This whole “freedom” thing has become something of a coloquial idea hasn’t it? A child getting a government-paid trip to see a doctor, well that’s like communism and a violation of freedom, but god help you if you want to live in a purple house. Who do you think you are anyways?

(brrr the very thought. . .)

“Our street is us and we are it. Our street is where we like to be, and it looks like all our dreams.”

Alas, but for reality. . .

The problem is that in the last case there are frequently few rules or bounds on what HOAs are allowed to do, especially when they can foreclose on properties for vanishingly small amounts. (Disclosure: I’ve been involved in HOA foreclosures in condo properties, but the amounts involved were highly nontrivial.) For example, the recent Texas case in which a subdivision HOA foreclosed on a series of homes over hundreds of dollars of fines indicate that reform is urgently needed in such cases. At the moment, those who live under the power of HOAs are largely dependent upon the honesty and leniency of board members.

Liens and injunctions should be sufficient for most minor cases, whereas arbitration and financial restructuring should be used when larger financial sums are involved. Foreclosure, while still something that should remain within HOA power, should be a last resort in all cases, and only when the homeowner is genuinely unwilling to comply with major financial, behavioral, legal or structural issues. Creating what amounts to a private, parallel legal system, virtually unanswerable to other authority, that threatens persons’ homes is a rebuke to liberty.

That is, the property itself may be a aesthetic marvel. But if the surroundings are a bombed out crater, the value takes a dive.

Ill never have to worry about HOAs.

God forbid one of these HOA people get too old to maintain their shrubs and mow their lawn? Bring in the stockage, sorry granpa, you should have kept your tulips from whilting.

As for property values, any realtor knows the value of the home depends on 3 things – location, location and location.

Apart from the many, many abuses of the system, what I hate about HOAs (apart from the petty rules themselves) is it is one more thing that separates neighbors. I have a neighbor who loves his leafblower (I mean, really really loves the infernal thing). Now, I don’t have an HOA to complain to, and he’s not violating any ordinances so the city isn’t going to get involved. So, I have to do a novel thing: ask him, politely, if he can avoid using it at certain times. That is, I have to decide if its worth the trouble to bother the neighbors about something. And they have to decide if its worth bothering me.

If I had an HOA, I could simply rat him out the authorities about this or that or the other thing from behind my drawn curtains.

During the drought the state of Colorado had to pass a law that HOA’s could not require people to violate water restrictions to keep a lawn green. People were literally caught between cities threatening to shut their water off or put a flow restrictor on and HOA’s threatening them over their lawns not being green enough.

Then there’s the case of a woman who painted her house – not one of the 10 approved shades of beige. It was still beige – I couldn’t tell it was different from the “official” but the HOA took her to court and won. She had to repaint an approved beige.

An ex-employee of Richmond Homes told me that the company founders wife picked all the house colors. Doesn’t it just make you feel great to know that for the next however many decades her taste is your fate?

While I’m not a big fan of more regulations – HOA’s have no oversight and need some. A state code limiting how insane they can get and requiring financial submissions, sunshine laws etc.

In CO, we have had a law for a number of years that prevented HOAs (and other HOA like organizations) from restricting a homeowners ability to put solar energy systems on their roofs.

Last year, the law was updated to include all energy efficiency systems, which was a huge victory. Now, homeowners who want to install swamp coolers instead of AC units, install clotheslines for drying clothing, or install solar or wind power systems to generate their own energy cannot be prevented by HOA rules. The HOA is still allowed to make minor changes to your plans, but those changes cannot “significantly increase the cost, or decrease the effectiveness” of the system.

I’m fine with allowing neighborhood busybodies who want to hassle each other over paint colors, but it isn’t OK to restrict people who are trying to make improvements to their energy efficiency – something that benefits everyone.

Any one of these problems could have been ended if the neighbor took a pie over and sat down to hash out the issue. Or if they both met at the local and had a few pints. Other countires hate their neighbors, sure, but they don’t buy big plots of land and then sink their ranch as far away from everyone else as possible.

I think Bevatron’s doctrine is simple: realize right from the first that these rabbit warrens are chock-a-block with the kind of people you hate. Then, go somewhere else.

If anything, it’s nice to suppose that all the assholes in the world have self-segregated themselves, yammering about lawns and roses, so they will hopefully leave you alone.

There are rules in place for how you have to maintain your home, but they are mostly pretty reasonable. The biggest complaint any of my neighbors seem to have is not being able to keep their boat parked beside their house.

I’ve read all kinds of HOA horror stories and I don’t understand why people don’t just go to a meeting and change the rules / HOA leadership?

And tas121790, HOA’s are even coming into existence in very old neighborhoods. They certainly aren’t confined to newer suburbs.

The typical defense of HOAs is that they protect the value of your neighbors’ property. Implicit here is the understanding that by altering the character of location around a property, you can effectively steal from the property owner.

It seems like the simplest computation would be weather the rights of a property owner to the value conferred by location outweigh what we perceive as essential human decency.

It seems glaringly obvious that, in these ten instances, the rights of the neighbors to protect their property rights and homogeneity of their neighborhood do not outweigh the essential human rights of the defendants in the case.

Which leads me to question the integrity of judges that would hand down such clearly unethical rulings.

This is the value of lawyers, I suppose : when the laws are not ethical, lawyers must make them ethical, even if this requires exhausting the appeals process up to the Supreme Court.

Since obviously people who have been bankrupted by their HOAs can’t afford to do this, I wonder if it would be feasible to have a publicly funded class action suit against the HOAs in violation ?

My knowledge of legal proceedings is poor, but I think we can all agree that a crime, by common understanding of human rights, has been committed here.

“I thought I owed them less than $800,” says Lindsey. “They said it was over $1,000.” The dispute wound up in court as the association threatened to foreclose on her home.

In the end, it turned out that Lindsey was right about the money she owed. The board had goofed. But the association won its lawsuit anyway. The judge ruled that she was wrong not to make back payments while the matter was in dispute. To her dismay, Lindsey was left with a $22,000 bill for the association’s legal costs

The plain fact is that if you move into a H.O., you’re agreeing to a lot worse than the ‘expressive’ restrictions everyone understands H.O.s take away from you. You’re basically handing them your checkbook.

Basically, if being kept in a structured world is appealing to you, then you would do just as well to shoot somebody as buy a house in an HOA area.

No thanks. I prefer freedom.

Also here is a great Pat Murphy story about HOAs.
http://www.brazenhussies.net/murphy/Flamingos.html