For the Love of God, Have Some OPTIMISM! (Pittsburgh, York: transplants, HOA)

[RNG]

I have an honest question for Azsummer03. I don't understand your HOA reference - stating that Pittsburgh could form these to clean up the city. I worked in the mortgage industry for years and from what I've seen HOA's are usually only part of Planned Unit Developments (PUD's in real estate terrms, new housing developments with names like Acorn Hill, etc.), condo developments, and co-ops. From my experience, people who live in these areas pay real estate and school taxes and then pay an additional monthly fee for the association to take care of things in the community, from mowing lawns to snow removal, or changing the light-bulb in the light that shines on the development sign. These fees can be small or astronomical, depending on the development. Anyway, if HOA's are common to these areas, then how do you start one in Pittsburgh, an area of older homes and a myriad of unique communities that blend into one another? Don't people pay taxes for the things like trash and snow removal? Why should people pay additional monthly fees to have their lawns mowed? You could say that they just don't mow their lawns, or paint their garages, so the association will either do it for them or make them do it by fining them for disobeying the by-laws of the HOA. But that's what city ordinances are for... If the city is not doing its job then its up to citizens to voice their disapproval and vote in people who will enforce this requirement. I am not trying to be difficult, but I just don't get it. Why pay additional fees for something that should be taken care of to start with, for something you are paying for? In *my* opinion, and from my experience (never having paid a HOA fee or lived in a community that has them), HOA's are a waste of time and money. I know people who have lived in HOA communities, and they lament the fees and the constricting rules associated with them. I was in one recently, and I swear, if you blindfolded me and took the numbers off the townhomes, and then spun me in a circle and whipped the blindfold off, I would not be able to find a home I was in five minutes before. Everything looks the same. All the colors and plants are similar. There is nothing unique, nothing interesting, everything is cohesive and perfect and a little creepy. I myself do not love to see in my neighborhood a car on blocks in a driveway or a cruddy old boat covered by a tarp, or trash cans flung on a lawn, or scrabbly grass, but I would like to see something showing the personality of the owner on these homes. In the same townhome community I mentioned, the woman who owned the home I was visiting was bragging that she and others had fined a couple who **dared** to hang blue curtains in a front window of their home as they had a new baby boy. This clearly violated the rules of the HOA, which states that all window treatments be white or cream. I almost choked on my coffee (organic coffee purchased by this woman out of respect for the earth and its inhabitants, regardless of their color, economic status, etc.) and decided to go back to Collingswood, where my one neighbor flies a Support Our Troops flag and the other a Gay Pride flag. I parked next to the house with the scrappy boat covered by a tarp. I noted that my lawn needed mowing. I breathed a sigh of relief.

[Drover]

RNG:

You're missing one of the most important functions of a HOA: to control the manner and pace in which change takes place in a neighborhood. The purpose of HOAs is not just collective landscaping, snow removal, garbage collection and the like. It is also to make sure, say, that someone doesn't come in and turn a 4,000sqft house into six apartment units as often happens in urban neighborhoods. They exist to make sure someone doesn't buy a house, tear it down, and put an apartment complex in its place. While I dislike HOAs for much of the reasons you cite -- they tend to be instruments of blandness and conformity -- they are also a way of setting and maintaining community standards with regard to aesthetics and land usage when the government cannot or will not act. The closest thing most urban areas have to HOAs is zoning laws and preservation districts. Sometimes zoning laws are ineffective to maintain a neighborhood's character. Sometimes a developer with enough political clout can change the zoning laws you counted on when you bought or moved into some place, and suddenly you wake up to find a 4-story apartment building next to your house, blocking the sunlight and view that you've enjoyed for 20 or 30 years. HOAs assure that a party with enormous political clout will not be able to use that clout alone to begin affecting a fundamental change in a neighborhood's character, composition and density.

As for how to implement an HOA in an already developed and established neighborhood; well, it's difficult but not impossible. Seeing as you've been in the mortgage industry, I'm sure you're already familiar with some or most of what I'm about to say, but since I don't know for sure what your level of familiarity is, here goes: HOAs are creatures/creations of the covenants and restrictions in the deed of sale of a property. Those conditions are attached to the land ("run with the land" in legal terms) in perpetuity through a legal concept known as vertical privity of estate. There is nothing preventing residents of an established neighborhood from voluntarily entering into such an agreement whereby they place the agreed-upon conditions in the deed when they sell their property and construct the conditions in such a way that they run with the land. It would only be binding upon those who agree to the arrangement and carry it out in the deed of sale when they sell their home. So if 80% of the residents on a block agree to form and join a HOA, it will not be binding on the other 20%.

[kettlepot]

What Drover seems to be going into detail here is not so much an HOA but zoning laws and the function of the planning commission. That said, rather than forming an HOA in an existing neighborhood, another less restrictive alternative is a maintenance assessment district. For that, properties are assessed a special tax which is then used to construct and maintain additional community improvements that exceed basic city standards. These would/could be things such as additional lighting, extra park clean up or landscaping, street trees, replacing aging sidewalks, or perhaps even road and traffic issues. It can't address specific dilapidated privately-owned properties, but can address dilapidated public properties. Of course given the astronomical nature of property taxes within the city of Pittsburgh, I can't see anyone within the city willing to take on an additional property tax burden.

[Drover]

No, that's not what I'm talking about. HOAs are very different animals than planning commissions and zoning laws. The obvious difference is that they are private organizations. They can be far more restrictive than a government can get away with politically or in some cases constitutionally; they are more stable - they are not nearly as suspectible to political influence and changing winds; they are more democratic - the members vote directly rather than trying to persuade government officials who may not care about the same issues as the association members or may be hostile to their interests; they are more efficient because they can act directly and don't have to wait on politicians who have 3,372 other things to attend to. None of these attributes make HOAs inherently better than zoning laws or planning commissions. They are a tool to accomplish many of the same functions. And one of those functions -- perhaps the most important one -- is controlled land use.

[RNG]

I appreciate the clarification from both Drover and Kettlepot on the HOA issue and other alternatives. While ranting about HOA's in my previous post, I did not even consider land-use issues, which are incredibly important in today's world of sprawl. In that respect, HOA's do a good job in protecting a community. The town I live in was plagued with many of our historic homes chopped up into apartments, and many apartment buildings were built in the 1960's. However, part of the revitalization of my town was due to the local government offering no-interest loans to citizens to turn 2+ unit homes back into single family homes. They bought out two particulary ratty apartment complexes and turned one into a lovely senior citizen community and the other into upscale apartments. This was not done without a few bumps in the road, and the result isn't absolutely perfect, but it was a considerable improvement to the town. Of course, this is possible in a town like mine which contains about 15,000 residents, and would be practically impossible in a city such as Pittsburgh without a lot of effort.

[kettlepot]

Drover, I can see now how an HOA would be an even more restrictive barrier against unwanted change and development after the wall of the zoning laws have been breached. In my city, besides the planning board that meets downtown, each community has an advisory board elected by the residents that represents the will of the neighborhood to city hall. If a developer wants a variance from the zoning laws he needs the support of the neighborhood first. I've never seen a local board overruled by city hall. But that's out here. Hard to say how things would work in Pennsylvania.

These community based boards were implemented after the badly planned growth of the 60's and 70's destroyed the character of older city neighborhoods of modest homes with cheap, landscape-free underparked apartment buildings, and federally subsidized low income apartment towers. These neighborhoods will never fully recover from what was done to them.

[Drover]

Hell, even the New York Times wrote an approving article about the houses in the South Side Slopes. It hardly seems axiomatic that everyone thinks the whole area should be razed.

It's pretty common for cities to have ordinances requiring a minimum level of maintenance on a property, typically under nuisance law theory. I don't know for sure if Pittsburgh has such an ordinance but I would be surprised if it doesn't.

[subdivisions]

Originally Posted by Drover

Hell, even the New York Times wrote an approving article about the houses in the South Side Slopes. It hardly seems axiomatic that everyone thinks the whole area should be razed.

I've been looking at property in the last few months, and some of the houses I've seen on the South Side Slopes are unbelievable. Apparently it's the new hip spot in Pittsburgh, and people are renovating their old houses. A lot of the bigger industrial buildings have been turned into incredible loft spaces. I've never seen anything like some of these houses up there. I'm already priced out of that market unless I want to buy a fixer upper, and I suspect that trend is going to continue in the next few years, so the people with the junky houses now have an incentive fix them and/or sell.

[Drover]

Heh. I like Pittsburgh well enough but I don't know exactly how you got encouragement from me. I have some extremely detailed posts in this thread as to why I wouldn't move there yet myself.

Anyway, if you're looking to do urban pioneering, a good place to start is the South Side slopes. The elevator has already left the bottom floor but it seems there's still plenty of room to travel. Check out http://travel2.nytimes.com/2006/08/13/realestate/13nati.html (broken link)

Best of luck. Maybe I'll be there in a few years. It'll take me a lot to pull me away from Chicago/Wisconsin though. If any place will do it, it's a resurging Pittsburgh. Maybe some day...

[Wisteria]

What happened to Azsummer03 referred to in the posts? It's confusing. I found the HOA information useful, and saw that, too, and couldn't find what it referred to. Thanks.