Like any authority they can be too lax or go too far, sometimes with good intentions. Maybe somewhere in the dark mists of time someone had a shit box work truck that leaked oil all over the place so they banned all work trucks or maybe they are snobs.
My ex wife lives in a condo complex with an HOA. They use the dues to maintain the common pool and to do the landscaping and do repair the roofs. The ex ran afoul of them because she wasn’t allowed to install a certain type of washing machine but it was because those types of machines tend to leak and fuck up the lower neighbor’s walls.
I honestly think that most of them are benign but we only hear the horror stories. That said, I’d avoid living in an area with one.
I don’t live in an HOA community, but the city codes here certainly don’t seem to be enforced. There was an ordinance prohibiting parking a car in the driveway where it blocked the sidewalk. So people could actually use the sidewalk. Dogwalkers, babies in strollers, little kids riding bikes, or joggers. It was never enforced, as far as I could tell.
According to standard practices and customs (i.e., the redit stories), one must park your own eyesore truck in front of their house, perhaps in multiples. I never had a reason to try this.
Back when I was young and out with friends walking around the city, New York City if it matters, we’d sometimes see a car blocking the sidewalk, sometimes three or four of us would climb across the hood or trunk as to not walk into the street. Not nice I know now, but it seemed appropriate at the time.
“An Albuquerque homeowner’s association board member is accused of vandalizing her neighbor’s property with spray paint and when police caught up with her, they say she had some of the evidence on her. This all apparently started over a dispute over HOA dues and when neighbors helped police track the woman down, she admitted it all.”
"The victims said they don’t know the woman they think left this mess behind, later identified as Alicia Tierney. Other neighbors told police Tierney could have been upset because she had previously been trying to collect payments for the homeowner’s association that they say doesn’t exist.
“We don’t pay dues because there’s no HOA,” one neighbor told police. The police lapel doesn’t clearly show the spray can or red paint on Tierney’s hand, but the victims say the suspect showed up near their home shortly after the incident happened."
In the news today is a police raid on a home in a middle-class neighborhood of Houston, conducted on a report of a kidnapping. What police found instead was over 90 people crammed into the house as part of an apparent human smuggling operation. Five of the occupants tested positive for Covid-19 after they reported symptoms.
The kicker is that a check of real estate listings in this neighborhood, including ones just a couple doors down from the home in question, shows that they are part of a mandatory HOA.
Apparently you can get by with human trafficking in this “established neighborhood”, as long as you don’t park your work pickup in the driveway or plant vegetables in the front yard.
Although imagine the hue and cry from the anti-HOA crowd if a couple blocks over in the same HOA the HOA’s “Interior Inspection Committee” stopped by one fine Saturday to check all through someone’s house looking for excess beds, adequate vacuuming of carpets, lack of bugs, and only tasteful wall-hangings.
Were the hypothetical IIC to have done that, I bet one of the homeowners would be screaming on TwitFace about it and somebody here would cite it as an example of ridiculous HOA overreach.
I use to have neighbors across the street who made their garage an real room in their house and as a result had to move all their garage stuff to their driveway and put a portable awning over it making their driveway a garage. So every single day I had to look at 10,000 pieces of junk scattered over a driveway under an awning while the guys 6 cars were now parking all over the Street, including in front of my house.
So yeah definitely one of those situations where you wish you had an HOA.
Or a time to check to see if they had the proper permits. You would be surprised at the number of times people make such changes without getting permits first.
I agree. I disagreed with the part of the article that said HOA’s inevitably become power mad because that isn’t my experience AT ALL.
Most are benign and not very active, and the existing members struggle to fill seats on the board and keep them filled. So many of these articles cast the HOA as an adversarial force working against the homeowners, something that has to be fought. But in an HOA community, the homeowners are the HOA. Members may have a problem with the board, and their recourse is the exact same recourse that shareholders of a corporation have if they don’t like the job the board is doing - vote them out.
If they really are tyrannical fascists terrorizing the entire community, that should be easy. If it isn’t, it’s because a large number of the residents agree with what they are doing.
I have mixed feelings about my HOA community. I don’t like the “house police” aspect but, like in many communities, the HOA is a necessity - we have lots of parkland and ponds that need to be maintained, as well as a pool and a clubhouse. So, while I don’t like being in an HOA neighborhood per se, I like being in a neighborhood with public green spaces and an uncrowded pool I can use, and if you have amenities like that you need an HOA of some sort.
Confession - I’m on my HOA board. I’ve been on the co-op or HOA board everywhere I lived. I’m not a controlling person and I think a house needs to be in a somewhat egregious state of disrepair before the HOA steps in. I really don’t like controlling tyrannical HOA boards and the best way to keep my HOA board from becoming like that is from the inside.
It’s always been pretty easy, my communities have always been places where no one wants to serve on the HOA board. When I moved into my latest neighborhood, I basically made a call, volunteered and they jumped.
Or fear reprisals, or can’t find people eager to step into that particular den of snakes.
The minority – the source for all of these “HOA From Hell” horror stories – are clearly a minority, but they can really be like plane crashes: low probability, high consequence.
And recourse is often much harder than many would like to believe. And cliques form that are eerily reminiscent of Lord of the Flies and/or middle school.
And any number of circumstances can make it extremely hard, impractical, or unaffordable to sell and move out.
And CC&Rs can be enforced with extreme prejudice, strongly against the outgroup and never against the ingroup.
And – as I referenced elsewhere – there truly is no recourse when the situation is intolerable because many/most states have the Business Judgment Rule which tends to have the practical effect of giving the HOA the (wholly unearned) benefit of the doubt in a Court of Law.
By and large, our HOA means well and does a thankless job, but some of the rules are downright comical. Two years ago the inspection committee checked every mailbox post in the development with a plumb bob and if yours wasn’t 100% straight, you got a write-up and threat of a fine if not corrected. The builder put in the posts, most of them not deep enough, and put two mailboxes on posts meant for one, so a lot of them lean. It’s ridiculous to expect residents to fix them. A major beef I had with them was when my siding got damaged by the company that mows the lawns. According to the agreement the development has with the company, the lawn service is not responsible if they damage your house. This happened to me twice and I had to pay someone to come out and replace the siding. Finally we put in a mulch bed so they couldn’t get anywhere near the house.
I presume that you aren’t a party to the contract with the lawn service and that the HOA is. The HOA (I presume again) is also responsible for mowing your lawn and they hired the lawn service to do it. Why should you be bound by the HOA’s contract with the lawn service and why isn’t the HOA responsible for the damage?
Our last home, a condo, was part of an HOA. We were lucky, as the board was fair and not intrusive, and the rules and regs were sensible. The biggest problem was that there were a couple of resident PITAs living there who, despite having signed on to the rules, felt they could do as they wished. Otherwise, it was pretty much eleven years of good living until the last year, when some petty tyrant thought she could act unilaterally without approval of the membership.
As far as I can tell, the large HOA ( the neighborhood has approximately 400 single family homes, townhouse and condos + 500 rental apartments) I belong to has never fined anyone for anything related to the appearance of their house, lawn or vehicles (or anything other than late fees) in the 15 years or so that the neighborhood has existed.
“Why should you be bound by the HOA’s contract with the lawn service and why isn’t the HOA responsible for the damage?”
That’s a good point. The lawn service sheared off the top of a vent in my front yard and I told the HOA flat-out that the damage was plain and simple negligence and I wasn’t paying to have it replaced. (Apparently the same day the lawn service did the same at 3 or 4 other houses.) They made the lawn service have it replaced. Yay. One small victory.
