I never said it's approporiate. I wouldn't want to live next to such house either. But I find it unacceptable that you would like to regulate that away, just like I don't think it's acceptable to regulate whether someone can hang their laundry outside or not. It's a uniquely American fetishism with defining freedom as "freedom to tell others what they can or cannot do". There's a reason HOAs exist pretty much only there and hardly anywhere else. I might find the sight of my neighbour's car unappealing - but you're the one who wants to regulate what they can or cannot do with it.

I think an argument against this is that the HOA follows the property, not the consumer. If I could opt out of an HOA when purchasing a home, it wouldn't be so bad. (but then again, the HOA would likely be severely weakened.)

I think in most US states, the legal situation is actually that local governments are creations of the state. They are allowed to have their own ordinances and so on as a matter of convenience, to avoid state legislators having to bother worrying about every edge case that only comes up in one county, but they do not have a right to exist independent of the state saying that they do. There are exceptions, but municipal ordinances (and HOA rules) can be overridden by state law.

We don't /have/ to let all these little NIMBY fiefdoms exist. They exist at the pleasure of the state legislature, and therefore voters statewide, not just locally (modulo gerrymandering, a big caveat).

Here:

> > it's really hard to draw a sharp line between that and the wrong color of shutters.

> It's really easy - the former example is actually illegal in most places and the local LE will deal with you

How do you think HOAs enforce their restrictions? When push comes to shove, disputes with HOAs get settled in courts, which are an arm of the state.

> You simply cannot equivocate an HOA with the state. People have recourse against the state.

People have the exact same recourse against HOAs as they have against the state because the HOA's authority derives entirely from the state. HOAs do not have their own enforcement mechanisms. And HOA boards are elected just like the people who run the state(s) in the USA. It really is just another level of government.

Not disputing that; however, it makes far more sense to regulate things that actually affect neighbors (noise, dumping, etc) rather than proxies for those (long-term versus short-term residency). It shouldn't matter whether the residents are short-term or long-term, as long as they're held to the same standard.

> You enter into an implicit (or explicit) contracts with your HOA or local government when it comes to zoning, and this introduces restrictions -- it's not NIMBY (necessarily), since you knowingly agreed to the restrictions when you purchased.

It's NIMBY when those restrictions are arbitrary (in particular when they restrict things that don't actually affect neighbors, other than their sense of moral outrage) and changeable in ways that affect existing residents who haven't agreed and only bought into the old restrictions.

They were forced to sign it if they wanted to purchase property. If it was optional I wouldn't be angry. To me the entire reason for owning instead of renting would be to be able to modify the hell out of it to my house of my dreams. Yes I could avoid moving into an HOA neighborhood, but HOAs are spreading like viruses and it's becoming increasingly difficult to find a place that doesn't have one.

I would just ask that the law make HOAs optional when purchasing property. If you want the benefits HOAs give you (if any), you're welcome to join, but you shouldn't be forced to join one just because you want to move into a certain district.

> A year from now I won't have any say, because I won't be on the board.

So now the house you supposedly "own" will be governed by some people that you don't even know. If they don't like your yellow car they could make a fit of it. I'm angry because if I owned property in a free country they shouldn't even be legally allowed to make a fit of something that isn't impinging on their freedom.

> Generally, I like the HOA since they mow my lawn.

I'd rather save the HOA fees and pay for a lawnmowing service.

Easy: other people bought their property at a premium for the government guarantee that they would be able to live in quiet and peace. If you want to not abide by these rules, you have to go and buy a property in a zone that does not come with these rules.

> If I own property, I have a right to use that property as I see fit. I should be able to build a building on it, take the building down, build a business, this is a fundamental right of being a human.

Then buy a property that does not come with restrictions. You live as part of a society, so respect at least the basic rules of that society. You wanna know why so many HOAs turn out to be so "dictatorial"? Because they all had that one person too many who decided that they didn't care about their neighbors.

You're looking at it too much from your personal perspective. If you buy a house in the sticks, you have the freedom to start an HOA with your neighbors and bind your house to the HOA. You then have the freedom to sell your house, and buyers have the freedom to buy the house or walk away because it has an HOA. Just like you have the freedom to permanently tear down your house and rebuild it, and future buyers aren't entitled to retroactively restrict what you can do with your property today.

> But it's still strange that a whole community can unite against one house within the gates (or whatever) and decide how things should be. Not what I would expect in a country that prides itself on its freedoms.

Again, you're looking at things too much from an individual perspective. Freedoms in the US include freedom of association, freedom of assembly, freedom of speech. Freedom means the freedom to start a club of like-minded people and kick them out. If you don't like club A, house A, or HOA A, you have the freedom to start a new club/HOA the way you want it, and so on in perpetuity. Not allowing HOAs would be suppressing community and thereby suppressing freedom. Not allowing houses to be sold with an HOA would be suppressing personal freedom in contracts. There's a difference between something being unpalatable (again, I wouldn't even consider an HOA house) and something being anti-freedom.

Freedom of association is the freedom to associate with whoever you choose and not to associate with anybody you choose not to. You can’t have feeedom of association without the freedom to discriminate against people you don’t want to associate with.

> the argument that i could have moved somewhere else if i didn't like this HOA is not really reasonable given the housing shortage in most places.

Less than a third of US households are a part of HOAs, with most of them being apartments (where that type of regulation is typical almost everywhere in the world). Your argument that HOAs are monopolising housing supply doesn’t stand up to the facts.

Unless the HOA rules have a stipulation about your roof shingles exactly matching the other roofs in the neighborhood, which is common. And boring a shit to look at. I hate HOAs so much.

If all they did was protect property values by keeping people from doing outrageous things, I might be okay with them, but they go way beyond that to the point where it diminishes the value of buying property (since you can't adapt it as you see fit). Municipal codes usually take care of the worst behavior, anyhow. Which is why if I ever buy land and/or a house, it will be in a more rural area. Then I can put a damn Tesla solar roof on it, build a shed with a different roof and paint it all purple with green stripes if I feel like it.

This keeps coming up, and the answer is an unqualified Yes! It's surprising people don't understand this.

If an HOA has a rule that says I can't own a TV in my house, then yes, I intend to impose myself on them and go against their wishes. Is that hard to understand? Just because rules exist when you buy a place doesn't mean I should try to abide by them.

>

>Here:

>

>> it's really hard to draw a sharp line between that and the wrong color of shutters.

>

>> It's really easy - the former example is actually illegal in most places and the local LE will deal with you

>

> How do you think HOAs enforce their restrictions? When push

> comes to shove, disputes with HOAs get settled in courts,

> which are an arm of the state.

So? That doesn't make it illegal; going to court against an HOA is a civil matter, so the issue of whether something is illegal or not is irrelevant. Going to court because you broke the state's rules is a criminal matter.

When something is illegal, you call the cops and let the state prosecution handle it. When something isn't illegal, you have to directly sue the respondent(s) yourself and handle the matter yourself.

So, yeah, there's a big difference between getting prosecuted by the state in criminal court for defecating on your lawn and getting sued in civil court by the HOA for breaking the contract.

There's no circular reasoning there at all: one of those things ends up in a certain type of court, the other ends up in a different type of court.

> People have the exact same recourse against HOAs as they have against the state because the HOA's authority derives entirely from the state.

No, you have more recourse against the state when the state breaks the rules, and not just because the state has many more limitations on their rules than a HOA. For just one example, the state may not prohibit political speech of one party and encourage political speech of another party, while the HOA has no such limitation.

For that you have no recourse agains the HOA, but you *will* have recourse if the state attempted it.

> It really is just another level of government.

It really isn't.

There's a particularly large difference between criminal and civil trials.

There's a difference between what a juristic person is allowed and what an arm of the state is allowed (one of those two aren't allowed to suppress speech, for example, while the other can).

There's a difference in the enforcement that is allowed (for HOA: fines only, and then go to civil court for an order, for the state: arrest, then prosecution).

There's a difference in the levels of enforcement allowed (HOA has no choice but to launch civil proceedings, while the state is fully within its rights to use force, deadly or otherwise).

They really aren't the same. The rules of an HOA is a meeting-of-the-minds contract between two juristic persons. Any "contract" is not a contract if one of those people don't agree (signed under duress, for example).

The laws of the state does not require the citizen to agree; there is no contract because the citizen has to abide by those laws whether or not they agree to them.

Whether the officers are elected or not (or whether there are officers at all) would be determined by the founding documents of the HOA. But it is definitely not compulsory.

>Often times not, as one cannot buy houses in an area without being a member of the HOA.

That doesn't make it compulsory. If you buy a house in an established HOA you chose to be subject to it. If you don't want to be subject to it, you don't buy the house. Saying you should have the right to buy a house in an HOA area and not be subject to it is saying you believe contracts should be non-binding, that is, worthless.

>I get to vote on members of my local government. I don't get to vote on members of the HOA.

As pointed out above, an HOA can have whatever structure the founders want it to have, or whatever the current decision makers amend it to be. As a tangent note, democracy does not define freedom.

I'm sure that's often true. And I know that I mostly give nature relatively free rein on my country property. That said, I can at least appreciate the point of view of why suburban neighbors on fairly small land plots who keep meticulously neat lawns, gardens, and homes are going to have an issue with the person whose house has peeling paint, an unmaintained lawn, and generally looks abandoned.

But if you're moving into a house with a HOA with a total of 8 houses; and it has a certain "look" in part because everyone has white frilly curtains in their windows; and most of the people in that area want to maintain that look... then, what's the problem? Surely not every HOA in a city will have people who all want white frilly window curtains, so you can find some other HOA?

Unless, of course, the problem is that the rules are set up so that a minority can impose their will on the majority; and in that case, the problem isn't so much the existence of the HOA itself, but the bylaws which let it happen.

Similar, in a lot of ways to the government: Either the government really does represent the will of the people, in which case people complaining about "the government" are really complaining about their fellow citizens; or, the government doesn't represent the will of the people, in which case the voting system &c needs to be fixed so that it does.

I do agree that there is a larger societal value to having limits on what kinds of rules there are; just as we have state laws which limit what a city council can do, and federal laws limiting what a state can do, and a constitution limiting what the federal government can do. "HOAs may not outlaw pollenator-friendly plants" seems like a good rule; "HOAs may not require frilly white window curtains" I'm not convinced of.

Because you signed on a line that said you agree to being governed by the HOA when you bought the house. It’s that simple. The sad reality though is that if you don’t like it, you have to find somewhere else (which doesn’t work well if your whole city is under the HOA)

No, it's like complaining that the lawn has been saturated with salt so that it can never grow properly, and a previous owner somehow managed to legally enshrine that so that you can't fix it.

So I should be free to leave an HOA? No wait, I can't without selling my house as well. Restricting the right to free association as a condition for purchasing housing seems onerous.

You could easily get the same thing out of a HOA in a city with fewer city-wide rules and regulations.