Should HOAs be banned?

Disclaimer: I'm very anti-HOA. But I do think the case could be made for them in high-density housing like apartment buildings and condos.

Single family homes, though, no. When I was house shopping, I removed any that were part of an HOA from my search. I'm not saying there are no "good" HOAs, but I've heard too many horror stories, and good HOAs can become bad HOAs over time, and your only recourse is to move. No thanks.

I don't think they should be banned, per se, they definitely need reigned in as far as what they can mandate and an opt-out mechanism. I'm not sure how the latter would work if there's things like street maintenance, etc that's part of it, but I'm sure some solution could be found.

Yes.

HOAs, at base, are there because the municipality the development is being built in doesn’t want to pay for anything. Not paying is part of the deal worked with developers that now has inertial momentum to it such that it’s baked into just about every new development.

Houses, people, and taxes are added to the municipality with as little responsibility as possible. It’s a great deal, for them.

The grift is this. Normally, sidewalks, parks, and snow management fall to the city, town, or village governments. With HOAs, the town government gets to say it’s not our responsibility, let that neighborhood manage itself. We don’t want to pay for another park or police the snow, so build your houses within our borders, but leave us out of it. The town grows, has enough people to attract new business, but adds less new costs and responsibility than they otherwise would.

So now the people are managing themselves and the only enforcement on it is the risk of losing your house (having it sold out from under you to pay random fees), depending on how Karen the people in the HOA happen to be.

Example. You’re alone in the world. You get sick and end up in an extended hospital stay, let’s say 62 days. It’s a GI problem and you had an ileus. Your lawn isn’t mowed for the duration. You finally get a taxi ride home and find you’ve been fined $1000 a day for 6 weeks because your lawn isn’t mowed. Alongside the incredible medical bills, you can’t pay this. A lien is placed on your home.

That this scenario is even possible with HOAs is very wrong.

An HOA makes perfect sense in a condo scenario because people share walls and the HOA deals with building management. But with single family homes, absolutely not. At that point, it’s no longer a single family home but a condo, just not one that shares walls.

Never understood how they gained traction in the US you pride yourselves on freedom and land protection but then allow some curtain twitcher to dictate how you use the land you paid for.

Could we ban HOAs from being included in house sales, and every time it’s sold the new owners have to opt in?

This is a really good suggestion.

Maybe limit mandatory HOA involvement to things like what’s truly necessary and shared and not how tall your grass is?

A shared maintenance cost for very specific things like the community center, garbage pick-up, the roads, etc., is a great idea.

They've just figured out a way to be racist and get rid of neighbors they don't like. They should be remade at the very least.

No. Should they be as pervasive as they are with unbounded layers of beurocracy? Also no.

I think people might not understand how many assholes live around you that the HOA keeps in check. I didn't until I joined the board. Sometimes you have to litigate, but sometimes you also just need a dedicated (and elected) group of people to go knock on the door and talk out a problem. It's nicer to have this somewhat regulated (bank accounts, insurance, taxes, and yes even covenants for procedure if they are kept up to date) than to just knock on some doors and wing it.

If your HOA has an old lady measuring your grass and some dude using color swatches to check the paint on your mailbox, move. If your neighborhood has lights, clear sidewalks, fences and landscaping that are cared for, and no dog crap to step in, keep paying into it. They are doing a good job.

Yes. When we bought our first house we were told the HOA was optional. The day after closing they showed up and told us we were part of it. We needed to start paying our dues, and we needed a copy of the rules. That was $140 for a photo copy of a photo copy of a photo copy at least 13 times over. It was totally illegible.

My elderly grand mother was visiting, so we moved our car to the visitor spot so she could be parked in front of the house. We were towed.

My car had a flat, we were towed because the car appeared to be abandoned.

Everything about it was a nightmare. Shortly before we moved we found out the president no longer lived in the area, and was embezzling. He was reelected after that was revealed to the rest if the neighborhood, but no one was allowed to see the votes.

I wouldn't ban them, but I would make sure they need continual community buy-in to keep going. Make them automatically sunset if not renewed. Like, every ten years you have to get signatures from 2/3 of the home owners in the HOA in order to renew it. Good HOAs can keep going indefinitely or be reestablished later. Bad ones just disappear when they can't get enough signatures to keep the thing going.

I don't have a problem with people volunteering to bind themselves into a communal covenant. I do have a problem with the long dead hand of developers past binding people into a perpetual obligation. I know it is possible to dissolve HOAs, but it requires getting the vast majority of homeowners to come together to actively choose to revoke it. I would use the opposite system. Every ten years you need a supermajority of homeowners to commit to renewing it.

This is obviously in the context of single family homes. They're unavoidable in condos.

I won't live in an HOA. But that being said, I don't really have an issue with other people wanting to live in an HOA.

However, I do not like the fact that the HOA has permanent authority over any property you purchase inside of its zone.

I feel like there should be a specific and reasonable amount of money that you can pay in order to exempt your home from the HOA permanently, a method to break the HOA contract at least for as long as you live there.

Like maybe the HOA could reinstate the contract once you move out, and the next owner would have to break it again, but at least while you're living there, you should be able to be exempt from them if you so choose.

Banned? No. Regulated to rein in power? Yes.

My HOA has mellowed a bit over the years. Nowadays, 27 years after the subdivision was built, they negotiate for decent landscaping service, and make sure people don't leave trash and junk cars in their yard, that's about it. I'm happy enough with how they operate. I don't own a lawn mower or a rake.

Some HOAs are run like mini fiefdoms, though.

Absolutely ban them as they currently exist. If you must band together for whatever reason, do so en masse not hand the reins to a small handful of people who inevitably go power mad

The point of HOAs is protecting/increasing property value. We need property to be cheaper, not more expensive. Higher property values benefit speculation, not ownership. Burn them all.

Anyone who's in favor of HOA's should watch Hot Fuzz.

Freedom of association means the freedom to be a member of an HOA. But requiring HOA membership to purchase a specific property should be banned. Freedom of association means that you should have the freedom to not be a part of the HOA.

I’m surprised nobody has mentioned it yet, but HOAs are a holdover of practices to keep minorities from moving into neighborhoods. They still are sets of discriminatory practices, reinventing themselves in pettier ways.

Tl;dr fuck HOAs.

Imagine Bob is a city construction worker with a work vehicle. He and his wife both park in the driveway, so he has to park the work vehicle on the street. The HOA digs up a rule to keep slapping fines on his vehicle because Bob is “making the neighborhood unsightly,” aka neighbor Jane doesn’t want to live in a “blue-collar” neighborhood.

I have a likely rather unique viewpoint as someone who's HOA just had their whole board resign and be replaced after a scandal came out proving they weren't legitimate:

Ours basically only maintains the local park & roads & lights and negotiates fair rates for trash pickup and fuel deliveries for everyone, sort of like how a union can get better wages (if it's just for this purpose it's called a collective btw)

Why doesn't the city, you may ask? We're in unincorporated county land: there is no city to do maintenance work on these things, so without it things would be.... Worse, here

Though in most places yeah, they shouldn't exist

Most HOAs are run by assholes.

But when run properly they keep neighborhoods clean and safe.

I think HOAs and Business Improvement districts persist because they fill a need for hyper local government that the existing, formal governments are not fullfilling. HOAs don't need to be banned, they need to be replaced with something else that better fulfills this niche but is more regulated and accountable.

Don't ban them, there are some good parts in there

Require yearly elections on who leads

Limit the power they have, especially with giving out citations

Don't allow to outsource the work. You want a HOA, you do the HOA. Those HOA companies are thr worst

Currently live in an HOA that won't even let people put up actual privacy fences around their back yards so every fucking dog for 8 houses in either direction can see each other when they go outside and bark non-stop. So yea, fuck HOAs.

This might be unpopular, but I don't think HOAs should be banned. WAIT! I, personally, think HOAs suck and I'd never agree to buying a home in an HOA. That said, not everyone feels that way. Some folks genuinely like living in HOAs, and for all the horror stories, there's at least a few where the HOA simply exists to provide amenities to the neighborhood i.e. playgrounds, walking trails, pools, etc. People should be free to choose the kind of housing arrangements they want, and if they want an HOA, then that's their prerogative.

The real problem with HOAs is that we're trying to solve the housing crisis exclusively with single family residential zoning, which means that HOAs are vastly overrepresented in terms of what's available on the housing market. It's fundamentally a zoning issue. People who don't want an HOA or can't spend $2,000/mo in mortgage plus another $300/mo or whatever in HOA fees should have options, but they kinda don't. Ask your city why their zoning sucks.

I think they have the potential to be good if they were way more democratic, but they're never run that way.

When I lived in a townhouse that was part of an HOA that had some nice things going for it. There were a couple tennis courts, a swimming pool, a communal garden, a club house thing you can pay to use, they regularly mowed the front yards and trimmed the front hedges and they would periodically repaint the fronts of the houses. However, while I was living there, the head of the HOA was a douche that kept misusing funds.

The house my sister lives in has an HOA that does literally nothing except bitch residents to upkeep their lawn.

I think at least HOA’s should be banned from requiring certain plants in your yard. Namely grass. HOA’s should not be able to prevent people from replacing their lawns with native and edible plants.

I think we should just aggressively limit their authority. Essentially saying you can't make a contract that exceeds our defined limits. If you do, the entire contract is void, not just the parts that cross the line. Let's put them on eggshells so they don't lose what little authority we allow them to have. I live in a suburb with no HOA. Really missing city community though.

HOAs can be really good things but have all the same problems as regular democracies, mainly voter apathy. If the members of the HOA don't keep informed about the issues in the neighborhood, don't attend meetings, and don't vote, then you very quickly end up with a few assholes gaining power and doing whatever they want.

Most of the suggestions I see in the comments would also render HOAs powerless and essentially pointless.

I think I can offer some perspective as someone who works in the real estate industry and is on an HOA BOD.

Of the hundreds of clients I've worked with, only 1 ever wanted an HOA, because he didn't have one and it was awful. We're talking fences laid on the ground, grass several feet high, vehicles parked all over the front lawn, the entire yard front and back being used as a landfill, you name it.

HOAs are essentially the smallest form of government. The HOA carries the force of law. This also tends to attract the worst people for the job. Think about it; who's going to take time out of their day to volunteer on behalf of the community? People who want power over others.

People are petty as fuck. One person receives one citation and they become salty and begin seeking out and reporting every single violation they can find, which just makes it awful to live in.

Could we ban HOAs from being included in house sales, and every time it's sold the new owners have to opt in?

That would completely invalidate the purpose of the HOA.

My neighborhood's HOA has been pretty chill the few years I've lived here. The fees pay for the pool, landscaping, walking path maintenance, etc. Maybe I'd feel different if one of my neighbors was finding and reporting a bunch of violations, but so far it seems like the HOA has been good for my neighborhood. I'm sure other places get out of hand, but it's not always the nightmare people make it out to be online.

The city I grew up in (population around 30,000) made HOAs mandatory for any development of 5 or more homes. Why? The city council got fed up mediating disputes between neighbors. People would go and expect the city council to get involved if their neighbors fence was ugly, or the lawn was unkept, or their party was too big. It started happening every meeting so they decided forcing everyone into an HOA would force them to solve it themselves.

I like my HOA, but I live in a condo building. We all pitch in to keep the roof repaired and the common areas cleaned, and the few rules just make life tolerable in such a confined space (quiet hours, for example). I can't imagine what good an HOA does for single-family homes.

A thousand times YES

Yes

You can have community orgs that don't make you pay fees as a condition of owning your home.

A lot of things an hoa covers is already covered by the township here so I'm unsure why you'd join one. But they're also not as common here because of that. I know some neighbors tried ages ago and something like 80 percent told those prone to screw off.

Yes.

Yes

I’ve lived with good HOAs. I’d still rather they dissolve and everything be part of normal city operations.

Plus is it just me or are the same people that say they want small government also the ones who are super pro HOA?

I believe some TIC agreements are structured as HOAs, which is perfectly reasonable --- but I'm pretty sure that's not what you're referring to here.

Yes. Housing is tough enough as it is. Linking a lot of properties to the HOA is disgusting and should be illegal.

Should HOAs be banned?

That's an easy one:

YES!!!

Objectively yes. We don't need an extra government to cover the job of the actual government, especially not ones that are easy for psychopaths to infiltrate. Your park? That's the damn state's responsibility, pay your fair share of taxes instead and let the city handle it. Your home value? Don't treat housing as a damn vehicle for investment. All those nasty poors and minorities? If they bother you find a way to leave earth, permanently.

HOAs are emblematic of everything wrong with America and actively strip away the good parts.

for regular ass house on a regular ass street, yes. exceptions are made for condominiums, apartment complexes and gated communities.

I mean I highly dislike them but also feel like many people like them for the exact reasons I dislike them.

Waiting for the inevitable showdown over having hens in your backyard. Instant solution to the egg problem.

I think a small community being able to have say in who moves in, asking contract term violators to leave in exceptional cases, while still being liable for discriminatory actions, can be a good thing. However, being able to fine members and repossess their property? That should be 100,000,000% illegal.

I don't want to live in a neighborhood where you can leave a car to rot on the front lawn, where you can have cows shitting all over, or you can build a 20 foot tall Jesus statue in your front yard.

If your HOA sucks, then get involved and make it better. Mine is fine.

Yes

An HOA can have a very positive effect on a neighborhood when handled properly, but inevitably a troublemaker gets on the board and starts making life miserable for everyone.

There was a recent local case where an elderly lady in her 80s accidentally underpaid her HOA dues by 30 cents. They started fining her, and before she figured out there was an issue, the fines were thousands of dollars, and she couldn't afford it. She tried to work it out with the HOA board, but they were immovable. Then they started foreclosure proceedings, and that's when she went to the local news.

This lady's house was paid off, and they had every intention of taking it away from her in her old age, over THIRTY CENTS!

The news tried to reason with the HOA, but they wouldn't be reasonable, and the last I heard, she was going to have to pay a lawyer to fight it in court.

No HOA should be able to take anyone's house away for any reason. Same with back property taxes, especially if a propery is fully paid off. It invites predatory behavior, and there are always people who will gleefully exploit such situations.

Absolutely.

Banned? The freedom cities will be the best HOAs ever.

Yes.

if you cant even decide what color your house is, you dont own it.

youre LARPing as a home owner while a Kouncil of Karens could evict you from the house you supposedly own.

No. Some people like them. If you like being in an hoa, you should be allowed to move into and have one.

I hate them, and would never live in one, but if some people want everything around them to look about the same and be some generic "pretty" and not have full control over your own property, you do you.

Conceptually great idea but they have people involved and people suck.

The HOA hate is completely overblown online. It's practically clickbait at this point. Just a framework for petty neighbour stories to entertain reddit teenagers with no real world experience.

I fell for it at first, and when my wife and I started looking for houses, I specified no HOAs. We saw a couple of houses that didn't have HOAs, and then I realized that while I personally would prefer not to be in an HOA, I really, really want my neighbors to be in one.

So we got a house with an HOA. It was a gated community of small houses in a bad neighborhood. The HOA handled trash pickup, maintenance of common areas, what little landscaping we had, and a couple other things that we wouldn't want to deal with on our own. Sometimes they'd hire a security guard to deter package theft. They charged a little more than I'd like to pay, but overall it was a positive experience. They sent us a letter once saying we had to replace our door. We didn't. Nothing ever came of it. And to be fair, they were right; that door is in terrible shape.

Now I live in a different neighborhood with a different HOA. Sometimes they send us an annoying letter saying I can't leave my trash cans out. It's a minor inconvenience. Overall another positive experience.

The vast majority of HOAs are fine. You don't hear about those because that's not entertaining. It's silly to think that the stories about petty old busybodies would be the norm.

They’re already opt-in: you opt-in when you choose to buy a home with an HOA

Also you can’t “ban HOAs.” It’s a contract you agree to when buying a house

Gonna take a controversial tack here:

No, they shouldn't be banned.

You have a choice to buy into an HOA or not. You can still buy plots of land, and build to suit; you are not obligated or limited solely to houses that already exist in HOAs. Yes, your up-front costs will be higher, because you're going to have to pay for putting in a well, septic system, and possibly running electric to your place, and if you want gas you'll need propane deliveries, versus hooking in to an existing water/sewer/electric/natural gas system. But that's still your choice.

Some people want HOAs because them come with amenities that people wouldn't have otherwise. In my area, there are two very large HOAs that both offer things like full golf courses, and horse stables with miles of trails for riding; the people buying in those HOAs buy into them because of those things; having enough land on your own to keep and ride horses is, well, good luck finding that much land as a single parcel within reasonable driving distance of any city.

Finally, if you buy a home, most of the time you want to know that your home isn't going to plummet in value. You're dropping a LOT of money on one, and hoping that, if you ever need to move, you'll be able to get the money you put in back out again. When you don't live in an HOA, there's always a risk that the things shitty neighbors will do will end up wrecking your property values. E.g., if the person right next to me starts parking dead cars in their driveway, and has yard dogs that are barking at all hours of the night, not many people are going to willingly move in next to them.

Do I LIKE HOAs? Not really. The best HOAs are the ones that have absolutely minimal interference in your daily life. I live in an HOA; they keep the road functional, specify certain aspects of new construction (minimum size--no tiny homes--colors have to be earth-tones, etc.) and... That's about it. Yeah, I'm supposed to get permission before I put in any yard statues more than 6' tall, and I'm not allowed to clear cut the trees on my property (...not that I ever plan to...), I can't put a pistol range in my yard and practice shooting at home, but that's about all. As long as I stay quiet, and mind my own business, the HOA doesn't give a shit. The most high-handed thing they've done in the last decade was amend the by-laws to ban short-term rentals; one shithead was renting out their place as an AirBnB, which led to loud parties on weekends and a lot of extra traffic.

No they shouldn't be banned. You don't want to line in one? Fine don't live there. No one is forcing you to buy there. Let those who want to live there, well... Leave them alone if that's what they want. What does it matter to anyone else?

Please note I'm not trying to attack the op. My comments are meant for anyone trying to ban them.

For those that live in an hoa and have a bad board, go run for office and get the idiots voted out. Either that or move. Probably cheaper to run for office and then fix the problems.