I (thankfully) live in a neighborhood without an HOA. Just one block away, there is an HOA. No reason to prefer that street (and home values aren't higher there).
This isn't an upper class neighborhood. It's mixed. Half of the residents are blue collar workers.
Over the years, I would think of reasons/annoyances where I'd say "Yes, while I'm glad I don't have an HOA, if we did have one it would take care of this or that annoying problem with the neighbor."
Then I spoke to friends who live in HOA neighborhoods and are on the HOA board. They told me clearly that "No, in practice, the HOA is not going to get involved in those (serious) matters. All they care about is the veneer (house appearance) and really petty rules." They also told me the purpose of the HOA was to justify its own existence. The owners get almost nothing for the funds they collect, other than a 3rd party company driving by and noting minor violations.
Another friend just had to spend $4000 to paint the front of his house. He's temporarily living in another state for a work assignment, and he and several others got notices that the HOA has decided to change the "look" of the neighborhood. Otherwise his house looked fine (not worn out paint or anything). I bet someone in the neighborhood has friends with a painting outfit.
I can stomach the idea of an HOA if they solved real problems (sanitation, etc), and not just appearances, but they don't. Even if it's in their bylaws, they don't enforce the serious stuff. Just the petty stuff.
Someone losing a home because they decided to have a window AC facing the street is plain immoral.
There is no reason to stomach an HOA, even if they are solving real problems. If there are real problems that need solving the municipality can handle it or a local cooperative can in some special cases; these can exist without any enforcement or review board authority and they can handle everything else you'd need for a community/centrally managed for a neighborhood.
This article slightly mixes condo and HOAs. HOAs are covered under 720 and it does not have the same rules (which are less stringent) than condo’s
Condo rules are much stricter than HOAs
State of Florida also puts caps on fines - the max is $100/day or $1000 for a single violation. But that’s after a period to cure and then due process meetings (made up of homeowners not board members) who may waive or not fine at all or defer.
A homeowner can also fix the problem and later have the same problem again but not be fined if they fix in time.
The foreclosures are for extreme cases and a lot of HOA attorney shops don’t charge a retainer but will tack on fees that are paid back to the HOA attorney and association.
>Florida ranks 1st of the states on HOA Spy for foreclosure suits brought by associations, with 10,296 of 14,168. The count depends on which courts are indexed in each state as well as on the associations, so it is a count of records, not a rate.
Florida is known for having the strongest "sunshine" laws in the country, that make government records transparent. That makes this statistic pretty useless.
People love to hate on HOAs but not all are bad, and in general they are a good example of self-governance, when the alternative is having people who DON'T live in your neighborhood regulate your neighborhood. Which would you prefer?
> People love to hate on HOAs but not all are bad, and in general they are a good example of self-governance, when the alternative is having people who DON'T live in your neighborhood regulate your neighborhood. Which would you prefer?
The latter, because I can kick them out of office, and because silly rules will impact a much larger number of people, and a large number can have their voices heard.
When your HOA has only 20-30 members, variance is high. It's a lot easier for people to abuse HOA power for their own personal gains.
You can very easily run to be part of your HOA leadership, and it is significantly easier to do than kicking an elected professional-politician out of office. The biggest issue with most HOA/COAs is that basically no one (especially the people who might have some qualifications) want to participate. This leaves only the people who want to be, frankly, petty little shits. It is not hard to exert influence over a group of 20-30 despondent neighbors.
The microcosm of subdivision-level governance where Karens/Kens with too much free time relish in power-tripping over their neighbors... All things equal, I'll take state, county, or city government over HOAs.
That's a false dichotomy. Everyone has to comply with laws regardless of what neighborhood they live in. The only difference is that the HOA has more stupid rules than the city. I'd rather have fewer rules.
People love to take extreme positions, because they’re easy and satisfies an emotional itch they have, not because they’re correct. The same can be said about government regulation which is analogically similar. You have those who fallaciously infer that, because government regulation can go wrong, it is therefore bad (contra abusus non tollit usum). Others take opposing socialist views.
People should instead think in terms of ends. Human beings are social animals. We have obligations toward others (here, the community). That includes obligations that concern the environment that the community occupies. So the fruitful focus of energy and debate should be what this means for the community (what are these obligations, and why) and if and how to regulate them.
I would never buy a house that was part of a HOA. For people that like them, more power to ya. But I don't understand the people who complain, just don't buy into an HOA then?
I just went to zillow and typed in my zip and tried two different filters for single family homes priced between $300K-$550K:
Listings:
No HOA fee: 32
up to $500/month: 62
I'm not going to bother because this is an HN comment but I think you can imagine what happens to the results when I specify newer than say 1993 (when my house was built).
I have an HOA, but it seems defunct. Everything we do to the house, if visible, can be interpreted to mean I must get unanimous agreements, in writing, from all my neighbors.
It turns out I managed to land right between two asshole neighbors (constant trespassing, dogs, etc)
Do all houses available require an HOA, even the ones that don’t look so nice or aren’t in great neighborhoods? I don’t usually like to go around questioning people’s experiences, but I think a lot of people go around with ideas of what an acceptable street looks like that simply aren’t achievable without an HOA or extreme price segregation.
I had the thankless task of being executor for my parents' estate. I distinctly remember the Florida HOA that made that so much worse.
After expressing their utmost sympathies and saying they'd help any way they could, mere weeks later they put a legal "estoppel" on the sale of the house due to some overgrown vines(?), which of course, were never mentioned by anyone.
This is not possible and maybe mixing terms. HOA has to disclose an existing violation as part of the estoppel process. Estoppel is just a disclosure certificate not a legal hold
I used to live in Broward county, Florida, so I'm not surprised that it shows up as number one on the OP article's list. It's totally insane how much power HOAs have in that state. The idea that an entity other than a mortgage lender you owe can "foreclose" and seize the home you live in is total lunacy.
> The idea that an entity other than a mortgage lender you owe can "foreclose" and seize the home you live in is total lunacy.
What consequences are sane for a member who does not pay dues, water bills, etc., for a prolonged period? Turning off the water is illegal here. Liens get ignored. My HOA will avoid foreclosure for years, and has only resorted to it twice in twenty years, but it's the ultimate recourse. Should the other members just suck it up forever?
Did you even consider why it's illegal to turn off the water? And maybe ask yourself how foreclosing on someone who can't pay for water only seems like a way to skirt the law and take water away from them in addition to their shelter.
Nope, but what are the countermeasures for abusing this power?
Also, once in a decade is not a rare occurrence for events of this significance. Once in 20 years is OK, once is 50 is rare, but once in a decade is not.
I’ve always found it funny that many of the states that despise unions love HOAs.
For example, they’ve fought for the right to have a “right to work”, so that closed shops can’t be a thing — you cannot compel inclusion in a bargaining unit by nature of employment.
Yet restrictive deed covenants where you are compelled by the state to join a private association are fine.
The arguments for or against them are similar if you dig into them.
>Should the other members just suck it up forever?
given that an HOA is completely unnecessary... yes. you should suck it up forever. if you want to be part of an HOA and pay dues into it, good for you, go ahead.
if somebody else doesn't want to be part of your little club, why should you get to take their house away for that?
Typically the HOA's I've seen manage community resources. Where I used to live that meant the neighborhood parks, green spaces, 3 docks in the river, a pool, and a few lakes. No value seems a bit hyperbolic.
the HOA managing a pool is definitely not the norm. and if it is, it's a pool club - somebody doesn't pay their dues, they should lose access to the pool, not their house.
most HOAs manage a tiny amount of communal green space that should have been turned over to become city property, but was held back as HOA property to give the HOA a reason to exist.
It is common, though probably a minority. Pools are expensive to own but nice to have close to your house. If you live close enough to bike kids will use them, but the common city pool is too far for most kids even if it is bigger and better.
I think we have the wrong units of measure for government size. I live in a county where the lines made sense 200 years ago: Everybody in the county can ride their hose to the courthouse, file whatever they need and be home in time for super. These days everyone drives and can be there in half an hour or less. Instead what I care about is the metro area. I want a unit that ensures my transit system is a coherent whole, the water supply is cheaper to consolidate to one large entity vs many small ones.
There is one suburb near me where some people would have to drive 25 minutes to get to the city library - most of that is uncongested highway. I really need a smaller unit to own and run a library so kids are always in bike distance. That city does a good job of scattered small parks but there is one complex with large fields for softball - if you don't live close maybe you shouldn't pay for something you don't use. I want parks owned by a smaller area government that can bring my neighborhood something they don't have. - HOAs often serve that. They just have a poor legal structure.
If you own part of a shared walls building then a corporation is required to manage that. You have to pay your share of the share costs. However the corporation should be limited in what else it can do, but it must exist.
My city sales tax dollars should not be used to fund the maintenance of a fancy median in some neighborhood on the other side of town.
You can put in a special district, that's an HOA under a different name, with even more government powers and bureaucracy costs. For example, you vote on stuff via the general election, they can seize your home for unpaid property taxes, they can impose zoning laws, and in some places they can impose criminal ordinances (dog pooping in the park).
> most HOAs manage a tiny amount of communal green space that should have been turned over to become city property, but was held back as HOA property to give the HOA a reason to exist.
You are just making this up at this point. Why do you think the city would accept property that they would have to legally maintain and be responsible for, when it is generally isolated and (largely) accessible to only a specific neighborhood?
My HOA pays the buildings water and sewer and trash. Also fixes the roof over the condo building, cleans the common interior, and does repairs (typically on our shared plumbing), and the elevators.
These days many municipalities don't want to manage more streets and infrastructure so they heavily favor HOAs for new developments that will handle what should be the city's responsibility.
Not sure why I can't respond to your other comment. But this is in response to your comment:
> they should lose access to the pool, not their house.
To enforce this you have to be able to gate, secure, and prevent them and their guests from using this. That costs a lot more money just to ensure they pay in. The HOA is the least worse option to "consent" and ensure that they do. Taking away the house is a much later step after a letter, 2nd and 3rd warnings, fines, ignored fines+interest, and a lein is ignored.
This is true sometimes, but if you are upset at a specific HOA, look at your docs to see what it actually manages. HOAs exist to pay for community obligated costs; sometimes that is a pool, sometimes it's "water and gas bills", and sometimes it's an entire golf course.
Further, if you're talking about a condo building (which, yes, is technically a COA, but the two get combined all the time), it is literally paying for your roof and elevators to work.
Buying into a "little club" and agreeing to pay your share of expenses only works when everyone participates. If not, your neighbors are just paying upkeep on your property; why should they have to do that?
HOA's are necessary when you have shared resources or have physical connections between units. Sure they make little sense if they exist just to control what color you paint your house but having a agreed upon method to have discussions/ manage resources is important.
If somebody else doesn't want to be part of your little club, then they shouldn't buy a house that belongs to that little club in the first place. Pretty easy.
If you don’t want to be a part of the HOA then don’t sign the contract. If you have to sign to buy the house then either sign or find another house. If they’re that bad then there ought to be lots of homes for sale that don’t come with an HOA contract.
Those are two different things. The union negotiates pay and benefits. What does the HOA negotiate?
Also I'm a firm believer that if you're at a union shop and decide not to be part of the union you shouldn't be able to use their pay scales and should have to negotiate everything for yourself. The same with HOA's, I guess. If they do something for the community, like the pool the other poster talked about, then you shouldn't have access. Easy.
They shouldn't be able to take your house for any reason.
>HOAs don't add value. All they are is an opportunity to power trip for those who have the most free time on their hands.
I'm sure the people who support right to work laws would also claim labor unions "don't add value". On the flip side I doubt HOA supporters think they "don't add value".
I'm not sure how Florida has managed it's "free state" image. I've lived across the south and midwest my whole life and Florida was easily the least "free" state I've lived in.
Hi, previous neigbor! I’m in Broward too. It’s insane here but also in Miami-Dade. My condo maintenance cost went x2 over the last few years and the pool where the water isn’t yellow with you know has been shut down for at least 3 years. Meanwhile the “board” argues about the carpet patterns for about as long as.
The municipality that collects property taxes, utilities, contractors/mechanics liens, etc. have had the ability to foreclose everywhere since time immemorial, so it's not too crazy really...
There was a fairly crazy case in Georgia recently where a lady stopped paying her annual dues over a billing dispute. The amount worked out to be less than $3,000.
The HOA hired a law firm, forced a foreclosure, held a foreclosure auction where the HOA itself bought her house for THREE DOLLARS, and continued to charge her HOA dues (even though the HOA owned the home now) before evicting her later.
The HOA then sold the home to an employee involved in the foreclosure, whose partner was on the HOA board that had voted to foreclose, and voted to accept the three dollar ($3.24, to be precise) bid, though they hid this behind an LLC that didn't actually exist when they did it. The employee then reactivated her real estate license and sold the home to another family several months later.
There are fewer greater lunacies than HOAs, and the type of people drawn to run them.
That's cause Broward is a BLUE country unlike the north half of Florida that is RED. BLUE counties are the worst down here when it comes to HOAs. Almost every development or neighborhood has them and they are AGRESSIVE. In the northern RED areas of Florida, there are either no HOAs OR the HOA only has authority or the communal shared spaces (ie, club houses, pools, common esways) and leave the home owners themselves alone in terms of dictating their lives.
I came in here gung ho to defend HOA’s because I’ve seen neighborhoods without them and they’re never really stunning. That being said the ability or the power to foreclose on your home because of that should not be allowed.
> because I’ve seen neighborhoods without them and they’re never really stunning.
Most neighborhoods I’ve lived in have not had an HOA. They’ve ranged from okay to great.
I can think of a few neighbor situations where an HOA with teeth would have been welcome. The most specific involved someone getting a big angry dog breed, neglecting it, and then leaving their gate unlocked so it got out. That one was eventually dealt with by the city, though.
Meanwhile the one HOA I lived under was pretty boring and friendly. Didn’t really bother anyone but maintained a nice common area. HOA board members were friendly and reasonable, but then again so were all the neighbors so there wasn’t much to deal with.
I think the nightmare situation is a busybody HOA that starts going after things that don’t matter, which would be hell.
HOA’s kill any character an area has. The fees more than offset the economic benefits of joining one. The damming economics largely comes down to local governments skipping road maintenance without giving you a discount on your taxes.
Net resolution you lose money living in a worse location.
I live in a neighborhood without an HOA, and any time someone comes over for the first time they all make comments about how nice the neighborhood is. Acceptance of an HOA is the pinnacle of Stockholm syndrome.
You have to pay for the community utilities, door people, elevators, exterior maintenance/repair, roof repair, and snow maintenance that people won't pay for as a group when given a chance. It's really the only lever that guarantees compliance the least amount of drama. The alternative is that you have to file civil suit to settle obligations. (You share a roof with your neighbors.. they refuse to pay for it because the roof isn't explicitly over them, they refuse to shovel and everyone gets fined.. etc)
In Chicago: you can get fined for not shoveling the sidewalk when theres snow. A lot of the people didn't want to pay 20-30k a season for the snow removal and suggested "owners can self do that." (Ignoring we have all ages, ability, and conditions.. also the fines start at 7am.. if they're enforced). But.. the fines would go to the association due to the markings of the area/easements.
In this context, do you still believe that dealing with this fine should involve the work, effort, resources, legal fees, court time, delays in court availability because healthy 40 year old Jim bob was late for work and couldn't shovel their portion of the sidewalk the last 10 times? Or that the Gen Z, not my problem because I don't think it's a problem.
This has to do more with price of house, not HOAs. In Florida for example, some(maybe most?) counties require all new developments to maintain their own roads, which requires something akin to a CDD/HOA. Newer houses typically cost more and bring in people with money, not someone who inherited the house or has been living there for generations.
I could show you HOA neighborhoods that look like a warzone, and beautiful nonHOA areas of million dollar houses.
The fact that the government has washed their hands of dealing with pesky problems like maintaining streets is bizzarre to me. How far is too far with privatization?
This is relative. You might not think native flowers and plants are stunning, and that a manicured lawn is, but I do! And lawn rules might prevent me from obtaining my version of “stunning”. This is something…you want to defend? A lack of freedom to do what one wants with something they own?
is stunning even real though? who wants a picture when you can be alive. hoas tend to be more about the veneer than the spirit of their existence. the intent is nice but humans gonna power trip if they seek those positions of authority
Eh, I live in Berkeley, a lot of the neighborhoods here are amazing, and there are almost no HOAs (besides the kind that keep condo buildings running). It's nicer than the bast majority of American suburbs I've seen. If anything, the amazing yards and cozy houses are only viable because there is no HOA pushing down arbitrary top-down rules on aesthetics. Forcing people to have traditional lawns would have totally killed the place.
You forgot one important detail, the average price of homes in Berkeley. Anybody spending $1M on a 2/1 craftsman bungalow is going to also drop a few extra dollars on landscaping.
You have a very narrow experience of the world, then. The most bland, ugly, tasteless neighborhoods I’ve seen are all in HOAs. The most beautiful are all without HOAs.
But that’s all beside the point, because this article is about how HOAs are bad for people who need somewhere to live, not about what offends your (unusual) taste.
This is a good observation. When HOAs try to regulate appearance, they regulate everything to a uniform mediocrity. That leads to using draconic rules and enforcement mechanisms needlessly. Often enough, this becomes a cudgel for Karens to enforce cultural norms not everyone shares. It becomes a tool of racism and cultural domination. It seems as if HOAs themselves need to be curtailed by law and regulation, and limited to functions that can't be provided by municipal government nor by individual homeowners.
> I’ve seen neighborhoods without them and they’re never really stunning
I don't give a shit about a "stunning" neighborhood. If I own property nobody else should have a say about its appearance.
The only exception I'd defend is a historic neighborhood where the goal is specifically to upkeep a historically accurate appearance of centuries ago.
But no, I will NEVER support an HOA anywhere else. These consortiums of Karens that patrol modern housing communities can go to hell.
I will plant the flowers I want, have the Halloween decorations I want, and do whatever woodworking I want in my front yard. What's the point of ownership if I can't own it?
I can prompt an LLM to refute this and it would give me 5 reasons HOAs are making things better. Hard to read this and really come away with a sense of what the truth is. HOAs and homeowners have always been at odds but HOAs do provide some benefit in large communities. I hardly feel like they are making the “home crisis” worse.
You can prompt an llm and make it give you 5 reasons for any argument. LLMs are very good at writing highly convincing things that sound logical but may or may not be based in reality.
Would be better to say "I can run a research agent session and it can pull 5 data trends and papers that show the HOA are making things better" (I dont know if this is true and I did not do it)
I don't really think HOAs are the biggest driver of home prices/availbility one way or the other though.
And this is of the typical quality of what you’d get.
80% incoherent narration of random numbers, all down to the 1’s place so it looks super duper precise and impressive if you squint and don’t think too hard, like the “author” seems to have done.
To an extent they might make sense where there are shared facilities that need to be funded, like a swimming pool or something. Most of what they seem to do is just bullshit though.
You can accomplish this without an HOA, also. That’s just a non-profit. The idea that deed restrictions and dues are tied together is a serious overstep, in my opinion.
Yes. I lived in an HOA neighborhood in Texas that was fine. Dues were $25/month, and from that we got a nice community pool, and a legitimately nice Christmas party: they’d rent food trucks that were pre-paid, put up a Santa village, bring in VR rides, etc. All paid for from dues. They also really did not bother you if you were making an attempt at keeping your place looking decent.
Then I moved to one in North Carolina that was god-awful. Dues started at $65/month and went up every year. They’d send out neighborhood reminders that a pressure-washing service would be in the neighborhood next week if anyone wanted to hire them; anyone who didn’t got notices a few weeks later that they needed to pressure-wash their driveway and/or house. I also had to buy a specific brand and sheen of paint to repaint my mailbox; of course, the lettering was only available from a single supplier.
I now live on an acre lot that sits between two neighborhoods. I have no HOA, and it is glorious.
> Then I moved to one in North Carolina that was god-awful. Dues started at $65/month and went up every year. They’d send out neighborhood reminders that a pressure-washing service would be in the neighborhood next week if anyone wanted to hire them; anyone who didn’t got notices a few weeks later that they needed to pressure-wash their driveway and/or house. I also had to buy a specific brand and sheen of paint to repaint my mailbox; of course, the lettering was only available from a single supplier.
There really needs to be a way to harm organizations that do this. The HOA system is setup where the organization is protected and given the ability to make these kinds of rules. The only real option you have in that is you have to pawn the property off to some poor sucker that will also run into this issue later.
>To an extent they might make sense where there are shared facilities that need to be funded, like a swimming pool or something. Most of what they seem to do is just bullshit though.
You can say the exact same about the government. To be clear, are you in favor of more liberty for homeowners, or are you in favor of the government stepping in to regulate HOAs?
The purpose of the system is what it does - providing retirees with even faker jobs than they gave up to go on vacation paid by the fools that still work.
> I can prompt an LLM to refute this and it would give me 5 reasons ... Hard to read this and really come away with a sense of what the truth is.
Are you arguing a meta point that there is no such thing as truth because LLMs can make you any counter argument to you want? That seems bleak. Argue against the actual points of the article.
What points? Does the article make any points? I couldn't find any. For instance, point 1 ends with
"A foreclosure suit is not a lost home — most end when the owner, or the owner's lender, pays — but the pressure is the point."
Which makes no sense whatsoever. I thought they were making a housing crisis worse by forcing foreclosures, but now apparently "the pressure is the point." The point of what, exactly?
I wouldn’t want to live in a neighborhood without an HOA, especially in the south. If you don’t have an HOA like 30% of your neighbors are going to have a lot full of junk cars, houses patchily painted lavender and shitty unmowed front yards. However, I very carefully read all the fine print for what the HOA enforces and how much it costs before each home purchase. Some of them can be insane. I’ve seen up to $500 a month.
What's wrong with lavender? Why does everything have to be a boring tan or grey? You sound like the exact reason I would never buy a house with an HOA.
But that waters down the argument to the point of meaningless. For instance, did the egg shortage make the housing crisis worse, because every potential homebuyer has less money to buy a house?
Folks, I suggest before you comment, make it clear whether you're talking about HOAs for condos (shared structures), or detached houses. There's a big difference between the two.
The problem is that municipalities absolutely love HOAs. They get all the tax revenue and get to wash their hands of most responsibilities involved with them. From their perspective, they get to found little vassal townships where they can say “it’s your problem” to little people problems like “there’s too many potholes in the road” and “that sewer lift station is making weird smells.”
Oh, but if you want to do anything, you still need to pay those permit and inspection fees! No, we won’t help you find a paver at a reasonable rate even though putting those contracts out to bid is what we do all day long.
What is really bullshit is that HOAs aren’t granted a property tax abatement for absorbing many municipal functions.
Maybe HOA's are bad, maybe they're good, but the intellectual laziness required to shit this kind of garbage out onto the internet in place of genuine thought and analysis will fuckin kill us all.
Florida has a lot of people. The article never addresses the important questions - are these issues without merit?
If you want to live in an apartment, but - get the tax and investment advantages of owning then you need to do it via buying into a corporation of some sort. So they must exist.
If you are not paying on upkeep of your house they have to do something and that is going to be expensive, they have a right to get that money from whoever didn't pay not spread it out to the other owners.
While it isn't called foreclosure if you don't pay your property taxes your house will be foreclosed on. That an HOA can is just another entity.
There are a lot of people who live in Florida so I'd expect them to have a lot of HOAs. The only surprise is California doesn't beat Florida in this list, but that could well be a case of California has stupid laws and so you can't get the good parts of an HOA.
These is a lot to hate about HOAs. However the idea is sound and they can do good things. We need to stop the bad things that they do, but nothing that in the article points to anything bad.
Exactly. HOAs can be a pain in the butt but they aren't taking peoples homes away Willy nilly
The only way you get in that situation is by not paying your dues. Some HOAs may be more or less aggressive in handling it. But when you can't pay your dues, the other homeowners have to pay for your share
Dues are just a mandatory part of being in HOA that reflect the costs of the community
Thanks to Governor Kotek, Oregon passed a bit of housing reform in 2025 that lets you build 'middle housing' despite anything an HOA says. I was really happy to go to Salem (Oregon's capital) to speak in favor of that.
This is the result if people generally mistrust their local governments, defund them and then create little private villages (HOA governed). Turbo-capitalism wins once again ;)
Can someone explain to me (an European) what purpose HOAs serve? I mean do they actually have any benefits? I only know them from videos where people are being harassed by them
Look and feel of the house, paint, Pool Management, Park (if the community has one, and not the city managed one) Management, Yard Management (Trees, Plants, Mopping, Trimming), Trash (overflow vs contained, when to put trash out, when to take your trash can back, to keep it out of sight from street view and such) Regulations on whether a house can be given to AirBnb and such, Single Family staying vs multiple family, cars that can be parked on the road and you can ask Chatgpt for more if you want.
Overall, with America being a capitalist country (and Florida state being the best example of it), they want people to keep spending their money on something, and would never allow someone to just 'settle' and live a life without spending money. HOA, among other things property taxes and other city imposed taxes you are never "resting in peace" after retirement, but wait for your next notice to come - either from City or HOA.
That does not have to be the responsibility of HOAs. I have had a period where my previous gardener quit and I was looking for a new one; some weeds in the front yard grew too tall. The city sent me an official reminder. This was in a neighborhood without HOAs.
Home issue will never get solved unless houses are mandated by law to be a shelter, not an investment, or at least, an asset that depreciates over time same way japan did it. As long as housing is considered an investment, it will always go up to the point they become like now, their values become speculative rather than real actual cost, and that will open the doors for many monkey business to keep the speculative prices high. An authoritarian law to change housing to shelter rights will solve it, not a democratic one since majority of voters are home owners or who is in charge it’s in their interests to keep it that way. Will that happen? Not peacefully I assume, so many things are built on the current status, from banks interests and creating credits out of thin air, to countries economy based on keeping people near certain spots to milk more taxes, remember, one of the biggest reasons why WFH was attacked in such coordinated way is to protect the real-estate industry and the things built around it.
That's actually the more dangerous situation. For instance, a meta-analysis of 394 blog posts suggests that 94% of LLM-written data presentations use spurious statistics. In addition, 2513 posts out of 3408 analyzed were found to use the same fabricated data. Click here for more info on singles near you.
At this point I trust statistics in LLM output about as much as I do policy position statistics from humans; that is: you need to double check things either way.
That is certainly a good method to maintain epistemic hygiene. All things indeed do need to be double-checked before confirmation into the net. However, would you say you read your spam section and double-check each email as much as you do those in your inbox? Or do you use heuristics to dismiss some things more than you do others? If you do, in fact, expend the same energy on all sources of data then I understand your resistance to the idea of classification by source.
Yea even reading the first couple paragraphs I can't really get a sense of what it's trying to say. Feels like generic claude output and doesn't really communicate what the "crisis" is or how it's getting "worse".
We all wanna blame HOAs. Nobody asks why HOA? The legal BS to set one up isn't free, so why?
The near universal proliferation of owner's associations and management groups and whatnot for developments larger than ~1ac (the EPA threshold, some states/towns have lower) is something you can lay at the feet of the Clean Water Act and it's implementation and precedents over the following decades.
Developers don't do anything that costs money, like set up an HOA, without a reason. The developers create the HOA because you need your >1ac residential development to pass stormwater permitting. While you theoretically could make each individual .25ac parcel you're putting a house on compliant as a standalone it's infinitely cheaper to just ignore all that, grade everything toward the road, dig a ditch, send the contents of the ditch through your stormwater treatment features, build in a little margin to those items, show the permitting authority the numbers that prove it passes with flying colors and when some jerk says "but what if X Y Z changes" you point to the excess you built in and tell them to GFY.
Now, where it really gets evil is when you start really pinching pennies or where the rules change over the course of the process making your numbers not work. Say you've got a lot of grade, a lot of rainfall, a lot of stormwater you gotta "treat". Well, you start adding rules to the HOA. Require certain parts of the lots remains grass or planter or whatever. Disallow patios, but do allow wood decks because the municipality considers those pervious, etc, etc. Or maybe the results you've got are marginal but you throw the bureaucrats a bone by saying you'll disallow car-ports and sheds in the HOA rules to prevent people from adding impervious surface. Or maybe you're uphill of some wetlands but not close enough to be regulated by default you promise to disallow working on cars and require people pick up their pet waste and not use lawn fertilizer or some other laundry list of certain things in order to make the local town's wetlands people comfortable not raising objection and claiming jurisdiction.
And of course, however these rules and plans shake out, the HOA is responsible for enforcing whatever those rules and requirements are in perpetuity so it's not like a pissed off majority can show up to vote "ok, this has gone too far, pack it in boys"
But nobody wants to talk about any of that because it's uncomfortable.
Short term renters, questionable people (thieves, renters who abuse the properties around them, people who use the property poorly [massive parties that bring guns + drunk loud people]), illegal activities (like off permit filming of commercial works), brings disproportionate problems to the neighbors. Airbnb is a lightning rod of people who do that. That's one of the reasons why hotels have weird rules in states and cities.
That is exactly what the people who live under HOAs want. I despise HOAs, but I'm happy that the kind of people who like HOAs have a community they can all congregate in. It keeps some of them from mingling with the rest of us.
I have a house. I have no HOA. I'm very happy with this situation and don't see any possible value that an HOA could add to this situation.
Funnily enough, there does seem to be a sort of wannabe HOA in my neighborhood that is always dropping things off in our mailbox asking for donations and telling us about events. I never give them any money, and never go to their events though, so either they don't provide any value or the value they provide apparently is not derived from them having any enforcement power.
Or maybe I'd be circumspect to recognize that my neighbors having rights is just the price of me having rights, just like I'm not in favor of a police state even if it means that sometimes people will commit crimes. Who knows!
And I have a house without a HOA but did go through a bunch of complicated (and expensive) easement agreements and survey definitions that LePage’s to a lot of loose-gooey hand shakes and outright mistakes over the years.
I am by no means a fan of JOAS in general but things like the maintenance of private roads including winter plowing do need to be dealt with and while a couple of neighbors can probably get agreements drawn up for “only” $10K each, that only goes so far if more people are involved.
Now I don't trust HOAs but some of this is deceptive weasally writing.
> They foreclose on their own members, over debts that start small
There are members who refuse to pay special assessments or fees for the community. Given that's Flordia, theres an above average population that would believe "they aren't required to" even though they accepted it when starting. (yes there are abusive HOAs and there are non-sense fines.. and sometimes those nonsense fines come from people neglecting the property in a very bad situation)
It's your job to handle it when it's a small situation. Moving to the stage of liens takes more time to do that and then resolving that usually happens on sale or refinancing.
Sure, but it makes sense to research one you're about to buy into and there's a lot more to the site than this post. I clicked around some.
This site seems to provide some data that's compelling. I see some gaps in California and a couple of liens that mention FL in Los Angeles. Maybe it's a starting point if moving though. This kind of transparency is a good thing. Some HOAs are abusive.
(My comment is about detached houses).
I (thankfully) live in a neighborhood without an HOA. Just one block away, there is an HOA. No reason to prefer that street (and home values aren't higher there).
This isn't an upper class neighborhood. It's mixed. Half of the residents are blue collar workers.
Over the years, I would think of reasons/annoyances where I'd say "Yes, while I'm glad I don't have an HOA, if we did have one it would take care of this or that annoying problem with the neighbor."
Then I spoke to friends who live in HOA neighborhoods and are on the HOA board. They told me clearly that "No, in practice, the HOA is not going to get involved in those (serious) matters. All they care about is the veneer (house appearance) and really petty rules." They also told me the purpose of the HOA was to justify its own existence. The owners get almost nothing for the funds they collect, other than a 3rd party company driving by and noting minor violations.
Another friend just had to spend $4000 to paint the front of his house. He's temporarily living in another state for a work assignment, and he and several others got notices that the HOA has decided to change the "look" of the neighborhood. Otherwise his house looked fine (not worn out paint or anything). I bet someone in the neighborhood has friends with a painting outfit.
I can stomach the idea of an HOA if they solved real problems (sanitation, etc), and not just appearances, but they don't. Even if it's in their bylaws, they don't enforce the serious stuff. Just the petty stuff.
Someone losing a home because they decided to have a window AC facing the street is plain immoral.
There is no reason to stomach an HOA, even if they are solving real problems. If there are real problems that need solving the municipality can handle it or a local cooperative can in some special cases; these can exist without any enforcement or review board authority and they can handle everything else you'd need for a community/centrally managed for a neighborhood.
This article slightly mixes condo and HOAs. HOAs are covered under 720 and it does not have the same rules (which are less stringent) than condo’s
Condo rules are much stricter than HOAs
State of Florida also puts caps on fines - the max is $100/day or $1000 for a single violation. But that’s after a period to cure and then due process meetings (made up of homeowners not board members) who may waive or not fine at all or defer.
A homeowner can also fix the problem and later have the same problem again but not be fined if they fix in time.
The foreclosures are for extreme cases and a lot of HOA attorney shops don’t charge a retainer but will tack on fees that are paid back to the HOA attorney and association.
To get to that point takes a long time
>Is Florida the worst state for HOA foreclosures?
>Florida ranks 1st of the states on HOA Spy for foreclosure suits brought by associations, with 10,296 of 14,168. The count depends on which courts are indexed in each state as well as on the associations, so it is a count of records, not a rate.
Florida is known for having the strongest "sunshine" laws in the country, that make government records transparent. That makes this statistic pretty useless.
I was sort of wondering the same thing. It would be helpful to get a clearer picture of what's missing from the data.
People love to hate on HOAs but not all are bad, and in general they are a good example of self-governance, when the alternative is having people who DON'T live in your neighborhood regulate your neighborhood. Which would you prefer?
If HOAs are a good example of self-governance, I can only conclude that self-governance is bas.
> People love to hate on HOAs but not all are bad, and in general they are a good example of self-governance, when the alternative is having people who DON'T live in your neighborhood regulate your neighborhood. Which would you prefer?
The latter, because I can kick them out of office, and because silly rules will impact a much larger number of people, and a large number can have their voices heard.
When your HOA has only 20-30 members, variance is high. It's a lot easier for people to abuse HOA power for their own personal gains.
You can very easily run to be part of your HOA leadership, and it is significantly easier to do than kicking an elected professional-politician out of office. The biggest issue with most HOA/COAs is that basically no one (especially the people who might have some qualifications) want to participate. This leaves only the people who want to be, frankly, petty little shits. It is not hard to exert influence over a group of 20-30 despondent neighbors.
The microcosm of subdivision-level governance where Karens/Kens with too much free time relish in power-tripping over their neighbors... All things equal, I'll take state, county, or city government over HOAs.
That's a false dichotomy. Everyone has to comply with laws regardless of what neighborhood they live in. The only difference is that the HOA has more stupid rules than the city. I'd rather have fewer rules.
Buying a house is often a multi-decade commitment. A specific HOA might not be bad today, but what about 10 years from now?
People love to take extreme positions, because they’re easy and satisfies an emotional itch they have, not because they’re correct. The same can be said about government regulation which is analogically similar. You have those who fallaciously infer that, because government regulation can go wrong, it is therefore bad (contra abusus non tollit usum). Others take opposing socialist views.
People should instead think in terms of ends. Human beings are social animals. We have obligations toward others (here, the community). That includes obligations that concern the environment that the community occupies. So the fruitful focus of energy and debate should be what this means for the community (what are these obligations, and why) and if and how to regulate them.
I would never buy a house that was part of a HOA. For people that like them, more power to ya. But I don't understand the people who complain, just don't buy into an HOA then?
The houses available in my area and price range all required an HOA. In general it’s not safe to assume all people have all options at all times.
Are you willing to share the general area? I’m curious.
Where I’ve bought houses, HOAs were rare. I’ve always heard about these places where HOAs are the only option but I fortunately haven’t run into one.
I just went to zillow and typed in my zip and tried two different filters for single family homes priced between $300K-$550K:
Listings:
No HOA fee: 32 up to $500/month: 62
I'm not going to bother because this is an HN comment but I think you can imagine what happens to the results when I specify newer than say 1993 (when my house was built).
I have an HOA, but it seems defunct. Everything we do to the house, if visible, can be interpreted to mean I must get unanimous agreements, in writing, from all my neighbors.
It turns out I managed to land right between two asshole neighbors (constant trespassing, dogs, etc)
It's still a choice being made. People choose to live where they live. They could choose to live elsewhere.
Do all houses available require an HOA, even the ones that don’t look so nice or aren’t in great neighborhoods? I don’t usually like to go around questioning people’s experiences, but I think a lot of people go around with ideas of what an acceptable street looks like that simply aren’t achievable without an HOA or extreme price segregation.
I had the thankless task of being executor for my parents' estate. I distinctly remember the Florida HOA that made that so much worse.
After expressing their utmost sympathies and saying they'd help any way they could, mere weeks later they put a legal "estoppel" on the sale of the house due to some overgrown vines(?), which of course, were never mentioned by anyone.
This is not possible and maybe mixing terms. HOA has to disclose an existing violation as part of the estoppel process. Estoppel is just a disclosure certificate not a legal hold
It is possible I am mixing terms, as IANAL and also this was several years ago
Regardless, they made a simple issue (which was not disclosed at least to me) a legal hassle.
Yea understood it’s possible it went to your folks and they ignored it. Hard to say. Sorry for your loss!
I used to live in Broward county, Florida, so I'm not surprised that it shows up as number one on the OP article's list. It's totally insane how much power HOAs have in that state. The idea that an entity other than a mortgage lender you owe can "foreclose" and seize the home you live in is total lunacy.
> The idea that an entity other than a mortgage lender you owe can "foreclose" and seize the home you live in is total lunacy.
What consequences are sane for a member who does not pay dues, water bills, etc., for a prolonged period? Turning off the water is illegal here. Liens get ignored. My HOA will avoid foreclosure for years, and has only resorted to it twice in twenty years, but it's the ultimate recourse. Should the other members just suck it up forever?
Did you even consider why it's illegal to turn off the water? And maybe ask yourself how foreclosing on someone who can't pay for water only seems like a way to skirt the law and take water away from them in addition to their shelter.
> Liens get ignored. > Should the other members just suck it up forever?
Until the house is sold or refinanced. Yes, the HOA has to wait, but can eventually get its money with interest.
That can be years, and that prevents the money from going into interest based accounts which pays for regular, surprise, and longer term maintenance.
We have other situations where you can end up owing a debt, you don’t get to foreclose. You go to civil court, get a judgment and then try to collect.
Nope, but what are the countermeasures for abusing this power?
Also, once in a decade is not a rare occurrence for events of this significance. Once in 20 years is OK, once is 50 is rare, but once in a decade is not.
I mean, the idea is nice, but it involves humans.
I’ve always found it funny that many of the states that despise unions love HOAs.
For example, they’ve fought for the right to have a “right to work”, so that closed shops can’t be a thing — you cannot compel inclusion in a bargaining unit by nature of employment.
Yet restrictive deed covenants where you are compelled by the state to join a private association are fine.
The arguments for or against them are similar if you dig into them.
>Should the other members just suck it up forever?
given that an HOA is completely unnecessary... yes. you should suck it up forever. if you want to be part of an HOA and pay dues into it, good for you, go ahead.
if somebody else doesn't want to be part of your little club, why should you get to take their house away for that?
> given that an HOA provides no value at all
Typically the HOA's I've seen manage community resources. Where I used to live that meant the neighborhood parks, green spaces, 3 docks in the river, a pool, and a few lakes. No value seems a bit hyperbolic.
the HOA managing a pool is definitely not the norm. and if it is, it's a pool club - somebody doesn't pay their dues, they should lose access to the pool, not their house.
most HOAs manage a tiny amount of communal green space that should have been turned over to become city property, but was held back as HOA property to give the HOA a reason to exist.
It is common, though probably a minority. Pools are expensive to own but nice to have close to your house. If you live close enough to bike kids will use them, but the common city pool is too far for most kids even if it is bigger and better.
I think we have the wrong units of measure for government size. I live in a county where the lines made sense 200 years ago: Everybody in the county can ride their hose to the courthouse, file whatever they need and be home in time for super. These days everyone drives and can be there in half an hour or less. Instead what I care about is the metro area. I want a unit that ensures my transit system is a coherent whole, the water supply is cheaper to consolidate to one large entity vs many small ones.
There is one suburb near me where some people would have to drive 25 minutes to get to the city library - most of that is uncongested highway. I really need a smaller unit to own and run a library so kids are always in bike distance. That city does a good job of scattered small parks but there is one complex with large fields for softball - if you don't live close maybe you shouldn't pay for something you don't use. I want parks owned by a smaller area government that can bring my neighborhood something they don't have. - HOAs often serve that. They just have a poor legal structure.
If you own part of a shared walls building then a corporation is required to manage that. You have to pay your share of the share costs. However the corporation should be limited in what else it can do, but it must exist.
My city sales tax dollars should not be used to fund the maintenance of a fancy median in some neighborhood on the other side of town.
You can put in a special district, that's an HOA under a different name, with even more government powers and bureaucracy costs. For example, you vote on stuff via the general election, they can seize your home for unpaid property taxes, they can impose zoning laws, and in some places they can impose criminal ordinances (dog pooping in the park).
> most HOAs manage a tiny amount of communal green space that should have been turned over to become city property, but was held back as HOA property to give the HOA a reason to exist.
You are just making this up at this point. Why do you think the city would accept property that they would have to legally maintain and be responsible for, when it is generally isolated and (largely) accessible to only a specific neighborhood?
My HOA pays the buildings water and sewer and trash. Also fixes the roof over the condo building, cleans the common interior, and does repairs (typically on our shared plumbing), and the elevators.
These days many municipalities don't want to manage more streets and infrastructure so they heavily favor HOAs for new developments that will handle what should be the city's responsibility.
Isn’t that was your local municipality in for?
If that's your persuasion don't buy a house in an HOA. You can go to the city pool.
Not sure why I can't respond to your other comment. But this is in response to your comment:
> they should lose access to the pool, not their house.
To enforce this you have to be able to gate, secure, and prevent them and their guests from using this. That costs a lot more money just to ensure they pay in. The HOA is the least worse option to "consent" and ensure that they do. Taking away the house is a much later step after a letter, 2nd and 3rd warnings, fines, ignored fines+interest, and a lein is ignored.
> given that an HOA is completely unnecessary...
This is true sometimes, but if you are upset at a specific HOA, look at your docs to see what it actually manages. HOAs exist to pay for community obligated costs; sometimes that is a pool, sometimes it's "water and gas bills", and sometimes it's an entire golf course.
Further, if you're talking about a condo building (which, yes, is technically a COA, but the two get combined all the time), it is literally paying for your roof and elevators to work.
Buying into a "little club" and agreeing to pay your share of expenses only works when everyone participates. If not, your neighbors are just paying upkeep on your property; why should they have to do that?
HOA's are necessary when you have shared resources or have physical connections between units. Sure they make little sense if they exist just to control what color you paint your house but having a agreed upon method to have discussions/ manage resources is important.
If somebody else doesn't want to be part of your little club, then they shouldn't buy a house that belongs to that little club in the first place. Pretty easy.
if somebody else doesn't want to be part of your little club, why should you get to take their house away for that?
Because they signed the paperwork saying they wanted to be part of the little club and gave that little club the power to take away their house.
If you don’t want to be a part of the HOA then don’t sign the contract. If you have to sign to buy the house then either sign or find another house. If they’re that bad then there ought to be lots of homes for sale that don’t come with an HOA contract.
You deal with it exactly the same way as if any other club member or customer don't pay. Not by giving something like HOA an unchecked power.
HOA should be allowed to kick out member. And people should be allowed to not be members of HOA.
>And people should be allowed to not be members of HOA.
Just like labor unions (ie. "right to work" states), right?
Those are two different things. The union negotiates pay and benefits. What does the HOA negotiate?
Also I'm a firm believer that if you're at a union shop and decide not to be part of the union you shouldn't be able to use their pay scales and should have to negotiate everything for yourself. The same with HOA's, I guess. If they do something for the community, like the pool the other poster talked about, then you shouldn't have access. Easy.
They shouldn't be able to take your house for any reason.
>What does the HOA negotiate?
At least in theory? Neighborhood "character" (and by proxy "land value").
I do not see them as equivalent and I see the analogy as a bad faith analogy.
HOAs don't add value. All they are is an opportunity to power trip for those who have the most free time on their hands.
>HOAs don't add value. All they are is an opportunity to power trip for those who have the most free time on their hands.
I'm sure the people who support right to work laws would also claim labor unions "don't add value". On the flip side I doubt HOA supporters think they "don't add value".
I'm not sure how Florida has managed it's "free state" image. I've lived across the south and midwest my whole life and Florida was easily the least "free" state I've lived in.
There is an interesting parallel here with that state's dominant political party espousing 'freedom of speech' but only when it's in their favor.
Hi, previous neigbor! I’m in Broward too. It’s insane here but also in Miami-Dade. My condo maintenance cost went x2 over the last few years and the pool where the water isn’t yellow with you know has been shut down for at least 3 years. Meanwhile the “board” argues about the carpet patterns for about as long as.
The municipality that collects property taxes, utilities, contractors/mechanics liens, etc. have had the ability to foreclose everywhere since time immemorial, so it's not too crazy really...
There was a fairly crazy case in Georgia recently where a lady stopped paying her annual dues over a billing dispute. The amount worked out to be less than $3,000.
The HOA hired a law firm, forced a foreclosure, held a foreclosure auction where the HOA itself bought her house for THREE DOLLARS, and continued to charge her HOA dues (even though the HOA owned the home now) before evicting her later.
The HOA then sold the home to an employee involved in the foreclosure, whose partner was on the HOA board that had voted to foreclose, and voted to accept the three dollar ($3.24, to be precise) bid, though they hid this behind an LLC that didn't actually exist when they did it. The employee then reactivated her real estate license and sold the home to another family several months later.
There are fewer greater lunacies than HOAs, and the type of people drawn to run them.
This is one of those cases where suing would have had a better outcome and the 3k+legal fees garnished from her income would have been better.
I can't imagine that a good judge would accept that settlement to scam someone out of a house far below value and leave them with the debt.
That's cause Broward is a BLUE country unlike the north half of Florida that is RED. BLUE counties are the worst down here when it comes to HOAs. Almost every development or neighborhood has them and they are AGRESSIVE. In the northern RED areas of Florida, there are either no HOAs OR the HOA only has authority or the communal shared spaces (ie, club houses, pools, common esways) and leave the home owners themselves alone in terms of dictating their lives.
I came in here gung ho to defend HOA’s because I’ve seen neighborhoods without them and they’re never really stunning. That being said the ability or the power to foreclose on your home because of that should not be allowed.
> because I’ve seen neighborhoods without them and they’re never really stunning.
Most neighborhoods I’ve lived in have not had an HOA. They’ve ranged from okay to great.
I can think of a few neighbor situations where an HOA with teeth would have been welcome. The most specific involved someone getting a big angry dog breed, neglecting it, and then leaving their gate unlocked so it got out. That one was eventually dealt with by the city, though.
Meanwhile the one HOA I lived under was pretty boring and friendly. Didn’t really bother anyone but maintained a nice common area. HOA board members were friendly and reasonable, but then again so were all the neighbors so there wasn’t much to deal with.
I think the nightmare situation is a busybody HOA that starts going after things that don’t matter, which would be hell.
HOA’s kill any character an area has. The fees more than offset the economic benefits of joining one. The damming economics largely comes down to local governments skipping road maintenance without giving you a discount on your taxes.
Net resolution you lose money living in a worse location.
I live in a neighborhood without an HOA, and any time someone comes over for the first time they all make comments about how nice the neighborhood is. Acceptance of an HOA is the pinnacle of Stockholm syndrome.
You have to pay for the community utilities, door people, elevators, exterior maintenance/repair, roof repair, and snow maintenance that people won't pay for as a group when given a chance. It's really the only lever that guarantees compliance the least amount of drama. The alternative is that you have to file civil suit to settle obligations. (You share a roof with your neighbors.. they refuse to pay for it because the roof isn't explicitly over them, they refuse to shovel and everyone gets fined.. etc)
I definitely believe it should be civil suits over liens for this particular situation.
In Chicago: you can get fined for not shoveling the sidewalk when theres snow. A lot of the people didn't want to pay 20-30k a season for the snow removal and suggested "owners can self do that." (Ignoring we have all ages, ability, and conditions.. also the fines start at 7am.. if they're enforced). But.. the fines would go to the association due to the markings of the area/easements.
In this context, do you still believe that dealing with this fine should involve the work, effort, resources, legal fees, court time, delays in court availability because healthy 40 year old Jim bob was late for work and couldn't shovel their portion of the sidewalk the last 10 times? Or that the Gen Z, not my problem because I don't think it's a problem.
Small-claims court exists.
This has to do more with price of house, not HOAs. In Florida for example, some(maybe most?) counties require all new developments to maintain their own roads, which requires something akin to a CDD/HOA. Newer houses typically cost more and bring in people with money, not someone who inherited the house or has been living there for generations.
I could show you HOA neighborhoods that look like a warzone, and beautiful nonHOA areas of million dollar houses.
The fact that the government has washed their hands of dealing with pesky problems like maintaining streets is bizzarre to me. How far is too far with privatization?
They have just created another level of government. I'm fine with that in principle. However the details are often screwy
> never really stunning.
This is relative. You might not think native flowers and plants are stunning, and that a manicured lawn is, but I do! And lawn rules might prevent me from obtaining my version of “stunning”. This is something…you want to defend? A lack of freedom to do what one wants with something they own?
is stunning even real though? who wants a picture when you can be alive. hoas tend to be more about the veneer than the spirit of their existence. the intent is nice but humans gonna power trip if they seek those positions of authority
Eh, I live in Berkeley, a lot of the neighborhoods here are amazing, and there are almost no HOAs (besides the kind that keep condo buildings running). It's nicer than the bast majority of American suburbs I've seen. If anything, the amazing yards and cozy houses are only viable because there is no HOA pushing down arbitrary top-down rules on aesthetics. Forcing people to have traditional lawns would have totally killed the place.
You forgot one important detail, the average price of homes in Berkeley. Anybody spending $1M on a 2/1 craftsman bungalow is going to also drop a few extra dollars on landscaping.
have you ever like, gone to San Francisco?
You have a very narrow experience of the world, then. The most bland, ugly, tasteless neighborhoods I’ve seen are all in HOAs. The most beautiful are all without HOAs.
But that’s all beside the point, because this article is about how HOAs are bad for people who need somewhere to live, not about what offends your (unusual) taste.
This is a good observation. When HOAs try to regulate appearance, they regulate everything to a uniform mediocrity. That leads to using draconic rules and enforcement mechanisms needlessly. Often enough, this becomes a cudgel for Karens to enforce cultural norms not everyone shares. It becomes a tool of racism and cultural domination. It seems as if HOAs themselves need to be curtailed by law and regulation, and limited to functions that can't be provided by municipal government nor by individual homeowners.
> I’ve seen neighborhoods without them and they’re never really stunning
I don't give a shit about a "stunning" neighborhood. If I own property nobody else should have a say about its appearance.
The only exception I'd defend is a historic neighborhood where the goal is specifically to upkeep a historically accurate appearance of centuries ago.
But no, I will NEVER support an HOA anywhere else. These consortiums of Karens that patrol modern housing communities can go to hell.
I will plant the flowers I want, have the Halloween decorations I want, and do whatever woodworking I want in my front yard. What's the point of ownership if I can't own it?
I can prompt an LLM to refute this and it would give me 5 reasons HOAs are making things better. Hard to read this and really come away with a sense of what the truth is. HOAs and homeowners have always been at odds but HOAs do provide some benefit in large communities. I hardly feel like they are making the “home crisis” worse.
You can prompt an llm and make it give you 5 reasons for any argument. LLMs are very good at writing highly convincing things that sound logical but may or may not be based in reality.
Would be better to say "I can run a research agent session and it can pull 5 data trends and papers that show the HOA are making things better" (I dont know if this is true and I did not do it)
I don't really think HOAs are the biggest driver of home prices/availbility one way or the other though.
I think that's his point as this article reads like that exact prompt. Pure LLM garbage.
And this is of the typical quality of what you’d get.
80% incoherent narration of random numbers, all down to the 1’s place so it looks super duper precise and impressive if you squint and don’t think too hard, like the “author” seems to have done.
To an extent they might make sense where there are shared facilities that need to be funded, like a swimming pool or something. Most of what they seem to do is just bullshit though.
You can accomplish this without an HOA, also. That’s just a non-profit. The idea that deed restrictions and dues are tied together is a serious overstep, in my opinion.
Yes. I lived in an HOA neighborhood in Texas that was fine. Dues were $25/month, and from that we got a nice community pool, and a legitimately nice Christmas party: they’d rent food trucks that were pre-paid, put up a Santa village, bring in VR rides, etc. All paid for from dues. They also really did not bother you if you were making an attempt at keeping your place looking decent.
Then I moved to one in North Carolina that was god-awful. Dues started at $65/month and went up every year. They’d send out neighborhood reminders that a pressure-washing service would be in the neighborhood next week if anyone wanted to hire them; anyone who didn’t got notices a few weeks later that they needed to pressure-wash their driveway and/or house. I also had to buy a specific brand and sheen of paint to repaint my mailbox; of course, the lettering was only available from a single supplier.
I now live on an acre lot that sits between two neighborhoods. I have no HOA, and it is glorious.
> Then I moved to one in North Carolina that was god-awful. Dues started at $65/month and went up every year. They’d send out neighborhood reminders that a pressure-washing service would be in the neighborhood next week if anyone wanted to hire them; anyone who didn’t got notices a few weeks later that they needed to pressure-wash their driveway and/or house. I also had to buy a specific brand and sheen of paint to repaint my mailbox; of course, the lettering was only available from a single supplier.
There really needs to be a way to harm organizations that do this. The HOA system is setup where the organization is protected and given the ability to make these kinds of rules. The only real option you have in that is you have to pawn the property off to some poor sucker that will also run into this issue later.
>To an extent they might make sense where there are shared facilities that need to be funded, like a swimming pool or something. Most of what they seem to do is just bullshit though.
You can say the exact same about the government. To be clear, are you in favor of more liberty for homeowners, or are you in favor of the government stepping in to regulate HOAs?
The purpose of the system is what it does - providing retirees with even faker jobs than they gave up to go on vacation paid by the fools that still work.
> I can prompt an LLM to refute this and it would give me 5 reasons ... Hard to read this and really come away with a sense of what the truth is.
Are you arguing a meta point that there is no such thing as truth because LLMs can make you any counter argument to you want? That seems bleak. Argue against the actual points of the article.
What points? Does the article make any points? I couldn't find any. For instance, point 1 ends with
"A foreclosure suit is not a lost home — most end when the owner, or the owner's lender, pays — but the pressure is the point."
Which makes no sense whatsoever. I thought they were making a housing crisis worse by forcing foreclosures, but now apparently "the pressure is the point." The point of what, exactly?
I can prompt and LLM to prove this and it gives me 5 reasons HOAs are making things worse.
That's not a reason to change your mind ... LLMs can refute anything you ask them to without thinking.
I wouldn’t want to live in a neighborhood without an HOA, especially in the south. If you don’t have an HOA like 30% of your neighbors are going to have a lot full of junk cars, houses patchily painted lavender and shitty unmowed front yards. However, I very carefully read all the fine print for what the HOA enforces and how much it costs before each home purchase. Some of them can be insane. I’ve seen up to $500 a month.
> houses patchily painted lavender
What's wrong with lavender? Why does everything have to be a boring tan or grey? You sound like the exact reason I would never buy a house with an HOA.
You care about unmowed frontyards? No wonder your country is going to shit if this is what you’re worried about.
Barring any guardrails, AI would tell me that the Holocaust had redeeming qualities if I asked it.
They are not truth or judgment machines.
How would foreclosing make the housing crisis worse? Wouldn't another family purchase the home thus creating a net zero?
Between the foreclosure and sale, who is paying to bring the property up to HOA code?
The party who foreclosed the house and is currently selling it. Who else could it be?
Why would you assume that? There’s no prohibition on selling a home with code deficiencies as long as you disclose them.
Right, but such things tend to knock down the sale price by approximately the amount to cure.
Maybe the buyer after the price is inflated by the extra cost that was unnecessarily incurred by the HOA
But that waters down the argument to the point of meaningless. For instance, did the egg shortage make the housing crisis worse, because every potential homebuyer has less money to buy a house?
Folks, I suggest before you comment, make it clear whether you're talking about HOAs for condos (shared structures), or detached houses. There's a big difference between the two.
The problem is that municipalities absolutely love HOAs. They get all the tax revenue and get to wash their hands of most responsibilities involved with them. From their perspective, they get to found little vassal townships where they can say “it’s your problem” to little people problems like “there’s too many potholes in the road” and “that sewer lift station is making weird smells.”
Oh, but if you want to do anything, you still need to pay those permit and inspection fees! No, we won’t help you find a paver at a reasonable rate even though putting those contracts out to bid is what we do all day long.
What is really bullshit is that HOAs aren’t granted a property tax abatement for absorbing many municipal functions.
Sweet f'kin christ that website is unreadable.
Maybe HOA's are bad, maybe they're good, but the intellectual laziness required to shit this kind of garbage out onto the internet in place of genuine thought and analysis will fuckin kill us all.
Florida has a lot of people. The article never addresses the important questions - are these issues without merit?
If you want to live in an apartment, but - get the tax and investment advantages of owning then you need to do it via buying into a corporation of some sort. So they must exist.
If you are not paying on upkeep of your house they have to do something and that is going to be expensive, they have a right to get that money from whoever didn't pay not spread it out to the other owners.
While it isn't called foreclosure if you don't pay your property taxes your house will be foreclosed on. That an HOA can is just another entity.
There are a lot of people who live in Florida so I'd expect them to have a lot of HOAs. The only surprise is California doesn't beat Florida in this list, but that could well be a case of California has stupid laws and so you can't get the good parts of an HOA.
These is a lot to hate about HOAs. However the idea is sound and they can do good things. We need to stop the bad things that they do, but nothing that in the article points to anything bad.
Exactly. HOAs can be a pain in the butt but they aren't taking peoples homes away Willy nilly
The only way you get in that situation is by not paying your dues. Some HOAs may be more or less aggressive in handling it. But when you can't pay your dues, the other homeowners have to pay for your share
Dues are just a mandatory part of being in HOA that reflect the costs of the community
Thanks to Governor Kotek, Oregon passed a bit of housing reform in 2025 that lets you build 'middle housing' despite anything an HOA says. I was really happy to go to Salem (Oregon's capital) to speak in favor of that.
This is the result if people generally mistrust their local governments, defund them and then create little private villages (HOA governed). Turbo-capitalism wins once again ;)
Can someone explain to me (an European) what purpose HOAs serve? I mean do they actually have any benefits? I only know them from videos where people are being harassed by them
They empower grumpy assholes to play police and impose their will on you.
There are HOAs in Europe. The Wohnungseigentümergemeinschaft comes to mind.
Look and feel of the house, paint, Pool Management, Park (if the community has one, and not the city managed one) Management, Yard Management (Trees, Plants, Mopping, Trimming), Trash (overflow vs contained, when to put trash out, when to take your trash can back, to keep it out of sight from street view and such) Regulations on whether a house can be given to AirBnb and such, Single Family staying vs multiple family, cars that can be parked on the road and you can ask Chatgpt for more if you want.
Overall, with America being a capitalist country (and Florida state being the best example of it), they want people to keep spending their money on something, and would never allow someone to just 'settle' and live a life without spending money. HOA, among other things property taxes and other city imposed taxes you are never "resting in peace" after retirement, but wait for your next notice to come - either from City or HOA.
As a fellow European, preventing the value of your house dropping because your neighbors didn’t clean up their front yard.
That does not have to be the responsibility of HOAs. I have had a period where my previous gardener quit and I was looking for a new one; some weeds in the front yard grew too tall. The city sent me an official reminder. This was in a neighborhood without HOAs.
but why would you need an HOA for that? If your neighbor drops their junk on the street you can just call the cops on them yourself
Same function as the laws about when you can mow in Germany, simply at a sub municipal level.
So they are able to enact their own laws? That's pretty different from Germany, where a municipality cannot override laws from higher courts.
In part it's the result of the American antigovernment tendency, at least in certain communities.
Home issue will never get solved unless houses are mandated by law to be a shelter, not an investment, or at least, an asset that depreciates over time same way japan did it. As long as housing is considered an investment, it will always go up to the point they become like now, their values become speculative rather than real actual cost, and that will open the doors for many monkey business to keep the speculative prices high. An authoritarian law to change housing to shelter rights will solve it, not a democratic one since majority of voters are home owners or who is in charge it’s in their interests to keep it that way. Will that happen? Not peacefully I assume, so many things are built on the current status, from banks interests and creating credits out of thin air, to countries economy based on keeping people near certain spots to milk more taxes, remember, one of the biggest reasons why WFH was attacked in such coordinated way is to protect the real-estate industry and the things built around it.
LLM written.
I'd rather not read LLM output, but this post is mostly a data presentation, not a written argument.
That's actually the more dangerous situation. For instance, a meta-analysis of 394 blog posts suggests that 94% of LLM-written data presentations use spurious statistics. In addition, 2513 posts out of 3408 analyzed were found to use the same fabricated data. Click here for more info on singles near you.
At this point I trust statistics in LLM output about as much as I do policy position statistics from humans; that is: you need to double check things either way.
That is certainly a good method to maintain epistemic hygiene. All things indeed do need to be double-checked before confirmation into the net. However, would you say you read your spam section and double-check each email as much as you do those in your inbox? Or do you use heuristics to dismiss some things more than you do others? If you do, in fact, expend the same energy on all sources of data then I understand your resistance to the idea of classification by source.
It’s literally like 90% text, and it’s not an insignificant amount of text.
It's text presenting data, for the most part, not text trying to emotively persuade, which is the norm in pieces like this.
This comment effectively places a lien on the article - check the article to see the analogy!
Yea even reading the first couple paragraphs I can't really get a sense of what it's trying to say. Feels like generic claude output and doesn't really communicate what the "crisis" is or how it's getting "worse".
The debt was the accusation. The frustration was the catalyst.
We all wanna blame HOAs. Nobody asks why HOA? The legal BS to set one up isn't free, so why?
The near universal proliferation of owner's associations and management groups and whatnot for developments larger than ~1ac (the EPA threshold, some states/towns have lower) is something you can lay at the feet of the Clean Water Act and it's implementation and precedents over the following decades.
Developers don't do anything that costs money, like set up an HOA, without a reason. The developers create the HOA because you need your >1ac residential development to pass stormwater permitting. While you theoretically could make each individual .25ac parcel you're putting a house on compliant as a standalone it's infinitely cheaper to just ignore all that, grade everything toward the road, dig a ditch, send the contents of the ditch through your stormwater treatment features, build in a little margin to those items, show the permitting authority the numbers that prove it passes with flying colors and when some jerk says "but what if X Y Z changes" you point to the excess you built in and tell them to GFY.
Now, where it really gets evil is when you start really pinching pennies or where the rules change over the course of the process making your numbers not work. Say you've got a lot of grade, a lot of rainfall, a lot of stormwater you gotta "treat". Well, you start adding rules to the HOA. Require certain parts of the lots remains grass or planter or whatever. Disallow patios, but do allow wood decks because the municipality considers those pervious, etc, etc. Or maybe the results you've got are marginal but you throw the bureaucrats a bone by saying you'll disallow car-ports and sheds in the HOA rules to prevent people from adding impervious surface. Or maybe you're uphill of some wetlands but not close enough to be regulated by default you promise to disallow working on cars and require people pick up their pet waste and not use lawn fertilizer or some other laundry list of certain things in order to make the local town's wetlands people comfortable not raising objection and claiming jurisdiction.
And of course, however these rules and plans shake out, the HOA is responsible for enforcing whatever those rules and requirements are in perpetuity so it's not like a pissed off majority can show up to vote "ok, this has gone too far, pack it in boys"
But nobody wants to talk about any of that because it's uncomfortable.
HOAs are great. They keep the AirBnB trash out.
Might as well just say "I want to control what other people do with their private property"
Short term renters, questionable people (thieves, renters who abuse the properties around them, people who use the property poorly [massive parties that bring guns + drunk loud people]), illegal activities (like off permit filming of commercial works), brings disproportionate problems to the neighbors. Airbnb is a lightning rod of people who do that. That's one of the reasons why hotels have weird rules in states and cities.
If you live in an area covered by an HOA then you signed up for it, literally, like your signature is on the paperwork. I have zero sympathy.
That’s not really a controversial idea and nearly everyone who owns a home where you can see your neighbor’s house wants to do that to some degree.
If you live in close proximity to other people, you should not be allowed to do whatever you want on your private property.
Pretty much every municipality already has laws that limit you in that manner.
That is exactly what the people who live under HOAs want. I despise HOAs, but I'm happy that the kind of people who like HOAs have a community they can all congregate in. It keeps some of them from mingling with the rest of us.
You already can't do what ever you want with your own property.
I have a house. I have no HOA. I'm very happy with this situation and don't see any possible value that an HOA could add to this situation.
Funnily enough, there does seem to be a sort of wannabe HOA in my neighborhood that is always dropping things off in our mailbox asking for donations and telling us about events. I never give them any money, and never go to their events though, so either they don't provide any value or the value they provide apparently is not derived from them having any enforcement power.
If you have wonderful neighbors, HOAs are unnecessary.
If you have horrible neighbors you will wish you had one.
Unless those horrible neighbors are part of the HOA's board.
Or maybe I'd be circumspect to recognize that my neighbors having rights is just the price of me having rights, just like I'm not in favor of a police state even if it means that sometimes people will commit crimes. Who knows!
I have horrible neighbors and no HOA. I do not wish I was apart of an HOA.
And I have a house without a HOA but did go through a bunch of complicated (and expensive) easement agreements and survey definitions that LePage’s to a lot of loose-gooey hand shakes and outright mistakes over the years.
And you think that the solution to having to deal with other people making claims about your property is to just fully cede the jurisdiction of them?
I am by no means a fan of JOAS in general but things like the maintenance of private roads including winter plowing do need to be dealt with and while a couple of neighbors can probably get agreements drawn up for “only” $10K each, that only goes so far if more people are involved.
Now I don't trust HOAs but some of this is deceptive weasally writing.
> They foreclose on their own members, over debts that start small
There are members who refuse to pay special assessments or fees for the community. Given that's Flordia, theres an above average population that would believe "they aren't required to" even though they accepted it when starting. (yes there are abusive HOAs and there are non-sense fines.. and sometimes those nonsense fines come from people neglecting the property in a very bad situation)
It's your job to handle it when it's a small situation. Moving to the stage of liens takes more time to do that and then resolving that usually happens on sale or refinancing.
Sure, but it makes sense to research one you're about to buy into and there's a lot more to the site than this post. I clicked around some.
This site seems to provide some data that's compelling. I see some gaps in California and a couple of liens that mention FL in Los Angeles. Maybe it's a starting point if moving though. This kind of transparency is a good thing. Some HOAs are abusive.
> Now I don't trust HOAs but some of this is deceptive weasally writing.
No surprise, it reeks of being written by an LLM.
Highly suggested that it's influenced by forums who have reported poor situations by people that have been in them.