3 ms·
I'm pretty sure that my current house, built in the sixties, in the South Bay has a covenant that has all kinds of restrictions, including one on race. (It migh
by TomVDB 8y ago
I'm pretty sure that my current house, built in the sixties, in the South Bay has a covenant that has all kinds of restrictions, including one on race. (It might have been a covenant on a different house that we bid on, but got rejected.)
It definitely also has a restriction where we are prohibited from replacing our current house with a new one that has a value of less than $10k. :-)
I was told that removing these kind of restrictions from the covenant is a pretty heavy procedure so nobody goes through the trouble of doing so.
- lostapathy 8y agoModifying covenants is really hard - but with good reason. You don't want a heavy-handed HOA to drastically change the rules after you're heavily invested in a property. Historically, some states have passed laws that allow racial restrictions to be amended out without the usual process, and without the usual filing fees, but even then nobody wants to take on the work (or their own legal fees).
- village-idiot 8y agoLooking in as a renter, HOAs just look like a giant pile of petty corruptions and abuses. I’m amazed anyone puts up with them.
- mjevans 8y agoI can see situations where they'd be helpful; mostly in areas where local ordinances are either insufficient or not sufficiently enforced. They also make things like neighborhood "taxes" for fixing infrastructure issues more likely to happen - at least for things everyone agrees are a useful priority (like paved roads).
- lostapathy 8y agoThey often turn into that. Unfortunately, in many ares you don't have a lot of choice - nearly all new housing is in an HOA, most established "good neighborhoods" are in an HOA, and not enough housing turns over in non-HOA, non-crappy neighborhoods. I became president of ours on a promise to reduce dues and shrink the scope of the HOA as much as possible. It's a giant PITA, but less so than if the crazy, bored and power-hungry types took it over. We remind people with truly out of control maintenance issues to clean it up, and will only get more aggressive on super egregious things. As it should be.
- TomVDB 8y agoI always thought that covenants were part of an HOA, but for us, that's not the case. It's regular single family home. The covenant is attached to the tract on which all the houses were built and supposed to be enforced by some neighborhood council... which doesn't exist.