Florida's HOAs and condo associations are making the housing crisis worse

One example is Musk Thistle. It grows extremely rapidly, reproduces at a rate that's unbelievable, and is very difficult to kill. In this heavily farmed region, a few of them growing in a roadside ditch can turn into tens/hundreds of thousands of them within a year. Not only do they outcompete just about any other plant including crops, but they have incredibly sharp barbs that injure livestock.

In publicly owned spaces or abandoned fields/lots, the county has people that searches for them and sprays them with a herbicide. If they're spotted on your private land, usually they'll notify you that you have X days to cut them down (before they flower and seed) or they'll come do it whether you want them to or not. Some counties will send a bill for this, some fund it from property taxes.

If you haven't lived in an area where they vigorously grow it sounds like a huge overreaction, but left uncontrolled because one neighbor isn't taking care of it, it can become impossible to keep it out of your yard. According to wikipedia, a single plant can produce 10,000 seeds that disperse through the wind and remain viable for decades in the soil. Even the desire to not have a painful rapidly reproducing weed in your yard aside, they can do incredible damage to cropland.

It's a shame though, it's a kinda pretty flower. Imagine a vivid pink sunflower.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carduus_nutans

Who else is going to fix the roads? The county and state aren't going to, they don't own it. We seal the asphalt every 5-8 years and repave every 15-20 (I've only lived her 10 years, so those are very rough guesses).

Wrt weeds, I suspect you are simply unaware of all the maintenance tasks your city does. Consider yourself blessed!

Not that I'd ever want an HOA again, but that was nice and your experience isn't canonical.

I think GP is advocating exercising social skills rather than "live and let live" without interaction between you.

Get to know each other - BBQ or similar. Sure, you find out or confirm you hate some of their views/hobbies. But it also means you develop human empathy and usually find things you do agree on.

Maybe you hate their loud car. But you both hate the climbing vine on the fenceline and could spend a saturday morning fixing that together.

Why Americans insist on living in fcking plywood shacks is beyond me

Freedom of assembly. If my neighbors and I buy stuff, put it in a box and then buy and create rules around how its benefits and costs are divided, and I sell my share in the box, that should be fine.

Complain all you want, but if all new homes in your city are in a HOA, you are going to be under the thumb of those 80-something HOA board members who have nothing else to do in life but nitpick your house violations. Is that a desirable outcome for anyone?

Kind of like how most software bugs problems are not Integer Overflows, most unsustainable things are not Ponzi schemes.

Listings:

No HOA fee: 32 up to $500/month: 62

I'm not going to bother because this is an HN comment but I think you can imagine what happens to the results when I specify newer than say 1993 (when my house was built).

I have an HOA, but it seems defunct. Everything we do to the house, if visible, can be interpreted to mean I must get unanimous agreements, in writing, from all my neighbors.

It turns out I managed to land right between two asshole neighbors (constant trespassing, dogs, etc)

HOAs are pushed by state and local Florida governments because they create stronger guarantees about what a new development will self-maintain (and therefore won't need to be immediately funded by a local government).

Also... high COL coastal Floridians (and especially transplants) seem to be incredibly conservative in the sense of 'I want to keep my neighbor from doing anything crazy.'

For them, HOAs are a guarantee that the asset they bought is less likely to be blighted by its neighbors.

Personally? It itched like hell when I lived there, and that was with a fairly relaxed HOA. One of the many reasons I'd never live in Florida again.

What is the best alternative to that choice? You can’t answer since you aren’t the one in that position.

Frequently it is the least bad among a bunch of choices.

Choosing to go into crippling debt to pay cancer treatment bills is a choice too, but only a moron thinks the blame should be laid at the feet of the patient for making that “choice”.

An HOA isn't just about neighborhoods of freestanding houses, it's also about multi unit buildings.

Even if it’s a very low maintenance and amenity HOA on public roads, how do you resolve the fact that all the fees and costs have accumulated if the home were to be sold, you essentially end up at a similar end point where the home is sold. Usually these are also not individual circumstances, i.e., a person who has ignored all kind of warnings and letters and board meetings over usually years, also has many other issues going on and often they’re just letting the home go anyways and e.g., are just living there for “free” for about 1-3 years of HOA/bank legal proceedings.

Just like labor unions (ie. "right to work" states), right?

Typically the HOA's I've seen manage community resources. Where I used to live that meant the neighborhood parks, green spaces, 3 docks in the river, a pool, and a few lakes. No value seems a bit hyperbolic.

This is true sometimes, but if you are upset at a specific HOA, look at your docs to see what it actually manages. HOAs exist to pay for community obligated costs; sometimes that is a pool, sometimes it's "water and gas bills", and sometimes it's an entire golf course.

Further, if you're talking about a condo building (which, yes, is technically a COA, but the two get combined all the time), it is literally paying for your roof and elevators to work.

Buying into a "little club" and agreeing to pay your share of expenses only works when everyone participates. If not, your neighbors are just paying upkeep on your property; why should they have to do that?

> they should lose access to the pool, not their house.

To enforce this you have to be able to gate, secure, and prevent them and their guests from using this. That costs a lot more money just to ensure they pay in. The HOA is the least worse option to "consent" and ensure that they do. Taking away the house is a much later step after a letter, 2nd and 3rd warnings, fines, ignored fines+interest, and a lein is ignored.

Because they signed the paperwork saying they wanted to be part of the little club and gave that little club the power to take away their house.

Wow, no. That should only be dealt with by the city. I cannot imagine the types of misuse and abuse that would come from the self-centered, small-minded petty tyrants that want to be on a HOA board deciding what breeds of dog they'd like in their community. It'd be a bunch of "toy" dogs that frankly I find far more obnoxious than larger breeds with incessant yapping. I don't get to make the decision that that's a problem, because it's a preference/annoyance, not a problem. But you can guarantee that that's the kind of thing that happens.

> I think the nightmare situation is a busybody HOA that starts going after things that don’t matter, which would be hell.

I think many HOAs are exactly that, because often the kind of person drawn to being on a HOA board is exactly that. Just like they're often the kind of person to post on Nextdoor, "Hey, there are a bunch of black teenagers I've not seen before walking down the street."

There's probably a security aspect too with regular private security patrols in HOA areas that do enough to shoo away encampments from setting up. You don't have to look to hard to find encampments off vine north of melrose but you aren't going to find anything like that south of melrose in hancock park, thanks to the spend on private security, given it's the same LAPD in either case.

Yes, and then you find out just how petty petty politics can be.

The inconvenient truth, at least for HOA advocates, is that a community of 20-30 people, or even a hundred or so, does not need to be governed at the level of the community. Most people are reasonable and will respond to reasonable requests from neighbors if there is an issue, without having to drag in a higher authority at all. Those who are not reasonable, are not going to be magically made reasonable by having an HOA--indeed, as you admit, they're precisely the ones who are going to end up running the HOA. On balance, you're better off not having "governance" at all until you get to a larger population, like a town or a city.

I showed up to my first annual meeting where basically no one was there other than the president. He asked if I wanted to be on the board because they didn't have enough people participating. I asked what I'd have to do, and he said "just vote on things". I said OK, and he said the rules let him appoint members to vacancies (spoilers: the rules don't), so he "appointed" me on the spot.

At subsequent meetings, I discovered most of the board was completely disinterested in doing anything, other than the president who would probably fall under the "petty little shit" category, but he seemed like he knew what he was doing (spoilers: he didn't), so everyone pretty much just voted in favor of what he wanted to do. I was the only board member who worked from home, so I would be the only one on site to deal with things that involved vendors working on the property, so then I became the guy everyone expected to do everything.

The president got diagnosed with cancer and had to step down. He wanted me to be president, but I was like fuck that. The VP took the role, but she has pretty much done nothing and is clueless, so I keep being the one people expect to take the lead on everything.

I'm honestly tired of it and wished some competent people in the association would get on the board. There were massive mistakes I caught as a board member because I'm the only one who actually reads anything in the bylaws, CC&Rs, and all that shit. The HOA had been paying hundreds of dollars a year for decades on things that didn't need to be performed because our property management company misclassified us under some statute that didn't even apply to us, and nobody knew any better or even bothered to ask, "Hey, why the fuck are we actually doing this?"

I'll not say I'm a "good" board member. I don't care about enforcing house rules, and I don't want to get involved when people complain about their neighbors unless it's something that affects the association's financial health. The only reason I stay on is because I've done enough after-the-fact clean-up of the previous president's mess that I'm terrified of what insane things might happen if no one is keeping an eye on the other members. If you're in an HOA, I'd encourage getting involved to keep the crazies in check, at least for as long as you can stomach it.

Anyway, thanks for listening to my TED talk.

That's an argument not to have HOAs, right?

> You can very easily run to be part of your HOA leadership, and it is significantly easier to do than kicking an elected professional-politician out of office.

In my so many decades of existence, I've yet had a reason to want to kick my mayor out of office. And none of the cities I've lived in have passed laws related to what I can do with my house that were particularly problematic.

But HOAs? The majority have clauses I dislike.

> "I think by far the most important bill in our whole code is that for the diffusion of knowledge among the people...whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government"

> "The most effectual means of preventing tyranny would be to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large"

The level to which German society proscribes behavior top down with the law simply wouldn’t be tolerated across the spectrum for the simple reason no one would agree what the rules should be, even if they share the European idea that everyone else should follow the rules they personally support.

There really needs to be a way to harm organizations that do this. The HOA system is setup where the organization is protected and given the ability to make these kinds of rules. The only real option you have in that is you have to pawn the property off to some poor sucker that will also run into this issue later.

I guess you could be in a LLM, in which case you'd have to wait for retraining.

> 80-90 years ago

Today's HOAs are very frequently involved in racial discrimination suits for violations of the Fair Housing Act.

1. Unverifiable source ("a meta-analysis", trying to get authority without actually having it.

2. Hyper-specific numbers without error bars (and source), pretending to have certainty and precision.

3. Shockingly large number, intended to get an emotional reaction and a sense that it rounds to "all".

4. Numbers align too neatly with the point being made. They could still be true, but there could also be some overinterpreting, stretching of the truth or just plain lying going on.

Beautiful demonstration that numbers intended to convince are never to be trusted outright. No notes.

As an aside, the whole freak-out about LLM hallucinations has mostly shown me that way too many people accept human numbers way too easily. People are frequently as dumb or even dumber than LLMs.