4 ms·

Umm sorry but that's nonsense - externalities of your property impacts your neighborhood and having rules upfront about what's acceptable is a good way to deal

Umm sorry but that's nonsense - externalities of your property impacts your neighborhood and having rules upfront about what's acceptable is a good way to deal with conflicts and setting expectations. Laws have to be defined for the entire country. If I buy a house in a nice neighborhood and I pay extra because it's a nice neighborhood - I want to know that everyone has some standard of maintenance.

forgetfreeman 2y ago
To put it as bluntly as possible I don't give a flying fuck at a rolling donut what you or others likeminded think is nonsense here. I live on 20 wooded acres surrounded by undeveloped forest lots ranging in size from 40 to 200 acres, the closest neighbor is half a mile away, and I couldn't pick anyone that lives there out of a police lineup if my life depended on it. I chose my location precidely to avoid this creeping horseshit notion that you've got rights over the things I own.
- rboyd 2y ago
  You described nearly exactly my little place here in the countryside too. I noticed property taxes were up this year, and the electric co-op cut down two of my favorite trees while I was on vacation because they said they were too close to the lines. There’s always something. sigh
  - forgetfreeman 2y ago
    The power co-op cleared three problem trees after I called them out which opened things up enough that I've been able to drop a bunch more myself with no issues. Got an Alaska mill on the way to process the trunks into lumber, the greenhouse is going in this fall. My only real complaint is the bizarre amount of mice we have on the property, but that's a solvable problem.
- fastball 2y ago
  So you wouldn't mind if someone bought the property closest to wherever your house is on your 20 acres, cut down the undeveloped forest, and built an abattoir right on the property line?
  - yourapostasy 2y ago
    The general rule of thumb I've personally observed (YMMV) with those who hold such absolutist externality related positions is they hold it right up to the minute that someone else much more powerful and deep-pocketed than they start unilaterally imposing externalities upon them. Your abbatoir example is a good one, and the other one I've seen in real life is when a Swift, Cargill or other similar mega-agribusiness setting up a CAFO feedlot next door. The odor externality from the manure piles/lakes usually riles such characters right up, but that is the least of it. Even when the manure management challenges are properly mitigated (and there are no such CAFO feedlots that can mitigate to only 2-3 incidents per year, it is more like 20-30 per year for the average one), neighboring properties like your parent commentator's are adversely impacted with sharply increased pathogen and contaminants control in their groundwater. As rural properties like your parent poster's usually rely upon well water, this becomes a pretty acute issue for neighbors. Fracking operations also are frequently very sloppy with their adverse impact upon groundwater, even though they are very diligent upon staying on their property. Redress that makes whole including judicial system interaction expenses is difficult, expensive even for single-digit liquid assets millionaires, and rare. At the end of the day, this has many characteristics of a classic engineering modeling problem, subject to unperceived historical biases. People who hold absolutist property rights interpretations like your parent poster are generally historically biased to a time period when such interpretations were couched in an energy-poor and population-sparse time of our civilization. Back then, as long as one was within approximately human- and animal-power scales of energy over the generational time span, and rural population densities, externalities from large scaling scenarios were rare for most people, and mostly theoretical. With our current access to energy and ability to rapidly densify neighboring properties, the available externalities to present materially change, and the interpretations (which are actually the mental models we work with) break down in the face of a engineering-like scaling step change that requires categorically different solution spaces. I'm personally very sympathetic to your parent poster's position, but realistically, my personal experience has informed me of the dynamic I've shared, and I've since substantially modified my position.
- 15155 2y ago
  You'll be paying taxes on that land, do you actually own it?
  - forgetfreeman 2y ago
    Of course I own it. I also utilize all of the public infrastructure around my land and enjoy the fact that I don't have to resort to armed patrols to protect it from roving bands of raiders, so yeah, taxes.
  - beaeglebeachedd 2y ago
    Not necessarily. Much of Alaska has no property tax, plus you get a paycheck on oil dividends.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- demondemidi 2y ago
  Funny I lived on 11 acres carved from a 180 acre plot. The 90 year old owner of the surrounding plot died and his children had it logged. For three years loggers were running chainsaws near daily and 18 wheelers were tearing up my small road as they built new ones to feed it. The road was shared from my house to his through my property. Then his teenaged grandkids started running motorcycles through the clear cut and shooting guns. Sitting on my porch used to be pleasant but now it was constant noise. Since the land was unmaintained and unincorporated I had no recourse. I moved before they finished. I check google maps every few years and they are STILL logging. I forgot to mention that the lack of forest now means I can see floodlights from the local high school sports fields 20 miles away and can hear the freeway traffic that passes through the nearby town, also 20+ miles away. It’s not deafening just annoying and persistent instead of wind blowing through thick forest.
- jasondigitized 2y ago
  It’s because you don’t give a flying fuck why HOAs exist. It separates those who are of different likeminds. There is a neighborhood in Austin called Apache Shores for people like you but who do give a flying fuck to know their neighbors. It’s best described as a series of junkyards next to zero scapes next to 70s A-frames next to medieval manor homes. It’s awesome for people who don’t care if their neighbors house looks like a donut shop. I don’t give a flying fuck that you don’t give a flying fuck about your neighbhors. I want neighbors that care about me and ask if they can have a stick of butter or borrow my table saw or carpool my kids to school. My neighborhood is a true community. We help each other. We organize with each other. We raise kids with each other. All from our huge McMansions with perfect lawns adorned with labradoodles who don’t bark at strangers. It makes my life better and I have never once gotten worked up about some bullshit notion that the HOA is treading on me. It’s possible to like conformity while eating suburban Chipotle while reading Kant. You can be a free thinker while also agreeing to not park your car on your lawn. If you want a pink mailbox and want to use your chainsaw in your birthday suit at 6am go right ahead, in any thousands of neighborhoods or hermitages that allow it in the land where the ratio of eagles to hamburgers is nearly equal. I’ll be in my garage with my neighbor smoking weed with our shirts off, making sawdust, listening to Steely Dan. Oh the tyranny
  - beaeglebeachedd 2y ago
    Hoa are the mushroom head of covenants, which I see as one of the greatest threats to liberty. Boomers unilaterally reaching out the grave to encumber property on all transfers and heirs. The contract of course is unsigned by the counterparty yet somehow runs with the land. Due to this nonsense it was almost impossible finding land allowing me to build a tiny house for my family despite no zoning or codes against it.
    - phil21 2y ago
      Yep, this is my problem with HoAs. Everyone supporting them loves to bleat about how "voluntary" they are - but any new construction since perhaps the late 80's in my area have been nearly 100%, if not 100%, HoA. This is not voluntary - it's pay to play, and you are practically forced into these living arrangements if you are within a certain socioeconomic class and want to own a home. That I won the lottery and can "opt out" of the situation personally is immaterial. I find the situation at best unethical. These don't even exist for the standard reasoning any longer. It's turned into a financial grift for developers to avoid paying for improvements, and municipalities to expand the tax base without having to pay for infrastructure. Plenty of "communities" out there currently having their cake and eating it too - at least for the first one or two generations of owners. It's about as sustainable as you'd expect such arrangements to be the more you look into them. If you want suburban new home construction in my area you have had to buy within a HoA for the past 30 years. It's getting to the point where only the older "city core" and inner ring suburbs come devoid of a HoA. So it's either exceedingly expensive dense urban living or a 2 hour drive from a rural property. Such "choice" indeed. HoAs kill freedom more than they offer it from my experience. They also slowly suffocate any future development forcing everyone into exceedingly hard to break covenants of the past. The ossification and hollowing out of middle class America continues.
- nemo44x 2y ago
  I think you did well to isolate yourself. But many people are willing to come to agreement on what type of community they want to live in and explicitly regulate antisocial behavior. It’s great this country is large enough to accommodate all types.

forgetfreeman 2y ago

To put it as bluntly as possible I don't give a flying fuck at a rolling donut what you or others likeminded think is nonsense here. I live on 20 wooded acres surrounded by undeveloped forest lots ranging in size from 40 to 200 acres, the closest neighbor is half a mile away, and I couldn't pick anyone that lives there out of a police lineup if my life depended on it. I chose my location precidely to avoid this creeping horseshit notion that you've got rights over the things I own.

rboyd 2y ago
You described nearly exactly my little place here in the countryside too. I noticed property taxes were up this year, and the electric co-op cut down two of my favorite trees while I was on vacation because they said they were too close to the lines. There’s always something. sigh
- forgetfreeman 2y ago
  The power co-op cleared three problem trees after I called them out which opened things up enough that I've been able to drop a bunch more myself with no issues. Got an Alaska mill on the way to process the trunks into lumber, the greenhouse is going in this fall. My only real complaint is the bizarre amount of mice we have on the property, but that's a solvable problem.
fastball 2y ago
So you wouldn't mind if someone bought the property closest to wherever your house is on your 20 acres, cut down the undeveloped forest, and built an abattoir right on the property line?
- yourapostasy 2y ago
  The general rule of thumb I've personally observed (YMMV) with those who hold such absolutist externality related positions is they hold it right up to the minute that someone else much more powerful and deep-pocketed than they start unilaterally imposing externalities upon them. Your abbatoir example is a good one, and the other one I've seen in real life is when a Swift, Cargill or other similar mega-agribusiness setting up a CAFO feedlot next door. The odor externality from the manure piles/lakes usually riles such characters right up, but that is the least of it. Even when the manure management challenges are properly mitigated (and there are no such CAFO feedlots that can mitigate to only 2-3 incidents per year, it is more like 20-30 per year for the average one), neighboring properties like your parent commentator's are adversely impacted with sharply increased pathogen and contaminants control in their groundwater. As rural properties like your parent poster's usually rely upon well water, this becomes a pretty acute issue for neighbors. Fracking operations also are frequently very sloppy with their adverse impact upon groundwater, even though they are very diligent upon staying on their property. Redress that makes whole including judicial system interaction expenses is difficult, expensive even for single-digit liquid assets millionaires, and rare. At the end of the day, this has many characteristics of a classic engineering modeling problem, subject to unperceived historical biases. People who hold absolutist property rights interpretations like your parent poster are generally historically biased to a time period when such interpretations were couched in an energy-poor and population-sparse time of our civilization. Back then, as long as one was within approximately human- and animal-power scales of energy over the generational time span, and rural population densities, externalities from large scaling scenarios were rare for most people, and mostly theoretical. With our current access to energy and ability to rapidly densify neighboring properties, the available externalities to present materially change, and the interpretations (which are actually the mental models we work with) break down in the face of a engineering-like scaling step change that requires categorically different solution spaces. I'm personally very sympathetic to your parent poster's position, but realistically, my personal experience has informed me of the dynamic I've shared, and I've since substantially modified my position.
15155 2y ago
You'll be paying taxes on that land, do you actually own it?
- forgetfreeman 2y ago
  Of course I own it. I also utilize all of the public infrastructure around my land and enjoy the fact that I don't have to resort to armed patrols to protect it from roving bands of raiders, so yeah, taxes.
- beaeglebeachedd 2y ago
  Not necessarily. Much of Alaska has no property tax, plus you get a paycheck on oil dividends.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
demondemidi 2y ago
Funny I lived on 11 acres carved from a 180 acre plot. The 90 year old owner of the surrounding plot died and his children had it logged. For three years loggers were running chainsaws near daily and 18 wheelers were tearing up my small road as they built new ones to feed it. The road was shared from my house to his through my property. Then his teenaged grandkids started running motorcycles through the clear cut and shooting guns. Sitting on my porch used to be pleasant but now it was constant noise. Since the land was unmaintained and unincorporated I had no recourse. I moved before they finished. I check google maps every few years and they are STILL logging. I forgot to mention that the lack of forest now means I can see floodlights from the local high school sports fields 20 miles away and can hear the freeway traffic that passes through the nearby town, also 20+ miles away. It’s not deafening just annoying and persistent instead of wind blowing through thick forest.
jasondigitized 2y ago
It’s because you don’t give a flying fuck why HOAs exist. It separates those who are of different likeminds. There is a neighborhood in Austin called Apache Shores for people like you but who do give a flying fuck to know their neighbors. It’s best described as a series of junkyards next to zero scapes next to 70s A-frames next to medieval manor homes. It’s awesome for people who don’t care if their neighbors house looks like a donut shop. I don’t give a flying fuck that you don’t give a flying fuck about your neighbhors. I want neighbors that care about me and ask if they can have a stick of butter or borrow my table saw or carpool my kids to school. My neighborhood is a true community. We help each other. We organize with each other. We raise kids with each other. All from our huge McMansions with perfect lawns adorned with labradoodles who don’t bark at strangers. It makes my life better and I have never once gotten worked up about some bullshit notion that the HOA is treading on me. It’s possible to like conformity while eating suburban Chipotle while reading Kant. You can be a free thinker while also agreeing to not park your car on your lawn. If you want a pink mailbox and want to use your chainsaw in your birthday suit at 6am go right ahead, in any thousands of neighborhoods or hermitages that allow it in the land where the ratio of eagles to hamburgers is nearly equal. I’ll be in my garage with my neighbor smoking weed with our shirts off, making sawdust, listening to Steely Dan. Oh the tyranny
- beaeglebeachedd 2y ago
  Hoa are the mushroom head of covenants, which I see as one of the greatest threats to liberty. Boomers unilaterally reaching out the grave to encumber property on all transfers and heirs. The contract of course is unsigned by the counterparty yet somehow runs with the land. Due to this nonsense it was almost impossible finding land allowing me to build a tiny house for my family despite no zoning or codes against it.
  - phil21 2y ago
    Yep, this is my problem with HoAs. Everyone supporting them loves to bleat about how "voluntary" they are - but any new construction since perhaps the late 80's in my area have been nearly 100%, if not 100%, HoA. This is not voluntary - it's pay to play, and you are practically forced into these living arrangements if you are within a certain socioeconomic class and want to own a home. That I won the lottery and can "opt out" of the situation personally is immaterial. I find the situation at best unethical. These don't even exist for the standard reasoning any longer. It's turned into a financial grift for developers to avoid paying for improvements, and municipalities to expand the tax base without having to pay for infrastructure. Plenty of "communities" out there currently having their cake and eating it too - at least for the first one or two generations of owners. It's about as sustainable as you'd expect such arrangements to be the more you look into them. If you want suburban new home construction in my area you have had to buy within a HoA for the past 30 years. It's getting to the point where only the older "city core" and inner ring suburbs come devoid of a HoA. So it's either exceedingly expensive dense urban living or a 2 hour drive from a rural property. Such "choice" indeed. HoAs kill freedom more than they offer it from my experience. They also slowly suffocate any future development forcing everyone into exceedingly hard to break covenants of the past. The ossification and hollowing out of middle class America continues.
nemo44x 2y ago
I think you did well to isolate yourself. But many people are willing to come to agreement on what type of community they want to live in and explicitly regulate antisocial behavior. It’s great this country is large enough to accommodate all types.