this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2025
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Abolish HOAs too, they heavily restrict anything visible on your house and to anyone saying just don't buy a house with an HOA a good 95-99% of homes around me are in HOAs.
In case anybody is wondering why that is, it's because local governments heavily encourage developers to establish them in order to shirk their responsibility to maintain public infrastructure and shift that liability onto the homeowners more directly (compared to paying for it through taxes). This is necessary because single-family houses are revenue-negative and bedroom communities without a substantial dense (i.e. tax profitable) downtown can't afford to subsidize them in the long run without going bankrupt.
In other words, all these suburban neighborhoods of single-family houses are ticking time-bombs that will devastate somebody's finances in a few decades when the streets need to be repaved. The purpose of HOAs is to make sure that that "somebody" is the homeowners themselves in order to contain the damage.
The real issue is that forcing development to be low-density and therefore financially unsustainable is fundamentally the wrong thing to do to begin with, and forcing people to be subject to capricious privatized HOAs is just the shit icing on the shit cake.
My previous house was in a tiny city (0.9ish square miles) that had no hoa and had some of the absolute best municipal areas, parks, and events of anywhere I have seen. The costs of that were baked into the property taxes paid to the city and they never had any issues. We had code enforcement but they were largely unintrusive.
Where I moved to has good parks but the hoa is mental. I would not have moved out of my old city if the houses were bigger but we just outgrew our house with our kids.
Point is, if you set it up right, the funds are there. If you want to be a shitty city and buck responsibility HOA's allow that, same with MUD's and LID's. Its all privitization of stuff governments are supposed to provide from tax revenue.
Talk to your representative. The state makes the rules hoa's like by.
hoa can be useful, but many get bogged down on things they should not.
I wish that would be effective but I am in Texas...
HOAs do have their uses. Better to get involved and fix yours. It's literally the most local and direct political change you can be a part of.
You also never hear about the good ones because people don't bitch about them every chance they get.
My HOA is goodish. It is only $175/year and the leadership is pretty laidback. What's helped is a developer keeps wanting to build a massive apartment complex illegally next door (destroying a riparian zone, without adequate emergency vehicle access, etc..).
It has kept all the busybodies in the neighborhood occupied for over 10 years. The developer just lost its 3rd lawsuit (with an appeal).
It's given the busybodies something to focus on and sucked up all the money they would use to cause mischief. Instead they have had to prioritized their enforcement on the worst offenders.
They have also slowly gotten rid of the AirBnB and Corporate owners by fining the shit out of them. It's stabilized the home prices and let a lot of younger families move into the neighborhood.