In defense of HOAs

[Anonymous]

Yep. I liven in a very quirky, charming neighborhood with complete freedom for 18 years. Moved to a perfectly manicured slice of Camazotz.

I love it. It’s just so darn relaxing not to have to worry about other people’s trash etc. Everything just always looks good.

To each his own!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:HOA's exist because humans have a tendency to be lazy, gross and selfish. Without them, there's no telling what your neighbors will let their homes look like. Yes, even in Potomac and Chevy Chase....where the lazy kids inherit their parents' multimillion dollar home and then let it go to shit.

I live in an HOA community, and I have a love-hate relationship with them. I love them when they enforce the rules by not allowing people to smoke in the community's public spaces, but I hate them when they tell me that I can't install a Ring security system on the outside of my front door.

+1. I agree.

And I would add that Americans tend to be very focused on "what's good for me," rather than "what's good for my community." An HOA kind of forces us to care about our community as a whole, rather than just what is good for me.

If a person wants complete freedom to do whatever they want on their property, then they should probably buy some land and live in the outskirts, rather than in a suburb.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:HOAs have positives and negatives.

I live in a neighborhood without one and some people in one of the houses have ten cars in their one house, probably at least three renters who are so-called "family."

Two of their cars are always parked in front of my house. There must be 12 people at least in the house.

+1

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:HOA's exist because humans have a tendency to be lazy, gross and selfish. Without them, there's no telling what your neighbors will let their homes look like. Yes, even in Potomac and Chevy Chase....where the lazy kids inherit their parents' multimillion dollar home and then let it go to shit.

I live in an HOA community, and I have a love-hate relationship with them. I love them when they enforce the rules by not allowing people to smoke in the community's public spaces, but I hate them when they tell me that I can't install a Ring security system on the outside of my front door.

+1. I agree.

And I would add that Americans tend to be very focused on "what's good for me," rather than "what's good for my community." An HOA kind of forces us to care about our community as a whole, rather than just what is good for me.

If a person wants complete freedom to do whatever they want on their property, then they should probably buy some land and live in the outskirts, rather than in a suburb.

+1

Agree, but the guy who thinks he is the HOA, with an arsenal of guns enough for a large army, and enough cars to open his own dealership, will be the first one against HOAs, unfortunately.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:HOA's exist because humans have a tendency to be lazy, gross and selfish. Without them, there's no telling what your neighbors will let their homes look like. Yes, even in Potomac and Chevy Chase....where the lazy kids inherit their parents' multimillion dollar home and then let it go to shit.

I live in an HOA community, and I have a love-hate relationship with them. I love them when they enforce the rules by not allowing people to smoke in the community's public spaces, but I hate them when they tell me that I can't install a Ring security system on the outside of my front door.

+1. I agree.

And I would add that Americans tend to be very focused on "what's good for me," rather than "what's good for my community." An HOA kind of forces us to care about our community as a whole, rather than just what is good for me.

If a person wants complete freedom to do whatever they want on their property, then they should probably buy some land and live in the outskirts, rather than in a suburb.

The problem is that the HOA supporters and apologists are generally too short-sighted and ignorant to understand what is ACTUALLY good for the community. That is why we have HOA rules like green lawns in August with no weeds (leading to increased pesticides and fertilizers in our groundwater and runoff), no clotheslines (increased electricity usage), no vegetable gardens in front yards (increased cost to homeowner plus increased overall food miles and agricultural land usage), required nighttime landscape lighting (terrible for bug populations), etc.

I would say the flip side of the “don’t buy in a suburb if you want freedom to do as you please on your property”argument is that if you want total control over what you see from your house, you need to buy up all the property you see from your house.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:HOAs have positives and negatives.

I live in a neighborhood without one and some people in one of the houses have ten cars in their one house, probably at least three renters who are so-called "family."

Two of their cars are always parked in front of my house. There must be 12 people at least in the house.

+1. Our old neighborhood did not have an HOA and we had the same situation. Multiple cars on lawns and people who elected to burn their trash in their front yards rather than use a disposal company. This was not a rural area where no one had to smell it, either. They'd usually do it on the hottest days of the summer, to really add to the ambience. My parents live in a sought-after part of Arlington that also has no HOA. They could probably sell their house for $1.4M+ with no trouble. They share a block with a guy who uses his front lawn and the street in front of his house to repair motorcycles year round and another guy who has let his house go so badly that there is a largish tree growing through the middle. In most other locations, this would probably be a huge deterrent if they needed to sell.

When we moved, we specifically looked for a neighborhood with an HOA. It's not for everyone, but I vastly prefer it to the alternative.

This is all stuff that is typically covered by city ordinances, enforcement is usually based on either getting a complaint or someone in the inspections department having certain people they prefer to pick on. I don't know anywhere in the US where it is legal anymore to burn trash (although I grant some people pretend it's a recreational fire pit), usually vehicle repairs must be completed within a few days, and a tree growing through a house is a dangerous structure.

Unfortunately local government selectively enforces or not enforce the codes. Fireworks light up the sky in SS and some other parts in MoCo on holidays but no one comes to stop it. 10 persons in a house? Its a cultural thing. Littering your own front yard, its okay.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:HOAs have positives and negatives.

I live in a neighborhood without one and some people in one of the houses have ten cars in their one house, probably at least three renters who are so-called "family."

Two of their cars are always parked in front of my house. There must be 12 people at least in the house.

Most hoas couldn't do anything about this. The streets in front of all the houses I've owned in FFX and Loudoun are public and anyone can park there. My hoa doesn't seem to limit the number of cars a neighbor can own.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Anybody doing any cool stuff? HOAs are anathema to cool stuff.

Tell me about it. Our HOA just denied my appeal for a very obviously temporary structure at the front of our house.
I do appreciate the HOA in general because without it, people would have 10 cars in their front yard. But it burns my toast that they have so much say over what you can and cannot do. I guess there is no winning.

I'm happy to allow people to have 10 cars in their front yard (which, actually, people do not do in my non-HOA neighborhood) if it means I can do the stuff an HOA wouldn't allow me to do. Like paint my front door whatever color I want, put vegetables in the front yard if I want, or take down holiday decorations on my schedule instead of theirs.

ie be the neighbor no one wants to live next door to.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Anybody doing any cool stuff? HOAs are anathema to cool stuff.

Tell me about it. Our HOA just denied my appeal for a very obviously temporary structure at the front of our house.
I do appreciate the HOA in general because without it, people would have 10 cars in their front yard. But it burns my toast that they have so much say over what you can and cannot do. I guess there is no winning.

Are you the decontamination station person?

Yes

Omg. It's you and you are STILL angry about your crazy plastic sheet front door decontamination station being shut down?! Girl, get therapy because that was some crazy.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There is no defense. HOAs suck and are an infringement on everyone's constitutional rights.

Do you know what a HOA is? As a owner you are part of the HOA. This is a private association and you can get into the board and convince members to rewrite the do's/don'ts rules.
You and your fellows members of the HOA make the rules.

+100

No one goes or participates in my neighborhood unless they've been written up. The lack of participation in the hoa in every single neighborhood I've lived in is sad. I know people are busy but in general our homes are our biggest asset.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We used to live in a painfully boring perfectly manicured HOA neighborhood. We now live in a decidedly non-HOA neighborhood where houses all look different, some yards are perfectly manicured and some are “bee friendly” weed fests, wildflowers and fruit trees are all over, and there are actual bumblebees wandering around to all the many flowering plants and bushes. Each yard looks different. I absolutely love it and am thrilled to death I no longer have to cough up $350/yr for the privilege of having to get approval to plant a local bush or receiving neighborhood-wide nasty notes about weeding or barking dogs.

HOAs are all about uniformity and conformity. My non-HOA neighborhood is eclectic AND has much higher property values than our former HOA ‘hood of nouveau riche.

I'm in a very strict HOA and my yard is almost all native and pollinator friendly and I also have a native bee house. Actually, the HOA requires us to have at least 8 shrubs or trees on the property and forbids planting invasive species, which is amazing. In my old non-HOA neighborhood, an idiot planted bamboo which invaded the whole neighborhood. It took us thousands of dollars each to control it, we could never eradicated it.

It must be a relatively recent HOA document, in that it values things like native plants. The old ones from the 80s and 90s all required just massove of amounts of grass. This is one problem with HOA documents—they are very hard to change so don’t keep pace well with changing tastes or norms. Things like solar panels, which may be important to our future, or more environmentally friendly landscaping are good examples.

It is not true in my neighborhood. Each community has rules and documents and procedures for making changes. You may have a lazy board or you may be like many homeowners who won't do the work to make the hoa functional. You can't just go in and rewrite the rules with meeting and getting input and following a process.

I'm lucky in my neighborhood that there are homeowners who are very knowledgeable who have devoted a great deal of time to serving on the board. They enforce the rules not because they are controlling nuts but because they know why the rules are there. A lot of the rules neighbors complain about have very valid reasons for being in place. Our board listens to suggestions for changes and change the rules regularly to keep up. You can make your hoa better and more responsive but you need people who care and will give up their time.

[Anonymous]

Hoas keep the boomers in check

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Some of you are pretending that not having an HOA means there’s no local code enforcement. That’s obviously not true. You can’t burn trash in our neighborhood or build a giant aviary, because you’d get a visit from code enforcement. You’ll get one if your lawn violates the code too.

That’s about the right compromise for me between everyone’s liberty and our need to coexist. I would never live in an HOA. I don’t want enforcement of a uniform aesthetic. I just want to keep everything safe and not have nuisances. A weedy yard is not a nuisance.

The problem is in a lot of towns,cities,municipalities code enforcement doesn't do its job.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:HOA's exist because humans have a tendency to be lazy, gross and selfish. Without them, there's no telling what your neighbors will let their homes look like. Yes, even in Potomac and Chevy Chase....where the lazy kids inherit their parents' multimillion dollar home and then let it go to shit.

I live in an HOA community, and I have a love-hate relationship with them. I love them when they enforce the rules by not allowing people to smoke in the community's public spaces, but I hate them when they tell me that I can't install a Ring security system on the outside of my front door.

+1. I agree.

And I would add that Americans tend to be very focused on "what's good for me," rather than "what's good for my community." An HOA kind of forces us to care about our community as a whole, rather than just what is good for me.

If a person wants complete freedom to do whatever they want on their property, then they should probably buy some land and live in the outskirts, rather than in a suburb.

The problem is that the HOA supporters and apologists are generally too short-sighted and ignorant to understand what is ACTUALLY good for the community. That is why we have HOA rules like green lawns in August with no weeds (leading to increased pesticides and fertilizers in our groundwater and runoff), no clotheslines (increased electricity usage), no vegetable gardens in front yards (increased cost to homeowner plus increased overall food miles and agricultural land usage), required nighttime landscape lighting (terrible for bug populations), etc.

I would say the flip side of the “don’t buy in a suburb if you want freedom to do as you please on your property”argument is that if you want total control over what you see from your house, you need to buy up all the property you see from your house.

As other posters have pointed out, HOAs usually have very low participation, so it’s easy to get things changed. Want to explicitly allow xeriscaping or clover yards? Want to ban night time landscape lighting? Join the board, get active, talk to your neighbors. You would be surprised at how few of things are set in stone.

Most people aren’t involved, though, and only complain on the Internet.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:HOA's exist because humans have a tendency to be lazy, gross and selfish. Without them, there's no telling what your neighbors will let their homes look like. Yes, even in Potomac and Chevy Chase....where the lazy kids inherit their parents' multimillion dollar home and then let it go to shit.

I live in an HOA community, and I have a love-hate relationship with them. I love them when they enforce the rules by not allowing people to smoke in the community's public spaces, but I hate them when they tell me that I can't install a Ring security system on the outside of my front door.

+1. I agree.

And I would add that Americans tend to be very focused on "what's good for me," rather than "what's good for my community." An HOA kind of forces us to care about our community as a whole, rather than just what is good for me.

If a person wants complete freedom to do whatever they want on their property, then they should probably buy some land and live in the outskirts, rather than in a suburb.

The problem is that the HOA supporters and apologists are generally too short-sighted and ignorant to understand what is ACTUALLY good for the community. That is why we have HOA rules like green lawns in August with no weeds (leading to increased pesticides and fertilizers in our groundwater and runoff), no clotheslines (increased electricity usage), no vegetable gardens in front yards (increased cost to homeowner plus increased overall food miles and agricultural land usage), required nighttime landscape lighting (terrible for bug populations), etc.

I would say the flip side of the “don’t buy in a suburb if you want freedom to do as you please on your property”argument is that if you want total control over what you see from your house, you need to buy up all the property you see from your house.

You make it sound as if all hoas are the same. I've experienced several. None required green lawns in August. None had rules about weeds in the lawn and no one has been forced to use herbicides. None required any night time lighting. They did not allow veg gardens in the front yard and none allowed clotheslines. I wish they would allow clotheslines in the back yard but most homeowners don't want to be staring at their neighbors laundry as the sit on their decks.

My hoa doesn't force us to do any yard maintenance other than clean up of dead plants and mowing to a certain height.