This is my favorite:
Texas man: HOA declared my pickup truck not fancy enough for neighborhood | kvue.com
Full disclosure- I used to work at the company where he was CEO, and his truck was definitely not a low-end work truck; it was the top of the line F-150 model with every bell and whistle.
HOA rules should not be up to the personal preferences of whoever happens to be on the HOA board at the time. If the rules say no pickup trucks in the driveway, then no pickup trucks in the driveway. The fanciness of the pickup truck should be irrelevant since each individual will have a different opinion of how fancy is fancy enough. If the homeowner feels that’s an unreasonable rule, they don’t have to live in that neighborhood.
Doesn’t make it not horrible or not stupid.
And that argument can be used to justify any petty tyranny that a HOA chooses to enact in the future, which is bullshit.
There really should be some kind of ‘reasonable and customary’ standard with respect to HOA rules and compliance, not just the idea that if you don’t like whatever bullshit the HOA busybodies come up with, you can live somewhere else.
Typically those kinds of restrictions are spelled out in the covenants rather than arbitrarily decided by the HOA board. Things like number of pets, flagpoles, signs in the yards, restrictions on commercial vehicles, etc. should all be in the covenants and the homeowner should know about them ahead of time. I agree that many rules seem excessive, but the homeowner is bound to follow those rules when they purchase the property. If they don’t want to follow those rules, they should find a different property. The pickup truck issue doesn’t even seem that out-of-line. It’s not that he can’t have a pickup truck. It’s that it can’t be parked outside. It doesn’t seem like it would be that burdensome to park it in the garage.
Some HOA boards may be real sticklers when interpreting the rules, but they can’t just arbitrarily make up new rules. The covenants can be changed, but typically that is an onerous process. The most common difficulty is that it typically takes a quorum of homeowners to agree to the change, but homeowner participation in the process is very low. But if enough homeowners feel a restriction is unreasonable and want it modified, they can get the covenants changed.
This. In the short term, the HOA board inevitably has plenty of latitude in how it interprets and enforces rules, but it can’t just make up new ones on the fly - filmore’s description of the difficulties of doing so is spot-on.
According to the story, the HOA rules ban trucks from outdoor parking altogether. The story says they made exceptions for some vehicles, like the Cadillac Escalade, that in their opinion “do not look like pickups.” (Hard to argue, IMHO.) But the Ford F-150 is unquestionably a pickup truck.
Sure, it’s a stupid rule. But here’s the kicker:
Mr. Greenwood said his family has a car, a Suburban and his teenage son’s truck, but only a two-car garage.
“I don’t want to mess with the logistics with what’s in the garage and what’s not,” he said.
So he just doesn’t want to switch around which cars go in the garage and which ones don’t, given that the Suburban - which is definitely not a pickup truck - may well pass muster with the HOA.
No sympathy.
Each person likely has their own opinion as to what they like/don’t re: driveway parking. We don’t have a HOA and I don’t REALLY care, but I might be fine w/ no ongoing parking of vehicles in the driveway - so if you have a 2-car garage, both cars have to be inside. I DO start to object when the cars are parked such that they obstruct the sidewalk.
Or maybe all vehicles must be in running order. My nextdoor neighbor had an old heap parked outside for over a year. Yeah, I could avoid looking at it, but I prefer the look now that its gone.
But the bottomline is, if I want to park certain vehicles in a particular location, I do not buy into a HOA that specifically precludes that.
BTW - most HOAs can be amended. If the rule is so stupid, the truck owner should have no difficulty convincing sufficient people to amend the rules.
BTW - how do you propose defining “reasonable and customary?”
Mmm…yes and no.
"Is there any limit on how high the homeowner’s association (HOA) can raise dues?
Unfortunately, the short answer is usually “no.”"
And then there’s the joy of “special assessments”.
If worries over neighbors hanging laundry in the back yard or parking a déclassé pickup truck in the driveway outweigh concerns about having your life micromanaged by fellow residents and potentially paying unforeseen amounts of $$$ for the privilege, then an HOA may be for you.
There is an infamous case of an HOA in Virginia that allowed campaign signs but limited the size of any signs. One homeowner put up a campaign sign that exceeded the size requirement, and the board instructed them to remove it or replace it with a compliant sign. The homeowner cut the sign in half, so he now had two compliant signs. Ha ha. The board fined the homeowner, the homeowner sued the HOA, and the HOA ended up selling common property to pay the judgement and went bankrupt.
My first reaction is "Wait, do they object to pickup trucks… or the type of people who own pickup trucks?"
If I were a good ol’ boy coon-dog-owner truck-drivin’ redneck, I might feel like the Golden-Doodle-owner Prius-drivin’ HOA biddies were looking down their surgically-lifted noses at me.
As to pickup trucks … Depends on when the HOA was incorporated and where it’s located.
My waterfront condo in South Florida dates from 1975. In those days nobody but ruralians and workmen drove pickups. The association of pickup trucks was to scruffy people. Meanwhile, the builder wanted the complex to have a tony upscale urbam, or at least upper middle class comfortable suburban vibe. So they wrote the covenants that pickup trucks are permitted only with a full bed cover that must be flat. Which precludes ladders, pipes, etc., sticking out at odd angles, and prohibits camper tops too.
For the same reason, motorcycles were/are highly restricted too.
To change these rules embedded in the covenants requires, as a matter of FL law, an affirmative vote of 75% of the owners to make a change. Crucially, any abstention counts as a vote for approval for the status quo. We rarely have over 30% participation in any voting matter.
So if somebody wanted to allow pickups with no restrictions, they’d need to convince at least 50% of our members to bother voting at all, and 100% of those to vote for change. And get 75% of the few folks who usually bother to vote to also agree to the change.
About 10% of our apartments are owned by hard core absentees, folks wasting away in nursing homes, or investment corporations or such. Those never vote and just don’t care. So if the best turnout you can possible imagine is 90% and you need 75% voting “yes” to change, you need 83% of the people who do vote to vote yes.
Good luck with that. We on the Board are hostage to ways of running condos that somebody thought made sense when Nixon was President.
Yeah, motorcycles tend to ring some bells.
Years (decades) ago, my father lived in a cooperative apartment, in one of six buildings in an apartment complex, all part of the same co-op. One of my brothers had an apartment there, too.
Another brother and I would show up for visits and family gatherings on motorcycles, and park them, perfectly legally, directly in front of the building. There was another old family friend who would do the same. So sometimes there would be three bikes parked in a row in front of the building.
This drove some members of the co-op board absolutely batshit crazy. Letters were sent to my father and brother. Threats of action were made.
The threats were completely empty, of course. A co-op board’s jurisdiction most certainly does not extend to the public streets of the City of New York.
We all just thought it was funny. We all knew the board members who were pissed off (all of us grew up in that apartment complex), and took great delight in annoying them. We’d intentionally park the bikes right in front of their cars, for example.
It was all very silly.
That’s hilarious.
Out of curiosity, I looked up some car weights:
Toyota Yaris 2315 pouns
Chevy Spark 2246 pounds
There were only two cars I found that would be allowed to park:
Smart FourTwo 1984 pounds (But not the model with 6 speed auto transmission - that’s 2053 pounds)
Mitsubishi Mirage 1973 pounds (But god help you if you get the ES Trim package - that pushes it to 2051 pounds)
My mother lives in a gated community with an HOA.
One of the rules is that no vehicles – including delivery trucks – can be more than (IIRC) twenty feet long. There are relatively tight turns within the community and an over-length truck increases the risk of clipping the corner of a building.
But all you can do is to strongly emphasize this condition to whatever company you’re contracting (to do work, or make a delivery) with.
And sometimes they don’t comply. And sometimes they lie (“Oh, yeah. Our trucks are all well under that limit”). And you really don’t know … until … (cue foreboding organ music) It’s Too Late.
And, seemingly, somebody affiliated with the HOA (ie, a Board member) has an infrared remote truck measuring device that they wield mercilessly.
And the fines are several hundred dollars for each violation.
And good luck trying to get the owner of the truck to reimburse you for that.
The development in which we live has an H.O.A., and I’ve had my disagreements with them, but overall they are a positive, and the neighborhood looks well-kept and attractive because they enforce the rules. There are people here who would fill their front yards will all manner of ugly tchotchkes if they could, and they’ve tried, only to be told to get rid of them. Flags were a heated issue at an H.O.A. meeting a while back. People wanted to fly sports flags and all kinds of stuff, but the rules are American flag or state flag, and nothing else, of a specified size and attached to the house in a specified way. I noticed an open garage door one day and saw a Confederate flag on the wall. Were the flag rules not in writing and enforced, you can be damn sure that treasonous symbol would be flying on the front lawn.
“The Farrans said the HOA had a reputation for hard-line stances. In one case, board member Don Hughes compared some residents’ refusal to install window-pane dividers to the “cat and mouse game Saddam Hussein played with the USA,” e-mails show. Ultimately, Hussein “paid the price,” he said, concluding that the residents should comply.”
Mandatory windowpane dividers??? Who thinks up this stuff?
I think they means grids. That is the one rule in my HOA that I don’t like. We have to have these grids in the windows like the “After” picture here. They are grids to simulate the look of multipane windows from colonial days. I hate fake stuff. I wanted to install a big window without them for a nice view into a wooded area behind my house but not allowed.
I think people talking about “colonial style” have misremembered the date of the American Revolution 
Expensive medium size panes from around 1900. I think large panes started to become common in the 60’s. Glass roofs and walls were common much earlier, but the quality of the glass was not such that you would want to use it for a window.
Ultimately there are two drivers for HOA/Condo association restrictions:
The former are often driven mostly by the developer’s desire to have the last house built and sold be easy to sell because the whole development looks like one giant tract of immaculate model homes. In an ideal world, many of these restrictions, e.g. the window grids mentioned a couple posts ago, could sunset when the developer is gone and only real individual homeowners exist. The fact they don’t is mostly laziness on the part of the developer.
Though of course there are people who really love the feeling of living in a cookie cutter world full of cookie cutter people with cookie cutter cars stored in the (closed) garage of their cookie cutter houses.
The latter rules matter more on a basis of density. What makes sense in my condo building where within 50 feet of my six exterior walls I have 30 neighbors is very different from what makes sense where we each live on 5 acres of ranchette. But even with 5 acres each, one neighbor’s rifle fire can definitely hit their neighbors houses, kids, and critters. And the noise travels farther than that.
I think that’s it more than you might think. There are a LOT of people out there who get weird when it comes to their neighbors’ homes and how they decorate, landscape or keep them. It’s almost always couched in “protecting my property value” with some kind of concern that if they give an inch and allow for any divergence from their absolute uniformity, their property values will drop and the place will be overrun with lower-income people and then the place will go to hell for sure.
I’m not sure if it’s thinly veiled racism or what, but it’s definitely born from the same fear-based culture that drives the Conservative political segment of the population. It’s a fear that if they don’t “hold the line” against chaos, disorder and nonconformity, that the place is going to go to pot, and that things for them will be worse in some fashion.