Land of the free or something
Free to be assholes.
That’s why they vote the way they do
They want to hurt people, and to be allowed to hate openly with impunity
It took me a long time to come to terms with this as a European living here. I feel like I’m in a zombie movie surrounded by angry, bully zombies.
I cannot understand people voluntarily moving to the US
I’m working on getting someone OUT of that festering shit-hole
I wish I could go too. Kids and I have European passports. They don’t want to leave and I can’t leave them here, so here I stay.
Because the U.S. is a very large country, and not everyone here sucks. Just the government and the MAGA idiots. Surprisingly, the media, and the vocal minority of MAGA folks would have you believe we support what’s happening. But the truth is, most people don’t.
The entire country is fucked
You can be bankrupted if you have a heart attack or broken leg, and that’s even with insurance
There is so much money to go around, and yet people die from treatable diseases
People ration insulin and die as a result
Those who have a good life only do so because of the suffering of others
It’s a cruel, shitty place
I spend a lot of time in the US, which I’d rather not do, but that’s just how it is for the moment
I see it, and I don’t turn a blind eye
Yeah, I live here. Thanks for reminding me. As for going bankrupt trying to get insulin, I haven’t heard of that. But our medical system for sure is kind of fucked.
I’ll never understand why some people choose to live in minimum security prison.
New developments are more likely to be HOAs, as city governments realized that they can’t afford the money bomb that is car-based infrastructure to support single-family housing. So they foist those duties onto the HOAs, essentially making small municipal governments for every new housing development.
So… you can avoid them for now, but only if you live in developed cities.
How do countries do this without widespread HOA equivalents? In the UK we have similar arrangements for shared spaces but not anywhere near the comical level of control on private land as in the US
It is my understanding that suburban UK housing is still much more densely developed than US-style suburbs where having a few acres per house is normal (but makes the cost of roads unsustainable).
Most suburban lots in the US are definitely not an acre. Census Bureau Survey of Construction data says it’s closer to 0.25 acres or less per house as of 2023. Most suburban sprawlscapes around me are closer to 0.15 acres per house.
Especially in the southwest, like Arizona, they’re doing shared side yard nonsense to cram more mcmansions.
What about when you factor in land used for the suburb but not on lots, like roads?
The road outside my house now is pretty typical for everywhere I’ve lived (five states and counting). It’s two lanes wide, so let’s say 25 feet across (pretty sure it’s not actually that wide but we’ll go with it). One lane goes to neighbor across the street, one to me, so 12.5 feet by the width of my yard. It’s been a while since I’ve measured my full yard, but it’s somewhere around 60 feet I’d reckon. We’ll go with a house that’s wider rather than deeper for maximizing road space and round up to 100. That’s 1250 feet squared for the road, or roughly 0.03 acres.
If you added up every tiny little bit of everything you could maybe add 0.1 acres with the neighborhoods that have entry signs or something, but I really don’t see how you’d get up to an acre. And certainly most people aren’t talking about lot sizing doing all this extra math. There’s certainly inefficiencies in urban sprawl that come into play though.
I was thinking someone might have gone and simply taken the area of some suburb and divided by number of houses.
If you do this at a large enough scale you’d also catch stores and parking lots.
Perhaps the difference is that the UK is not so full of dickheads.
I can understand it for condos where you functionally own an apartment, that way it can pay for building/grounds maintenance, but if you’ve got a street where none of the houses are connected, then I dont see a point, there’s no benefit beyond everyone’s grass looking pretty uniform and no one having outlandish holiday decorations (which, where’s the fun in that). Actually now that I think about, I’m setting up an HOA who’s only rule is you can’t put up Christmas decor before Thanksgiving.
There are all kinds of things people can do that you might not necessarily want from your neighbors even if your houses aren’t connected especially outside city limits.
Mundane things like as neighbor with german rottweilers walks his small horses off leash but doesn’t pick up their poop. Maybe they only sort of listen to him and like to chase your kids or small pets.
Maybe one of the people decides they will park a trailer on the street for their mother in law for the summer that makes it hard for you to see backing out of your driveway. Or put 4 “antique” cars on cinder blocks in their front yard to work on but can’t find the time and now there are rabbits that live under them and eat your garden.
Or your neighbor get chickens or small livestock next door that come alive every morning at 5a and their son decides to take up the bagpipes to play every night at 11p.
And we of course have to remember all these neighbors move in 3 years after you, and now you can’t even move because nobody else wants to live next to Rottweiler guy, bagpipes guy, or the guy from hoarders storing cars on his lawn.
This is why it makes a lot of sense to have a small HOA with a handful of rules, but it still doesn’t make sense to have someone with a ruler come measure your grass.
My neighborhood of over 150 lots has been terrorized by ONE SINGLE DUDE. Almost everyone is at least reasonably considerate, but it only takes one who isn’t technically breaking the law to make everything kind of suck. As our local sheriff’s department likes to say, there’s no law against being a bad neighbor.
Yeah it sounds like we don’t need a whole bunch of rules but rather a less formal arbitration process. Like, a community council that can settle disputes even if there’s not a law being broken if one party is acting unreasonably. Of course, the loser could then elevate to an actual court if they feel their rights were/are violated.
No punishments, no fines, no lawyers, just a mediator to help settle minor disputes whose decisions are somewhat binding. Ideally several individuals that are elected by the community.
That would be a great way of doing it, honestly.
Edit: It was nice to have some guidelines in case you’ve never been a homeowner before though I will say.
there’s no law against being a bad neighbor
There is in many (most?) cities - every one of these is against city ordinance where I live. It’s better these sort of things are handled by the city; applied to many more people it’s harder to pull grass-measuring or other shenanigans.
rabbits that live under them and eat your garden.
Rabbits do not need cars to eat your garden, furry little buggers are perfectly happy with a hole anywhere in the ground. The excuses against ‘car guy’ are always the weirdest, especially the HOAs that don’t even let you do basic oil changes yourself.
I see you read over the part where I explicitly said “outside city limits”.
Seems I did.
To your point though, inside city limits the value proposition for an HOA is vanishingly small.
All of these things are just against the law where I am.
There isn’t choice in a lot of places. Every new development since at least the 90s has an hoa.
For the greater good.
Crusty jugglers
For the same reason people choose to pay 50 % of their income to their landlord.
It’s not an easy decision for a lot of people. I struggled to buy a house for 10 years, partly because HOAs are the name of the game in most areas in the US. One time we got all the way to due diligence when we found out that we couldn’t even hang our clothes outside on a clothesline! So we said no. That was five years in to the search, and it was another five years before we finally found something.
But, that was ten wasted years of my life, and I can understand someone making a different decision than I did. Hell, I wish WE had made a different decision!
“Small government” people want “freedom” so they eschew normal things like bylaws, but then the problems with that appear - whether it’s legitimate or Karen - and the control freaks in the neighborhood form up a HOA to deal with it, instead of offloading it to a (theoretically) uninvolved third party.
And now it’s the default way to enforce community standards.
I’m an old guy, and got my entire life I’ve said the same. When buying the two prior houses, no HOA was a hard requirement. But my wife and I split up later year - had to sell the house and split the money. She moved away, but I wanted to stay in the area where my friends and family are. So what I could afford was a condo, and all condos have HOAs.
Mine actually seems fine so far. I almost wish they enforced the rules more, but none of the rules seem egregious. And since the neighborhood/complex has common facilities like a pool and a meeting room, it’s kind of unavoidable having some common body to be responsible for them.
HOAs are a mixed bag. Many are awful, but deed restrictions can also be beneficial if the rules are reasonable and the buyers are aware of them. This is especially true if you live outside of a City and don’t have code enforcement.
My parents now live in the county without an HOA, and the neighboring property is an abandoned collapsed house full of trash and surrounded by decades of dead brush. It’s a massive fire hazard that’s full of pests…
On the flip side, their old HOA when they lived in the suburbs when I was younger freaked out if we did an oil change on our cars or had the wrong color paint on our window trim.
And unfortunately, we only really hear about the bad ones. The HOA in my neighborhood is actually pretty good. The dues mostly go towards maintenance in the canyons between rows of houses. This maintenance is necessary because I live in an area that is higher risk for wildfires. They pull old brush, keep the waterline working, and stuff like that.
Why does the local government not do these things?
Very, very basic people who are more concerned with their property values than having a hobby.
It’s kind of hard to buy anything modern that isn’t under an HOA
Eh? Just buy a house in a city, not in a house farm. I wouldn’t ever live in any of those communities. Maybe they are different elsewhere but here they are crazy, rules about what color your door can be. And all the houses in them are garage houses, the ones with the garage out farther than the front door. If that’s what you mean by modern, I hate them.
We buy old and slowly renovate and retrofit. But there are new houses nearby too, though mostly they are the garage houses, yuck. In the city there is still code enforcement, if you really ignore the grass you can get a ticket. but no rules about landscaping type (you don’t have to have a lawn out front) or what color you paint the outside of your house. Or whether you have a clothesline.
You should also anonymously report whichever house is farthest away from wherever she’s walking from.
We call this “Pam Pong.”
chaotic
evilgoodI don’t think this fits on alignment charts. It’s using the rules (lawful), but incorrectly, and it’s harming a person (evil), but to damage a bad institution (good).
It’s knowingly using the rules to inconvenience (not harm) a person in protest of their stupid rules. Sound pretty chaotic good to me.
Report every single house, like pressing all the buttons on an elevator.
For the most capitalist country in the world, its neighborhoods sure are suspiciously soviet.
That’s because for every “instance” they charge an assload of ridiculous fees. It’s not Soviet at all. It’s just another form of capitalism.
If it was actually socialist and not just authoritarian it would be a housing coöp. HOAs are only aligned to the will of developers and people using housing as a form of investment.
The primary goal of most HOAs is house price. It should be livability and repair of public resources.
From outside, with all the stories we read, it looks like the primary goal of HOA is to give some folks power they can abuse.
Go a step further. Report fake violations for your home constantly until they stop checking anything. Now you are above the law. Then start doing fake reports for everyone else until they shut down the anonymous form. Now you are free.
Just DDoS all their online crap
As much as I love that, you gotta be careful with that. Things are pretty traceable online.
You could probably just put nonsense in via tor and they are not going to have the resources to find out who did it.
DDoSinh the people is way more satisfying
SIX ENTIRE MINUTES OF FORCED TRASHCAN VIEWING!? You monster.
Won’t somebody think of the children?!
But also where else is it supposed to go? If you cant see it, neither can bin people.
Typically, you’re allowed to bring it out to the curb after a certain hour the night before collection day and you need to get it back out of view by a certain hour after the garbagemen come through.
What a stupid fucking rule. Unless it’s something like 18 hours on either side of pickup it’s interfering in someone’s schedule and regardless who cares
Is this my house or a hotel?
I threw up just thinking about this.
Some of my neighbors keep them out for days. No one cares. We all have better things to do with our time.
HOAs are idiotic. I was president (forced, it was a rotation basis) in one. First thing I did was convene the assembly outside, at 13:00 in the summer, no chairs. The meeting went from the previous 2 1/2 h. to 15 minutes. I’m going to install 3 heat pump compressors on the side wall of the building, which 2 or 3 Sandra Karens make furious noise about. I’m preparing a legal nuke, created with A"I", detailing every single thing that protrudes from their wall, down to the milimiter. Probably wouldn’t hold up in court, but if you ask a text generator to act as a vicious lawyer to draft a text for this with enough detail, they can whip up very scary texts. If they try to making me take them down, I’m going to hit them with notices to take down EVERYTHING that protrudes from the exterior, including planters, flags, and even fucking door knockers.
Fuck HOAs
So you became the shitty HOA president that everyone complains about to what, show everyone that you’re tough? I’m confused.
Are we supposed to be sympathetic to this comment? Add in AI bullshit if that wasn’t already enough. Yikes.
Why would so many people upvote this comment? So odd.
Lemmy hivemind circlejerk: Grrrr, HOAs bad!
Did you read the comment I replied to? They outlined their behavior, and it’s explicitly the behavior of a bad HOA president.
That said, I think HOAs are a great example of an unworthy and unnecessary hierarchy that we’ve imposed on ourselves for no real benefit.
HOAs exist because old people love rules and imposing those rules on others. At the same time, there’s a large section of the population that are lazy assholes who would never take care of their property if they weren’t threatened with fines.
Well, you should be sympathetic! I use Lemmy as the basis of my emotional scaffolding. Your attacks are making me suffer unnecessarily. Racist!
Sounds like the HOA still couldn’t prevent bad neighbors
If you really wanted to do something, then dissolve the hoa entirely.
I see you share Trump’s beliefs about governing.
Are you stunted?
Yes, aren’t you ?
Not like you are, champ
European here - what powers does a HOA actually have? Surely they can’t make you leave or anything? Are their fines actually legally enforcable? What if you just dont pay them?
They can, and likely will, put a lien on your house which makes it harder to sell. Probably other avenues to fuck up your life too. Around me it’s really hard to find a house without an HOA. It’s probably like 90% of the market, or I triple my commute.
It’s legally binding with the purchase of the house so there’s no going around it.
But how can they have a legal right to put a lien on it? Do they have some kind of legal claim to the land or property? What’s stopping any other organisation from doing this?
It’s part of the paperwork you sign when you buy the house. It’s essentially saying the can do that if you don’t pay fines. Luckily my HOA is pretty lenient about things, but still sucks. I’d rather dissolve it and remove the restrictions.
Hm. How nasty. And I’m assuming there’s some sort of provision that you have to sell on the house under the same terms?
Yep
They are part of the covenants, restrictions, and conditions that “run with the land.” They are a more organized way of controlling the aesthetic of the neighborhood than traditional covenants. In practice they are used to harass people and were originally used to discriminate.
deleted by creator
Because we live in a dystopic hellhole
Yes, the fines are legally enforceable because (generally) you have to agree to them in order to purchase the house - joining the HOA and being bound by its rules either literally or functionally becomes a permanent part of the deed to the property. There isn’t a legally viable argument that you only signed that part under duress because you could have chosen to live somewhere else instead. You could technically get a like-minded group of neighbors to run for the HOA leadership roles and eliminate the petty rules, but the rider contract to the deed still exists.
They can be very powerful, certainly when hijacked by lawyers, John Oliver did a bit on it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrizmAo17Os
It’s incredible, and horrendous.
I’m pretty sure they can legally take your house away from you.
You mean the house you own?
Cause you don’t own it in that case.
They have the power to charge fines and place liens if you don’t pay them
I’m just the messenger. I won’t live in one if those passive aggressive hellholes.
We have hoa-equivalents in Europe, tho. In my country they’re called something like ‘owners community’, and they can even take your home if your debt with them gets too big. But I don’t think they can fine you directly, the have to sue you, and the rules aren’t usually as insane as in the States, but they can ban you from installing the windows you want, putting up a flag, hang your clothes to dry on the front…
They can charge you fines, and if you don’t pay them they can put a lien on your house.
So no they can’t kick you out, but they can make it so that you’re unable to leave without paying them.
An HOA can literally take over your home if you owe them fines, even if the fines are wrong. They can evict you, sell your home, and keep all the money, and there isn’t a thing you can do to stop them. There are countless stories of HOAs getting vindictive toward a specific homeowner, and targeting them for foreclosure.
It should be illegal for anyone to take your PAID-OFF house for taxes, HOA fees/fines, or any other reason. The government and the HOA are infinite, and will be there after the homeowner dies or sells, and they can get their money then. Nobody should be able to take your house away for any reason, or there is no such thing as home ownership.
It depends entirely on the location. My HOA is like 100 a year and it pays specifically for a security guard, a camera, and a few yearly neighborhood events.
This means if someone in the neighborhood decides to park an RV in their front yard and let grass grow 6 ft tall, it’s up to their actual neighbors to go and knock on their door and tell them to buddy that looks like shit.Other neighborhoods with amenities (like pools, tennis courts, country clubs, private security, secret police, drones, etc) have much higher fees to pay for those things.
Enforcement depends on the context you sign when you buy the house/condo/etc.
If you’d like a hilarious description of exactly where this system logically concludes, read like the first 2 chapters of “Snow Crash”
(If this sounds exactly like taxes paying for public infrastructure, it absolutely is, but with one difference: it encourages the absolutely worst people in the neighborhood with the most time to make everything their business. Eventually whatever their prevailing bigotry is bubbles into existence in the form of harassment like OP describes.)
https://nypost.com/2026/09/15/real-estate/arizona-man-loses-475k-home-over-977-hoa-debt/
Sorry for the nypost link
I’m surprised she didn’t drive her SUV. At least you’re getting her some exercise.
What, and get anonymously reported for illegally parking on the street?
HOAs are bulllshit. It’s my fuckin house. If I want to ignore the fuckin lawn, that’s my perogative.
Most HOAs have a contract with a lawn care/snow removal service.
lol no they fuckin don’t
Most HOAs are to keep black people from living there. Unless they’re one of “ the good ones”
Every one I’ve seen has this because they’re too busy doing “gods work” to be bothered with basic maintenance of the property.
Just make sure majority of your neighbors agree and change the rule in a meeting. Easy peasy.
Even if you’re not in an HOA, your county/city might have an ordinance requiring that you keep your lawn at a reasonable height, though those tend to be much less restrictive because they’re trying to keep your lawn from turning into a hay field.
HOAs are filled with people with mental illness that force an anti-social relationship with all of their neighbours. It’s kinda of like a social prison with Karen wardens.
Land of the free.
Ikr. I live in Australia and I can’t imagine having to deal with some other jerk micromanaging your front yard.
Any time I’ve sought to purchase a home, I’ve told my realtor that “no HOA” was a mandate.
HOA is required in my town and all neighboring towns for so new construction which encompasses 80% of all housing
Trespass the bitch and keep reporting.
what the fuck? who cares about that shit?
Boomers who have nothing besides their house which is now worth twice what they paid for it.
It’s not worth twice as much… the dollar is worth half as much.
Hmm, we should probably print more money. That will fix it!
boomer go boom!
weak people who crave power, but are otherwise unable to attain any.
oh well
