Two and a half years ago, we moved into our new house. It was so much of what we wanted. It was close to where I work. It had plenty of space inside, with an open floor plan. In a county that rests on many an old cowpaddy, our plot, and our subdivision, are flat: no precipices in the back yard. Friendly neighbors are nearby.
My wife and her father are putting the finishing touches on out daughter's playhouse. It is connected to an agility course made of discarded giant cable spools and long boards. The playhouse itself was pieced together with an assortment of repurposed building material, and it's definitely … unique. Something we definitely would have had difficulty getting past the aesthetics committee within the homeowners' association.
Except for one thing — and this is something I'm thankful for at least several times a week. It's perhaps the best feature of our property.
It's not governed by a homeowners' association.
The more I head about the petty, invasive, and outright mean actions that homeowners' associations take against their residents, the less I ever want to deal with them. If I find another rental property, it will have to be an obscene deal for me to buy in a subdivision run by one of these outfits, whose primay function appears to be fining people for not agreeing with their sense of how a home should look.
Consider this: A homeowner got into hot water because the color of their granddaughter's playhouse was too pink. Granted, approval of the structure and the color was part of the deal, and that's where the disagreement, and then lawsuit, came about. Also granted, there are things that people can do with their properties that can make the values of the surrounding properties go down. I look at the playhouse and see, “Oh, a girl's pink playhouse.” How does that come to, “That playhouse is too pink, and we won't stand for it”?
That's why I consider a house without a homeowners' covenant attached to it to be a true bargain. Not only are there no HOA fees to pay, but I'm free to enjoy my property, and improve it, pretty much how I want, without asking people's permission, or fearing reprisal from anyone who wants to complain. The lack of wasted time with compliance is worth its weight in gold to me.
While I can see your point about HOAs allowing their members to indulge their innermost bureaucratic fantasies of controlling their neighbors’ property and how it appears from the street…you’re not telling the other side of the story. The side where without an organization in place that has the ability to enforce limits on what can be done with a house, you get things like ten cars parked on what used to be the lawn of a house whose occupant is operating a shade-tree mechanic’s shop in the hours before and after his day job. You get things like a dilapidated child’s playset leaning drunkenly to one side because the current occupant of the home can’t be arsed to tear it the rest of the way down. You get the woman running an unlicensed daycare out of her home that results in swarms of unsupervised children playing in the street.
The effect of these things on the value of the rest of the homes in the area is left as an exercise for the student. Not everyone plays nicely all the time in a neighborhood, and it can be a godsend to have an enforcement mechanism in place that allows for actions that don’t require a court order.
@Hickepedia: My subdivision isn’t like that at all, so I do get an HOA-like order without the HOA. I can see your viewpoint, though, and things can get out of hand the other way, too.
I totally agree – HOA’s can be a PITA. Where I grew up, there really weren’t HOAs unless you lived in a condo community or something like that. However, the zoning commission in my hometown MORE than made up for that headache 🙂
The same goes with me. I don’t mind my neighbors doing their own improvement or creating their own design. Similarly, I enjoy the freedom of deciding what I should put or not put in my property.
OMGosh, you are right about HOAs, but sometimes they are just what you gotta put up with. I moved into my condo, my first home and didn’t expect to stay so long and the rate for HOA went up over 100.00 since I moved in.
But it is what it is and I am staying put. If I had my druthers, man, I would never have signed up for an HOA.