Houses and Home Ownership

The fact that you have to politic at all is ludicrous to me. I don’t think it’s any of my neighbors’ business what color my house is or if my lamppost matches everyone else’s or if I want to put up Christmas lights or anything else on my property that I am paying a mortgage on. I had a woman burst into tears when I worked for Lowe’s because the HOA mandated a specific make and model of porch light they installed ten plus years ago that was out of production for several years. The HOA board would not budge and were going to sue her if she didn’t get that one. If that’s the kind of thing that happens in a HOA count me out.

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In all honesty:

  1. My lawn looks shitty when it’s overgrown.
  2. Let things grow too far, and deep-rooted things might threaten the leechfield.
  3. Ticks.
  4. Ticks.
  5. Ticks.
  6. Excessively tall grass legit makes the lawn harder to navigate. We have gardens and such.

I don’t object to lawns in principle - I object to grass in practice.

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Ok, I’m gonna go against the grain of the internet and this forum for a moment here.

Some HOAs exist just fine, are very reasonable and have very good reason to exist.

My caveat is that I acknowledge that there are definitely instances where they’re literally just grown-ass adults having power in a tiny domain and being little power trippers.

My home grown example. We live on a lake too large to be wholly owned by one house and is in-fact divided up more or less evenly among nine houses. When not tended to at all the lake does what many semi-stagnant* bodies of water do and becomes absolutely disgusting.

What you end up with is a collective action problem. It is better for all nine houses to create a pool of resources (munny) that are managed by all nine houses, they vote on an executive who actually does the day to day managing of the pool of monies, and is required to keep it completely transparent (he writes up a little report of all expenditures and amount in the account) And they have I think annual or bi-annual meetings to discuss possible high level strategies and whether contributions need to change in amount. It works just fine and it’s very very specific to the maintenance of the lake.

*It has 3 inlets and one outlet so it’s not completely stagnant but occasionally water levels drop causing all of the inlets to dry up and the waterfall becomes more of a trickle

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House was to good of deal to pass up. It’s now worth at least 40 more than I paid for. Bought the place in 2009. Worst I’ve had to deal with from the HOA is a overgrown yard. They haven’t been anal about it either. Once it gets knee high I will get a post card reminder. And I don’t have ticks to deal with but plenty of spiders and the occasional chiggers. And I would love to move closer to the city. Soon as I pay off the house. I will rent it out. Hopefully.

See my father in law has to deal with the HOA that is supposed to be like that, it exists only to maintain the gravel road into the subdivision because the state doesn’t want to extend maintenance down it. It has a stupid speed limit of 17 mph because the HOA decided that 25 was causing undue wear on the road, when in fact the road was built wrong in the first place and incorrectly maintained afterward. Even though my father in law paid an engineer to inspect the road and draft a document to that effect, because he is disliked basically for not falling in line and also for being a liberal in a deeply red area, the HOA doesn’t listen and disregarded a professional’s opinion.

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The key is to become the head of the HOA and make the other people jump thru your own ridiculous hoops.

Which sounds like grounds for some kind of awesome sim game

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I could just imagine Scott somehow becoming the head of an HOA.

“This HOA is bullshit. I hereby as my first and final act dissolve this crap. I’m out.”

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Nope, my HOA would have one rule. If anyone tries to tell anyone else in the neighborhood what they can do with, or on, their own property, then you lose your home. No assholes who are the type to run a normal HOA may live here.

It would also have one shared project. We would pool together and get ridiculously fast Internet for everybody.

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Granted Rym, you pay a LOT of money for those yards :-p

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True. But they’re REAL nice.

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If you consider the rent for just our apartments, it is way expensive. If you also factor in all the other things we get as free add-ons, like those big ass yards, it’s a bargain.

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Replace lawn with creeping thyme & pennyroyal.

mowing & ticks solved.

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It’s only a bargain if you use it.

Which, if you do, excellent.

In terms of mowing, I concur with the idea of riding mower or paying some local kid to do the work. IF they turn out to not be a thieving shitlord then you make out on the deal. If you have a riding mower and really good active noise cancellation you can just pound away some music for however long it takes and be done. Not the end of the world. And then in the off season maybe kit it as a racing lawnmower and find new ways to hurt all your bones.

I am still in the midst of plotting my ideal home but it will likely not have grass. Maybe scorpions.

Scorpion moat. Then you can yell at the damn kids to get off your scorpion moat.

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Pete forgot (7) Ragweed.

“Replace the lawn with” sounds great in principle, but it won’t actually work. The creeping charlie and other tenacious weeds will take over regardless of what we try to put in unless it is regularly mowed or weeded to keep them at bay. And fuck you, I’m not weeding an entire acre.

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This sounds like a power trippers power tripping + are actually idiots + actively don’t like you wombo combo.

This happens and it sucks, technically you do have some recourse but it’s tricky. The state won’t get involved with HOA disputes but they may get involved if it can be argued that the HOA isn’t serving it’s function at all and needs to go entirely… or something I don’t remember exactly the going over their head equivalent.

In this instance, as with many others it seems like it’s not worth it.

My only point is that I know some percentage of HOAs are fine and filled with reasonable people and I imagine that that percentage is higher than most believe because those bad instances really stand out and are easy to point to.

Even if there are HOAs that are fine and don’t cause big problems, do HOAs ever do anything really good? You never hear a story about “Oh, my HOA really helped me out! Oh, it made my life so great.” An HOA at its best is one that does nothing, then they shouldn’t exist.

Yeah admittedly it’s easier with my small patch, but I’ve just been doing a little at a time, everytime there’s a good rain. The creeping charlie I got from you is doing really nice here, I like it draping all over my planters.

HOAs are no-good because they supersede local government and place effectively government powers into the hands of unregulated, unchecked individuals (i.e., idiots). There is no oversight and no way to check their power if they overreach.

There is extreme potential for abuse, severe consequences from their actions (people can lose their homes), and no way to appeal a decision.

Even worse, they are in almost all cases unlimited in scope and responsible for their own scope. One of the most common scenarios of abuse is:

  1. Simple HOA that does routine maintenance of shared spaces.
  2. An idiot works to elect their friends to the HOA and gains control
  3. Massive scope expansion
  4. Everyone else has a job and can’t waste their time trying to take over the HOA
  5. Someone loses their house because their grass is the wrong color

The biggest danger are people who live at home, don’t have jobs (yet still have money), and want a power trip. There’s a reason nightmare HOAs are run almost entirely by retirees and homemakers.

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They solve collective action problems. I mean you won’t here it phrased like “Oh my HOA saved me that one time” more like, “I’m glad we have it as the alternative is undesirable”

Here’s the example. Before we had the HOA for the lake every property individually wanted to get rid of the floating nightmare that is wolffia. Problem is when everyone tried to solve it themself they dealt with the symptom (the plant itself) and not the underlying cause (systemic and is too deep into lake biology for this thread)

The way that manifested itself is there’s a commercial product that is sprayed, and is cheap enough for one person to just buy that kills the stuff on contact and renders the lake unswimmable for a few days. Also over time it actually makes the underlying problem worse.

Pre-HOA it was wait until it gets bad enough for someone else to buy the commercial product, and just don’t address the underlying issues. Post HOA the underlying issues are being addressed and we’ve not had to buy SONAR (the product) in many years.

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