How can it be mandatory to join a HOA?
Same way it can be mandatory to pay property taxes. In some cases at least, the streets and public services like snow removal are paid for by HOA.
My sense is that the key problem with HOAs is that the people who end up running them are the people who most want that sort of power - busybodies and petty authoritarians.
Everybody is opposed to petty authoritarians until the guy next door puts up a "Happy Holidays from Stormfront" banner.
This is really layperson-speak: I find this stuff confusing. But I think the only way to bring a mandatory HOA about is (1) Developer buys big chunk of land; (2) Developer subdivides it into housing plots, builds houses; (3) sets up a legal entity as the HOA; and (4) sells the houses subject to a legal obligation to pay HOA dues. You don't join the HOA, you buy your house subject to the HOA.
My mother's summer-house has a similar but non-obnoxious setup; the developer bought a mile-long strip of land stretching from the beach to a major road, and set up some kind of legal entity (I don't think it's an ordinary corporation, it's something weird) that owns the beachfront plot. Every lot along the road was sold with an inalienable ownership share in the beachfront plot, giving a right to use the beach and exclude non-residents (or their guests) from it (at least above the high tide line). The entity also collects dues for beach upkeep, but they're voluntary.
The priorities that HOAs actually set make me want to side with the libertarians
Don't libertarians love HOAs? Get out from under the thumb of Big Government, work things out in the private sector, etc.
I thought libertarians just had daddy issues about being told what to do.
Mostly, I think the obnoxiousness comes from the fact that a non-obnoxious HOA is pretty imperceptible. I think the thing that owns my mother's beach is an HOA, but all it does is clean the beach up, maintain a couple of picnic benches, and throw a barbecue once a year. There are bitter internal squabbles over who's going to run it, and accusations of financial peculation and that sort of thing, but if fighting about that sort of thing wasn't your chosen form of entertainment, you could live on the block and use the beach forever and not worry about it.
4: That's what it was when I lived in one, except for no beach.
I get into a variation of this argument with my uncle from time to time, who sees local, community run programs (within a healthy socialist country) as the answer to society's ills. But he lives in a blue state. I fret about the kind of local community-run program that springs up when your community is obsessed with punishment, shame, and the bible.
9: My HOA was in North Carolina and it seemed to do fine. One guy carved his shrub to look like a penis but nobody complained.
Everybody is opposed to petty authoritarians until the guy next door puts up a "Happy Holidays from Stormfront" banner.
Even the neo-Nazis are getting in on the war on Christmas now? Man, American Christians really are being persecuted.
But he lives in a blue state.
Assholes running HOAs can be found in every state that has HOAs.
Right, I don't think HOAs actually vary according to red state/blue state. I was talking about community organizations that serve a broader range of services.
9: Well, yeah, that's (one of the reasons) why the anarchist ideal scares me. Small local responsive organizations that run on personal contact and relationships are great if they're nice, but awful if they don't like you and have power over you.
I'm sure a petty tyrant could make life very hard for people using an HOA, but they could also do similar things if they just keep calling the cops and code enforcement and whatnot. You can, in theory, vote new HOA leadership so I could see how that could at least get better.
I'm in the process of buying a house that has a mandatory HOA. I haven't looked into it yet, but I assume it's just another covenant. Looks like the big activities are getting federal funding for a bike trail from our subdivision up towards the mountains, and advocating for better elk habitat protection for the herd that comes near the subdivision every winter. I expect to be harassed about my dog, of course.
Possibly related to home-ownership having such a proliferation of social-ladder-climbing implications for so many people?
I also like this idea of community land trusts and that general umbrella of organizations (I can't remember their generic name) where instead of the home as a risky investment, you have the home being affordable, secure-tenancy, and turning savings into (growth-capped) equity. But it does seem in peril of the same phenomenon.
I'd guess that people who hate elk don't like the HOA.
My mother-in-law lives on a property subject to an HOA that wasn't enforced for decades. Some people in the neighborhood were trying to drum up support for enforcing the HOA, which had a large portion of the neighborhood upset because they had stopped complying by putting up things like carports, leaving old cars on the lawn and parking RVs permanently on the street. The requirements all seemed perfectly reasonable if you wanted to live in a nice neighborhood, but it was problematic for certain parts of this neighborhood where the owners had let things get very run down.
When community ownership is too low-key.
but they could also do similar things if they just keep calling the cops and code enforcement and whatnot.
This varies quite widely with what's in the terms of the HOA. Many of them have complete authority over the street face of your house and what's in front of it. Your dickhead neighbor can't call the cops on you for painting your house dark green; some HOAs can sue you.
23: True. I'm thinking of my neighborhood where roughly 25% of the people have at least one car parked illegally at least part of the day and a similar percentage don't shovel snow leaving me to slide down the hill.
Chatham Village has an interesting form, in which you don't buy a house, you buy one stock in Chatham Village LLC (or whatever) which entitles you to live in one of the houses; when you move out, you're required to sell the stock back*. All exterior maintenance is handled by the LLC, and I think that your limited in what you can do inside as well, although I'm less certain about that.
* I think this is like a co-op, but I'm fairly certain it is not, in fact, a co-op
25: We almost bought up there. The drive down into town is what scared us away. Plus the rooms were pretty small.
3 was pretty funny.
Isn't it weird how condo associations seem to be the exact opposite? I mean, far from it being vicious busybodies, all the stories I hear about condo assocs are about how overworked and underappreciated the few community-minded people who do the actual work are, and how the other owners are all assholes who fuck everything up and damage the common areas and never pay their dues on time.
I think an anarchist HOA would be significantly different than those produced by capitalists. For one thing, I gather that a big problem with HOAs is that you get people who use their seniority in the neighborhood to bully everyone else. Now, something like that could happen in an anarchist society, but there wouldn't be legally enforceable contracts based on idiotic aesthetic preferences. Everyone would be instantly recallable and you couldn't foreclose on someone at all, 'cause there wouldn't be any property.
25.last: Their website calls them a coop.
27: I'd actually bet that most HOAs are at least harmless and maybe beneficial, like condo associations, they just get visible when they're awful. Maybe condo boards are better because they have more responsibilities? Depending on the HOA, there's a chance it doesn't have to do anything but mess with people. Condo boards, on the other hand, have to fix leaks and the like.
I think some HOAs are more prone to petty authoritarianism because the people who live in that community are all self selected to be the kind of people who like to live in small, well-ordered and well-guarded communities.
27: Fits with my theory of it being related to social anxiety/climbing. In an apartment as opposed to a standalone house, the image your living space presents to the outside is subsumed into a collective, so you're going to get less "my territory will bear witness to my immaculate UMC status" assholishness. Also condo-ownership is not as often people's lifelong aspiration (in most urban areas).
There are stories around here about HOA's making native gardens and clotheslines illegal. I know for sure they would hate all my choices (bright colors, bees!). I would never ever enter into an HOA.
28: Whaddya know. Maybe I should read that book.
27.2 aligns with my professional experience of condo boards. The brick walls are cracking, a half dozen people are trying to get it fixed, and everyone else is just bitching at the prospect of having to pay for repairs.
Often when a HOA is responsible for the roads and similar ordinarily-public services, it's been part of a deal between the local municipality and the developer - "We'll grant your permit to build a development of N homes here on the condition that you create an HOA that takes over our job and means we don't have to spend tax money on your roads".
I think the weirdness of HOAs, especially as distinct from condo associations, comes out of the way they're an extremely local form of government - given the above, they can be thought of as a kind of delagated/outsourced government - but that they aren't bound by the usual forms of government: open-meeting laws if your state has those, due process, empowered to micromanage in ways that governments generally aren't, and so on.
Further, there are areas where pretty much all of the recent development has been under terms like 35.1, so there won't, in practice, be a non-HOA option for a homebuyer.
Although it's all in who's running it. Imagine you won the lottery, bought all the houses on a nice block in your city, set up an HOA, and sold houses to people you liked who were willing to join an HOA that mandated native gardens, charged high fees for car owners that were used to pay for tools and parts in the communal bike-repair shed, and organized the baby-sitting coop. If it's an organization of your people who want to do your things, it stops sounding oppressive and starts sounding like a healthy community. (Well, maybe it still sounds oppressive. But differently oppressive!)
When you buy the house, the HOA agreement is part of the mortgage document. You agree to follow all the rules and you tell the bank that you'll follow all the rules and it's part of the condition of them lending you the ridiculous amount of money you need to buy a house.
I'll admit, I like my HOA. My neighborhood has a little playground and pavilion and three different park-like areas where people walk their dogs, and the HOA maintains all that stuff. They fix the streetlights and on a couple of random occasions when there's been graffiti the HOA has arranged for it to be cleaned up. (I wouldn't care about beautiful graffiti, but in one case, it was a swastika -- I was glad to have it gone almost immediately.) But they do also send letters to people requiring them to take care of their lawns and maintain their houses, and sometimes their rules about where trash cans can be (only in front of the house on garbage days) seem a little oppressive. But it's a trade-off and living in a neighborhood with parks and swings make it worth it to me.
22 is fucking amazing. That's some spectacular graft.
No one's mentioned racial covenants yet?
There is no HOA where we live, but we are within a Historical District that governs what we can do to the front side and visible-from-the-street parts of our house. The neighborhood clubs are all voluntary (and we're in the garden club and should join the historical society or at least attend since there's free wine) and the biggest historical zoning problem I've experienced is that the dog park has to get fences that fit the wrought-iron(-look) requirements of the neighborhood. I don't know who pays for the block party, but it's definitely open to all.
Yeah, I'm also in a historical district. I don't mind that as much, since there is a context besides "a clothesline would make property values go down".
38 -- That sounds kind of strange to me - once the loan is paid off, a covenant that runs with the mortgage, rather than with the land, would become inoperative. Not that I wouldn't expect a lender to get a warranty of some kind that the borrower is going to comply with the covenants that run with the land . . .
22 is frigging awesome and I'm surprised Law and Order hasn't stolen the idea yet.
I wouldn't want an HOA, for reasons that heebie alludes to in 9. I already feel like the neighborhood pariah because I mow the lawn on a street where that is clearly the man's job; thank goodness they can't bitch about my preference for native plants over water-wasting gardens.
I already feel like the neighborhood pariah because I mow the lawn on a street where that is clearly the man's job;
You won't grow a beard unless you use a riding lawn tractor.
If I could ever afford a yard suitable for hanging a clothes line and wasn't allowed to hang a clothes line because of some HOA bullshit, I would be so so sad.
I'm just going to mentally search/replace HOA/Co-op Board and see if I can work up some comment-fueling disdain.
A coop board is what a chicken shits on.
45: Sometimes I feel self conscious mowing the lawn because we have a reel mower (like this) and there seems to be some rule in the suburbs that yard work must involve some loud gas-powered engine, either a leaf blower, or a lawn mower, or if necessary a chainsaw.
I think suburban engineers are busy working on ways to use even more gas engines in lawn care. Maybe a sprinkler with a buzzing two-stroke engine from a leaf blower.
Most of my neighbors are polite enough, but we've been here nearly a year and interactions have been pretty limited. One introduced himself only after confirming that the man of the house was around; another's first question to me (literally -- was unpacking the moving truck) was whether I had kids, and followed that up with asking whether I was planning to. I think she was making polite conversation and I thought she was being astonishingly rude, so.
One finally said hello only recently; discussions immediately turned to whether shiv was around and gently whether we were married, etc. I feel like the divorced gal on Mad Men. Except without the creepy son.
I recommend a scythe for that real old school environmentally low impact tech. They're actually very effective.
I use a scythe for all my lawn care.
50: My father uses one of those, and is astonishingly smug about it.
I stupidly paused to see if a scythe or a sickle was better adapted.
another's first question to me (literally -- was unpacking the moving truck) was whether I had kids, and followed that up with asking whether I was planning to.
"Because my husband's really fertile, you know. Just in case you needed some help with that."
I wish I'd had the presence of mind to answer "We were hoping to rent first."
"We're waiting for approval from the Reverend Moon."
It seems that my reel mower needs sharpening - I actually had to give up in the back yard yesterday.
Given how tiny our yard is, I can't imagine having a gas mower. Maybe one of those electrics, but really, the reels are fine.
Have you considered having sex in front of an open window and playing loud music late at night?
"I only ask because our housing association has some rules ..."
The pernicious side of HOAs is that they disenfranchise the non-property owners. The HOA has many of the powers that a town's mayor has, but if you rent, you don't get a vote, and your landlord may get 50 votes.
Also, the enforcement powers also aren't limited by due process rquirement; you can fight your parking ticket to the Supreme Court if it's from the town, but not if it's from the HOA.
The pernicious side of HOAs is that they disenfranchise the non-property owners.
Which is specifically why libertarians love HOAs.
62: We've had beer on the patio! That didn't cut the grass either.
Even the neo-Nazis are getting in on the war on Christmas now? Man, American Christians really are being persecuted.
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I think many people have heard of this case, but for those who haven't, MN AG Swanson has been investigating Accretive, which was apparently sending bill collectors into ERs and stuff and hassling patients about their insurance/ability to pay. Now, they've brought in Rahm Emmanuel to plead their case by throwing his weight around. Big mistake. People around here do not like Chicagoans who are too big for their britches. And the whole thing smacks of sleazy, smoke-filled-room politicking, which, of course, it is. Like throwing gasoline on a fire, really.
http://www.startribune.com/politics/statelocal/150635345.html
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69. That's politically unsavvy. Heck, the orignal story made the NY Times. Having the mayor of Chicago lobby for you looks like...Chicago politics.
My mother was a mover and shaker in the HOA of our brand new Lennar development in suburban S. Florida in the early 90s. She got very worked up about a couple neighbors who had a satellite dish in an impermissible color.
Usually a laid-back woman, my mother fully disowns that time and talks of her HOA years as if they were the product of a kind of mad menopausal fugue state. I cannot disagree.
Have I complained about the mentally ill, blind chain smoker who's moved in next door? Don't worry, he didn't displace the drug dealer - he's upstairs.
Anyway, dude sits in his front window, about 15' from our bedroom window, smoking and bellowing incoherent and often violently abusive monologues in an astonishingly booming voice. At all hours. It's literally not clear when he sleeps - we'll hear him at 11 pm, 3 am, 8 am, and all afternoon.
AB actually called the cops to see if we're even allowed to call 911 - it seems weird for the cops to come out for someone alone in his room, but he wouldn't be any less disturbing if he were blasting music.
This landlord must have one hell of a screening process - in 11 years, across 4 apartments, he's rented to 2 households who never caused any trouble.
Good God, the man has the political instincts of a fucking fencepost.
22 -- holy crap! Someone needs to make a movie out of that.
If I move to Pittsburg, we could be neighbors!
The one in Pennsylvania ends in 'h'.
But you already live right near Pittsburg. JRoth is way over east of the Mississippi.
Whatever. He and Moby already talk about living near an Oakland and we're still not neighbors. But his next door neighbor would surely rent to me.
AB actually called the cops to see if we're even allowed to call 911 - it seems weird for the cops to come out for someone alone in his room, but he wouldn't be any less disturbing if he were blasting music.
What did the cops say?
Probably they said yes. This city uses 911 for everything but tax questions.
82 is true.
But they did say, sure, go ahead and call. Being loud after hours (in this neighborhood, anyway) is against the law, whatever the circumstance.
The violent talk stuff is hard to gauge, but if the cops were to hear it, it would be part of the complaint.
I am pro historic preservation, but in Boston's Back Bay and on Beacon Hill the historic preservation people are serious sticklers over less than meaningful stuff. You might get told that your shutters are the wrong shade of black etc.
Nantucket historic district commission is an official government body but notoriously heavy handed about similar stuff- colors, maintenance, renovations, etc.
There once was a man from Nantucket,
who wanted to redo his soffit.
The commission weighted in,
with a shit-eating grin
and told him to go off and suck it.
For me, poetry comes from deep within, an unstoppable force to must express itself.
20: they had stopped complying by putting up things like carports
This made me chuckle. I believe that carports are considered by some to be less than classy, but I have a hard time with the proposition that they keep the neighborhood from being nice. Opinions differ.
I have a love/hate relationship with my local historic preservation district/board. Mostly love, and I am very very pro preservation, but I'd sure like to tear down my eyesore of a rat-trap garage, but I can't b/c it's protected. I feel this is basically at the level of whining about taxes, though -- I'm sad when the burden of the state falls on me, but am glad it falls on everyone.
Also, there is some hilarity involved with the preservation board. To get approval for new construction that even arguably might conceivably alter anything historic in my (very specific) neighborhood, you have to go to a local body that's basically been controlled as an absolute fiefdom for 20 years by this incredibly elegant, effete gay man who is a big property owner and real estate agent.
So, if you want to actually get something done, what you need to do is kiss the ring, almost literally. That is, you get the right introduction, and then go over to his (insanely and preciously) well appointed home for tea or a sherry. You don't mention anything directly. Instead, you have a long conversation about woodworking or politics or whatever he wants to discuss and then, at some point, while he is stroking one of his five persian cats and talking about Stickley furniture, you obliquely mention that you might like to be doing something to the house (to "restore" it, of course, not to transform it) and lightly describe what you intend to do. If he approves, then when you go to the actual meeting your renovation proposal will sail through. But if you fail to kiss the ring, you take your chances.
His sherry was a little sweet for my taste, but I'm generally a fan.
If it isn't sweet, I think you have to call it port.
92 is hilarious. I have a soft spot for men like that, don't ask me why.
If Flippanter shows up at any point, let me know, because I do need to apologize for yelling at him last night.
I have a friend who lives in the Back Bay whose neighbor was converting a brownstone split up into apartments into a single-family home. They met outside the door and started a conversation about the most helpful person on the commission.
92: There's a guy fairly close to that description too, but he runs the historical foundation rather than the zoning board. He did encourage me to go to a meeting, specifically mentioning wine. Perhaps he noticed my inherent aesthetic subtlety or something.
95: ?!?!?!
What about (to mention just three) Manzanilla, Amontillado, and Fino sherry?
Also, I've never had a non-sweet port.
You might get told that your shutters are the wrong shade of black etc.
100. Some white ports are quite dry. I assume Moby is talking about white port, because tawny/ruby port is to sherry as raven is to a writing desk.
But for heaven's sake, I thought everybody who drinks sherry these days preferred a dry style. I associate sweet sherry with dodgy 80 year old aunts.
White port can be ferociously dry, and very good.
I was talking out of my ass on the sherry/port issue.
102 PX can be quite good, and very good value for a desert wine.
I'm drinking a sweet ale now, if that makes sense.
I'm afraid to ask for sherry because they alway know I'm the guy who orders rusty nails. Also $2.50 beers make everything else uneconomical.
107: Is this a bar where one would expect the sherry to be drinkable?
They keep paying rent, so I suppose so.
Post titles here too often turn to earworms.
Wow. I swear did have the other thread open.
102: I associate sweet sherry with dodgy 80 year old aunts.
I've been on the board of our local HOA for the past 22 years. It's a townhouse development, so there's a fair amont of common area that needs to be managed, plus maintenance for the exteriors of the buildings (painting, roofs, etc. - with attached housing, you don't want one person replacing his part of the roof and causing a leak in his neighbor's unit. Better to have the HOA replace everybody's roof at once.)
Shortly after we bought our home, I went to a board meeting and saw a board that was attacking a homeowner without giving her a fair chance to speak in her own defense, and was unwilling to listen to objections from the audience. I ran for the board that summer to make sure that someone on the board would listen to the homeowners, and would speak up when people were being treated unfairly. I've stayed on the board ever since.
I've never been big on telling other people what to do, or making sure that everyone's house looks exactly alike. But I figure the best way to make sure that the board reflects those values is to encourage people like me to be willing to serve, so that we don't leave the board in the hands of the control freaks. Someone is going to be running things, so better to have people with an ethos of service than those who want to play Napoleon.
I lived in a suburban KC metro-ara neighborhood with a strict, weird HOA, it was a J.C. Nichols development of the 50 and they had lots of odd rules. We'd get a note about violations, but we were never threatened or anything. All the leaders were in their 60s-80s, as far as I could tell.
I live in a different, much more urban neighborhood where our concerns are too much Sec 8 housing, crimes of petty theft and etc. and making sure people don't start meth labs in empty houses. Or steal all the plumbing out of the empty houses.
The biggest difference is that we know all our neighbors here in Hyde Park (still Kansas City), we have no qualms about speaking to them and we live in a place where the concerns are to keep the neighborhood safe and clean. And try to keep the historic appearance of the houses (this is a bit hard there are some blocks where fires, etc. have cause the rebuilding of houses that look more like they fit in our old neighborhood..._
But I like hit here and I feel I fit. We occasionally speak about moving to thus and such development out south, and then go, "oh, crap, their HOA will be on us every second for everything." For one, my family consists of three adults...)