FML, I didn’t actually live there. And I helped paint the damn door the approved color. If the rules had at least provided a few options, I wouldn’t have wanted to do something crazy, but it was this one shade of dark red. Not a bad color, but there are others that would have looked just as nice.
Besides, even if you have a detached house you could still have an insane HOA. It’s not just townhouses.
I’m renting now. There are rules about what I can and can’t do around my house. That’s not a problem, it’s not my house. If I owned it, though, the same rules would simply piss me off.
You’d think an HOA could just deal with the occasional bad apple in a neighborhood instead of punishing everybody for the sins of the few. Just because having a car on blocks rusting in the front yard is pretty unsightly in a suburban neighborhood doesn’t mean that letting one’s grass grow a quarter inch too long is just as bad. Or, for that matter, having one’s house painted an unapproved color.
Next Door Neighbor from Another Planet aka HOA VP (single family detached home, seriously uppity guard-gated community) turned us and the other five visible homesin several times a month in for having water the gutter, having cracks in our sidewalk expansion joints, not using marijuana to manage migraines (to skip the biweekly meetings), lack of barking dogs (she felt it indicated a lack of awareness about our surroundings), “offensive” front doors (original equipment – houses are less than 2 years old) not being replaced “in a timely manner” and Og only knows how many golf cart drivers for being not invisible.
Now ask me why we jumped at the chance to move to BFE North Dakota. No HOAs. Neighbors might be batshit crazy, but she is 2 miles away.
We rent a detached house in a neighborhood with an HOA. The HOA expects us to follow rules they won’t let us see or get a copy of because we’re renters, and won’t give a copy of the rules to our property management company either. They also won’t mail us notices of changes within the rules, as we’re not homeowners, but will still mail tenants letters regarding conditions, which seems to include things like the grass height being a milimeter too high during a week when it hasn’t stopped raining and removing a “dead”* tree in the middle of winter. In addition to being expected to comply with rules we don’t know, we’re also not allowed at any of the HOA meetings to find out what’s going on within the community. It’s gotten ridiculous to the point where the property management company we work with has decided that they’re going to ignore most of the property management regulations unless it’s something that can be proven that we were aware of before we were sent a notice and is actually still true by the time they receive their copy of the notice. We’ve lived there long enough and have been through a couple of property management inspections, so they know that we’re keeping up the house and have actually made some improvements to the landscaping that they’ve approved and reimbursed us for.
[sub]*Note: said tree is a young Floss Silk tree and was at the time both green and covered in new buds. We called up the HOA to explain that to them, but apparently in their minds, trees smaller than 5 feet come in two varieties: blooming and dead. [/sub]
Well, this was in Vegas, so perhaps she didn’t understand that water occasionally falls from the sky. :rolleyes: The thing that killed me was her bitching about cracks IN the sidewalk expansion joints. Howl at the moon crazy, and stupid to boot.
I bought my house in mid-Georgia (see my location), and when I closed, I read the paperwork that said my subdivision had an HOA, but two years later, I have yet to see anything from/about it.
I wonder if I could throw a coup d’HOA and proclaim myself “Chairman of the Subdivision.” Sure, neighboring HOAs and others known as “the Police” may have issues with the fact we’ve got roving [sub]armed[/sub] patrols, but hey, it helps keep crime at an absolute minimum. Why, if a neighboring subdivision is having trouble, that’s okay–we’ll annex them into our own! Then, we can have more people pay dues to the HOA; because you know, if you don’t support the HOA, you’re just not a good community member or decent homeowner. Be part of the winning team! If you don’t want to join, well, you’re bringing the rest of the [del]collective[/del] association down. . .
The more people we can [del]strongarm[/del] get to volunteer for the HOA, the more we can help out the community, and the more people will enjoy it! Why, we even have a new subdivision song! Post the colors everyone and sing along, “Subdivision uber alles. . .!!” Later, we’ll purge the nonbelievers!
I’m sorry, I have nothing really substantiative to post other than my complete distrust of HOAs, and the fact that I’ve seen/heard nothing good come out of them. Add this to the fact that our shithead secretary spends company (yes, government) time on HOA issues, and it adds to the bad “week old vomit” taste in my mouth of the entire process. Look, if you want a few extra bucks to have a company mow the lawn, fine, call it a “Common Area Maintenance Fee”, but don’t disguise it under some cockamamie farce of an “Association”. I pay taxes for services I need, which aren’t exclusive to neighborhoods–they’re available to everyone who needs them (i.e. fire/police).
I recently bought a townhouse; I would have preferred buying a single family house but all the ones that otherwise fit my requirements had other disadvantages, especially being situated on lots that required more upkeep than I could comfortably manage. So I finally bowed to the inevitable and started checking out townhouses. The place I ended up buying is half of a duplex, and includes the surrounding land. However, the HOA dues include all the landscaping work required on my land, except for upkeep of any garden I choose to plant in the back yard.
I made a point of checking out the HOA rules before making an offer, and even managed to talk to a few of my prospective neighbors to get their opinions on the HOA. Shortly after I started moving in a woman came by and dropped off a copy of the HOA rules, (of which I had already received a copy in the mail), a list iof contact names and numbers in case I had any questions, and a certificate good for $5 off at the local Great Harvest Bakery (which I appreciate, since I love their bread). So far, I think the $195 a month I pay is well worth it; I’ll see what happens when I put in my request to have the tree and shrubs in front of my place replaced with something more to my liking.
Not that I have much of a dog in this fight, but I think this is part of the problem. HOA boards self-select for those who feel it’s worthwhile to invest a lot of time to enforce standards on the community, whereas the “live-and-let-live” type of homeowner just isn’t interested. People with things to do and places to be couldn’t care less about whether their neighbors’ garage door has the regulation number of windows as per spec.
I’ve been to communities in the California desert where the houses were more uniform and cookie-cutter than those of a British Army base I used to visit some years back. Perhaps there’s an untapped market for barracks living, I dunno. But the uniformity certainly didn’t add to the perceived property value in my mind, on the contrary.
I’ve lived in 3 different neighborhoods with HOAs. First one was optional, and all of $25/year. I paid because it seemed important to support the upkeep of the community building and the playground, even tho lots of kids seemed to delight in destroying the basketball backboards and the swings. We had a lot on the lake, so we had to pay the Lake Lot Owners Association if we wanted to have access to the boat ramp, and it was such a small amount, we paid that, too. They did something smart, tho - to pay for the upkeep of the dams between the lakes (there were 4 in this community) they’d passed a tax assessment of $100/year on all lake lot owners. It was administered by the county as part of our property taxes, so there was no problem with people not paying their share. It was a most pleasant association.
The second one was pricier - in the 3 years we lived there, the rates went from $450 to $550 per year. It paid for use of the pool, the community beach on the “lake”, and for plowing the streets. Now, 8 years later, I hear from friends who live there that it’s up to $800/year and the board is pretty full of itself. We’d gone to one meeting just after we moved there, and it was very clique-ish, so we never went again. I understand it’s much worse now.
The third was the smallest (48 homes), the newest (we were maybe the 12th or 15th to move in), and the most maniacal. The told you what kind of fence you could have, what color your house could be, you couldn’t park any vehicles on the street (just a paved driveway or garage) and if you owned a boat or a commercial vehicle (like my neighbor who drove his work van home) it had to be garaged out of sight. No RVs. No sheds visible from the street. They tried to say no satellite dishes, but that’s illegal. They did yard inspections twice a year - we got gigged because our lawn was more weeds than grass. It was kept cut short, and it was green, but it offended someone. However, we had a signed contract with a lawn service stating they were treating it for weeds, so we dodged that bullet. I think the kids who bought our house were forced to resod it. Oh, and they fined you if your trashcans were out after pickup day. All that abuse for $45/year. I was so glad to leave that place!
Our current neighborhood was built from '75-'81. The lots are mostly 3 acres, with a very few larger or smaller. Most of the places are very attractive, tho some are less landscaped than other. A couple people run businesses and some have large garage/workshops. And you know what? Houses run in the $350-$400K+ range. I’m pretty sure the lack of an association hasn’t hurt our property values. It’s one of the reasons we picked this place. I’m staying here till I die.
My sister works for a HOA management company, and yes, she pronounces it like whore. I figure, she sees it from above, and still hates them? Then I can call them that too. I sometimes describe her job as being a pimp (because she manages hoa’s).