weren’t built around the same time by the same builder - how does that work as far as making membership mandatory? My understanding is mandatory HOA membership is something that goes along with the deed - if you buy the house membership is required. If the houses are built by different builders at different times , how could that work unless the different builders all jointly decided to require it ? And if Builders A, B and C all make HOA membership a condition of the sale, that really isn’t any different than if the homes were all built by the same company. What would be really different would be if I could be forced to join an HOA formed years after I already bought my house- but I’m pretty sure that can’t happen.
Because you don’t have to build a home to have a restrictive covenant attached to a property. Imagine a scenario where there’s some former farm land say 500 acres that is no longer economically viable, and the family that owns it wants to cash out, a real estate developer buys the land, designs a road system and plats out properties out of the 500 acres, sets up a restrictive covenant requiring the owners of those plats be part of the HOA to maintain those roads, and starts selling lots. Mind that some of these HOAs can have specific stipulations in the covenants that would make it very difficult if almost impossible to “transform” the HOA into one that does things like architectural reviews and things of that nature.
In many ways if you are buying in an unincorporated area and will be relying on a shared private road to access your home, a HOA can be an important thing to look for–there are alternatives that can be less desirable. For example it’s not unusual at all to find a small cluster of rural homes, say 2-5 that were carved out of existing family land holdings years ago. These homes do not have public road access to the nearest government maintained road, so the families that own the home agree to easements necessary to get a road built across their properties attaching them all to the road system, and then they have a shared burden to maintain that road. Unfortunately while the easements will typically be documented (although some aren’t), the shared road maintenance agreement is often an informal agreement at the time of its construction. Years later families sell and move out, neighbors change, and maybe someone moves in who just doesn’t want to pay for the road upkeep. Without a proper agreement there may be great difficulty in compelling that person to pay their fair share. A properly built HOA with appropriate covenants and restrictions can avoid this situation.
Couldn’t it also be that some issue made the home owners vote to create a new HOA years after the homes were built? My neighborhood almost did that when the city tried to pull something that almost all of us thought was shitty. It ended up not being an issue at the end so we all just went back to ignoring each other.
The tricky part there is that if there’s no HOA in the covenants that go with the property, people in the neighborhood can form one, but membership and dues-paying would be voluntary.
Also mind a lot of this varies by state, we don’t have these that I’ve ever worked with, but some states have “Road Associations.” A Road Association can be created sometimes even against the consent of the people affected. Some states have laws on the books that if a private road is used by more than X number of people, then if at least Y number of people vote to form and call a meeting to discuss a road association, the approving owners can have a road association created which has the authority to engage in maintenance and liability mitigation services and can bill all users of the road.
I grew up in a planned community that regulates house/door colors, clotheslines, and fencing materials, and other exterior displays.
That’s the situation where I live. The HOA collects money to maintain the gravel road serving the 15 houses in our little subdivision. There are also a few rules, such as minimum home square footage and no large farm animals. Chickens etc are OK though.
Is it just a voluntary association, or is it binding on all the owners in the association?
I’m only a little surprised that there isn’t a disclosure requirement under Wyoming law (though there is in my state). I’m much more surprised that, given the absence of a disclosure requirement, other people in the transaction aren’t on the lookout HOAs in the covenants, conditions, and restrictions on the deed. I would expect that the buyer’s real estate agent would know about it from other property listings in the same HOA or, if a seller failing to disclose and HOA is a common thing in Wyoming, that she or he would learn to ask the seller about it. The mortgage lender would care because it’s a housing expense that should be factored into the underwriting model (although if it’s a tiny expense, maybe they just don’t care that much). The title insurance company and the buyer’s lawyer should look carefully to make sure that there’s no HOA, or if there is, that the owner doesn’t owe money to the HOA that could cloud the title.
Googling found this real estate disclosure form for Wyoming that lists Homeowners Association as a disclosure item. I believe you when you say you didn’t know about the HOA but I’m surprised that it escaped the attention of everyone in the process.