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Our home is an older home. We have newer subdivisions in the area. Yesterday I was talking to a co-worker. I mentioned the things we are planning for the outside of the house. We want to rip out the grass in the median strip between the sidewalk and the street. Possibly putting in decorative pavers. He asked how we are able to do that. I mentioned that although the area is part of the city that the city expects the homeowner to maintain it.
He lived in a HOA community. They are not allowed to make any changes to the yard area. It has to look the same as when it was built. Same trees, plants, or at least similar.
Another couple we know live in an HOA in an upscale neighborhood. My daughter and I ride our bikes thru there. She mentioned that she wants to live there when she is older. I mentioned this to this couple. They told me that it is not all that it seems. They are not even allowed to park a car on the driveway. All cars have to be in the garage. They have a three car garage and four cars. One of them is not going to be in the garage. When they moved there they had fewer cars. As kids grew up they bought more cars.
After hearing all these experiences I am thinking we will stay where we are, and live how we want to live.
HOAs differ significantly from neighborhood to neighborhood.
I have heard of HOAs that don't allow vehicles to be parked outside the garage, but for example, ours prohibits parking on the street but not in the driveway. We can basically do what we like in our yards as long as we don't do something crazy like put in an amusement park or something like that.
I'm another 'not voting because my answer depends on the HOA'.
I've owned two houses, both in an HOA.
The first HOA were a bunch of jerks. It didn't start off that way, but about....five years in, I'd say, they started getting nasty. They were quick to jump on any residential infractions, but you could call them half a dozen times about something that was *their* responsibility, and good luck getting them to do anything. One incident I remember was the drainpipe shared by my townhouse and the townhouse to my left had broken, so water would splash all over the place. Both myself and the next door neighbors called repeatedly about it. One day, I came home and saw the wife of the couple repairing the drain pipe herself. She told me that she got tired of calling the HOA about it and them ignoring her (she had been wondering if they were ignoring her because her family were Muslim immigrants from the Middle East, but I told her I'd been calling them too, and they were ignoring me as well, and I'm white and American-born), so she looked up how to do it online, got the tools and did it herself. (I split the costs with her. I figured if she'd gone to that trouble to do it, and the drainpipe was shared by our homes, it was only fair.)
That HOA also had the bad habit of sending out highly unprofessional missives to people. There was one in particular that had me so mad that I went to their office and told them in no uncertain terms that somebody needed to take a course in professional letter-writing.
When I finally was in a position to move, I told my realtor outright that any home he showed me that fell under that HOA would not be considered at all. He quietly said, "You are not the first person to have told me this."
My current HOA, I don't have any issues with. The development I live in has three 'sections'--the townhouses in the north part, the paired homes in the middle part, and the SFHs in the south part. There's one 'overall' HOA that takes care of the common areas, then there's three sub-HOA's for the three sections. From what I see on NextDoor, the SFH's and the paired homes (where I am) don't have issues with their sub-HOA's, but the townhouse residents are forever griping about theirs. But my sub-HOA seems pretty reasonable and flexible. They might have something 'against their rules', but if you can make a good case for it, a lot of times they'll go ahead and say okay.
I posted this in the Boise forum, but I'll put it here, also.
I get the idea of the value of HOAs. Where I think they fail is in outlawing environmentally valuable ideas; namely front lawn herb gardens and clotheslines. (To those who are peeing their pants: NO, they are NOT unsightly. Take the stick out of your ass.)
It's also not important that everyone's garage door be the same color. But it is good not to have junk piled up in the driveways.
For those of you who feel that HOA's preserve property values, take a look at the poll results above.
As a real estate agent, for a while now, the percentage of buyers that I get who put on their list of requirements anywhere BUT in an HOA has been steadily growing. For those who want or who don't care whether or not their home is in an HOA, I do my best to get the CCR's for them (many now have them online) BEFORE they make an offer so they can review them before putting out costs into home inspections, etc., and then getting them during the process and finding they can't live with them and having to start over.
As said above, an HOA is not an HOA is not an HOA. Then you have to add in an HOA does not always remain the same, as someone pointed out above from their own experience. In another such discussion here on C-D, a poster spoke of his own experience in an HOA that had been wonderful for 40 years, from its inception. Most of the owners had lived there since the community was built, and it was a perfect place to live - unintrusive, minor restrictions. Then the original owners started dying off or moving to nursing homes and the homes were sold one by one to new owners who came in and took over and completely wrecked the HOA, determined that everyone else who had been there when they moved in change to fit their own particular preferences, making the place a most unpleasant place to live. You can imagine what happened to property values in that case. So even reading and doing your home work is no protection against that, the biggest danger to property values an HOA presents.
oh hell no i refuse to live with a bunch of porch pirates!!! i have a friend that lives in an HOA and there refusing to have 5G installed freaking idiots. most people seem to be the ones that are pissed off from sitting in traffic all day... HOA'S dont protect property values that's a crock of ****... some HOA'S put the ASS in ASSOCIATION
Except the riff-raff won’t cut their grass or remove their weeds.
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