> There are people fighting their HOA, tooth and nail, because the HOA is enforcing their rules about signage, or giveaways, or something, and these people are even featured on the evening news and portrayed as "innocent HOA victim" when in fact, they're trying to illicitly run a business out of their garage and gin-up foot traffic for that business from passers-by in a SFH residential-zoned neighborhood.

Isn't this just taking the perspective of the HOA? Mixed use zoning is a completely reasonable policy. The status quo shouldn't be used for normative determinations. At which point you have busybody HOAs lobbying for restrictive residence-only zoning and then harassing sympathetic small business owners who are just trying to make a living.

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ButlerianJihad a day ago | parent [-]

An HOA is, by definition, your ordinary neighbors. And by the principles of “small government” and subsidiarity, the HOA is tasked with establishing rules and guidelines that help make good neighbors live in harmony, such as uniform aesthetics, prohibited activities, and so forth. These rules are otherwise handled by landlords or municipal codes.

It is really about conformity and keeping the peace, so that the Clark Griswolds and Gladys Kravitzes of the world cannot run roughshod over the others.

Mixed-use zoning is perfectly cromulent, but I am not referring to mixed-usedl zoning. These are large SFH residences with ample lots in suburban developments.

This sort of entrepreneurship is fine if you’re a web designer, or traveling electrician, but many times they instead flout all kinds of boundaries such as carrying the proper business licenses, parking/disabled accessibility, insurance, signage etc.

Americans in suburban and residential areas have a certain expectation that their neighborhoods should be free of obvious commercial enterprises, because that is why we invented strip malls!

	▲	AnthonyMouse 20 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> And by the principles of “small government” and subsidiarity, the HOA is tasked with establishing rules and guidelines that help make good neighbors live in harmony, such as uniform aesthetics, prohibited activities, and so forth. These rules are otherwise handled by landlords or municipal codes. The trouble here is that the principle of subsidiarity doesn't lead to the HOA making these decisions from both ends. For many of them the HOA isn't local enough and the decision should be up to the individual property owners, e.g. they should have nothing to say about you putting solar panels on your roof or operating a business that isn't meaningfully disruptive to the neighbors. For the others, the rules have regional/national implications for things like housing affordability and small business viability and the HOA is subject to perverse incentives. Each suburb wants a different one to host the strip mall, with the result that there is an insufficiency of land zoned for dense construction and mixed use, and then it requires a higher level of government to act because too many of the local ones refuse to allow any at all.