HOA revenge
(midwest.social)
Go a step further. Report fake violations for your home constantly until they stop checking anything. Now you are above the law. Then start doing fake reports for everyone else until they shut down the anonymous form. Now you are free.
Just DDoS all their online crap
Kyle is my kind of kin. I love being petty. ;)
For the most capitalist country in the world, its neighborhoods sure are suspiciously soviet.
That’s because for every “instance” they charge an assload of ridiculous fees. It’s not Soviet at all. It’s just another form of capitalism.
I'm surprised she didn't drive her SUV. At least you're getting her some exercise.
What, and get anonymously reported for illegally parking on the street?
I'll never understand why some people choose to live in minimum security prison.
It's not an easy decision for a lot of people. I struggled to buy a house for 10 years, partly because HOAs are the name of the game in most areas in the US. One time we got all the way to due diligence when we found out that we couldn't even hang our clothes outside on a clothesline! So we said no. That was five years in to the search, and it was another five years before we finally found something.
But, that was ten wasted years of my life, and I can understand someone making a different decision than I did. Hell, I wish WE had made a different decision!
There isn't choice in a lot of places. Every new development since at least the 90s has an hoa.
I'm an old guy, and got my entire life I've said the same. When buying the two prior houses, no HOA was a hard requirement. But my wife and I split up later year - had to sell the house and split the money. She moved away, but I wanted to stay in the area where my friends and family are. So what I could afford was a condo, and all condos have HOAs.
Mine actually seems fine so far. I almost wish they enforced the rules more, but none of the rules seem egregious. And since the neighborhood/complex has common facilities like a pool and a meeting room, it's kind of unavoidable having some common body to be responsible for them.
New developments are more likely to be HOAs, as city governments realized that they can't afford the money bomb that is car-based infrastructure to support single-family housing. So they foist those duties onto the HOAs, essentially making small municipal governments for every new housing development.
So.... you can avoid them for now, but only if you live in developed cities.
How do countries do this without widespread HOA equivalents? In the UK we have similar arrangements for shared spaces but not anywhere near the comical level of control on private land as in the US
It is my understanding that suburban UK housing is still much more densely developed than US-style suburbs where having a few acres per house is normal (but makes the cost of roads unsustainable).
Most suburban lots in the US are definitely not an acre. Census Bureau Survey of Construction data says it's closer to 0.25 acres or less per house as of 2023. Most suburban sprawlscapes around me are closer to 0.15 acres per house.
Especially in the southwest, like Arizona, they're doing shared side yard nonsense to cram more mcmansions.
Very, very basic people who are more concerned with their property values than having a hobby.
I can understand it for condos where you functionally own an apartment, that way it can pay for building/grounds maintenance, but if you've got a street where none of the houses are connected, then I dont see a point, there's no benefit beyond everyone's grass looking pretty uniform and no one having outlandish holiday decorations (which, where's the fun in that). Actually now that I think about, I'm setting up an HOA who's only rule is you can't put up Christmas decor before Thanksgiving.
There are all kinds of things people can do that you might not necessarily want from your neighbors even if your houses aren't connected especially outside city limits.
Mundane things like as neighbor with german rottweilers walks his small horses off leash but doesn't pick up their poop. Maybe they only sort of listen to him and like to chase your kids or small pets.
Maybe one of the people decides they will park a trailer on the street for their mother in law for the summer that makes it hard for you to see backing out of your driveway. Or put 4 "antique" cars on cinder blocks in their front yard to work on but can't find the time and now there are rabbits that live under them and eat your garden.
Or your neighbor get chickens or small livestock next door that come alive every morning at 5a and their son decides to take up the bagpipes to play every night at 11p.
And we of course have to remember all these neighbors move in 3 years after you, and now you can't even move because nobody else wants to live next to Rottweiler guy, bagpipes guy, or the guy from hoarders storing cars on his lawn.
This is why it makes a lot of sense to have a small HOA with a handful of rules, but it still doesn't make sense to have someone with a ruler come measure your grass.
My neighborhood of over 150 lots has been terrorized by ONE SINGLE DUDE. Almost everyone is at least reasonably considerate, but it only takes one who isn't technically breaking the law to make everything kind of suck. As our local sheriff's department likes to say, there's no law against being a bad neighbor.
All of these things are just against the law where I am.
there’s no law against being a bad neighbor
There is in many (most?) cities - every one of these is against city ordinance where I live. It's better these sort of things are handled by the city; applied to many more people it's harder to pull grass-measuring or other shenanigans.
rabbits that live under them and eat your garden.
Rabbits do not need cars to eat your garden, furry little buggers are perfectly happy with a hole anywhere in the ground. The excuses against 'car guy' are always the weirdest, especially the HOAs that don't even let you do basic oil changes yourself.
I see you read over the part where I explicitly said "outside city limits".
Seems I did.
To your point though, inside city limits the value proposition for an HOA is vanishingly small.
Yeah it sounds like we don't need a whole bunch of rules but rather a less formal arbitration process. Like, a community council that can settle disputes even if there's not a law being broken if one party is acting unreasonably. Of course, the loser could then elevate to an actual court if they feel their rights were/are violated.
No punishments, no fines, no lawyers, just a mediator to help settle minor disputes whose decisions are somewhat binding. Ideally several individuals that are elected by the community.
That would be a great way of doing it, honestly.
Edit: It was nice to have some guidelines in case you've never been a homeowner before though I will say.
For the same reason people choose to pay 50 % of their income to their landlord.
For the greater good.
Crusty jugglers
“Small government” people want “freedom” so they eschew normal things like bylaws, but then the problems with that appear - whether it’s legitimate or Karen - and the control freaks in the neighborhood form up a HOA to deal with it, instead of offloading it to a (theoretically) uninvolved third party.
And now it’s the default way to enforce community standards.
HOAs are idiotic. I was president (forced, it was a rotation basis) in one. First thing I did was convene the assembly outside, at 13:00 in the summer, no chairs. The meeting went from the previous 2 1/2 h. to 15 minutes. I'm going to install 3 heat pump compressors on the side wall of the building, which 2 or 3 Sandra Karens make furious noise about. I'm preparing a legal nuke, created with A"I", detailing every single thing that protrudes from their wall, down to the milimiter. Probably wouldn't hold up in court, but if you ask a text generator to act as a vicious lawyer to draft a text for this with enough detail, they can whip up very scary texts. If they try to making me take them down, I'm going to hit them with notices to take down EVERYTHING that protrudes from the exterior, including planters, flags, and even fucking door knockers.
Fuck HOAs
So you became the shitty HOA president that everyone complains about to what, show everyone that you're tough? I'm confused.
Are we supposed to be sympathetic to this comment? Add in AI bullshit if that wasn't already enough. Yikes.
Why would so many people upvote this comment? So odd.
Lemmy hivemind circlejerk: Grrrr, HOAs bad!
If you really wanted to do something, then dissolve the hoa entirely.
Sounds like the HOA still couldn’t prevent bad neighbors
European here - what powers does a HOA actually have? Surely they can't make you leave or anything? Are their fines actually legally enforcable? What if you just dont pay them?
It depends entirely on the location. My HOA is like 100 a year and it pays specifically for a security guard, a camera, and a few yearly neighborhood events.
This means if someone in the neighborhood decides to park an RV in their front yard and let grass grow 6 ft tall, it's up to their actual neighbors to go and knock on their door and tell them to buddy that looks like shit.
Other neighborhoods with amenities (like pools, tennis courts, country clubs, private security, secret police, drones, etc) have much higher fees to pay for those things.
Enforcement depends on the context you sign when you buy the house/condo/etc.
If you'd like a hilarious description of exactly where this system logically concludes, read like the first 2 chapters of "Snow Crash"
(If this sounds exactly like taxes paying for public infrastructure, it absolutely is, but with one difference: it encourages the absolutely worst people in the neighborhood with the most time to make everything their business. Eventually whatever their prevailing bigotry is bubbles into existence in the form of harassment like OP describes.)
They can charge you fines, and if you don’t pay them they can put a lien on your house.
So no they can’t kick you out, but they can make it so that you’re unable to leave without paying them.
https://nypost.com/2026/09/15/real-estate/arizona-man-loses-475k-home-over-977-hoa-debt/
Sorry for the nypost link
I'm pretty sure they can legally take your house away from you.
You mean the house you own?
Cause you don't own it in that case.
They have the power to charge fines and place liens if you don't pay them
I'm just the messenger. I won't live in one if those passive aggressive hellholes.
They can, and likely will, put a lien on your house which makes it harder to sell. Probably other avenues to fuck up your life too. Around me it's really hard to find a house without an HOA. It's probably like 90% of the market, or I triple my commute.
It's legally binding with the purchase of the house so there's no going around it.
But how can they have a legal right to put a lien on it? Do they have some kind of legal claim to the land or property? What's stopping any other organisation from doing this?
Because we live in a dystopic hellhole
It's part of the paperwork you sign when you buy the house. It's essentially saying the can do that if you don't pay fines. Luckily my HOA is pretty lenient about things, but still sucks. I'd rather dissolve it and remove the restrictions.
Hm. How nasty. And I'm assuming there's some sort of provision that you have to sell on the house under the same terms?
Yep
They are part of the covenants, restrictions, and conditions that "run with the land." They are a more organized way of controlling the aesthetic of the neighborhood than traditional covenants. In practice they are used to harass people and were originally used to discriminate.
When house was built they were set up as HOA irrevocably. Or at some point the neighborhood wanted an HOA and current owners irrevocably joined HOA. So when you buy the house then the HOA sticks to it. That gives them legal right to issue you fines if you break their rules, and if those fines go unpaid they could place the lien
Yes, the fines are legally enforceable because (generally) you have to agree to them in order to purchase the house - joining the HOA and being bound by its rules either literally or functionally becomes a permanent part of the deed to the property. There isn't a legally viable argument that you only signed that part under duress because you could have chosen to live somewhere else instead. You could technically get a like-minded group of neighbors to run for the HOA leadership roles and eliminate the petty rules, but the rider contract to the deed still exists.
We have hoa-equivalents in Europe, tho. In my country they're called something like 'owners community', and they can even take your home if your debt with them gets too big. But I don't think they can fine you directly, the have to sue you, and the rules aren't usually as insane as in the States, but they can ban you from installing the windows you want, putting up a flag, hang your clothes to dry on the front...
They can be very powerful, certainly when hijacked by lawyers, John Oliver did a bit on it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrizmAo17Os
It's incredible, and horrendous.
Land of the free or something
Free to be assholes.
That's why they vote the way they do
They want to hurt people, and to be allowed to hate openly with impunity
It took me a long time to come to terms with this as a European living here. I feel like I'm in a zombie movie surrounded by angry, bully zombies.
I cannot understand people voluntarily moving to the US
I'm working on getting someone OUT of that festering shit-hole
I wish I could go too. Kids and I have European passports. They don't want to leave and I can't leave them here, so here I stay.
Any time I've sought to purchase a home, I've told my realtor that "no HOA" was a mandate.
HOA is required in my town and all neighboring towns for so new construction which encompasses 80% of all housing
HOAs are bulllshit. It’s my fuckin house. If I want to ignore the fuckin lawn, that’s my perogative.
Most HOAs have a contract with a lawn care/snow removal service.
lol no they fuckin don’t
Most HOAs are to keep black people from living there. Unless they’re one of “ the good ones”
Every one I've seen has this because they're too busy doing "gods work" to be bothered with basic maintenance of the property.
Just make sure majority of your neighbors agree and change the rule in a meeting. Easy peasy.
Fortunately, my HOA isn't bad at all. My money mostly goes to the landscapers, who do a pretty good job with everyone's front yard. Water is included. The main complaint happens in the spring when some people's grass turns green before other's and they complain that the HOA isn't watering the grass enough. A couple of weeks, every spring.
Also, people complain about things that the HOA has no control over, like cars on the street, or issues at the parks, or sidewalks and roads, or fence and wall height allowances/limits.
that the HOA isn’t watering the grass enough.
Grass shouldn't be watered. If it needs to be watered, you're growing the wrong thing for your climate.
Mine apparently is abandoned. Dude who owned the road died 20-30 years ago and people just stopped bothering with it years before I got here. Cheapest dirt on the market and I doubt all the old people here are planning on selling anyway. So everyone just does whatever now.
No angry words, problems or disputes with anyone in 8 years.
It really isn't bad unless you have a militant one which I will never understand.
The problem is that the probability of any given HOA becoming militant approaches 100% over infinity time.
So does the probability that you die and the earth is consumed by the sun, both arguably more certain and a bigger concern.
I don't own the place but the one I live in won't even let you put up a privacy fence. Only those shitty little metal rail fences. Can't go in the backyard without everyone on the block seeing into your business and all the dogs on the street bark at each other constantly. They also don't like pools for some reason but that doesn't really affect me.
You should also anonymously report whichever house is farthest away from wherever she's walking from.
Report every single house, like pressing all the buttons on an elevator.
We call this "Pam Pong."
chaotic ~~evil~~ good
I don't think this fits on alignment charts. It's using the rules (lawful), but incorrectly, and it's harming a person (evil), but to damage a bad institution (good).
It's knowingly using the rules to inconvenience (not harm) a person in protest of their stupid rules. Sound pretty chaotic good to me.
SIX ENTIRE MINUTES OF FORCED TRASHCAN VIEWING!? You monster.
Some of my neighbors keep them out for days. No one cares. We all have better things to do with our time.
I threw up just thinking about this.
Won't somebody think of the children?!
But also where else is it supposed to go? If you cant see it, neither can bin people.
Typically, you're allowed to bring it out to the curb after a certain hour the night before collection day and you need to get it back out of view by a certain hour after the garbagemen come through.
What a stupid fucking rule. Unless it's something like 18 hours on either side of pickup it's interfering in someone's schedule and regardless who cares
Is this my house or a hotel?
Fire ants and ground hornets are allowed as pets right?
Land of the free.
Ikr. I live in Australia and I can't imagine having to deal with some other jerk micromanaging your front yard.
HOAs are filled with people with mental illness that force an anti-social relationship with all of their neighbours. It's kinda of like a social prison with Karen wardens.
Trespass the bitch and keep reporting.
See, this is this I would do in my early twenties, before the MKULTRA, but I would lure women so I could masturbate to them in my window.
Golly gee, the least they could do is post a link to the anonymous reporting form and Sandra's address.
Hi , iam Sandra !, let the hell fall on you !!!
You know, there are a lot of very inexpensive places without HOAs you could live in, but they might not be up to your standards, go figure.
Well that just isn't fucking true. XD
As if the houses they're slapping together in all these hoa developments aren't going to be falling apart in 15 years.
You sound like someone who has zero experience with HOA's
I don't think you know what someone without HOA experience looks like. I've had houses in HOA regulated neighborhoods, village regulated neighborhoods, and unregulated, and I definitely prefer the village and HOA.
This shouldn't have to be said, but stop moving to regulated neighborhoods and then bitching about an authority you voluntarily accepted. Do you have agency? Of course you do. But face the facts, regulated neighborhoods are nice. They are desirable. And so you want to move there but then have your feelings hurt that you're not allowed to shit the place up. Boo god damn hoo.
