HOA experiences/stories

man, i can't wait to here these stories. post them up!

Got one of those violation letters with photographic evidence attached to the letter. It was not my trailer or my driveway.

There's a company here in Jacksonville called Kingdom Property Management that specializes in enforcing rules for HOAs.  I parked at a customer's house and I saw this car with their sign do a U turn towards me.  They stop and ask me what I'm doing there.  Mind you this isn't even a gated community they are just being nosy SoBs.  I responded that FCC rules prevented me from telling them.  I knew that would get them riled up.  Sure enough they said they would call the police on me.  Go ahead but Jacksonville has a law now about interfering with utility workers.  Police never came.

My wife, when she was younger and still living at home, got in trouble for hanging red curtains inside her bedroom window.

They were hung inside of the regular curtains and the blinds.

Based on the annoying things I've seen and heard about HOA's over the years, I'm not terribly interested in living with one.

I am typically very anti-HOA. 

Until you live someplace with very little in the way of property maintenance ordinances and enforcement. 

Now, I'd love to live in a HOA with three simple rules:

1) Don't let your house look like crap. Whether that's painting it wacky colors, or letting it fall into disrepair.

2) Don't let your property look like crap. Whether that's too many junk cars in the front yard, trash everywhere, junk laying around within view from the street, etc. 

3) Don't impact the audible enjoyment of your neighbors to their proprieties outside of working hours. This would include dogs barking, construction noises, parties, yelling, etc.

This is pretty much my current HOA, with rule 3 being the exception. We can do whatever we want with out properties provided it meets local zoning. No rules on what color we paint out houses. No rules about the fences needing restained. No rules about landscaping (aside from keeping things "well kept"). We don't even have rules about AirBNB or Renting (which sometimes I think might be useful). 

As it was explained to me, our HOA is $220 a year for a little added insurance if we ever had problems with neighbors being dicks. I'm generally a good neighbor and try to be as respectful as possible to those who frequently view the "public" areas of my property, and largely keep my messes behind fences and in garages. 

In reply to Dieselboss15 :

The bottom line? Rules don't save you from nosy busy buddies   who want to tell you how to live. Nor will  prevent people from being jerks,  slobs,  or weird.  
 

Paper  can a huddle back and forth but in the end you just can't pick your neighbors. 

Meh, all mine does is keep the entrance to the neighborhood mowed and clear the road of snow. In 3 years the only enforcement I have heard even thought of was someone who parked 6 truck snowplow attachments in their driveway all summer and someone had a rooster that was annoying the E36 M3 out of a number of us. (Me included).

My subdivision HOA collects $15 per year per household, which it uses to pay a private snow removal contractor. Thats it. No complaints from me.

In reply to Apexcarver :

Somebody was complaining to our neighborhood association about a Husky killing her rooster. Don't know anything about that. 

HOAs gets a bad rap, but I'd bet that 99% of them are basically just keeping a community looking respectable. I lived in one for a while. It kept a park up for the kids. New nets on the basketball hoops every year or two and lawn mowing for the park. 

I did used to caddie at a course that was in a neighborhood. A golfer who lived in that HOA saw someone putting up a new window. His comment was "He needs to finish that before shiny happy person in the group behind us sees it, he'll call him out because we're supposed to have individual panes. That is just a big one with a muntin" I thought that was pretty silly.

Snowdoggie said:

In reply to Apexcarver :

Somebody was complaining to our neighborhood association about a Husky killing her rooster. Don't know anything about that. 

Ours almost suffered lead poisoning of the high velocity variety 

Guess I'm not too scared because there's two autocrossers, 3 drag guys, and a high performance sxs guy in my small neighborhood of about 18 houses.

I like my HOA, but I live in a highrise condo, so it might be a bit different from a single-family-home subdivision HOA. For my monthly fees I get:

-Water/sewer bill paid

-Gas Bill paid

-Electric Bill paid

-Trash Bill paid

-Secure climate-controlled indoor parking (in downtown!)

-All exterior maintenance (I never again have to do any lawn-mowing, weed pulling, gutter cleaning, house painting, roof shingling, window washing, etc)

-All exterior insurance (my homeowners insurance bill went down a fair bit when moving out of a house)

-A gym

-A spa

-A large shared patio/yard

-A secure mail room-no worries about porch pirates!

When I crunched the numbers, I actually ended up saving enough monthly to offset the cost of renting an industrial shop space with some buddies, which has actually turned into a fun little community I never had when I was working in the garage/shop at my house.

I sought out a building without a concierge. A) I'm not that self-important, and B) I wanted a building I live in, not a home that feels like a hotel!
 

The great energy efficiency, access to downtown entertainment at my door, and ease of walking away and leaving on a trip without all the usual "who will take care of the yard/mail/freezing pipes/home security/etc?" are all bonuses. 
 

Now the funny story: the house rules state no major repair work in your parking space, with fluids mentioned specifically as a no-no. Upon moving in, I asked at a meeting about replacing wiper blades and got the OK, so I asked about washer fluid, being a fluid and all....crickets....a few uncomfortable clearing of throats...and a muttering about probably being within the spirit of the rules if not the letter.

 A few car nuts in the building as well. There's a 60's Alfa Guilia sedan, a Bugeye Sprite, a nice Volvo 122, a Jag E-type, an E39 M5, and a rowdy-sounding Smart car I've seen around.

My only experience with an HOA was unpleasant. Busy body neighbor didn't like us (for whatever reason) and decided to report everything in an attempt to try and use the HOA as a bludgeon. Luckily, I'm a spiteful shiny happy person, know how to read a contract and I give zero berkeleys, so I don't care who I piss off and who I take down with me. Even though we were renting our place, we wound up making the neighbor that started the pissing contest move. berkeley em, I hope they lost their savings on the house and the movers broke all of their crap during the move, too. 

Never had another problem with the HOA, or any of the other neighbors once the initial battle settled down, but when I went to buy a house, "No HOA" was in the top ten features we were looking for. 

I've had serious discussions with people where I've told them about my disdain for HOAs. The mutual agreement out of this is that I probably don't want them as neighbors, and they probably don't want me as one, either.

If they tried to bring in an HOA where I live now, I'd convert my property into a halfway house of some sort, even if I lost every cent of equity in it. 

There is a community in South Austin where nearly all of the houses have fenced-in side and back yards.  In an attempt to keep driveways and properties looking neat and tidy, they made a rule that if you own an RV or a Boat, it has to be stored behind the fence on your property.

This led to everyone in the neighborhood putting their RVs and boats in their driveway and leaning a section of fence they bought at HD against it.  HOA should have worded it better.

Curtis73 (Forum Supporter) said:

There is a community in South Austin where nearly all of the houses have fenced-in side and back yards.  In an attempt to keep driveways and properties looking neat and tidy, they made a rule that if you own an RV or a Boat, it has to be stored behind the fence on your property.

This led to everyone in the neighborhood putting their RVs and boats in their driveway and leaning a section of fence they bought at HD against it.  HOA should have worded it better.

 

That is pretty good. 

I've got one: same golf course HOA referenced earlier. Not sure if this is true, it was a rumor going around. Professional football player lives on the course, has a Rousch F150. Supposedly, the HOA had a rule, no pickup trucks allowed in the driveway. Supposedly he was threatening to put the truck in his garage and buy a real beater that was allowed, and was sending the board pictures of rusty hunks that he was considering. A couple of board members got the rule changed to "No commercial vehicles". 

mtn (Forum Supporter) said:

Curtis73 (Forum Supporter) said:

There is a community in South Austin where nearly all of the houses have fenced-in side and back yards.  In an attempt to keep driveways and properties looking neat and tidy, they made a rule that if you own an RV or a Boat, it has to be stored behind the fence on your property.

This led to everyone in the neighborhood putting their RVs and boats in their driveway and leaning a section of fence they bought at HD against it.  HOA should have worded it better.

 

 

That is pretty good. 

 

I've got one: same golf course HOA referenced earlier. Not sure if this is true, it was a rumor going around. Professional football player lives on the course, has a Rousch F150. Supposedly, the HOA had a rule, no pickup trucks allowed in the driveway. Supposedly he was threatening to put the truck in his garage and buy a real beater that was allowed, and was sending the board pictures of rusty hunks that he was considering. A couple of board members got the rule changed to "No commercial vehicles". 

The no commercial trucks thing is crap. If I live here, and that commercial truck is how I support my family....arghggh.  That's why I hate HOAs.  

DrBoost said:

 

The no commercial trucks thing is crap. If I live here, and that commercial truck is how I support my family....arghggh.  That's why I hate HOAs.  

Yup, I quoted myself.  
While I do hate HOAs, I live in a neighborhood that has one. $20 a year to pay for the upkeep/taxes on our private beech. That's it. I can live with that.  
When our real estate agent was telling us about this house she mentioned that it had an HOA and my wife and both said 'hard pass'. Then she looked into it and found out the details. I won't even consider an HOA unless it's similar to ours. 

"Dear Homeowner. There is green slime on  the fascia on the North East corner of your home.  Please clean this right away or we will engage our attorney to proceed with legal action." 

I read the letter, walk outside, and see a 6 inch wide strip of green at a point below a roof valley which I clean in two minutes with a brush dipped in bleach. 

Legal action threatened on the first notification? For this which accumulated over a wet winter when I wasn't paying attention.  Really?   This was typical of this neighborhood association and I was so glad to get away from their authoritarian junta.

I deal with HOA rules at work all the time. Half of my paint orders are customers that need to repaint because the HOA is being an shiny happy person. 

DrBoost said:

DrBoost said:

The no commercial trucks thing is crap. If I live here, and that commercial truck is how I support my family....arghggh.  That's why I hate HOAs.  

Yup, I quoted myself.  
While I do hate HOAs, I live in a neighborhood that has one. $20 a year to pay for the upkeep/taxes on our private beech. That's it. I can live with that.  
When our real estate agent was telling us about this house she mentioned that it had an HOA and my wife and both said 'hard pass'. Then she looked into it and found out the details. I won't even consider an HOA unless it's similar to ours. 

Sounds like ours.  Very low key.  $20/year to keep the street lights on and the entrance maintained.  And it usually takes added donations and volunteers to make all that happen.  I don't think any letter has ever been sent to any resident although it probably should have been on a couple of occasions.  I've lived here 30+ years.  I won't move to any neighborhood that has a serious one.  We've had bad experiences with two others we have owned property in.  

DrBoost said:

 

The no commercial trucks thing is crap. If I live here, and that commercial truck is how I support my family....arghggh.  That's why I hate HOAs.  

Trust me, in this neighborhood it wouldn't have been an issue. If you lived there and had commercial trucks, your commercial trucks were offsite or in the 3-4 car garage. And if you were the type to be bothered by it, you wouldn't buy there to begin with. This is the same town that had a McDonalds with an Omlette Bar on Sundays, cooked up by a guy in a shirt and tie. 

On a big motorcycle trek a few years ago I decided to take a jaunt out to Hilton Head.  Nice island.  They hate motorcycles.  I had to drive the whole way south to go to the public beach just to see water.  I would have been welcome to drive through one of those nice gated communities, but they have strict no-motorcycle rules.

SWMBO just sold her house that had an HOA.  One of their rules was that you couldn't have a screen door on your house.  How dare you betray your rich-people heritage by embracing energy conservation.  Wasting energy conveys opulence, evidently.

The townhouse I rented in Austin said you couldn't have a vehicle in your yard.... I can understand not PARKED in your yard, but you can't even drive on it.  Imagine my welcome when I was moving in.  I backed my pickup to the side door to unload and was welcomed by a board member who said he was going to call it in if I don't move my truck immediately (while I was holding one end of a washing machine)

Here's my story not HOA but similar.

An owner of a property across the street made numerous complaints to the PoPo regarding my activities on MY property. (never bothered to say a word to me) It was his wife that was making the complaints, not sure he was aware. I never confronted them.

I was making a point to not be obnoxious or flagrant in my activities (no cars in the yard, no noisy after-hours, etc). 

I told the officer it was selective enforcement, he said no, they were obligated to follow up on every complaint filed.

Fine, I drove around the neighborhood in a 3 block radius and took ~30 photos of many similar "violations".

I informed the officer that if I was to be forced to comply with such Draconian ordinance language everyone in the city should also, it's only fair. Right?

I told the officer that if my feet were held to the fire, I would make it my civic duty to ensure city wide compliance (not just my neighborhood).

I explained to the officer that I would be forced to file official complaints about every possible "violation" I noted, and that it would very likely be necessary to hire office help to process the number of violations I reported.

The officer came back the next week and said it was determined that I was not in violation of the spirit of the ordinance in question, and that I could expect to not hear from them again regarding this or similar issues.  Due to the single source of complaints (he then told me in a round about way who the complainer was).

Luckily things never escalated (in my old age I've toned down my response to situations like this ) and Thankfully the complainer (looser) moved shortly after.  *snicker* I'll bet the PoPo also told her that it's not illegal for me to enjoy my hot tub in the buff. I'll bet she would have had a melt down when I put up a ham radio tower last year.

Oh-Re-Gun is still somewhat unencumbered by boorish legislation (still no sales tax either!) on some fronts.

RE: HOA = Not while I am ambulatory will I agree to be a party to an HOA, poorly written city ordinances are bad enough.

HOA?

No.

Berkin.

Way.