> to filter out the riffraff who can’t afford larger homes.
When I was poor, I just wanted a home I could afford in a safe neighborhood. Now that I have money, I just want poor people to be homeless.
/mockery
Grandpa’s Basement House
61–70 of 275 posts
Re: Grandpa’s Basement House
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I bought my first house, I purposefully avoided any neighborhood with an HOA because of all the internet scare mongering I had heard over the years. After ten years of one neighbor parking cars on their lawn, another growing more weeds than blades of grass, and another with 8 vehicles parked along the street I was done. When I bought my second house I specifically wanted an HOA. After another 6 years, I couldn’t…
For the first two I just can't get that worked up over it, and for the last one it's the use of shared reasource (the street) that bothers me.
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??
Re: Grandpa’s Basement House
#63> to filter out the riffraff who can’t afford larger homes. When I was poor, I just wanted a home I could afford in a safe neighborhood. Now that I have money, I just want poor people to be homeless. /mockery
Residential zoning is just so wrong. It’s trendy on the left to say it’s “racist” and it is that, but it’s also classist and elitist and WASP supremacist (e.g. banning multigenerational families, which are common among both Hispanics and lower-tier whites).
I live in a pre-zoning code suburb in Maryland. The current minimum lot size is 20,000 square feet. Our house and most of the neighboring houses are on 2,900 square foot lots. At least on this side of the neighborhood, nobody tattles on each other for doing unpermitted work. The result is real diversity and a tightly packed community. (Though as housing prices increase, our neighborhood, being so close to DC, is under threat from PMCs.)
Re: Grandpa’s Basement House
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
For the first two I just can't get that worked up over it, and for the last one it's the use of shared reasource (the street) that bothers me.
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??
> I don't get people who genuinely care for its own sake about their neighbors lawn having weeds.
Certain types of invasive plans are noxious, outright poisonous, encourage hay fever, or just spread so fast that they can end up destroying neighbor's yards as well.
Plants don't obey property lines.
Edit: Unkempt yards can also be breeding ground for pests. From mosquitoes in still water to hoards of rats. Most people don't want to put up with those styles of annoyances that are trivially avoidable if everyone in the area cares just a little.
Re: Grandpa’s Basement House
#65Re: Grandpa’s Basement House
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've never heard of anything like that. Outside of HOAs, most regulations we see about the front are length of grass, what can and can't be done at the easement, public health issues, and maybe laws about invasive plant species. My wife used to work at a company that codified these laws, and she didn't know of anything either.
My HOA defines the acceptable types of trees, plants, and shrubs that can be planted. I don’t know if vegetables are restricted, but you cannot plant anything you want. This is common in colorado.
My HOA prohibits any vegetable or fruit plants, except heirloom tomatoes. So I can guess somebody on the board has a particular hobby.
Re: Grandpa’s Basement House
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Those kinds of folk need representation the most. An understandable sentiment. How much are you willing to pay for it? If you have a $1.5 million mortgage and that loon shows up next door and paints their house purple, your house might lose $300,000 in value. Same with the other neighbors, who also pay mortgages but aren’t as compassionate as you. What happens when your spouse gets a sudden offer to relocate and yo…
Shocking how quickly peoples opinions change on this stuff when an eccentric next door can lower the value of their own investments
Since they paid their money to buy the property, they can paint their house whatever color they damn well please, IMO.
Re: Grandpa’s Basement House
#68The idea of HOAs having any kind of say feels so undemocratic, but not in a standard way. We should not tolerate purely popular democracies. We allow representative democracies, and part of that public contract is for our leaders to represent all those in their constituency, not just those who voted for them. That means those in the minority. The crazy guy growing gourds instead of a lawn. The loon with the purple ho…
When I bought my first house, I purposefully avoided any neighborhood with an HOA because of all the internet scare mongering I had heard over the years. After ten years of one neighbor parking cars on their lawn, another growing more weeds than blades of grass, and another with 8 vehicles parked along the street I was done. When I bought my second house I specifically wanted an HOA. After another 6 years, I couldn’t…
The road example I get, but why do you care what other people do on their property?
We bought our house in 2016, next to an old tear down house. (I’m talking about plants growing inside because the roof doesn’t keep the water out.) Recently someone bought the house, tore it down, and built a million dollar house in its place. The other day, he gets into a fight with my wife—over various things, but among them the fact that he’s mad we won’t clean our porch. I told him that he’s the idiot who built a million dollar house next to people who were happy living next to a tear down for years.
Now before, I felt a little guilty for keeping the pool toys out there all year, but now I’m definitely not going to put them away.
Re: Grandpa’s Basement House
#69> Growing vegetables on what should be a lawn is verboten in many locations, if not by the government than by private association bylaws. So again, USA is country with most freedom? Freedom™, but you can't grow vegetables on your own property. Or you will be punished for having too long grass. Lmao
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 think HOAs are an elegant way to segregate the population into "people who want to live under HOAs" and "people who would hate to live under HOAs".
Nobody is likely to be happy when these two groups have to live next to each other, so it's an elegant solution to sort the population into more compatible subsets. Everybody wins.
Re: Grandpa’s Basement House
#70The idea of HOAs having any kind of say feels so undemocratic, but not in a standard way. We should not tolerate purely popular democracies. We allow representative democracies, and part of that public contract is for our leaders to represent all those in their constituency, not just those who voted for them. That means those in the minority. The crazy guy growing gourds instead of a lawn. The loon with the purple ho…
When I bought my first house, I purposefully avoided any neighborhood with an HOA because of all the internet scare mongering I had heard over the years. After ten years of one neighbor parking cars on their lawn, another growing more weeds than blades of grass, and another with 8 vehicles parked along the street I was done. When I bought my second house I specifically wanted an HOA. After another 6 years, I couldn’t…
Some of you might enjoy the X-Files episode about an HOA with a sinister side.