A south Bossier City homeowners association has sued to force a family to remove a front yard sign supporting their son's military service because it violated subdivision covenants.There are countless examples of HOAs taking exorbitant, unpatriotic, nonsensical stands on trivial issues. A lot of these stories are linked on Drudge when they occur, but I have wondered if there one good compendium that chronicles all that is soulless and evil about HOAs. I found this, but it's not quite what I'm looking for. Here is a good example of the type of site I'm thinking of, in this case chronicling the woes of our legal system, including frivolous lawsuits. If you've seen such a site cor HOAs, let me know.
Maybe I should start a feature on this website in which I keep track of HOAs. A Google search on homeowner's associations returns a lot of links to the blogs of individual HOAs. One could probably mine them for some golden nuggets. I could also review this post on "The Impact of Homeowners Associations on Purchasing Decisions." I might just do that. I even created a new label for this post, so I'm well on my way.
I would be very interested in a series on HOAs. I grew up out of the city limits on a very nice farm next to a run down house with a hoarder and across the street from a meth lab. The neighbors didn't bother us much, so I get really frustrated when people talk about using HOAs and government regulations to protect property value. I just want to actually own our house if we ever get to buy one and not have an HOA or the government dictating what I can and can't do on *my* property.
ReplyDeleteThis is interesting. When we purchased this family home, we were coming out of a decent neighborhood, that had few CCR's, and none were enforced as there was no body organized to do so...SO, the neighborhood quickly became a dump, making our home values go down a bit...
ReplyDeleteWe wanted to buy a home in the country, on some amount of property. At the time, at the real estate height, we couldn't afford even a trailer on property. We needed to move for a variety of reasons, so we decided on our neighborhood. It's a very nice "ranchette" neighborhood, meaning all the lots have to be at least .5 and range to 1 acre. We are on .78. Along with our decision, came the decision to buy in this neighborhood because there are STRICTLY enforced CCR's, with an active HOA.
Normally, we are a "please don't tell us what to do outside the basic law" kind of folks. However, having lived in several hoods' with folks who didn't care, we hoped that living for 5-20 or more years in a hood' with a bit nicer of homes, with folks who are forced to care for their properties, it would help.
So far, it has. With a very few and far between exception that is quickly remedied, no home here is a dump or is clearly home to anything unsavory like we've experienced before.
On the downside, we can never have our chickens here, but I have a garden. Additionally, our hearts, views and lifestyle have changed since moving here..so it can be difficult to raise Godly, responsible, hard-working, frugal, humble, non-spoiled, non-constantly entertained home focused children long term, in a neighborhood of children who get brand new sports cars for their birthdays..
If we could do it again, we likely would have WAITED till the boom went bust, and then rented until we could afford the freedom of the country..with enough distance to not care what the neighbors do since it wouldn't impact us!
Hindsight is always learning!
Oh, to the PP, there are lots of neighborhoods with no CCR's or HOA's so that shouldn't be a problem.
ReplyDeleteIf everyone cared about their own homes, that would be great..but many do not, so it's great to have a choice in the matter..what a shame grown adults have to be told to not allow their front yards to be heaped with cars and trash!
The really dumb thing is, SO many people who don't follow the CCR's in a neighborhood, will claim to "not know" about them...duh, research before you buy, AND you can't close on a house without signing on all documents certifying that there ARE or ARE NOT CCR's.