Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
It's tacky to point something out as tacky. Clotheslines are great and anyone who has been raised to use them knows good and well you hang your "delicates" on the inside lines, shielded with the sheets and towels.
And clotheslines are going to be come the new environmentally correct way to dry laundry, leaving no carbon foot print and emitting only water vapor.
Those that drive an SUV and dry their clothes in a dryer shall be the targets of eco-terrorists.
Last edited by Asheville Native; 07-29-2008 at 02:14 PM..
We have an HOA where we live now. Our house is on the market and we're looking for a house without an HOA. It doesn't matter if a house has everything we want and more. If it has an HOA, we won't consider it.
Sometimes a HOA makes sense. If a development has common elements, parks, club house, pool, there has to be some way to maintain it and an entity to handle the details.
I am truly glad we have an HOA in our develpment. We still have 17 homesites available but our builder is most likely going to go out of business.
We stand as one regarding the future of our development. If they sell the homesites to another builder, we want to maintain the quality of any future homes built here. And one lawsuit by the association if necessary is better than a bunch of different lawsuites by individuals and trying to coordinate everything.
We have been lucky with our HOA. We are a small community and most everyone gets along. There's always those few. But the HOA helped with that too. We have a great board of regular people that don't nitpick over every single thing. But we lucked out here. I'm from Florida and the HOAs and Condo associations are brutal there. If this place wasn't small we probably wouldn't have gone with one either. But I am glad we did in this case.
I haven't read all 11 pages of responses, so forgive me if this was already mentioned...
But just as an interesting aside, restrictions on property use aren't new, and let's ignore municipal code/zoning for a moment which certainly has been in widespread use for a century or more in some locations. While the concept and terminology of "HOA" may seem new, covenants have been tied to deeds throughout history, some very controversial(and now thankfully unenforceable) such as disallowing certain races, or those with diseases like tuberculosis from living in the development.
And even to some degree, sometimes a large degree, city code and zoning limits personal property rights as well. Our city just struggled with two well publicized cases recently that had nothing to do with an HOA, but certainly read like any personal property rights dispute one might encounter in a community with an HOA(sign size and livestock).
But although I generally prefer not to personally have the additional overhead of an HOA, the negative connotations can vary widely depending on implementation. Some HOAs are more lightweight than others, some are run better than others(if run at all), and some have had clear benefits where others have driven communities apart. So to me it really is in the implementation, and being clear about what problem(s) the community is trying to solve. I think the ones that have no clear purpose and defined scope tend to be the ones that attempt to do/control too much and cause controversy.
But my bottom line on HOAs, HPCs, and similar community oversight: is that if one doesn't care to live in a community with this overhead, look elsewhere to live. Otherwise one likely will be unhappy. The only caveat to this if/when this oversight is overlaid on a community that previously had no existing association. That can be difficult to resolve and manage when the minority did not desire the creation of the new organization, and requires a soft touch, good communication, and cooperation.
That is why I read ours very closely.....there is nothing in there that I would have a problem with being enforced.
No garbage cans out in the frount except on pick up day (have 24 hours to get them back after pickup), no kennels or livestock (you can't keep much on a .25 arce lot anyway), fences in back yard only (no height restrictions), no parking in the yard on the grass and with a parking space for each car in the driveway(though on street parking is allowed) and no clothes lines (I hate those things.) That is it....completely and utterly.
What I don't get is the hating of the clothes lines. Coming from a family that lived wayyyy out there for the first part of my life, that's just what we used and something I'm accustomed to. Now of course if you lived out where we did you dried ALL your clothes on the clothes line, but I'm not retarded, I wouldn't hang my boxers and such out to dry in a neighborhood. What I'm getting at is that I smell a buncha snobs out there and that bothers me. What is SO horrible about some shirts and pants drying in the wind huh? Are you that stuck up and snobby that you just cannot stand the thought of someone NOT eating up electricity (hey, they're forcing electric cars on us, gotta save for juice for my car) and using free air to dry their clothes? Oh, heaven forbid.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Clotheslines are great and anyone who has been raised to use them knows good and well you hang your "delicates" on the inside lines, shielded with the sheets and towels.
Coming from a family that lived wayyyy out there for the first part of my life, that's just what we used and something I'm accustomed to. Now of course if you lived out where we did you dried ALL your clothes on the clothes line, but I'm not retarded, I wouldn't hang my boxers and such out to dry in a neighborhood. What I'm getting at is that I smell a buncha snobs out there and that bothers me. What is SO horrible about some shirts and pants drying in the wind huh? Are you that stuck up and snobby that you just cannot stand the thought of someone NOT eating up electricity (hey, they're forcing electric cars on us, gotta save for juice for my car) and using free air to dry their clothes? Oh, heaven forbid. 
