Too many people are ok with buying a house that’s part of an HOA.
The fees alone are staggering, and I’ve never see a one do their job properly (from a maintenance perspective).
There are reasonable HOAs, you just dont hear about them. Plenty of them are just entities that exist to pay for care of common grounds. I lived in a place with one that just handled trash pickup, and a community pool.
I know multiple people that have them exclusively for road maintenance through their neighborhood. If that gets expensive, it’s just direct evidence that your community has sprawled too much.
There are a few main areas where an HOAs tend to pop up:
- A developer wants to build out a neighborhood on what was previously farmland or whatever and there is no municipality that will build out the roads or utility access, or provide trash services (maybe not even emergency services), so the private developer needs to negotiate the build out with all of the services and infrastructure that make modern living possible, and then arrange for everyone in the neighborhood to pay for those services collectively, from road maintenance to the electricity consumption of the streetlights to the trash services picking up people’s trash.
- A developer wants to build a large building or complex where each unit is individually owned, but that things like the foundations, roofs, walls, stairwells, and elevators need to be commonly owned.
- A developer wants to build out a neighborhood with certain shared amenities available to the whole neighborhood: neighborhood swimming pool, playgrounds and parks, maybe a gate, maybe access to things like a lake or a beach. I’ve even seen one with a plane runway for small propeller aircraft that the homeowners could use.
Lots of these are just a replacement for what a city actually should be providing (infrastructure, parks), or designed to be exclusionary (gated communities, private clubs), or just the reality of shared buildings (typical condo association). A lot of the rules, then, start resembling normal municipal zoning laws or nuisance laws, and a lot of the fees pay for things that look a lot like taxes to pay for community-wide benefits.
they don’t have a choice. most new homes are constructed under HOA.
65% of new or updated properties, are in a HOA. and 85% of attached housing is.
the only way to not be in one is to buy older freestanding housing, which is the least affordable housing option.
Let them Rot. The alternative is to keep buying paper mache houses with a foot-bridge long list of monthly / semi-monthly expenses bound by the rules of brown-nosed power hungry “neighbors”/(developers). Do you really want to work until you die for house not worth owning? Can you even say you own an HOA house?
You can fight the authoritarian power of the HOA! All you need is:
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The ability to afford a home. (I’m down at the first hurdle.)
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$60,000 in legal fees to end up settling with the HOA.
This country sucks so bad.
That truly depends on where you live.
I currently have to live in Texas under an HOA. My particular HOA is relatively benign, mostly just an unnecessary monthly expense, but HOAs in Texas have more power than HOAs in most other states.
There is no way that $60k could get you out of an HOA here.
Homeownership rates in the US, iirc, are not significantly different from the UK and France, and are significantly better than Germany and Sweden.
Cool, and China has a 90% home ownership rate. So things can also be much better
I mean, China achieves this homeownership rate via liberal use of imminent domain power, cheap labor, shoddy construction, and a lack of worker safety regulation, which allows them to construct large amounts of housing quickly and cheaply.
In, say, France, the government is far less likely to displace people and tear down their homes in order to build a 40 story apartment building. And if someone does decide to build a 40 story apartment building, they need to ensure it won’t create a significant negative impact on the environment, that it will be safe and structurally sound, that the workers are paid decently and mostly go home with all their fingers and toes. France used to be able to build huge amounts of housing - but then they decided they valued human life over making buildings quickly.
So there are trade offs, is what I’m saying
Everything after “China achieves this…”: the source is that you made it the fuck up.
The US does all the same things you portray China doing as bad as well. Go look at any inspection videos of new construction housing and you would be appalled at the horrific quality. And those workers are largely undocumented migrants who are getting exploited as well. So someone with my job in China is able to own their own apartment in of similar quality to the one I currently rent. The Chinese government has made it clear that they will not bail out housing speculators to ensure that a home’s primary purpose is providing shelter instead of increasing net worth.
“Someone else has it worse” has never, EVER been the language of people actually looking to make the world a better place.
This discussion started as a comoarison to other places.
This country sucks so bad.
That is not a comparison.
I’m not saying someone else has it worse.
It’s like, if someone says America sucks because it snows so much, and it would be so much better if only it were more like Sweden where the weather is always warm and sunny… then you’re just wrong. You need to update your knowledge and expectations about the world.
You could also know some attorneys and judges and know how to dress them out of a case (showing up looking so good they don’t want to sue you. And frankly if they do, look at you. You’re gorgeous)
is… is that a thing?
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