4 ms·
There are some cities that get around this by requiring HOAs in new subdivisions, and requiring those HOAs to pay for maintenance of much of the infrastructure.
by twblalock 10y ago
There are some cities that get around this by requiring HOAs in new subdivisions, and requiring those HOAs to pay for maintenance of much of the infrastructure. The homeowners pay the same property tax they would pay anywhere else in the same city. There are a number of cities in the Sacramento area that have been doing this kind of thing for over a decade now.
That approach brings in another set of problems, but it's worth mentioning.
- jdavis703 10y agoI'd love to see a more local approach where say a couple hundred of my neighbors from the few blocks around me could vote to raise taxes for something specific, like repaving a street, or rehabbing a park. It's local money that you know stays local.
- nitrogen 10y agoIn some areas it might be possible to set up a local special tax district that does just that.
- r00fus 10y agoThese already exist where I live (CA), there are line items for things like city-wide storm sewer, improvements to local parks, levies for specific work. It's managed by the city, so I'm not sure if it hits the general fund, but it is a tax specifically for those things.
- driverdan 10y agoCuring cancer with AIDS? No thanks.
- gohrt 10y agoYou prefer that your local neighborhood be administered by a national bureau of neighborhood affairs?
- jimmaswell 10y agoHomeowners associations are abominations. They put "property value" above everything else to the point that you're not allowed to have the wrong brand of car or put your garbage out before midnight the night before it's collected. They should honestly be illegal.
- dagw 10y ago"They" aren't som abstract entity, they're you and your neighbors. If you don't like the direction your homeowners association is going, why not join it and propose changes?
- slfnflctd 10y agoMaking changes to an HOA, once it's established, is functionally impossible in many places due to the way they are set up. They require a certain percentage of homeowners to approve a change, which ends up being far more of them than you can get to respond to mailers or doorbells. The meetings of the HOAs themselves tend too often to devolve into wasting everyone's time on minor, petty differences about how to spend the dues. This is at least partly intentional, I suspect, because it allows the city to make certain assumptions about newer neighborhoods which have these boilerplate HOAs that are essentially the same across a whole region. This type of thing may or may not be better in some situations than no HOA at all, but it undermines what I would consider true property ownership while also preventing any kind of effective adaptation to new information or circumstances over time. For example, I know of a neighborhood where they are required to put a certain color of asphalt shingles on their roofs when they need a new one (about every 10-15 years). Roof mounted solar panels or tiles will never be allowed in this neighborhood, which I find utterly insane. If I was in a position to buy property, I would strongly favor a location unburdened by this kind of albatross.
- abricot 10y agoI wonder if that is not a symptom of them having nothing real to worry about? If they had infrastructure issues to discuss, they would never get to the car brand point on the agenda.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- driverdan 10y agoI'm not sure why my original response, "Curing cancer with AIDS? No thanks" was flagged. HOAs are awful and mandating them is despicable. Curing one problem with another is not a solution.
- sctb 10y agoIt's not a civil and substantive comment. Inflammatory, no-information posts aren't what this site is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html