I'm normally against the idea of HOAs as they can be terribly abused by petty bourgeoisie types. That said, I was thankful for them in at least one case.... we had a bubba buy the house adjacent to ours, who promptly parked a big nasty old trailer in the yard overhanging our property. We didn't even do anything -- the HOA took notice and began issuing regular tickets. The bubba refused to compromise and eventually sold the house to keep their trailer, and better neighbors moved in. The other nice thing about them is they can maintain some sense of architectural standards when folks are doing updates and renovations.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:MD has been taken over by YIMBYs and the HOA is probably your only protection from your neighborhood turning into a disaster unless you also have covenants on the property. Do you want 8plexes in your neighborhood people blocking access to your house by parking on the road? If not, then do not dissolve the HOA. If you don't care about this then go ahead.

Our HOA in VA says they can't govern parking on roads. So you can't park commercial vehicles, trailers, etc in driveways, but you can on the road since it is a public road.

The extra parking will come from the 8plex units because there will be non parking minimums and parking will overflow in the road. The parking issue is about the extra density, not the HOA enforcement component directly. HOA protects from aggressive developers destroying your quiet and safe neighborhood.

Anonymous wrote:MD has been taken over by YIMBYs and the HOA is probably your only protection from your neighborhood turning into a disaster unless you also have covenants on the property. Do you want 8plexes in your neighborhood people blocking access to your house by parking on the road? If not, then do not dissolve the HOA. If you don't care about this then go ahead.

My friends neighborhood in Arlington has become a disaster. There is alway trash in the yard of the new sixplex unit and it blocks most of the sunlight to their house.

Anonymous wrote:MD has been taken over by YIMBYs and the HOA is probably your only protection from your neighborhood turning into a disaster unless you also have covenants on the property. Do you want 8plexes in your neighborhood people blocking access to your house by parking on the road? If not, then do not dissolve the HOA. If you don't care about this then go ahead.

Our HOA in VA says they can't govern parking on roads. So you can't park commercial vehicles, trailers, etc in driveways, but you can on the road since it is a public road.

MD has been taken over by YIMBYs and the HOA is probably your only protection from your neighborhood turning into a disaster unless you also have covenants on the property. Do you want 8plexes in your neighborhood people blocking access to your house by parking on the road? If not, then do not dissolve the HOA. If you don't care about this then go ahead.

Anonymous wrote:I lived in an HOA with 20 homes. We ahd a drainage pond we were responsible for so I don't think there ever was a way for us to dissolve the HOA. It sucked because no one wanted to be on the board and we had high fees that went to trash, mowing the pond area, but more than half of our fees went to the HOA management company who did our finances and that is it. Some families were months behind on their dues and another cost was paying lawyers to get those families to pay.

Forgot to add we also didn't think it was realistic to dissolve the HOA because we would not have only had to get the vast majority of owners to agree, but also the mortgage companies. Seemed like an impossible task.

I lived in an HOA with 20 homes. We ahd a drainage pond we were responsible for so I don't think there ever was a way for us to dissolve the HOA. It sucked because no one wanted to be on the board and we had high fees that went to trash, mowing the pond area, but more than half of our fees went to the HOA management company who did our finances and that is it. Some families were months behind on their dues and another cost was paying lawyers to get those families to pay.

Anonymous wrote:Be careful, especially if there is road maintenance involved (plowing, paving, etc.). If the HOA gets dissolved, there is no guarantee that any local agency will take that over and then every home will eventually be screwed when things deteriorate.

When a developer gets permission to develop a parcel and says it will form an HOA to take care of the road maintenance within that neighborhood, the local entity that approves that does it in part because it means it will not have the cost of maintaining the road/roads. If the HOA dissolves, that agency doesn't necessarily have any legal obligation to suddenly take care of the road that it was promised that it would not have to maintain. So then no one has to care for the road ever--plowing, patching, eventually repaving, etc.

So if the neighbors want to dissolve the HOA, they should first get a local government agency to legally agree to take on the road maintenance, which can be an uphill battle. In some cases I have heard that local governments will form a special tax district for former HOA neighborhoods to help cover the costs that the area brings when the HOA dissolves, especially if the infrastructure is aging and the city is stuck with the bill to fix things.

I lived in an HOA neighborhood with public road. Not all of them have private roads. But it was an older neighborhood. Maybe newer ones all have private roads so this is a good point.

Anonymous wrote:It's a 10 home community. The HOA may be maintaining a road, but probably nothing more. It's probably just a needless hassle for whatever neighbor ends up having to manage the paperwork

This. And I urge OP to think about the future if this is in fact a volunteer-run HOA. I used to live in a 1980s-built neighborhood with HOA operated by neighbors. Apparently it was fine when it was all original owners who were enthusiastic about their new homes. But then those original owners became older and didn’t want to deal with it anymore. And a lot of newer buyers were transitory and/or a number of homes turned into rentals. People got busy with young kids and dual income families. No one wanted the responsibility or liability* taking this on.

I ended up stepping up to be a board member at one point, but we couldn’t even get a quorum to show up for meetings to vote on things that needed to get done (like maintaining land) so we had to somewhat skirt things and operate outside the documents (which were mostly photocopies of old photocopies). When we went to sell our house we had to wait for the president to get back from vacation and get around to finally sending the buyers the HOA packet.

Just ugh. It’s a thankless job and impossible to for the bylaws to evolve if people don’t show up to vote.

I’m now in a non-HOA neighborhood and the homes are so much more beautiful and interesting. If for some reason I ever considered an HOA neighborhood in the future it would be a big one with professional management. Hell no to a small neighborhood in which your neighbors run the HOA.

*There was an insurance policy for the officers, but who even wants the headache of potentially getting sued because you didn’t follow some bylaw or maintain or renew some thing or other.

You’ll need it in 20 years when new owners move in who can’t now their grass, park on the grass or fix their shutters

Anonymous wrote:Probably a different question ~ but what about condo communities HOA? Someone has to replace the roof. It has to all look the same.

Good point. I'm one of the anti-HOA posters and don't have an HOA for my regular house but there is an HOA for our ski house townhome, and an old condo that we rent out. For those, I think it is a necessary evil. Might be happenstance, but those two HOAs are less oppressive than the single family home ones I've seen. They tend to just deal with the necessary stuff, like the roof and the common areas rather than overregulating.

Anonymous wrote:Probably a different question ~ but what about condo communities HOA? Someone has to replace the roof. It has to all look the same.

Condo ownership is different as it’s not really fee simple, you own your unit and a common interest in the common property which includes walls and roofs. So the HOA is part of the ownership needed to maintain the common interest in the structure.

A group of fee simple homes doesn’t usually have the common ownership element unless the road is shared.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Do not get rid of it. You will need to sue your neighbors to get them to pay for road maintenance if there is no HOA. it Will destroy your neighborhood. If they cared about maintaining the appearance of their Home they wouldn't be against the HOA. The HOA is also your only protection from simplex destroying the neighborhood. You want to protect yourself from the disaster of Arlington zoning.

Possibly dumb question - why does the HOA maintain the road and not the county?
Signed,
Maryland resident

I live in a condo in another state. We are responsible for our own roads within the borders of our development. Roads are actually quite expensive. Cities are quicker to approve developments if the public infrastructure costs are minimized. The developers don't care if they push maintenance costs on future owners. And the early owners don't care because the costs won't fall to them. My community spends a lot on periodic re-asphalting/sealcoating and maintaining the ends of driveways in hopes of postponing the day when we need to renovate the underlayers of the roads.

Also in my town, there are still gravel and dirt roads in some 100 year plus SFH neighborhoods. Some of the residents like it that way and they get angry when there are special city assessments to put in sidewalks and concrete roads. It's quite costly. Tens of thousands to put sidewalks along two sides of a big lot.

A HOA for 10 houses is crazy. You need people on a board to manage it . If I had to guess no one wants to do that. Someone has to volunteer to manage funds, schedule grass cutting , maintenance etc….. it’s a way for the county to not do what they’re supposed to do for you as taxpayers.
I’d absolve in a heartbeat bit we have 87 houses and you have to get every single homeowner to agree.

Probably a different question ~ but what about condo communities HOA? Someone has to replace the roof. It has to all look the same.