This shouldn’t be a surprise, but overbearing homeowner’s associations are in the news again. Hitting our local news, a neighborhood with large numbers of foreclosures has hired lawn service for all its residents (at the residents expense of course). Since the HOA is still under the control of the developer, the residents have no means to weigh in on the issue. Hmm. I would guess that this is one of those quickly developed neighborhoods that cropped up all over Central Florida a few years ago and had lines of speculative investors waiting to buy and flip. The foreclosures and poor lawn care are probably the result of those left holding the bag.
In other news, a Raleigh man is in hot water with his HOA because he decided to install a beautiful hand painted mailbox instead of the required standardized hunter green ones. Oh the horror. Imagine how much property values dropped because of that. The funny thing is that this exact same thing happened in our neighborhood. Someone pained some nice beach scenes on their boring black mailbox and the HOA went ballistic and put a lean on their house. Fortunately, the neighbors stepped in and struck down that rule.
Homeowner’s associations are a double edge sword that can quickly go out of control. On one hand, I am a firm believer that you should be able to do whatever you want on your property. This is a free country and land ownership is a valued American ideal. However, on the other hand, we can’t all live on private 500 acre tracks in Montana and we need something to keep the neighbors from putting a chicken farm in the back of their zero lot line home. This is where homeowner’s associations come into play. They are there to look out for your investment and to make good neighbors. This would be great if every HOA could act responsibly and within reason.
It’s funny how reason quickly goes out the window. Human nature seems to drive people to exert control over one another. If it’s not the government, it’s the people who live right around you. After all, who tends to run most HOA’s? Usually it’s what I refer to as the “busy bodies” of the neighborhood. The people who have lots of time on their hands and have nothing better to do than complain about the bulb that burned out on your porch and pick required color schemes for newly repainted homes. The rest of us who have careers and/or are raising families simply have better things to do with our time. Now this is not always true. In fact our HOA has been quite tame lately; a nice change from a few outbursts years ago. However, the picture I am painting is how the trouble starts in most overbearing HOAs. A few people with too much time on their hands start to overreach the boundaries of keeping “guidelines for good neighbors” and start to meddle in everyone’s business.
This starts to explain why out of control HOAs are making the news more and more. People are living in more urban areas and closer to one another than ever. Residents are starting to look at their homes as more of an investment than dwellings. Top it off, many of us are becoming too busy to notice what a few people with time on their hands are doing in their neighborhood. It’s a recipe for trouble. Just look at the increasing number of internet resources are popping up on how to fight homeowner’s associations.
Are there any solutions other than fighting the HOAs? In a perfect world, yes. Realize that your home is just that, a place to live. It’s nice that it can be an investment, but that is secondary. Also realize that your neighbors have rights and freedoms too. The HOA is simply there to set guidelines and get the residents (all of them) to work together to live in harmony.
Will this really happen? Probably not. Until then, fix your porch light and get use to the army green and yellow exterior color scheme that the architectural committee thought was just peachy as they met over tea while you were at work.
Tags: HOA
December 2nd, 2008 at 11:06 am
Yeah, HOAs scare me.
I realize what their purpose is. They are there to keep up values in the neighborhood. But actually it is an opportunity for lawyers to control your land. And you pay for that. For many, a lot of money too.
I saw on the news that a local man lost his job when the economy tanked and he wrote to his HOA saying he was barely trying to keep his home from going into foreclosure. He asked the HOA to acknowledge this and to work with him on the yearly fees-waive them or whatever- until he was able to find a new job and they were refusing.
Well, I can then see why a home in a neighborhood like that would go into foreclosure, leading to overgrown grass and green pools. Idiots focused on paperwork, money and greed can’t see the big picture. Help the guy out. He is trying to communicate his hardship with you. Be a human, arrange something before you get the whole yard bill, and the pool chemical bill. And most importantly, don’t dump those bills on the other homeowners either because you were so obstinate to help a guy out who was trying to do the responsible thing.
Or, if unsure, have the homeowners meet collectively to determine what they think is reasonable due to the unusual nature of our economy right now.
In my neighborhood, it is $25/year and that pays for yard of the month awards and newsletters, and a few other things. Other than that, if you have a complaint about your neighbor, you call the cops and they check the law, then leave a bill on your door for mosquitos in your green pool or whatever. Then the liens begin to accumulate. To me, this is reasonable.
I don’t want to be harassed if I want to put potted plants near my driveway. I don’t want to be harassed if I can only afford a wood fence and not a wrought iron style fence.
I like my freedoms.
Who knew, in the land rush so many years ago, that we would be as regulated as we are today. . . . .
Something tells me they didn’t worry about things like army green and yellow paint.
I can only imagine that they were just trying to survive through the winter, just like we are now surviving a struggling economy.