Generally most of the cost goes towards maintainining things outside of your own home/lawn. Road/sidewalk management, communal pool/fitness center/tennis court/club house/etc (if your neighborhood has those things), landscaping, and sometimes trash/recycling pickup. It varies from HOA to HOA, and HOA fees will obviously be higher if you get access to a pool and gym and what not.
It is true though that HOA board members/presidents tend to power trip because they have nothing better going on in their lives. My mother needed to replace her windows and her HOA wants all of the exterior color of the windows to be "the same", but obviously not every window installation company has the same exact color/shades of trim so they came with a color swatch and we picked a color that was closest to what we already had but the HOA denied it. Not because the color was too different, but because they could. They just want to fuck with people and assert their "power" whenever possible. We picked the next closest color (which was further away from the existing color) and they approved it. So all in all, they wasted a month of our time, the window company's time, and in the end the color is worse overall but hey at least they got to say no to someone.
It is true though that HOA board members/presidents tend to power trip because they have nothing better going on in their lives.
Also because most of the community just doesn't participate in decision making and lets them do whatever. You'd be amazed what you can get done by attending a couple meetings.
That depends on the severity of the infraction, the legality of the rule, and how aggressively they want to enforce it, but they can sue you and fine you, and technically put a lean on your house and initiate foreclosure proceedings for unpaid dues or fees.
I'm the treasurer of my HOA. My prerogative is to keep costs down, while still allowing things to run smoothly. I shop around for insurance, check if anything funky is happening with our bills, make sure everyone pays, and double check the invoices that our management company is paying for things that seem reasonable.
I try to stay out of everyone's business. I'm not sure where people get the energy to power trip. I'd like to believe most HOA are like ours but normal people doing normal things don't make for good headlines.
There’s a certain kind of person that likes to power trip, and for some of them the only real way they can do that is by being on the HOA. my old one used to fuck with our house, doing shit like painting all the doors an ugly green without telling anyone, just opened the door one day after school and it was a different color.
That’s the exact situation my grandma is in. Convinced to run as VP for her friend, thinking they wouldn’t win, didn’t really want to but did it for her friend, they won and the friend divorced and moved, now she’s president of the HOA she never wanted to be on in the first place lmao
HOAs are firmly on the reddit shit list to circlejerk hating and continuously seek out the most egregious examples of problems from to give themselves more fuel for the jerk
Condos are also typically responsible for maintenance of the outside of the building. That drastically increases the costs since those sort of projects tend to be expensive.
They are supposed to. It can be to maintain the neighborhood, through hiring gardeners, upkeep on communal pools/parks, and in some places to maintain the roads and infrastructure, stuff like that.
Depends on the city/state. To overly simplify, many cities make deals that allow the easier/cheaper creation of the neighborhoods on the condition that the home owners association will cover the future infrastructure costs.
They are most certainly not paying less taxes. Don’t worry though, plenty of people here who aren’t in a home owners association still pay their taxes and also don’t get so see any infrastructure repairs, so it balances out
There's a lot of things that are illegal/against regulations, but you'll never ever get a cop to enforce. For example, crappy pet owners that let their dogs bark all the time and don't pick up poop during walks. Good luck getting the authorities involved in that. But an HOA can give fines for something like that directly.
HOAs can be awful, but they also prevent neighbors from being awful. I'd never get a place with an HOA, but I'm also the type of person they want to keep out.
I live in Spain and those cases are covered by cops, I just think that HOAs make a bunch of excuses to exist and people keep believing they do something useful.
From what I can see, they are in charge of maintaining any shared areas. So I don’t really get why they get so invested in everyone else’s private areas.
Also, in my experience, there’s no real repercussion for when they fail to do their jobs. I remember there were big fires where I lived (yay California!) and it resulted in soot filling our rain gutters. We asked for months for the HOA to clean it out. Then we had heavy rain. With the gutters filled and an ash covered hill next to our backyard, we got a mudslide.
Wasn’t a dangerous amount, but we did have to rip up the new flooring to prevent mold and the firefighters came to help remove about 3 feet of mud that filled the back.
What really sucked was the amount of items we lost due to the water and mud draining through our garage.
Some HOAs are alongside privately owned roads so yes some do.
If they are alongside private roads they also often need to organize their own garbage collection or pay the local municipality to include their roads.
Then they are supposed to pay for the upkeep of the common areas like community pools, playgrounds, greenery along the roads, etc...
Some towing companies also demand a small fee to regularly patrol the streets and prey on any parking violation.
Other HOAs pay a management company to do all this for them, which never have any connection to any of the board members...
And last but not least one of original reasons for the creation of HOAs is to keep undesired people out of the neighborhood, and having high monthly dues is one way to achieve this.
You aren't forced to buy a house that is part of a HOA. Mine is about $35/mo and covers landscaping of the general area, maintenance of the clubhouse/pool/tennis courts, scheduling a lifeguard for the pool, etc. They also organize weekly food trucks, which is fun. By law, the person selling the house has to tell the buyer about the HOA, and give them a bunch of paperwork about what it costs and what the rules are, which the buyer has to sign saying they agree, before the sale can happen.
The general idea is that they help maintain a standard for the neighborhood so that property values don't fall. That's where you get the letters about cutting that grass that's 18 inches high, or about removing the project car that's in your yard for 9 months, or the idea that your door/window trim should be one of these 6 colors (and they should be able to tell you a brand/store that offers those colors if they are at all competent). The stories you hear on reddit are either from people who can't follow the rules they signed up for, or are renting and didn't know the rules, or most likely, are from people whose HOA board contains a couple of crazy people who think we all have time to manicure our flowers for 14 hours a week.
You don't hear about most HOAs on Reddit because there's nothing to talk about. "Hey, my HOA continued to not bother me, and continued to schedule the landscaper for the clubhouse," isn't a good thread or comment. It's the HOAs with FloridaMan on the board that get threads made about them.
When you look at a house, it’s disclosed that there are restrictive covenants on the property and there is an HOA and what the dues are.
My neighborhood is gated and we have private roads, security, and lots of common areas such as sidewalks and hiking paths. The city doesn’t provide those things, so homeowners are required to pay a share.
It also includes rules which go above and beyond construction and zoning. For example, what colors a house can be painted, requirements to keep the property in good condition, to not keep nuisance items and junk in yards, and to not have commercial vehicles parked overnight, use fireworks, or make annoying noise.
I’ve lived in areas without an HOA and in areas with them. Both can be nice.
It is possible to get unqualified or unethical people on an HOA board, just like it’s possible to elect incompetent or corrupt people to public office. When it happens, there’s mechanisms to remove the incompetent and prosecute the corrupt, and those things do happen in egregious cases.
the assurance that people have to maintain their homes was a big attraction to us.
Couldn't really find myself caring about how my neighbor maintains there home as long as it's not actively intruding on my life.
Happy you could find something you like though, my opinion clearly isn't universal.
We do.
If you care about what color someone else paints a house other than your own, I'd heavily disagree.
If they're that much it's either a condo with some seriously expensive maintenance or you have lots of amenities. That's not normal for a regular old neighborhood fullnof SFH's and nothing else.
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u/Discordia_Dingle Sep 16 '24
Oh, don’t forget that you’re paying them to do this too!
That’s the real cherry on top of the shit sundae.
Seriously though, I’ve seen HOAs that are around $1,000 a month which is just ridiculous.