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.
The idea is supposed to be that an HOA can be more efficient in taking care of problems. The municipality can be underfunded, etc, and take a long time to solve a problem.
In practice, HOAs generally don't do anything useful, though.
Our neighborhood actually saves the County money for property they don’t have to maintain (drainage/swales/mowing/etc) and provides community things like tennis courts, basketball courts, pools, playgrounds etc that the County doesn’t have to provide or maintain. It’s also cheaper for the HOA to do it
I'm all for paying dues for things like tennis courts, etc. These are truly common amenities.
My house, though, is not common property. Let the HOA rules cover only the common stuff.
Incidentally, local government where I live provides tennis courts, basketball courts, swimming pools and plenty of playgrounds. A few of these are within walking distance...
> If it had a convenience store nearby, it would be like a little village
I get that there's a certain type of person who'd like this, but for the majority of people, you're highlighting the reason people don't like HOAs. You're creating a little city, whereas most people just want a home.
In any case, as I may have said somewhere - if you exclude condos, only a small percentage of HOAs have any shared facilities. No courts, no clubhouse, no pool, etc. When I was house hunting, easily under 10% of HOAs had any shared area.
Competitive bids are only required if it exceeds 10% of budget in Florida. You still have to get quotes ahead of making a budget or it makes no sense. For example, you can’t go for a high bidder just-because. It has to be in budget. Then, people have to be elected to serve and usually it’s 1-2 year terms. If someone doesn’t like how the HOA is run then they can always try to run against the current Board members running for re election.
> You still have to get quotes ahead of making a budget or it makes no sense. For example, you can’t go for a high bidder just-because
There are a couple examples in the comments, of HOAs awarding no-bid, single-source contracts to cronies or family. Are you sure that a government-par bid process is universally, legally required for HOAs contracting out with contractors?
> If someone doesn’t like how the HOA is run then they can always try to run against the current Board members running for re election.
There are also several examples in the comments, of dreadful HOAs which retain power for reasons other than residents simply wanting it. Applied to the crony contracting described above, I don't think that most residents, if polled, would say that they want that, yet the examples still happened. That seems to indicate that your remedy was inadequate to effect the will of the people. So my question to you is:
If, say, people don't want their HOA corruptly accepting inflated charges in no-bid contracts with friends and family, using HOA money, how is it that in some cases, their HOA did so? Those are the failure points in representation which need addressing.
State of Florida requires a list of bids to be posted and before a Board meeting. The motions on whom was selected is required to be documented in the meeting minutes.
Yes, per Fl Statute 720 any quotes/bids for contracts exceeding 10% of the budget requires competitive bids but doesn’t set a number like 3. Two is practical minimum.
But competitive bids for attorneys, architects, CPAs, community association managers, or sole source vendors where there is only one in the area that does the work etc are not required. Like say a business that is the only one in the area that does aquatic maintenance on ponds.
In my local area HOAs are apparently required by the city. We manage ours, a very small HOA, and recently were in discussion about removal. If we remove the HOA, the cost for each house will likely go up significantly because there's work needed to manage a detention pond that the city requires we manage. If the HOA dissolves, they city takes it over but charges much more for the same management.
Feels really odd, no one in our area actually wants an HOA. Yet i think people are going to flip when their HOA dues are suddenly required by the city and at much steeper rates (i imagine 2-4x the cost, our dues are quite small atm).
That’s the entire point of HOAs though; so that the city can offload those costs onto another organization AND collect the same revenue they would otherwise. At least where I live, it’s well understood among developers that the zoning and permitting process is how this is enforced.
The real, completely arbitrary thing that makes housing expensive is zoning. There is research on this. Zoning, especially in the long term, has enormous effects, including on things seemingly unrelated such as reducing construction productivity, reducing competition among construction firms (fewer contractors) and reducing housing supply (supply vs demand).
I think people generally don’t appreciate how restrictive zoning effectively is. It’s not just what you can build, but how big it is, layout things, and can even reach into aesthetics etc.
This is essentially why HOA are mandatory for issuing zoning permits to developers. It's a easy way for municipalities to disavow themselves of having to provide basic infrastructure like water and sewage lines
