Sarcastic Journalist's comment about life in privatopia mentions an important problem: what's to be done with deadbeat neighbors who don't maintain their property? Many people think that hoas are the solution to that problem. Actually, HOAs MAKE THINGS WORSE.
Here's why:
- HOA authority is at best only vaguely defined. HOAs can't enforce rules as effectively as a local government (as Sarcastic Journalist's experience demonstrates).
- Wherever a hoa exists, the local government does less. In fact, local governments embrace hoas specifically because they are an excuse/reason to do less. Lower government services = lower taxes. Of course, taxpayers must then pay hoa fees for services that rarely (if ever) measure up to what a government can do.
- As a result, the basic codes of good neighbors (mow your lawn, don't park cars in your yard, don't leave holiday decorations up year round, etc.) can't be enforced. Yet petty despots feel empowered to outlaw your house color or landscape choices--legally or not.
I'll elaborate with real-life examples, if you're interested, and I'll end up explaining why I (sometimes) like homeowners associations.
1. HOA authority is vague and difficult to enforce.
In Florida, (hard to imagine a more developer friendly state) hoas are empowered to collect annual dues. These dues pay for everything from landscape maintenance to repairs to legal fees--where I live, they also pay for annual water testing, required by the county since our homes were built near a former landfill. So, instead of whatever agency would monitor groundwater poisons, we pay a private company to do that. Instead of the county parks department designing, installing, and maintaining our playground, we pay a private company to do that. Instead of the local water management district mowing the lawn near the retention ponds, we pay a private company to mow. And since we can't afford much, none of these private services measure up to what the county could provide.
Most communities have inadequate fee structures because low fees make it easier for developers to sell houses; developers leave woefully underfunded hoas in their wake. Still, because these fees pay for vital services (that the local government will no longer provide once an hoa is established), the hoa has broad powers to collect them. If you don't pay your dues, we can put a lien on your house for dues plus attorney fees. We can foreclose on your house, sell it at an auction, and collect the money you owe from the proceeds. Stories about thoughtless homeowners losing their homes due to unpaid hoa dues are legion--and pretty astonishing, considering that dues are often only a couple hundred dollars a year.
That's pretty much the main power of the hoa--collecting dues. Beyond that, it's very difficult to enforce the community restrictions. Some of the restrictions aren't enforceable because they violate the law (e.g., hoas trying to forbid people from using clotheslines or solar collectors--these environmentally friendly activities are protected by most states; our state also protects the flying of the American flag; federal laws protect the placement of satellite dishes). Some of the restrictions aren't enforceable because they deal with property not owned by the hoa (e.g., rules about parking on the street--our hoa doesn't own the streets, so we have no legal authority over what happens on them). And some of the restrictions aren't enforceable because it would cost more than available resources in time AND money.
Lawn maintenance is an example of a too-costly-to-enforce restriction. Let's say a neighbor doesn't mow his lawn for months and it becomes unsightly. We could complain to the county, but until the grass becomes several feet high, no local code has been broken. We could send a nasty letter. But the type of homeowner who doesn't mow a lawn for several months isn't usually the type of homeowner who will respond to a nasty letter.
We could levy a fine. But to levy fines legally, we need a group of neighbors to form a "violations" committee, completely separate from the main board. The committee has to issue several written warnings and provide a forum for the homeowner to plead his case. The committee has a legal obligation to treat all homeowners fairly and equally.
Do hoas without the proper violations process collect fines anyway? Sure. But they put every homeowner at risk when they do it. One lawsuit--which the hoa would lose--and the hoa would have to pay legal costs, at least. Any costs that exceeded the hoa's reserves would be paid by the homeowners themselves through a special assessment. (And if our former hoa board had persisted on the stupid mailbox color issue--they wanted us to have a white mailbox, even though nothing in the rules required mailboxes to be white--we WOULD have sued. If you don't defend your rights, you lose them.)
But let's say we have the extra volunteers to operate a violations committee to assess fines. Ha! I'm already laughing about this. You would not BELIEVE the number of times people complain and then we say, "We could really use your help on the violations committee" and the complainers say they are too busy to do anything besides complain. But let's pretend.
We legally fine the homeowner $50, and then another $50, and then another and another. He doesn't pay. We're forbidden by law to foreclose on his house (and can you imagine the abuses that must have led to THAT law in THIS state? *shudder*) So we have to sue for the money. Now we're racking up legal fees--that we're forbidden to collect from the homeowner--but we do it anyway because that lawn looks terrible. We win. The homeowner pays $200 and mows his lawn. We've spent lots of volunteer hours and easily $5000 in legal fees from the meager hoa reserves (funded by our $230 annual dues), but the lawn is mowed--THIS month. What do we do next month when the homeowner again doesn't mow the lawn?
We could pay someone to mow the lawn and then bill the homeowner for the costs plus a fine, but we'd still need to sue to collect. Or we could raise the fine to, say, $500, so that our "take" would be bigger, but it would be harder to win a court case if the fines were outrageous; I'm pretty sure a $500/month fine would be tough to justify, even setting aside the bad feelings it would cause with the neighbors who aren't egregious cases--remember, we need to treat all neighbors equally. No wonder that association in the X-Files conjured up a Tibetan monster to kill people who violated the rules!
(One of my Stepford neighbors insisted that we should take whatever people pay towards annual dues, apply it to their fines, then put a lien on their house for the dues. Riiiiight. Let's use transparent accounting chicanery to illegally lien someone's home for a fine. A judge would approve of THAT.) (And yes, that neighbor has steadfastly refused to volunteer on hoa projects for as many years as we've lived here.)
Some people would just say, "Jump? How high?" and pay whatever fines or perform whatever duty we asked of them. Those people are generally nice neighbors who are honestly too busy or who don't realize they've goofed or who never received a copy of the rules in the first place. And those people, who might otherwise support community projects, frequently become quite bitter when they get an enforcement letter, particularly a nasty enforcement letter, let alone a high fine. So at the same time that the hoa would spend a fortune to make Deadbeat Neighbor mow the lawn, we would damage our alliance with Good Neighbor.
2. Local governments do less where a hoa exists.
Now let's imagine that the homeowner lets his lawn grow several feet high so that he violates the county health code. We call the county. Chances are, they won't bother enforcing it. They're stretched too thin; the tax base is too shallow. Someone's grass rarely rises to a level meriting county attention.
And even when the local government DOES try to enforce these codes, they can't always fix the problem. When the city of New Port Ritchie decided to levy large fines on code violators, they ended up with $1.4 million in levied fines and $100,000 in collected fines. One disabled resident owed $192,500 in fines for lawn maintenance; she couldn't pay it. The city put a lien on her property but couldn't foreclose because the home was her primary dwelling. And she couldn't afford to sell her house and move because of the lien, which far exceeded the value of her home. If fining doesn't solve problems for a city government, which has its own department of law enforcers, it's not likely to solve problems for a volunteer hoa.
Reduced services affect more than code enforcement. Examples:
- We have a problem with drivers speeding through our neighborhood and parking illegally in front of fire hydrants, stop signs and so on. But even though the county "owns" the roads, the sheriff's department doesn't have enough officers to regularly patrol our streets. We have to pay an off-duty officer $24/hour to patrol. Even then, the officers are reluctant to ticket minor offenses.
- When our new playground equipment was destroyed by a costly act of vandalism, we worried that the replacement equipment would meet the same fate. But the sheriff's department wouldn't patrol unless we paid them $24/hour. Our management company suggested that we install security videocameras so that we could maybe catch the vandals in the act. Alas, we cannot afford it.
- A group of young adults moved into a house owned by an absent parent and began throwing boisterous parties, the sort of parties that feature loud music, strewn trash, shouted obscenities, cars at all hours, etc. The long-suffering neighbors called the police. The police were told by the partiers that the reason they had moved "to the country" was so that they didn't have to curb their party noise. (Yes, they were morons.) The police then told the neighbors that it was "really" the hoa who had leverage over these kids. ??????? Just what was the hoa supposed to do? Send its volunteer board members to interrupt the parties every night? Hire an off-duty sheriff to interrupt the parties every night? Send a nasty letter and threaten . . . what? That the police would be called? Or perhaps we were supposed to fine the absent parent (illegally, since we don't have enough volunteers to create a violations committee) and hope that the parent would stop the parties from 1000 miles away. In the end, the hoa got lucky; the parent failed to pay the annual hoa dues. After thousands of dollars in additional attorney fees and interest, the parent finally paid up and sold the house. But if the parent had paid the $230 per year, those kids might be partying still.
- A homeowner opened an import transmission business in his garage, complete with gaudy sign. The noise and traffic caused numerous complaints; again, neighbors were advised that the hoa "really" had the authority to close down the business. This despite the fact that the business violated a county zoning ordinance. The hoa atty wrote nasty letters and after a couple of months and thousands of dollars in legal fees (again, not recoverable from the homeowner), the business was closed down. It's hard to see how it is better for us to have to pay a private attorney to close down a clearly illegal business in our community.
So there you have it--hoas let you pay more to receive fewer services. What a great invention!
And that's if the hoa board uses your resources wisely; you have no guarantee that they will. A very frugal friend just bought a condo that within two months levied a $20,000 special assessment on every owner for important repairs. Fortunately, my frugal friend had enough money in savings. Unfortunately, it turns out that the condo board had levied the assessment without ever seeking any bids! The money is currently in short-term cds while the board muses over how it will proceed. Who knows if the board's guess about the cost will fall anywhere near the mark? Meanwhile my friend's savings are earning low interest for the association rather than higher interest for her.
3. HOAs empower petty despots to hassle you over petty things.
Then there's the architectural review aspect of a hoa. Some people honestly like to live in neighborhoods where every home looks alike. I don't personally know any of them and I don't want to. (I assume they shop at WalMart and eat all their food from McDonalds.) Most hoas are empowered to restrict your paint color, your landscaping, your decision to screen your back porch, your storage of lawn equipment, your fence, your landscaping, your lawn ornaments, etc.
Some people believe these restrictions protect property values, which is demonstrably not true. For one thing, the rules are not written specifically for a given community, they're passed around from developer to developer. Our rules mention two builders, neither of which had anything to do with our community. It's unlikely that the exact same rules would protect property values everywhere; clearly, some developments have more long-term value than others.
If only six insipid pastels were attractive to buyers, homes in communities with different color schemes wouldn't sell as well as they do. Besides, fashions for house colors change just as other fashions do. If our hoa restricted people to the original paint colors (as a previous board did), our community would look dated sooner rather than later.
The same goes for fences. Fence technology has improved; vinyl fences are easier to maintain than wood, chain link fences have been supplanted by a stylish coated mesh that survives hurricanes a heck of a lot better. Following the original rules would--and did--create a community with a whole lotta yucky looking fences. Some of our common areas are now basically a stockade, bordered by the ugly 6' "privacy" fence. Yet the previous board argued that other fences would be WRONG; they would HURT our property values. How did they know this? Because otherwise, the rules wouldn't ban them.
"The rules must be right BECAUSE they are the rules" is a guiding tautology that quite appeals to neighborhood lawn ornament nazis.
Then there's the rule forbidding any planting in the county easement between the sidewalk and the street. Our former board harassed one neighbor for planting a couple of bushes there. True, the land technically isn't his and the county would rip out the plants if they needed to access utilities. Shortly before he planted those bushes, in fact, a cable company DID come through and rip up everyone's easement. But if he wanted to take the risk, what was the harm? "Oooooh," responded the former board. Plants in the easement will HURT property values. You know what? The county just recently finished planting trees in our easements, and one of the justifications for the streetside tree program is that easement plantings HELP property values.
Still, the "we like everything the same" McStepford Neighbors are big fans of hoas, and hoas do give them some authority, and some of them shoulder this authority with a little too much eagerness. Our previous board blithely issued fines for all kinds of imagined infractions, from "we don't like the style of your patio furniture" to "we don't like the frog statues in your front yard." (And for the record: no WAY do I want the hoa legislating against the neighbor's frog statues--my kids LOVE them.)
When my husband went to a meeting to complain about being fined $50 for breaking the nonexistent "white mailbox" rule, it was clear that many of the board members had forgotten that they were enforcing a particular set of written rules that had been filed with the county. They thought they could just make up the rules as they went along. I'm not kidding. One of the more obnoxious members (the one whom the hoa paid to do its taxes, btw) demanded, "Where did you get those rules? I've never seen them," and then dismissed my husband's complaint with the comment, "You're just being stubborn about this." Well, yeah. And you're just being a bully.
But what happens when Renegade Homeowner paints the house paisley? Enforcing those codes is just as difficult as when Deadbeat Neighbor doesn't mow the lawn.
4. Why I like hoas.
TO THE EXTENT THAT THEY BECOME GRASSROOTS ORGANIZATIONS, I LIKE HOAS. Our hoa provided the perfect structure from which to get our tree program going, for example. I'm hoping we can use the hoa to sponsor other projects that build community rather than poison it. But taking back your hoa requires a HUGE amount of work. It's important work (you're only one hoa election from disaster, folks). But it's lots of work, about as much fun as canvassing, which is to say, very little fun. Are you willing to put in that kind of effort? Because unless you are very lucky, that's what it will take for you to have a good experience when you're a homeowner in any moderately developed part of the U.S.
Some good sites that I found while (re)writing this post:
American Homeowners Resource Center: Lots of links plus late-breaking horror stories from around the country.
NoHOA.com: The name says it all.
Cyber Citizens for Justice: A Florida activist organization working for hoa reforms.
On the Commons: Website for a weekly radio show about living in "common interest developments" such as those governed by hoa
Thus endeth the essay. Thanks for reading.
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