There is no reason to stomach an HOA, even if they are solving real problems. If there are real problems that need solving the municipality can handle it or a local cooperative can in some special cases; these can exist without any enforcement or review board authority and they can handle everything else you'd need for a community/centrally managed for a neighborhood.

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BeetleB 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The idea is supposed to be that an HOA can be more efficient in taking care of problems. The municipality can be underfunded, etc, and take a long time to solve a problem.

In practice, HOAs generally don't do anything useful, though.

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firesteelrain 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Our neighborhood actually saves the County money for property they don’t have to maintain (drainage/swales/mowing/etc) and provides community things like tennis courts, basketball courts, pools, playgrounds etc that the County doesn’t have to provide or maintain. It’s also cheaper for the HOA to do it

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sheepscreek an hour ago | parent [-]

> It’s also cheaper for the HOA to do it

How?

	▲	firesteelrain 4 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		HOAs have direct control over spending and don’t need to meet the same bidding standards.
	▲	margalabargala an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The project can either be managed by a paid county employee in exchange for money or a volunteer HOA tyrant I mean member in exchange for power.

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wat10000 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That’s always the pitch when privatizing government functions. It rarely works out.

	▲	Gibbon1 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Corruption that will get you sent to prison if your working for a muni is legal if you're running an HOA.

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unshavedyak 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In my local area HOAs are apparently required by the city. We manage ours, a very small HOA, and recently were in discussion about removal. If we remove the HOA, the cost for each house will likely go up significantly because there's work needed to manage a detention pond that the city requires we manage. If the HOA dissolves, they city takes it over but charges much more for the same management.

Feels really odd, no one in our area actually wants an HOA. Yet i think people are going to flip when their HOA dues are suddenly required by the city and at much steeper rates (i imagine 2-4x the cost, our dues are quite small atm).

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l1tany11 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

That’s the entire point of HOAs though; so that the city can offload those costs onto another organization AND collect the same revenue they would otherwise. At least where I live, it’s well understood among developers that the zoning and permitting process is how this is enforced.

The real, completely arbitrary thing that makes housing expensive is zoning. There is research on this. Zoning, especially in the long term, has enormous effects, including on things seemingly unrelated such as reducing construction productivity, reducing competition among construction firms (fewer contractors) and reducing housing supply (supply vs demand).

I think people generally don’t appreciate how restrictive zoning effectively is. It’s not just what you can build, but how big it is, layout things, and can even reach into aesthetics etc.