• socsa@piefed.social
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    3 days ago

    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.

  • Impractical_Island@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    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.

    • GreenKnight23@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      but how will you use hot sauce on your bunghole? you’ve got you stretch out the hole first before you peel your banana.

      • Impractical_Island@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        These are not mutually exclusive. You can dick a dickaroo in many a fashion. I have seen videos but do not possess them for I am a law abiding citizen now.

  • modus@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    I’m surprised she didn’t drive her SUV. At least you’re getting her some exercise.

    • tazeycrazy@feddit.uk
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      3 days ago

      The primary goal of most HOAs is house price. It should be livability and repair of public resources.

      • matlag@sh.itjust.works
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        2 days ago

        From outside, with all the stories we read, it looks like the primary goal of HOA is to give some folks power they can abuse.

    • Equinox1289@sh.itjust.works
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      3 days ago

      If it was actually socialist and not just authoritarian it would be a housing coöp. HOAs are only aligned to the will of developers and people using housing as a form of investment.

    • IamMoonPie@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      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.

  • Gaslov@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    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.

    • lightnsfw@reddthat.com
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      3 days ago

      As if the houses they’re slapping together in all these hoa developments aren’t going to be falling apart in 15 years.

      • Gaslov@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        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.

        • Eheran@lemmy.world
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          2 days ago

          Noooo but HOAs are only there to stop black people!! Seriously some people are crazy. But still, even when you consciously buy such a house, you can still bitch about too crazy HOAs like with TO.

  • TrackenDaKracken@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    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.

    • boonhet@sopuli.xyz
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      3 days ago

      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.

    • bthest@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      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.

      • socsa@piefed.social
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        3 days ago

        The problem is that the probability of any given HOA becoming militant approaches 100% over infinity time.

      • lightnsfw@reddthat.com
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        3 days ago

        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.

  • toynbee@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    Any time I’ve sought to purchase a home, I’ve told my realtor that “no HOA” was a mandate.

    • Peck@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      HOA is required in my town and all neighboring towns for so new construction which encompasses 80% of all housing

  • davetortoise@reddthat.com
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    3 days ago

    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?

    • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today
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      2 days ago

      An HOA can literally take over your home if you owe them fines, even if the fines are wrong. They can evict you, sell your home, and keep all the money, and there isn’t a thing you can do to stop them. There are countless stories of HOAs getting vindictive toward a specific homeowner, and targeting them for foreclosure.

      It should be illegal for anyone to take your PAID-OFF house for taxes, HOA fees/fines, or any other reason. The government and the HOA are infinite, and will be there after the homeowner dies or sells, and they can get their money then. Nobody should be able to take your house away for any reason, or there is no such thing as home ownership.

    • _stranger_@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      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.)

    • CandleTiger@programming.dev
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      3 days ago

      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.

    • OfCourseNot@fedia.io
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      3 days ago

      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…

    • gloog@fedia.io
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      3 days ago

      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.

    • talentedkiwi@sh.itjust.works
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      3 days ago

      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.

      • davetortoise@reddthat.com
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        3 days ago

        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?

        • cantstopthesignal@sh.itjust.works
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          3 days ago

          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.

        • nimble@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          3 days ago

          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

        • talentedkiwi@sh.itjust.works
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          3 days ago

          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.

    • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      HOAs are a mixed bag. Many are awful, but deed restrictions can also be beneficial if the rules are reasonable and the buyers are aware of them. This is especially true if you live outside of a City and don’t have code enforcement.

      My parents now live in the county without an HOA, and the neighboring property is an abandoned collapsed house full of trash and surrounded by decades of dead brush. It’s a massive fire hazard that’s full of pests…

      On the flip side, their old HOA when they lived in the suburbs when I was younger freaked out if we did an oil change on our cars or had the wrong color paint on our window trim.

      • dkppunk@piefed.social
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        2 days ago

        And unfortunately, we only really hear about the bad ones. The HOA in my neighborhood is actually pretty good. The dues mostly go towards maintenance in the canyons between rows of houses. This maintenance is necessary because I live in an area that is higher risk for wildfires. They pull old brush, keep the waterline working, and stuff like that.

    • tamal3@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      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!

    • 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.

    • Malica@lemmy.zip
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      3 days ago

      There isn’t choice in a lot of places. Every new development since at least the 90s has an hoa.

    • chuckleslord@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      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.

      • lazynooblet@lazysoci.al
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        3 days ago

        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

        • ayyy@sh.itjust.works
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          3 days ago

          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).

          • mushroommunk@lemmy.today
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            3 days ago

            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.

              • mushroommunk@lemmy.today
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                3 days ago

                The road outside my house now is pretty typical for everywhere I’ve lived (five states and counting). It’s two lanes wide, so let’s say 25 feet across (pretty sure it’s not actually that wide but we’ll go with it). One lane goes to neighbor across the street, one to me, so 12.5 feet by the width of my yard. It’s been a while since I’ve measured my full yard, but it’s somewhere around 60 feet I’d reckon. We’ll go with a house that’s wider rather than deeper for maximizing road space and round up to 100. That’s 1250 feet squared for the road, or roughly 0.03 acres.

                If you added up every tiny little bit of everything you could maybe add 0.1 acres with the neighborhoods that have entry signs or something, but I really don’t see how you’d get up to an acre. And certainly most people aren’t talking about lot sizing doing all this extra math. There’s certainly inefficiencies in urban sprawl that come into play though.

                • redjard@reddthat.com
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                  3 days ago

                  I was thinking someone might have gone and simply taken the area of some suburb and divided by number of houses.
                  If you do this at a large enough scale you’d also catch stores and parking lots.

    • CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de
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      3 days ago

      “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.

    • Manalith@midwest.social
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      3 days ago

      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.

      • dream_weasel@sh.itjust.works
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        3 days ago

        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.

        • aeiou@piefed.social
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          3 days ago

          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.

        • itsprobablyfine@sh.itjust.works
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          3 days ago

          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.

          • dream_weasel@sh.itjust.works
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            3 days ago

            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.