Avoid buying in HOA neighborhoods (2014)
HOAs hate is a fascinating topic to me. Not because I care&#x2F;don&#x27;t care about HOAs themselves, but because it really shows how loud a vocal minority can be.<p>The usual narrative is the evil HOA trustees who enforce their selfish greedy wants on everyone else and rule with an iron fist. The reality though is that in most HOAs, they have very little discretionary power beyond what&#x27;s in the bylaws. What&#x27;s in the bylaws is agreed upon by the owners. If &quot;everyone hates being told what to do&quot;, it&#x27;s pretty simple to get the rules changed or to vote out the trustees. But it doesn&#x27;t happen. Why?<p>Generally one of three things<p>A) The inhabitants aren&#x27;t the owners and thus can&#x27;t change the rules. Ok, fair enough if that&#x27;s the situation, that&#x27;s going to suck.<p>B) People hate the rules, but they don&#x27;t hate them ENOUGH to go through the trouble of changing them, and some people who likes the rules are enforcing them. IMO ignoring rules you don&#x27;t like shouldn&#x27;t be an option (and is why we have so many bad laws at all levels of governments. If everyone who hates them got together to change them, not even the super rich could prevent it from happening).<p>C) The most common one from my experience: turns out a whole lot of people actually agree with the rules. All the talk of freedom, but that includes the right of consenting adults to come into a legal agreement about...stuff. As long as nothing they agree on is illegal to put in your contract, why shouldn&#x27;t they be allowed? If a bunch of people want to sign an agreement to reach a global maximum instead of a bunch of local maxima that make everyone miserable, why not?<p>Turns out not everyone is cool with the &quot;I do whatever I want and you do whatever you want&quot;, and &quot;let&#x27;s get together and make a compromise so we can both be a little happier&quot; is actually fairly popular too. And thus HOAs are a thing.<p>But I hear the reply already: &quot;In X area everything&#x27;s governed by HOAs! We have no choice!&quot;. Well, either change the rules (after all, if they&#x27;re THAT damn, it shouldn&#x27;t be too hard to get enough votes to get them changed), or buy elsewhere. We&#x27;re talking about buying here, so it implies a certain level of privilege, after all.