Quote:
Originally Posted by Clodfobble
Well, the serious answer is because they also tell your neighbors not to be dickholes. Nobody likes the HOA until they find themselves living next to a hoarder with dead animals in the yard and a 15-foot Nazi flag nailed to the roof. Even if you tell yourself you could just ignore a neighbor like that, the reality is you could never sell your house with that guy next to you.
HOAs are fine as long as they're run by reasonable people without a vendetta. But I have heard a few horror stories where one board member starts using nitpicky bylaws to harass average folks no one had a problem with in the first place.
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Yeah, no.
An HOA is no defense against dickholes as neighbors. HOAs run by reasonable people without vendettas probably do have a good chance of being fine, I'll agree to that.
*I* don't like HOAs because I'm not interested in having agents of conformity given additional legally enforceable tools to do their dirty work. Giving these pocket-potentates more hammers to harangue and harass the nail that sticks up, even a little just feels wrong. Full disclosure--I have a very small appetite for conformity to begin with--even driving past one of these named subsubsubdivisions with their aspirational signs at the entrance, or worse, the gate, gives me a mental shot of superiority. Party on you drones in your hive! Driving through them is worse, of course. I've actually been pulled over by the cops and hassled for driving while non-conforming. I had taken the wrong exit from the highway and found myself in this neighborhood for the first time.... fuck. I can't say for sure the cop was employed by the HOA, but the whole Borg-vibe was just... suffocating. The cop helpfully escorted me back to the deeper end of the gene pool.
I don't fit in. They know it. I know it. They're waaay over there, and I'm here and that suits us both.
For the record, I would not like to have a neighbor with a big ass Nazi flag on the roof and I think if one popped up in my neighborhood, an ad hoc HOA might spontaneously coalesce and to express the gravity of such deviant behavior. That's definitely a outlier-ish hypothetical example. As for the dead animals, I... might have a few of them in my own yard out there. Some are owl pellets and some are actual graves. So I'm not quite as judgy on that score.