As a non-American I have never understood why a people that values personal liberties are sometimes happy to be dictated to by housing authorities. I get it with apartment buildings with shared walls and communal property, but I just don't get why you would with suburban homes.
The roads in a gated community are "communal property" in about the same sense as hallways are in an apartment building. I suppose you could care if someone is driving an oversized load through the community and so wearing down the roads; or if they're parking a car on the road that's leaking oil.
There's also noise and odor/smoke pollution. An HOA is pretty much the only mechanism to ensure that a group of people who don't smoke marijuana can band together to live in marijuana-smoke-free air. (Yes, some people smoke enough potent skunkweed for the stink to carry multiple houses away. No, the police don't care.)
Most of the things HOAs care about are indeed idiotic, though. IMHO, the HOA's right to dictate what I'm doing ends where my property begins. The point of the HOA is to control/constrain the externalities you have on other houses/communal properties. If you put a garden gnome on your lawn, there's no externality.
> IMHO, the HOA's right to dictate what I'm doing ends where my property begins.
Actually, the HOA’s right to dictate ends with whatever you agreed to by contract when you bought the property. And the HOA can enforce that contract in court, to the point of foreclosing on your home if necessary.
So, yeah, when you buy a house in an HOA, read those covenants before you sign. They are usually at the bottom of the 90 page stack of papers when you close.
There are two types of HOAs, right? There's the type where the property is itself "part of" the HOA from the start (because the HOA is built into the legal structure of the development); and then there's the kind where the HOA is just a contract you enter into independently from buying the property–and which, at least in theory, you don't need to enter into.
HOAs created out of regular separately-developed SFH dwellings are the latter kind, and what I was referring to in my previous comment. (I kind of forgot that the baked-into-the-property kind existed for a moment. Oops!) In the voluntarist kind of HOA, it really is up for debate where the HOA's right to tell you what to do ends, because ultimately the HOA's power in such a voluntarist contract derives from the other members' willingness to shun you, annoy you, or at most refuse to give you access to communal resources like tennis courts, for failure to comply.
So in an HOA is it more like a leasehold or a freehold? From my understanding if it is legitimately a freehold I don't see why they'd have any legal right to do shit to you if you told them to do one. It is very confusing. Why does some external force other than law enforcement have any legal right to tell you what to do on your own property?
I've personally never lived in an HOA (and would refuse to move into one), but the best ones, from what I've heard of through friends and family, are those that are hands-off, namely:
1) Optional -- This puts the onus on the HOA to actually serve its residents, because if enough people dislike it enough to leave (after, say, a few elected residents go on a power trip), it will collapse.
2) Give access to neighborhood amenities (e.g. a pool or clubhouse)
3) Provide neighborhood services (e.g. snow removal or tree trimming, extra trash collection)
4) Are NOT in the business of mandating minutiae such as grass length, paint color, approving remodel plans, handing out fines, etc
5) Are NOT part of a private developer's subdivision (usually goes hand in hand with point 4) so much as a collection of residents which formed organically
Basically, I like the idea of HOAs if they're more similar to Los Angeles's Neighborhood Councils than LAPD: Home Edition (although, for so many other reasons, I think LA's Neighborhood Councils are unrepresentative and ineffective at serving the wider community's best interest so much as they benefit exclusively the homeowner's interest). Otherwise, I strongly believe they cause more harm than good -- not to mention they can easily be weaponized against a minority homeowner moving into a majority-white community.
Unfortunately, it seems like HOAs as described above are in the vanishing minority.
My dad has a property that's it's in a homeowner's association. Mostly it's just because there's a private road to a bunch of houses that needs to be maintained. That's pretty much the main thing that the HOA is concerned with. Time could come when there's some option for bringing broadband in too.
This. We bought a house in an HOA and I definitely had a moment where I was like, "Wait a minute, some guy bought this land, subdivided it, and created this HOA out of thin air and now here we are, 40 years later, living under that HOA he made up. None of the original owners even live here anymore!"
Americans only seem to value freedom from government interference in their lives. There's far more control from schools, universities, workplaces, and HOAs. Many rights like freedom of speech are curtailed in schools and workspaces, for example.
You are talking as if somehow non-Americans have access to more liberties across non-government entities in their lives. If anything, Americans treasure and enjoy the most freedoms across the widest gamut of institutions vs. non Americans.
I don't think that's true. Coming from Germany I feel that in the average US citizen living as an employee has less rights and freedoms than the average German citizen. In principle you can live a very free lifestyle in the US but you either have to have lots of money or check out from the lifestyle most people live.
That's true. If you want freedoms and rights in America, you're either not a part of the 'normal' American way of working and likely not making much money, or you're wealthy. Workplaces are authoritarian and remove a lot of rights when you walk in the door or sign into your computer, even doing surveillance on work devices that are further than simply asset tracking & data protection.
Home owner associations or your average American Beauty style dystopia is much rarer outside the US because people haven't voluntarily locked themselves into suburbia.
In Europe the middle class generally moves into cities and not out of them where you're for the most part left to your own devices rather than being bullied around by activist neighbours or your church parish or what have you.
I mean just take a look at fiction, from Steven King's small town horror, to the Truman Show, or PK Dick, this sort of provincial clampdown on people is quite uniquely American. Between boyscouts and girlscouts and the cheerleading team there's not that much freedom left.
I noticed this most in my encounters with American college students abroad. They're like oversized children. It's quite striking how managed American life is. From school until the evening to clubs and on-campus living, into the nuclear family and then retirement in Florida.
> from Steven King's small town horror, to the Truman Show, or PK Dick
And then there is The Addams Family. The 2019 film addresses their conflict with American suburbia quite well. In the end, the neighborhood accepts them. Sometimes art does not imitate life.
Germans for example have an expectation of privacy at the workplace. It's not allowed to monitor a German employee's web browsing on a work computer. In the US the employer can monitor them all they want.
Property rights are more "first class" than privacy rights; in the US, the idea that a company is not allowed to monitor the use of company equipment by employees is absurd- to the extent that many institutions are regulated to require it (i.e. monitoring for data exfiltration, etc).
Of course, most companies' monitoring is pretty shallow and reasonable, but there are exceptions, and I certainly wouldn't choose to work for one of the exceptions.
That makes sense. Property ownership seems to be one of the most important values in the US. Which leads to property owners having the freedom to restrict the freedoms of other people. You can see that in companies where employees are assumed to basically have no rights while working. Same in the west here where property owners fence off large areas of land and nobody can pass through. In Germany there usually is some kind of path where people can pass through. This can make hiking in CA quite difficult because you often run into a fence.
Though there are historical reasons for allowing land owners to restrict unauthorized access, realize too that property extends to anything that can be owned, not just land.
If a company has a commercial kitchen, it seems reasonable to be to prohibit employees from running their own food delivery startup out of the kitchen... If you get access to a company car (I.e. travelling salesman), the company should reasonably expect to be able to take action against you if you use ot to go drag racing, or for a personal vacation.
Likewise, the notion that an employee should expect to have free reign over a company computer and company internet access is just strange to me.
The use and access of those logs is strictly regulated, and yes, it is enforced.
Given that Germany has a much healthier employee representation than the US, it's much more difficult for management to slide in surveillance under the radar. (It's also rather painful if they get caught)
I wonder if those German workplace freedoms stem from a different legal system of culpability.
In some US states, for example, an employee who commits a crime using his employer’s computer has opened up his employer to civil liability. If the employer can show that the employee actively sidestepped the employer’s controls, the employer can make a good case against liability.
I wonder if anything like that can happen in Germany. If not, then employee privacy on employer-owned devices makes sense.
Usually, the locale employee organization ("Betriebsrat") will negotiate a contract with the employer ("Betriebsvereinbarung") where the usage of company equipment for private use is regulated. Haven't read one in years, but would assume, that this case is handled there, and gives the employer the right to check logs etc in case of criminal/legal inquiries.
“In some US states, for example, an employee who commits a crime using his employer’s computer has opened up his employer to civil liability. “
I always find this reasoning strange and inconsistent . Companies give company cars to employees which could injure people. Or I could stab somebody with an employer provided knife.
It's likely an effect of data privacy being established as one of the fundamental rights guaranteed by the German constitution and further strengthened by specific laws like the German data privacy law, which is a lot older than GDPR.
Interestingly data privacy (more precisely the "Recht auf informationelle Selbstbestimmung") is not named explicitly in the constitution, but has been "created" by the German constitutional court in 1983 in the context of a law suite against the German census of 1983 [1].
Historically I would argue all of this is the result of the experience 1933-1945 and also the (what was known at that time) experience in East Germany, the communist German Democratic Republic.
It's enforced to the point where the access control system to the building, even if it tracks entry and exit timestamps, cannot be used for e.g. time keeping or to monitor employee attendance. German companies will have to have a separate time keeping system, even if the access control system uses the exact same (RFID) cards for identification.
People in other countries are sometimes less burdened by interference from non-governmental organizations. Countries with strong unions offer workers freedom from the worst of workplace strictures - think the right to assemble or to speak out against your employer or blow a whistle without being fired. Most countries don't have HOAs and far fewer rules around how you can build and maintain your own house. You can paint your house bright pink in most places in India and no one will stop you.
The American body politic's focus on rights as the defining feature of the social contract isn't shared everywhere else. For example, in many countries, the focus is on the material benefits the government can provide for you ("development"). And because of that, there's less reflexive distrust in government as an institution able to benefit your life, in principle. Parts of the American citizenry absolve themselves of the expectation that government can, even in principle, improve your life.
America is living in the long 18th century - Enlightenment liberalism worked out over three centuries.
most likely the reason some Americans are fine with a HOA is because they do give up some liberties/freedoms for the other benefits that come with a HOA. Such as amenities, security, upkeep of surroundings, and other benefits from the pooling of resources (ie hoa fees). You also have essentially an arbitrator to deal with disputes between neighbors (mainly over appearances). (and generally when homes are constructed together/all at once and on a single large plot of land; their final costs are much less thus you can purchase homes for cheaper). In the case of subdivisions like this, Not all come with an HOA but that is generally the case.
I'm on the fence, so to speak. have lived in subs with and without HOA, and mostly haven't noticed much of a difference. we did get a curt letter once about a trashcan "visible from the street" but they didn't followup when I asked for more info. Depending on what street you're on, it might be visible against the back of the house, but it wasn't visible from the front street, which is all I'd assume we'd care about.
One of the values I've found is that it does provide a way to collectively prevent certain eyesores. I don't really want to have someone with 5 cars in the street on in their driveway for extended periods of time. Having a BBQ party? Sure - have 15 cars there for a few hours. Want to collect cars and work on them and leave cars 'in repair' out the street for weeks at a time? I'd rather you didn't, and would rather there be some agreed upon process to resolve those disputes.
I do understand some HOAs have people that get power hungry - grass being a 1/4" too tall, etc. That's generally bullshit, and I think there's probably other things going on in those cases where the HOA issue is the public face of some other private neighbor disputes going on.
Oh, we did have a letter once or twice about "your lawn is not kept properly". We have a lawn service and they got delayed, then it rained heavy for 3 days, and they were backed up again, and... we had really long grass. It was cut the moment someone could cut it at that point. Nature happens. If the worst that came out of that was a $50 fine or something... meh.
A lot of HOA's send letters about things they don't have authority over, and people comply anyway. If you push back or ask for clarification, they just drop it so they aren't exposed as lacking authority.
HOAs provide some value, in some cases mowing, upkeep, and snow removal. I'd never live in a place with HOA dues/restrictions but for older folks who aren't as physically capable it can be really nice.
They provide some value but they also attract control freaks who want to shape everything in the way they want. Most people don't want to engage in HOA so the people who do (and often are control freaks) have a lot of power.
Of course! No one is forced to buy into an HOA. For some Americans though I think it's less about giving up their freedoms and more about controlling their neighbors :)
My HOA has 100 home owners (large town home complex), that type of buying power puts us all in a really good negotiating position.
Not to mention they save me all the time I'd spend on arranging various home services, from window washing to roof cleaning to pest removal to repaving driveways. Having an HOA means I worry about what is inside my walls and nothing else.
Ours definitely does, what I pay for HOA dues is nothing compared to what I'd be paying if they didn't cover my cable, internet + HBO. They bundle it up for every resident. I've seen what others pay for cable, my HOA dues basically are in the ballpark of a pretty basic internet + cable plan (in Florida) now imagine paying double, cause that's what it'd be like if they didn't bundle it. I'm pretty sure our HOA pays like $30 - $50 per house or something for plans that normally cost $100+ so it's definitely severely discounted.
An HOA is typically formed by people who live in the neighborhood to allow a housing development to represent itself as a single larger entity instead of several smaller ones.
Like any human collaboration they can be awesome or terrible. A good HOA can manage resources for ammenities like pools and sports courts, they can help homeowners settle disputes over things like fencing and street parking. Like many volunteer orgs, they're run by those willing to volunteer - which are not usually the most capable at the job.
At the end of the day HOAs do get a lot of heat because they often enforce community guidelines on things like mowing your lawn and not painting your garage door to be the nazi flag. Like anything, this is a tradeoff - you may want to run a ham antenna in your backyard and be told you're not allowed.
This isn't, at all, how most HOAs come to be in the US. Not even close.
Most HOA's are formed when a developer plats a subdivision. They attach the Covenants and other deed restrictions at the property at that time. They do it so they can maintain control over properties they have already sold until they have sold every property in the development. They want to maintain that control so they can cultivate the image for the neighborhood that maximizes their ability to profit from it.
This notion that HOA's get created for altruistic reasons is almost universally false, and should go away. Yes, some HOA's survive in a way that isn't toxic, but even that is really in the eyes of the beholder.
> Like many volunteer orgs, they're run by those willing to volunteer - which are not usually the most capable at the job.
Sounds like a good use-case for sortition. Require that people "submit to the potential for being drafted for HOA service" as part of the purchase agreement of the houses built in the development. Then at least the HOA will mostly be composed of harried people who don't want to do the job and want to get it over with as quickly as possible; rather than busybodies with idle hands.
I wonder the same about zoning, can’t still wrap my head around it actually. Your neighbor dictating what you can or can’t do with your property is communism.
I don’t understand. You are ok with a coal plant or wind farm or slaughterhouse being built in a residential neighborhood? That doesn’t happen right now because of zoning.
This sounds bad in theory but in practice I am not sure why developers would purchase an expensive city land to build a coal plant there. But okay, let's have residential/industrial zoning. I am not okay with any restrictions inside the residential zone though. If someone wants to build an apartment tower on their single-family house lot, that should be allowed.
Adam Ruins Everything also had an entire episode smearing the charity Toms Shoes. He goes an entire rant about how Tom's doesn't need to donate shoes because people in Africa can buy them if they need them - but he entirely leaves out that Toms donates custom made shoes for a specific medical condition (podoconiosis) that makes most shoes uncomfortable to wear.
There's nothing wrong with being skeptical or critical. There is everything wrong with selectively being critical and misrepresenting the situation.
Adam Ruins Everything is inherently contrarian, to the point he doesn't have a show unless he's pouring some poison on something. This influences his "hot takes" to the point I doubt any of them are honest, and I wouldn't put it past him to make shit up.
"Critics of HOAs have attacked them as a “tool for exclusion” that can encourage racial segregation. There’s no available data on the race of the owners of each particular house, so Clarke and Freedman couldn’t test this accusation directly. But they did compare the racial demographics of neighborhoods with or without HOAs, and found that neighborhoods with HOAs tended to be richer and less racially diverse."
Unnamed critics state things "can" do things, while the following sentence shows there is no evidence. Then there is a follow up statement that the racial demographics show that HOAs tend to be richer (A major point of HOAs is to improve and maintain neighborhood values), and less diverse. The second part on its face might seem upsetting but, you'll find largely suburban communities ARE overall less diverse. It would maybe be relevant if they found and stated "HOAs in the same zip codes as non-HOA neighbrhoods of equal value are less diverse", that might show some racial differences, but then not even necessarily bias.
In short, bloomberg is a rag and should be used to pickup your favorite pets droppings with.
Without commenting on the quality of the Bloomberg piece, exclusion is quite literally the reason that HOAs were created. The original, explicit, and completely legal purpose of an HOA was to exclude specific races and creeds and we cannot dispute that.
Argue devil's advocate all you like, but there are many HOAs with "No Jews, Asiatics, Blacks, or Mulattos allowed" still on the charter and "Whites only" written directly into the deed.
Wasn't that long ago, and many of the people who wrote those bylaws are still alive...
> Having established the HOA, the developers have expanded their scope, giving them authority to regulate changes to residences, landscaping and maintenance requirements, color of houses, etc., a variety of other requirements and amenities that the developers believe will make their project more desirable to the market.
The last paragraph in that history section made me laugh, because now HOA's are mainly for developers to ensure they can sell their homes and then after the fact when they're no longer relevant you're left trying to satisfy an HOA and they always say its to keep property values up and what have you.
> Argue devil's advocate all you like, but there are many HOAs with "No Jews, Asiatics, Blacks, or Mulattos allowed" still on the charter and "Whites only" written directly into the deed.
Restrictive covenants have been a dead letter for decades, and they predate modern HOAs by definition.
Maybe Bloomberg should hire you rather than write this drivel. It's not my burden to provide evidence for something I am pointing the logical failures and wild claims of a rag magazine. Thank you for the link though it's informative
Bloomberg is at least conventional media, though, and even right-leaning media, at that. It's a bit different from a comedian making bombastic, click-baity videos for the internet.
What makes you think Bloomberg is right-leaning? My understanding is that WSJ has been right-leaning in NY finance journalism and Bloomberg has been left-leaning, historically.
