171–180 of 275 posts
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I specifically chose my neighborhood based on the HOA. I like that every yard has a lawn and that I don’t have to listen to neighbors chickens. I like knowing no one is allowed to paint giant murals on the siding or drill for oil on their front lawn. The only way to guarantee things like this don’t happen is with some sort of rules in place. If that means I hate freedom, oh well.
I wish lawns produced something useful. Half of the grass clippings in my neighborhood end up going out with the trash on Monday night. If only they could be used to produce food or fuel locally.
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Yeah, I get people wanting HOAs to maintain property values (Though I am not one of them, I chose a neighborhood with no HOA on purpose). I don't get people who genuinely care for its own sake about their neighbors lawn having weeds. Or the house having an unusual paint color. Who cares??
Weed seeds blow across property lines and create problems for other people. It creates an undue burden on those that want to maintain a garden or other curated flora.
You know weeds are only weeds if you don't want them, right? Everywhere else they're just wild plants.
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Yeah I had a neighbor who decided it was time to open his in home auto repair shop. Fortunately the HoA board didn’t look kindly on it for a variety of reasons/ issues. He eventually moved. I hope he found a good place with a big garage and fewer neighbors to do that thing. Same with the rental party house (before the days of air bnb(but same issues)).
Aren't those cases covered by zoning laws?
There was a bit of danger in all this expansion. The look of utter horror on my Dad's and Uncle's face when we turned off all the breakers and the stove was still on makes me laugh but was deadly serious at the time. Fixing that was a bit of an adventure. Dad and Uncle traced every wire in the damn house and I learned some new insults.
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I really don’t se why this is a thing for front yards either. Growing vegetables are just as pretty as a lawn, and even if you don’t think so, surely productive use of the land ought to take priority. I find it so strange that such restrictions only seem to exist in the US, where there is normally so much emphasis on individual freedom.
I've often wondered how much overlap there is on people who live in an HOA and people who are opposed to government regulation. I realize government regulation isn't quite the same as HOA regulations, but it's amusing to me how extreme some HOAs are (grass a certain length, no service vehicles, etc) and how the people that live in them are often politically conservative.
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What the author is describing are rules of homeowner's associations and other similar organizations. Individuals freely enter agreements with homeowner's associations which dictate land use. One is also free to choose to live in a place not governed by these rules. But, they are not the law of the land and they do not implicate a lack of freedom in the U.S. relative to other countries. Its quite silly to suggest as m…
There are some issues with the word "freely" because in many cities all new construction is HOA-encumbered. So you have the choice between new construction with an HOA and old (quite possibly run-down) and no HOA. That's not a free choice, it's Hobson's choice. It's about as free as entering into an arbitration agreement. You freely decide to get yourself a cellphone or credit card, and there aren't any on the market…
“Many cities” and “all new construction” are going to need serious citations. If your lens is through big home builders, then it looks like that but it’s completely false.
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> it seems that those homeovner associations are on level of North Korea and Soviet Russia The HOA is an agreement that is designed to keep a neighborhood from going downhill by residents parking on the street, or turning their yard into a parking lot, or from painting their house some atrocious color. As normally designed, they are little more than a codification of "don't be a jerk." The problem comes when people g…
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> people absolutely don't have freedom when it comes to accepting HOA terms Of course they do. If you don't like income tax, move to WA. If you don't like sales tax, move to OR. (If you like them both, move to CA!). These choices have inherent compromises. If you don't like HOAs, choose a different neighborhood. Again, inherent compromises. But freedom of movement is guaranteed to all (non-incarcerated) US citizens.…
Freedom of movement is only one kind of freedom. Freedom of growing your own carrot on your own property is another. Just don't say that you Americans are more free than other nations. Because you are simply not.
But your example is shit, because Americans are free to move a place without an HOA (I’m in one).
Somehow, while we were all busy debating for or against this or that political view, we, common people, lost control of more and more of our existence.
We lost control of the food we eat, the kind of houses we live in (as this article explains), the way we invest our money, our work schedules, our means of production, our means of transportation (and more).
Saying this, immediately triggers alarm bells (ah! He is saying that buildings should not be regulated, he must be a libertarian right winger! Oh! He says we need to own the means of production? He's obviously a communist!) and this prevents us from discussing many of the things that really matter.
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> I want you, dear reader, to set aside all the squirrelly feelings you may have about the political Left or Right. Perhaps you hate the evils of Big Government or the evils of Corporate Capitalism. Maybe you like cities. Maybe you don’t. Maybe you like the kinds of people who live in them. Maybe you don’t. Maybe you like places that are a bit messy. Maybe you need a place that’s orderly and tidy. That’s not the point I’m making here.
> Look at these images of the Summerlin West development on the far edge of Las Vegas. The scale is massive and the same dynamics are at work. Everything about this place is enormous and predicated on vast amounts of institutional complexity and debt. Somehow, as a society, we’ve drifted from ordinary people being able to build their own homes on a cash basis in an interactive iterative way, to these immense hyper elaborate habitats. You may not aspire to live in a small underground home that takes years to complete. The Summerlin West homes may be better in many ways. But there are trade offs involved. Both individuals and the larger society have agreed to a set of interlocking delicate systems that are simultaneously highly effective and spectacularly vulnerable to disruption. That’s my point.