Freedom of association means the freedom to be a member of an HOA. But requiring HOA membership to purchase a specific property should be banned. Freedom of association means that you should have the freedom to not be a part of the HOA.

This might be unpopular, but I don't think HOAs should be banned. WAIT! I, personally, think HOAs suck and I'd never agree to buying a home in an HOA. That said, not everyone feels that way. Some folks genuinely like living in HOAs, and for all the horror stories, there's at least a few where the HOA simply exists to provide amenities to the neighborhood i.e. playgrounds, walking trails, pools, etc. People should be free to choose the kind of housing arrangements they want, and if they want an HOA, then that's their prerogative.

The real problem with HOAs is that we're trying to solve the housing crisis exclusively with single family residential zoning, which means that HOAs are vastly overrepresented in terms of what's available on the housing market. It's fundamentally a zoning issue. People who don't want an HOA or can't spend $2,000/mo in mortgage plus another $300/mo or whatever in HOA fees should have options, but they kinda don't. Ask your city why their zoning sucks.

Absolutely ban them as they currently exist. If you must band together for whatever reason, do so en masse not hand the reins to a small handful of people who inevitably go power mad

Disclaimer: I'm very anti-HOA. But I do think the case could be made for them in high-density housing like apartment buildings and condos.

Single family homes, though, no. When I was house shopping, I removed any that were part of an HOA from my search. I'm not saying there are no "good" HOAs, but I've heard too many horror stories, and good HOAs can become bad HOAs over time, and your only recourse is to move. No thanks.

I don't think they should be banned, per se, they definitely need reigned in as far as what they can mandate and an opt-out mechanism. I'm not sure how the latter would work if there's things like street maintenance, etc that's part of it, but I'm sure some solution could be found.

No. Should they be as pervasive as they are with unbounded layers of beurocracy? Also no.

I think people might not understand how many assholes live around you that the HOA keeps in check. I didn't until I joined the board. Sometimes you have to litigate, but sometimes you also just need a dedicated (and elected) group of people to go knock on the door and talk out a problem. It's nicer to have this somewhat regulated (bank accounts, insurance, taxes, and yes even covenants for procedure if they are kept up to date) than to just knock on some doors and wing it.

If your HOA has an old lady measuring your grass and some dude using color swatches to check the paint on your mailbox, move. If your neighborhood has lights, clear sidewalks, fences and landscaping that are cared for, and no dog crap to step in, keep paying into it. They are doing a good job.

I’ve lived with good HOAs. I’d still rather they dissolve and everything be part of normal city operations.

Plus is it just me or are the same people that say they want small government also the ones who are super pro HOA?

Never understood how they gained traction in the US you pride yourselves on freedom and land protection but then allow some curtain twitcher to dictate how you use the land you paid for.

I hate my HOA except that it's the only thing from keeping my neighbor from filling his yard up with garbage and junk cars. My bar is low, but it's above that. We live too close for that kinda shit.

Yes.

HOAs, at base, are there because the municipality the development is being built in doesn’t want to pay for anything. Not paying is part of the deal worked with developers that now has inertial momentum to it such that it’s baked into just about every new development.

Houses, people, and taxes are added to the municipality with as little responsibility as possible. It’s a great deal, for them.

The grift is this. Normally, sidewalks, parks, and snow management fall to the city, town, or village governments. With HOAs, the town government gets to say it’s not our responsibility, let that neighborhood manage itself. We don’t want to pay for another park or police the snow, so build your houses within our borders, but leave us out of it. The town grows, has enough people to attract new business, but adds less new costs and responsibility than they otherwise would.

So now the people are managing themselves and the only enforcement on it is the risk of losing your house (having it sold out from under you to pay random fees), depending on how Karen the people in the HOA happen to be.

Example. You’re alone in the world. You get sick and end up in an extended hospital stay, let’s say 62 days. It’s a GI problem and you had an ileus. Your lawn isn’t mowed for the duration. You finally get a taxi ride home and find you’ve been fined $1000 a day for 6 weeks because your lawn isn’t mowed. Alongside the incredible medical bills, you can’t pay this. A lien is placed on your home.

That this scenario is even possible with HOAs is very wrong.

An HOA makes perfect sense in a condo scenario because people share walls and the HOA deals with building management. But with single family homes, absolutely not. At that point, it’s no longer a single family home but a condo, just not one that shares walls.

The point of HOAs is protecting/increasing property value. We need property to be cheaper, not more expensive. Higher property values benefit speculation, not ownership. Burn them all.

I wouldn't ban them, but I would make sure they need continual community buy-in to keep going. Make them automatically sunset if not renewed. Like, every ten years you have to get signatures from 2/3 of the home owners in the HOA in order to renew it. Good HOAs can keep going indefinitely or be reestablished later. Bad ones just disappear when they can't get enough signatures to keep the thing going.

I don't have a problem with people volunteering to bind themselves into a communal covenant. I do have a problem with the long dead hand of developers past binding people into a perpetual obligation. I know it is possible to dissolve HOAs, but it requires getting the vast majority of homeowners to come together to actively choose to revoke it. I would use the opposite system. Every ten years you need a supermajority of homeowners to commit to renewing it.

This is obviously in the context of single family homes. They're unavoidable in condos.

Yes. Housing is tough enough as it is. Linking a lot of properties to the HOA is disgusting and should be illegal.

HOAs are great for enforcing Jim Crow laws privately, since the government can't do it anymore. Fuck HOAs

Don't ban them, there are some good parts in there

Require yearly elections on who leads

Limit the power they have, especially with giving out citations

Don't allow to outsource the work. You want a HOA, you do the HOA. Those HOA companies are thr worst

Could we ban HOAs from being included in house sales, and every time it’s sold the new owners have to opt in?

This is a really good suggestion.

Maybe limit mandatory HOA involvement to things like what’s truly necessary and shared and not how tall your grass is?

A shared maintenance cost for very specific things like the community center, garbage pick-up, the roads, etc., is a great idea.

They've just figured out a way to be racist and get rid of neighbors they don't like. They should be remade at the very least.

Yes. When we bought our first house we were told the HOA was optional. The day after closing they showed up and told us we were part of it. We needed to start paying our dues, and we needed a copy of the rules. That was $140 for a photo copy of a photo copy of a photo copy at least 13 times over. It was totally illegible.

My elderly grand mother was visiting, so we moved our car to the visitor spot so she could be parked in front of the house. We were towed.

My car had a flat, we were towed because the car appeared to be abandoned.

Everything about it was a nightmare. Shortly before we moved we found out the president no longer lived in the area, and was embezzling. He was reelected after that was revealed to the rest if the neighborhood, but no one was allowed to see the votes.

An HOA can have a very positive effect on a neighborhood when handled properly, but inevitably a troublemaker gets on the board and starts making life miserable for everyone.

There was a recent local case where an elderly lady in her 80s accidentally underpaid her HOA dues by 30 cents. They started fining her, and before she figured out there was an issue, the fines were thousands of dollars, and she couldn't afford it. She tried to work it out with the HOA board, but they were immovable. Then they started foreclosure proceedings, and that's when she went to the local news.

This lady's house was paid off, and they had every intention of taking it away from her in her old age, over THIRTY CENTS!

The news tried to reason with the HOA, but they wouldn't be reasonable, and the last I heard, she was going to have to pay a lawyer to fight it in court.

No HOA should be able to take anyone's house away for any reason. Same with back property taxes, especially if a propery is fully paid off. It invites predatory behavior, and there are always people who will gleefully exploit such situations.

Anyone who's in favor of HOA's should watch Hot Fuzz.

I think HOAs and Business Improvement districts persist because they fill a need for hyper local government that the existing, formal governments are not fullfilling. HOAs don't need to be banned, they need to be replaced with something else that better fulfills this niche but is more regulated and accountable.

Yes.

I believe some TIC agreements are structured as HOAs, which is perfectly reasonable

but I'm pretty sure that's not what you're referring to here.

I think at least HOA’s should be banned from requiring certain plants in your yard. Namely grass. HOA’s should not be able to prevent people from replacing their lawns with native and edible plants.

Yes

Banned? No. Regulated to rein in power? Yes.

My HOA has mellowed a bit over the years. Nowadays, 27 years after the subdivision was built, they negotiate for decent landscaping service, and make sure people don't leave trash and junk cars in their yard, that's about it. I'm happy enough with how they operate. I don't own a lawn mower or a rake.

Some HOAs are run like mini fiefdoms, though.

I won't live in an HOA. But that being said, I don't really have an issue with other people wanting to live in an HOA.

However, I do not like the fact that the HOA has permanent authority over any property you purchase inside of its zone.

I feel like there should be a specific and reasonable amount of money that you can pay in order to exempt your home from the HOA permanently, a method to break the HOA contract at least for as long as you live there.

Like maybe the HOA could reinstate the contract once you move out, and the next owner would have to break it again, but at least while you're living there, you should be able to be exempt from them if you so choose.

Yes

Banned? The freedom cities will be the best HOAs ever.

I have a likely rather unique viewpoint as someone who's HOA just had their whole board resign and be replaced after a scandal came out proving they weren't legitimate:

Ours basically only maintains the local park & roads & lights and negotiates fair rates for trash pickup and fuel deliveries for everyone, sort of like how a union can get better wages (if it's just for this purpose it's called a collective btw)

Why doesn't the city, you may ask? We're in unincorporated county land: there is no city to do maintenance work on these things, so without it things would be.... Worse, here

Though in most places yeah, they shouldn't exist

My neighborhood's HOA has been pretty chill the few years I've lived here. The fees pay for the pool, landscaping, walking path maintenance, etc. Maybe I'd feel different if one of my neighbors was finding and reporting a bunch of violations, but so far it seems like the HOA has been good for my neighborhood. I'm sure other places get out of hand, but it's not always the nightmare people make it out to be online.

I’m surprised nobody has mentioned it yet, but HOAs are a holdover of practices to keep minorities from moving into neighborhoods. They still are sets of discriminatory practices, reinventing themselves in pettier ways.

Tl;dr fuck HOAs.

Imagine Bob is a city construction worker with a work vehicle. He and his wife both park in the driveway, so he has to park the work vehicle on the street. The HOA digs up a rule to keep slapping fines on his vehicle because Bob is “making the neighborhood unsightly,” aka neighbor Jane doesn’t want to live in a “blue-collar” neighborhood.