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 facts don't seem to support your implied claim that being governed by people who do live in your neighborhood is better. At least not in Florida.
My own personal experience from my wife having owned one condo and she and I having owned four houses is not very encouraging for your claim either. Of the four HOAs involved, the two that were run entirely by management companies (i.e., by people with no personal connection to the neighborhood, with little or no activity from the community members on the Board that we could see) were fine, they kept the common areas maintained and basically did nothing else that affected us. The condo association, while it had a management company, also had a Board filled with community members who had nothing better to do than harass everyone else, which they did with an energy that would have been amazing if it had been directed towards something productive. The other HOA had no management company, just the Board of community members, and was very intrusive, and from what we learned from neighbors, had been a mess for the entire history of the community.
So we now live in a neighborhood with no HOA, we only have to deal with the municipality. We like it.
> 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.
> You can very easily run to be part of your HOA leadership
Yes, and then you find out just how petty petty politics can be.
The inconvenient truth, at least for HOA advocates, is that a community of 20-30 people, or even a hundred or so, does not need to be governed at the level of the community. Most people are reasonable and will respond to reasonable requests from neighbors if there is an issue, without having to drag in a higher authority at all. Those who are not reasonable, are not going to be magically made reasonable by having an HOA--indeed, as you admit, they're precisely the ones who are going to end up running the HOA. On balance, you're better off not having "governance" at all until you get to a larger population, like a town or a city.
You definitely need that level of governance if there are common elements which need to be funded and maintained (pools, parks, the building itself for condos)
You need an organization to manage the common elements, yes. But the only "governance" that's required for that is...to manage the common elements. Which isn't really "governance", it's just management, and oversight of whoever is doing the managing. There's no need at all for the rest of the intrusive rules and regulations that HOAs impose in the name of "governance".
Only in a very minimal sense. A management that is only empowered to maintain common areas of a community can't "govern" the community members except in the very narrow sense of enforcing whatever rules the community wants to have for the use of common areas. Which is just an aspect of the fact that the community as a whole owns the common areas and the owner makes the rules.
Such a management can't mess with community members about how often they cut their lawns, or what color they paint their house, etc. But that sort of micromanagement is what "governance" by HOAs ends up being when it goes beyond basic management of common areas.
> You definitely need that level of governance if there are common elements which need to be funded and maintained (pools, parks
Sure. I think very few, if any, people dispute that. If there actually are common facilities like pools, it makes sense to have a common pot of money everyone contributes into, to maintain those facilities. Just about everyone will agree with that.
How do you make the huge leap from that, into saying a HOA has any kind of right to demand what kinds of flowers or windowshades or decorations someone installs into their private (not shared!) property?
Okay, well, nearly half of all HOAs are condominium communities which inherently have common elements. I’m not saying that detached SFHs with no common elements should be governed by HOAs; I was if anything implying the opposite
> Okay, well, nearly half of all HOAs are condominium communities which inherently have common elements.
This varies widely depending on the city. In many cities, it's hard to find a detached house in a neighborhood (that isn't ghetto) that doesn't have an HOA.
In the article, the associations that appear to be causing the most problems, at least in Florida, are condominium associations. So it might be worth reconsidering whether filling a "need" for such governance ends up being more trouble than it's worth--at least if it goes beyond just maintaining the common elements (which it seems like condo associations in Florida do).
I'm on my HOA board, and not because I want to be, I can tell you that.
I showed up to my first annual meeting where basically no one was there other than the president. He asked if I wanted to be on the board because they didn't have enough people participating. I asked what I'd have to do, and he said "just vote on things". I said OK, and he said the rules let him appoint members to vacancies (spoilers: the rules don't), so he "appointed" me on the spot.
At subsequent meetings, I discovered most of the board was completely disinterested in doing anything, other than the president who would probably fall under the "petty little shit" category, but he seemed like he knew what he was doing (spoilers: he didn't), so everyone pretty much just voted in favor of what he wanted to do. I was the only board member who worked from home, so I would be the only one on site to deal with things that involved vendors working on the property, so then I became the guy everyone expected to do everything.
The president got diagnosed with cancer and had to step down. He wanted me to be president, but I was like fuck that. The VP took the role, but she has pretty much done nothing and is clueless, so I keep being the one people expect to take the lead on everything.
I'm honestly tired of it and wished some competent people in the association would get on the board. There were massive mistakes I caught as a board member because I'm the only one who actually reads anything in the bylaws, CC&Rs, and all that shit. The HOA had been paying hundreds of dollars a year for decades on things that didn't need to be performed because our property management company misclassified us under some statute that didn't even apply to us, and nobody knew any better or even bothered to ask, "Hey, why the fuck are we actually doing this?"
I'll not say I'm a "good" board member. I don't care about enforcing house rules, and I don't want to get involved when people complain about their neighbors unless it's something that affects the association's financial health. The only reason I stay on is because I've done enough after-the-fact clean-up of the previous president's mess that I'm terrified of what insane things might happen if no one is keeping an eye on the other members. If you're in an HOA, I'd encourage getting involved to keep the crazies in check, at least for as long as you can stomach it.
> The biggest issue with most HOA/COAs is that basically no one (especially the people who might have some qualifications) want to participate.
That's an argument not to have HOAs, right?
> 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.
In my so many decades of existence, I've yet had a reason to want to kick my mayor out of office. And none of the cities I've lived in have passed laws related to what I can do with my house that were particularly problematic.
At least for the HOA I was a part of, the CC&Rs were nearly impossible to change. Getting elected didn’t give you the power to change them. They were a contract signed with each individual homeowner - changing them required getting consent from every homeowner individually.
Being on the board gave you power over how budget was allocated within those CC&Rs. I.E. the maintenance and upgrade of shared spaces. Vendor selection for violation detection/enforcement. Etc.
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.
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.
The implication is the people in my neighborhood know anything at all about what would make sense from a neighborhood regulatory standpoint. The sell is to drum up ancient peasant fears of the far away feudal lord vs local villagers gumptions, but the reality is usually denying genuine domain expertise besmirched by the mark of coming from a higher centralized government, in favor of rule by the loudest of the local bigots.
I'm not sure how much "genuine domain expertise" is actually embodied in most laws or regulations at any level of government. When I look at the US Code (or the Code of Federal Regulations), or state laws, or city or county municipal codes, I see some things that make sense, sure, but also a huge bunch of rules that are just arbitrary, and are only there because some special interest got a law or regulation written to benefit them at the expense of everyone else.
The one advantage of higher levels of government over HOAs is that they are generally impersonal. The faceless bureacrats that are processing your forms generally don't have any personal animus against you. They don't have to live next door to you and they don't have to care what your personal oddities are. They're just executing a bureaucratic process. Whereas with an HOA, every little petty personal grievance gets magnified, and so-called "governance" turns into endless feuding.
The term "self-governance" has always seemed to me to be an oxymoron. On its face it means everyone governs themselves, and nobody governs other people. Which if the people are reasonable mature adults, works out fine. But the term is always used to refer to some kind of governing institution, which means some people are given the power to govern other people. That's not "self-governance".
Which is why Jefferson, who would agree with you, thought that a well-informed people (education) was critical and without it self-governance would fail. It's not an oxymoron - it just comes with caveats.
> "I think by far the most important bill in our whole code is that for the diffusion of knowledge among the people...whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government"
> "The most effectual means of preventing tyranny would be to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large"
No, he wouldn't, because he used "self-governance" to mean the thing that contradicts what it says on its face.
> It's not an oxymoron - it just comes with caveats.
The kind of "democratic" governance we actually have certainly comes with caveats, yes--caveats that have basically never been really dealt with. Jefferson's ideal of a "well-informed people" has never been achieved.
Jefferson did claim to believe that the US Federal government should be as minimal as possible--until he became President and found that it's actually kind of nice to be able to use that power to do things you feel like doing, whether they actually meet that minimal government ideal or not.
But in any case, none of that justifies describing the governance we actually have as "self-governance".
That is a risk you freely accept when choosing to buy in an HOA. Co-ops, which are related but distinct, solve for this risk by requiring the co-op board to vote to approve any new residents. You have a co-op as an option for your living arrangements, as well. Optionality is a good thing.
I, and I suspect many other people here, prefer to live in countries where there are no neighbourhood associations that can dictate the look of your house, what colour of paint you must use, etc.
I prefer to spend $1.25mil on a house that won't drop in value because my neighbor is not allowed to put up demon statues and paint the house pink, etc.
Instead you chose a house that has significantly less value because of home buyer's preference for houses with a HOA and reduction in mortgage payment they can afford because of the fees.
I mean, where I live, there are no HOAs, but the city council instead mandates those kinds of things via zoning rules.
I think I still prefer that to HOAs, because
- The city is pretty good at taking care of public facilities
- I only pay city tax, not city tax and HOA fees
- The city has better things to do than walk around neighborhoods looking for violations, so enforcement is pretty lax
- The city government is subject to checks and balances
I’ve owned three places, two in HOAs and the currently place doesn’t have one. The HOAs were fine. I don’t miss them at all. At their best they just provided services (trash pickup, landscaping, etc.) that I can easily contract for myself.
If you don’t need an HOA (because there are actually shared common elements that need to be maintained) then why would you want one? And if you do need one, why would you want it to do anything beyond what’s required to maintain the shared bits?
> 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?
This is a false dichotomy: if you live under the rule of an HOA, you still have to follow municipal ordinances and city laws in addition to HOA regulations.
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.
