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> Guessing HOA's would lose their shit though. Perhaps there should be legal escape hatches from HOA rules specifically for energy efficiency upgrades. I don't

> Guessing HOA's would lose their shit though. Perhaps there should be legal escape hatches from HOA rules specifically for energy efficiency upgrades. I don't generally advocate for centralization of power (ie, a state imposing its will on a community), but in the case of climate change I'll happily make exceptions.

dheera 6y ago
Honestly I don't see why we can't just outlaw HOAs. If you own something you should be able to do whatever you want with it. It seems like a simple constitutional right to me.
- crooked-v 6y ago
  Eliminate HOAs and you've destroyed the basic mechanism that makes common maintenance practical for high-density non-rental housing.
  - dheera 6y ago
    It seems to me HOAs aren't mostly about maintainence, they're mostly about old farts yelling at you for installing a fence or planting the wrong type of flower or using the wrong color of paint. None of that stuff affects maintainence. Those farts shouldn't even be allowed to step on land they don't own. The stuff that actually affects maintainence, I can understand, but participation should be optional by law. If you want discount maintainence, don't mess with your water pipes and electrical conduits. But hey if you're okay with finding your own maintainence, you should be entitled to do whatever you want as long as it's legal per fire/building code.
    - vkou 6y ago
      How do you intend to make participation in maintenance of a highrise building, of which you occupy one unit, optional? [1] HOAs don't make a lick of sense for suburban blocks, but you can't do without them when you share a building. [1] You could try the Soviet model, where people took care of their personal apartments, while the common areas and infrastructure of most buildings would go to shit. I've seen it, I'm not eager to re-live it.
      - dheera 6y ago
        For highrise buildings I agree that you should need approval to touch the utility infrastructure. I was referring more to HOAs for suburban blocks, which are extraordinarily common in the US. Many of them are obsessed about whether you can park your car in the driveway, what kind of car you're allowed to own, what kinds of plants you can plant in your front yard, the color of your house, modifications to the aesthetics of your house, and other stupid things. Welcome to the "land of the free".
    - crooked-v 6y ago
      There's a reason I specified 'high-density'. 'Your' water pipes and electrical conduits become only a small part of the whole as soon as you're looking at townhouses, duplexes, or even just small homes sharing a lot and utility connections.
  - outworlder 6y ago
    HOAs are a US thing. Would you be surprised to know that high density housing exist elsewhere, with common areas, which are not maintained by HOAs?
    - vkou 6y ago
      Yeah, it does exist in other places not maintained by HOAs. It's maintained by an organization that is the exact same thing as an HOA, but is called a strata.
      - outworlder 6y ago
        Not exactly the same thing, just performs the same function. HOAs wouldn't be so bad if rules were grandfathered-in when you bought your house.
  - jjav 6y ago
    You absolutely do not need a controlling HOA just to maintain common areas. My neighborhood considered a HOA for the common park areas but in the end the land was transferred to the city and maintenance is paid via property taxes. No HOA to tell us what flowers we can plant.
    - crooked-v 6y ago
      So what do you do about townhouses that share walls or homes that share enclosed backyards?
- rlpb 6y ago
  > If you own something you should be able to do whatever you want with it. It seems like a simple constitutional right to me. However, if a group of people want to make a legally enforceable agreement between themselves for their mutual benefit, then it shouldn't be possible for one of them to renege on that agreement later. See also: easements (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easement). You can own property but if an easement exists then you can't do whatever you want with it. If easements were suddenly unenforceable, chaos would ensue. So the matter is certainly not as simple as "if you own something you should be able to do whatever you want with it".
- jandrese 6y ago
  HoAs are how neighborhoods fund communal property like pools, parks, plowing of parking lots, etc... Where you get into trouble is when they also try to enforce "property value" guidelines, which tend to become "against whatever the most power tripping person on the council thinks is 'ugly'". Solar panels are exactly the sort of thing that can be considered "ugly" and end up being banned. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
  - dheera 6y ago
    > HoAs are how neighborhoods fund communal property like pools, parks, plowing of parking lots, etc... All of that stuff can exist without HOAs. If you want access to communal property and a communal parking sticker, you can require a membership fee. As long as it's reasonably priced I'd most likely gladly pay for access to parks and communal facilities and stuff like that. It should be optional, but for the above, I'd be likely to opt in and I'm sure most people would. But no, I would not pay for them to come and yak at me for how I should decorate my front yard and house.
- vidarh 6y ago
  There is literally no place in the world where you can do "whatever you want" with property, for the simple reason that allowing you to do so would dramatically affect your neighbours in ways that would substantially restrict how they can use their property. It's a fair argument that conversely many types of restrictions on what you can do are unjustified and overly broad, but arguing from the basis that you should be able to do as you please will fall flat on its face because it is so easy to find examples that would massively negatively affect neighbours.
  - dheera 6y ago
    > dramatically affect your neighbours in ways that would substantially restrict how they can use their property. Well yes, if you practice the tuba at 3am, raise alligators in your backyard, and beekeeping in your front yard, then yes. But painting your house? Building a shed? Parking a car in the driveway? Building a fence? Adding architectural ornaments? Install solar panels? None of this stuff affects neighbours.
    - JKCalhoun 6y ago
      Yes, I think it is the degree of the regulations. Examples: no cars parked on your front yard. Check. No solar panels on your roof. That would be too far.
      - dheera 6y ago
        > Examples: no cars parked on your front yard. This would be too far. If the front yard and car are both my property it is not for anyone else to tell me what to do with them.
        vidarh 6y ago
        If driving the cars on and off your property does not in any way affect your neighbours, I'd be with you. But restrictions on numbers of cars are often used as a proxy for restricting traffic and noise. E.g. near me planning regulations generally prevent new construction from creating more than an average of 1.5 parking space per housing unit, to prevent further strain on the transport network. One might argue it's a poor proxy, as some people will have cars just sitting around, but it tends to work reasonably well. There certainly is over-reach, and one of my pet peeve is that restrictions like this (and ideally all regulations and laws) ought to have stated justifications as part of the text, and "test conditions" to validate if they achieve the goal, as it's often hard to unpackage why the rules are the way they are, but a lot of these restrictions do have a reasoning behind them as well. Whether or not one agree about that reasoning is a separate issue, but I think a lot of conflict over these kinds of regulations boils down to not knowing the reasoning behind them.
- orthecreedence 6y ago
  I personally hate the idea of HOAs, so I agree with you on a gut level. Taking a wider view, HOAs are a form of free association and I can't condemn them entirely. If people want to subject themselves to complete hell, they should be able to. And frankly, the kind of neighborhood that has an HOA is not the place I'd want to live anyway, so it's not like I'm personally missing anything. That said, the existence of HOAs should not be a driver for climate change, and aesthetics and property values are a really stupid thing to optimize for when we're facing catastrophic climate collapse.
  - everdrive 6y ago
    >HOAs are a form of free association and I can't condemn them entirely. I think an argument against this is that the HOA follows the property, not the consumer. If I could opt out of an HOA when purchasing a home, it wouldn't be so bad. (but then again, the HOA would likely be severely weakened.)
    - orthecreedence 6y ago
      The same goes for overbearing counties and their permitting. If I could just shirk off the local regulations or they could be opt-in, the world would be a much different place. An HOA is effectively just a contractual micro-state, and conversely, some counties are a scaled HOA. That said, I agree with you. I think HOAs are stupid, at least in the context of telling people what their shrubs should look like or what color to paint their house.
- m463 6y ago
  I think there is a spectrum of regulation that happens the closer you live to other people. I had a friend who lived in a dome house. It could not have been built in an incorporated area of his state.
  - dheera 6y ago
    Yeah, I think that as long as you don't live in a 300 year old historical district that needs to maintain its nationally-valued historical look, and the dome is built to building/fire code, nobody should have the right to tell you you can't build a dome house on property that you own. If I own the land, I fucking own it, and I solely decide what is done with it. The HOAs do not own it, and they can fuck off. I live in the land of the free, and I'll build my dome. Mandatory HOAs should be outlawed.
m463 6y ago
I think HOAs can be overridden. For example, the FCC has a carve-out that allows you to put up a satellite dish, in spite of any HOA regulation.

dheera 6y ago

Honestly I don't see why we can't just outlaw HOAs. If you own something you should be able to do whatever you want with it. It seems like a simple constitutional right to me.

crooked-v 6y ago
Eliminate HOAs and you've destroyed the basic mechanism that makes common maintenance practical for high-density non-rental housing.
- dheera 6y ago
  It seems to me HOAs aren't mostly about maintainence, they're mostly about old farts yelling at you for installing a fence or planting the wrong type of flower or using the wrong color of paint. None of that stuff affects maintainence. Those farts shouldn't even be allowed to step on land they don't own. The stuff that actually affects maintainence, I can understand, but participation should be optional by law. If you want discount maintainence, don't mess with your water pipes and electrical conduits. But hey if you're okay with finding your own maintainence, you should be entitled to do whatever you want as long as it's legal per fire/building code.
  - vkou 6y ago
    How do you intend to make participation in maintenance of a highrise building, of which you occupy one unit, optional? [1] HOAs don't make a lick of sense for suburban blocks, but you can't do without them when you share a building. [1] You could try the Soviet model, where people took care of their personal apartments, while the common areas and infrastructure of most buildings would go to shit. I've seen it, I'm not eager to re-live it.
    - dheera 6y ago
      For highrise buildings I agree that you should need approval to touch the utility infrastructure. I was referring more to HOAs for suburban blocks, which are extraordinarily common in the US. Many of them are obsessed about whether you can park your car in the driveway, what kind of car you're allowed to own, what kinds of plants you can plant in your front yard, the color of your house, modifications to the aesthetics of your house, and other stupid things. Welcome to the "land of the free".
  - crooked-v 6y ago
    There's a reason I specified 'high-density'. 'Your' water pipes and electrical conduits become only a small part of the whole as soon as you're looking at townhouses, duplexes, or even just small homes sharing a lot and utility connections.
- outworlder 6y ago
  HOAs are a US thing. Would you be surprised to know that high density housing exist elsewhere, with common areas, which are not maintained by HOAs?
  - vkou 6y ago
    Yeah, it does exist in other places not maintained by HOAs. It's maintained by an organization that is the exact same thing as an HOA, but is called a strata.
    - outworlder 6y ago
      Not exactly the same thing, just performs the same function. HOAs wouldn't be so bad if rules were grandfathered-in when you bought your house.
- jjav 6y ago
  You absolutely do not need a controlling HOA just to maintain common areas. My neighborhood considered a HOA for the common park areas but in the end the land was transferred to the city and maintenance is paid via property taxes. No HOA to tell us what flowers we can plant.
  - crooked-v 6y ago
    So what do you do about townhouses that share walls or homes that share enclosed backyards?
rlpb 6y ago
> If you own something you should be able to do whatever you want with it. It seems like a simple constitutional right to me. However, if a group of people want to make a legally enforceable agreement between themselves for their mutual benefit, then it shouldn't be possible for one of them to renege on that agreement later. See also: easements (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easement). You can own property but if an easement exists then you can't do whatever you want with it. If easements were suddenly unenforceable, chaos would ensue. So the matter is certainly not as simple as "if you own something you should be able to do whatever you want with it".
jandrese 6y ago
HoAs are how neighborhoods fund communal property like pools, parks, plowing of parking lots, etc... Where you get into trouble is when they also try to enforce "property value" guidelines, which tend to become "against whatever the most power tripping person on the council thinks is 'ugly'". Solar panels are exactly the sort of thing that can be considered "ugly" and end up being banned. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
- dheera 6y ago
  > HoAs are how neighborhoods fund communal property like pools, parks, plowing of parking lots, etc... All of that stuff can exist without HOAs. If you want access to communal property and a communal parking sticker, you can require a membership fee. As long as it's reasonably priced I'd most likely gladly pay for access to parks and communal facilities and stuff like that. It should be optional, but for the above, I'd be likely to opt in and I'm sure most people would. But no, I would not pay for them to come and yak at me for how I should decorate my front yard and house.
vidarh 6y ago
There is literally no place in the world where you can do "whatever you want" with property, for the simple reason that allowing you to do so would dramatically affect your neighbours in ways that would substantially restrict how they can use their property. It's a fair argument that conversely many types of restrictions on what you can do are unjustified and overly broad, but arguing from the basis that you should be able to do as you please will fall flat on its face because it is so easy to find examples that would massively negatively affect neighbours.
- dheera 6y ago
  > dramatically affect your neighbours in ways that would substantially restrict how they can use their property. Well yes, if you practice the tuba at 3am, raise alligators in your backyard, and beekeeping in your front yard, then yes. But painting your house? Building a shed? Parking a car in the driveway? Building a fence? Adding architectural ornaments? Install solar panels? None of this stuff affects neighbours.
  - JKCalhoun 6y ago
    Yes, I think it is the degree of the regulations. Examples: no cars parked on your front yard. Check. No solar panels on your roof. That would be too far.
    - dheera 6y ago
      > Examples: no cars parked on your front yard. This would be too far. If the front yard and car are both my property it is not for anyone else to tell me what to do with them.
      - vidarh 6y ago
        If driving the cars on and off your property does not in any way affect your neighbours, I'd be with you. But restrictions on numbers of cars are often used as a proxy for restricting traffic and noise. E.g. near me planning regulations generally prevent new construction from creating more than an average of 1.5 parking space per housing unit, to prevent further strain on the transport network. One might argue it's a poor proxy, as some people will have cars just sitting around, but it tends to work reasonably well. There certainly is over-reach, and one of my pet peeve is that restrictions like this (and ideally all regulations and laws) ought to have stated justifications as part of the text, and "test conditions" to validate if they achieve the goal, as it's often hard to unpackage why the rules are the way they are, but a lot of these restrictions do have a reasoning behind them as well. Whether or not one agree about that reasoning is a separate issue, but I think a lot of conflict over these kinds of regulations boils down to not knowing the reasoning behind them.
orthecreedence 6y ago
I personally hate the idea of HOAs, so I agree with you on a gut level. Taking a wider view, HOAs are a form of free association and I can't condemn them entirely. If people want to subject themselves to complete hell, they should be able to. And frankly, the kind of neighborhood that has an HOA is not the place I'd want to live anyway, so it's not like I'm personally missing anything. That said, the existence of HOAs should not be a driver for climate change, and aesthetics and property values are a really stupid thing to optimize for when we're facing catastrophic climate collapse.
- everdrive 6y ago
  >HOAs are a form of free association and I can't condemn them entirely. I think an argument against this is that the HOA follows the property, not the consumer. If I could opt out of an HOA when purchasing a home, it wouldn't be so bad. (but then again, the HOA would likely be severely weakened.)
  - orthecreedence 6y ago
    The same goes for overbearing counties and their permitting. If I could just shirk off the local regulations or they could be opt-in, the world would be a much different place. An HOA is effectively just a contractual micro-state, and conversely, some counties are a scaled HOA. That said, I agree with you. I think HOAs are stupid, at least in the context of telling people what their shrubs should look like or what color to paint their house.
m463 6y ago
I think there is a spectrum of regulation that happens the closer you live to other people. I had a friend who lived in a dome house. It could not have been built in an incorporated area of his state.
- dheera 6y ago
  Yeah, I think that as long as you don't live in a 300 year old historical district that needs to maintain its nationally-valued historical look, and the dome is built to building/fire code, nobody should have the right to tell you you can't build a dome house on property that you own. If I own the land, I fucking own it, and I solely decide what is done with it. The HOAs do not own it, and they can fuck off. I live in the land of the free, and I'll build my dome. Mandatory HOAs should be outlawed.

m463 6y ago

I think HOAs can be overridden. For example, the FCC has a carve-out that allows you to put up a satellite dish, in spite of any HOA regulation.