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Not all HOA's are created equal. I was the president of a bedroom community HOA for a few years in the early 90s and was pretty easy to get along with. We had very limited fees if memory serves, $150 a year that paid for street lights, road maintenance when needed, flowers at the entrance, a summer picnic, fall hayride and our annual HOA meeting dinner which was well attended. Seemed like a good deal.
I did see where if the HOA board becomes unbalanced in either direction there could be problems. One of our board members/architectural officer got all twisted in a knot over the color that someone painted one of the few non-cedar sided homes. It was a shade of clear mauve with cream trim, wine accents. It was a professional paint job. While not necessarily a color that I'd choose, it was attractive, did not detract from the other homes and it did not technically violate "colors found in nature" that our HOA rules demanded. It took a while to get the offended board member to cool down and see reason before he got into the homeowner's face about compliance and starting a ruckus in the neighborhood. If there had been six others like him, we would have had trouble in paradise. The uptight officer eventually moved to another area with tighter covenants as he was disgusted with us all. We moved out in the mid-90's to get closer to work to an older established non-HOA neighborhood in the city. We occasionally drop by the old neighborhood when in the area. The place has aged well and still seems peaceful.
HOAs can work and do what was intended or they can be a PITA or worse. Depends on the set-up, the residents and the power players. Any one of those gets out of whack and life becomes miserable for many.
On the opposite side of things, you could buy your non-HOA rural lot and have a blast. Then again you can get the same lot and have gunshots all night and day, ATVs all over, somebody's dogs on your property constantly, the neighbor hoarding junk cars, cats, dogs, pigs etc.... In other words, you could have yourself a nightmare with no recourse.
Trouble can be had if you get an HOA board full of Barney Fifes and Gladys Kravitzes or problems of the unsolvable kind had as stated above on a rural lot. A great deal of luck, surrender and looking the other way (if possible) is occasionally involved in having a decent experience with neighbors even in the middle of a city. My experience with the HOA was fine. Other folks not as much. It all depends on the people really.
My neighbor has a boat parked in front of my house, and he refuses to move it....I have to put my garbage can in my driveway, blocking my cars so that it will get picked up.
Same neighbor mows his grass at 6:30 am. No joke. Wakes up my entire family, including my 4 month old.
None of the people on my street except for our house and another weed their yards, edge at the curb or even mow for that matter. The guy 2 houses down from me has had a lawn mower box in his driveway for 3 months.
My other neighbor has duck decoys all over his yard.
My neighbor has a boat parked in front of my house, and he refuses to move it....I have to put my garbage can in my driveway, blocking my cars so that it will get picked up.
Same neighbor mows his grass at 6:30 am. No joke. Wakes up my entire family, including my 4 month old.
None of the people on my street except for our house and another weed their yards, edge at the curb or even mow for that matter. The guy 2 houses down from me has had a lawn mower box in his driveway for 3 months.
My other neighbor has duck decoys all over his yard.
The guy across the street has 2 cars on blocks.
We are moving to a neighborhood with an HOA.
You are dangerously close to offending the "rural culture" the "wealthy gentry" seem to hate
I have seen HOAs where the group-think had decided things like what type of roofing was allowed, what kinds of shrubs, how many vehicles could be parked on a property, lawn height, ...
Once I was looking at purchasing a tract of land that was within a HOA. The group was cutting a road that would wind through the other half of the sub-division. It was to have allowed access to all properties on one side of the sub-division, but not to my side. And I would have been required to pay an equal share for that road and it's maintenance forever. Even though it was not going to go near my property.
It wouldn't be so terrible if people would just take care of their things...an HOA shouldn't have to enforce people to clean up their garbage or mow their grass. I'm amazed at how little pride people have in their property. In some of these instances, it's pure laziness.
I certainly don't want to offend anyone, that's for sure...
But a boat parked in front of my house for the past 6 months, when he has a perfectly large enough driveway to park the boat in...just obnoxious.
Mowing the grass at 6:30 am in the summer is obnoxious.
I don't know if an HOA could curb obnoxious behavior.
Some may want a very strict controlled environment. There gradiations.
The alleged wealth paradigm may not be valid.
I am OK with other people having uses for ATVs, but have always been fond of dirt bikes and still have some.
Not everyone can grasp subtle points.
One of my old riding budies who helped me get started was able to split motocycle cases, and get everything back together. This man worked on how the runaway oil well
in the Gulf was to be contained in recent times. I was good with a wrench, these guys were some of the best. My first bike was a Yamaha 60 came with the frame and a series of boxes for $20. They said leave it at their house and come back next week....
The good ole USA is not the functioning entity it was with jobs, and personal responisbility. It is not like Cuba, North Korea, or the now defunct
Soviet Union where there are or were people who know best to look up to.
There are places for true gentry to live where there is a concierage in a gatehouse 24 7. Another option is a very large acreage.
Last edited by 1957TabbyCat; 07-03-2011 at 07:28 PM..
Some may want a very strict controlled environment. There gradiations.
The alleged wealth paradigm may not be valid.
I am OK with other people having uses for ATVs, but have always been fond of dirt bikes and still have some.
Not everyone can grasp subtle points.
One of my old riding budies who helped me get started was able to split motocycle cases, and get everything back together. This man worked on how the runaway oil well
in the Gulf was to be contained in recent times. I was good with a wrench, these guys were some of the best. My first bike was a Yamaha 60 came with the frame and a series of boxes for $20. They said leave it at their house and come back next week....
The good ole USA is not the functioning entity it was with jobs, and personal responisbility. It is not like Cuba, North Korea, or the now defunct
Soviet Union where there are or were people who know best to look up to.
There are places for true gentry to live where there is a concierage in a gatehouse 24 7. Another option is a very large acreage.
So for the rest of us we are doomed to watching the drunk redneck neighbor take it out on the ATV all day long with his four children in tow on their little ATVs and dirt bikes....
And, at this HOA in Arizona, all bets are off and it's a fight to the finish for competing interests that seems to have all the rest of the homeowners caught up in the mess:
Apparently not, since I live in the country and rarely see an ATV and NEVER see a dirt bike and if the neighbors get drunk (which I'm pretty sure they do from time to time, in some cases we're talking about actual cowboys here - you know, people who work cattle on horseback for a living and win money at rodeos?), they're not obvious or obnoxious about it.
The across the road neighbor did put in a lighted arena recently (the neighbor down the road had one for ages, but he's moved now and took the arena with him, dang it - we had a standing invitation to come use it if we wanted). I was a bit concerned because when the lights were being installed, they were pointed directly at our house and were pretty bright. But by the end of the installation, they were pointed down and shielded so that they would not offend anyone else or cause light pollution. Now, there IS light pollution in our area that wasn't there years ago, caused by the new subdivision in town that DOES have an HOA, go figure.
Occasionally we'll have someone driving like a bat out of hell down our little country road, usually in a fancy car. But other than that, no real problems.
As for a boat parked in front of your house for six months, do you live in a town? Because most towns do have some sort of regulation regarding parking that would cover that, you might have tried calling them about it. Most have some sort of regulations, too, regarding lawns not being mowed at all and, if notified, if the grass gets too high (not half an inch too high, not mowed at all too high), will send a notice and if it's not corrected, come in, do the mowing, and bill the homeowner for it. All without an HOA at all. (I don't know that the town would do that if the home was in an HOA, come to think of it, I think that's why cities like HOA's so much, because the HOA is supposed to take care of that sort of thing for them while the city still collects your taxes and the HOA collects its dues for the same thing.)
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It is a matter of buying where you fit in..
