In theory, the benefit of an HOA is supposed to be that douchebag neighbors can't fuck up the community by deciding they want to raise cattle, or become the amateur tuning garage for the local street racers who do "muffler deletes" on their $2000 Civics. Ideally, I think an HOA has value. If I buy a house in a community, I'd love some basic assurance that neighbors aren't going to do something insane.I lived in a nice, small neighborhood, where a guy moved in, filled his yard with rusty shipping containers and broken cars, did target practice by firelight at midnight, and his kid rode a dirtbike for 4-6 hours every day in circles in the back yard. Polite discussion was met with "fuck you." He was impacting the lives and property values of everyone around him. In practice, though, it never works like that. Normal people never want to be in charge because who really wants that job? Instead you get the fussy micromanagers or people on a power trip. So it never stops at "don't fuck up the community" and proceeds rapidly to "all aesthetic choices must be ratified by an HOA meeting." Groups that are given the power to regulate will keep regulating until your grass has to be a certain seed type and no more than 2.34" high. A couple we know bought a campervan. It wasn't a rusty heap, it was a nice, newish, midsized van shell. They fixed a few things, outfitted it to the tune of probably $50k. Went on a trip for a few months. When they came back, the HOA had passed a rule that you couldn't have a commercial-size van in your driveway, you could only have one if it fit in your garage.
My wife just got into an argument with our 6 year old whether “Utopia” was a country. My wife thought it was.
I love this: Apparently it's a folk song about the last fling before marriage. The band themselves, Tuuletar, does some interesting beat-boxing Finnish music... how's that for a niche?
Apparently they were just out at a restaurant for dinner, and hopped out back and sang this quick folk song.
Is there a more sad-looking,dull and depressing store on this planet to walk into than Staples? It’s like they’re trying to turn the stultifying aspect of working in a cubicle into their own nightclub. Every employee is miserable and doesn’t want to help. A Soviet-era parking garage has more pizazz to it.
All this heat you guys are complaining about? i will take a little bit of it. We need to dry out, already seeing some minor mudslides and minor flooding. This shit doesn't happen for at least a month.
It seems like HOAs go south when they're turned over to management companies instead of being run by the residents of the neighborhood. Even so, HOAs were automatic dealbreakers in our house search. I'm not really sure how it happened but we found a house on a cul-de-sac in a super solid non-HOA neighborhood for an unbelievably good price...and our street is the only street zoned as our neighborhood. I never want an HOA again. Ever.
There are no HOA's any where near me, but from all the horror stories i will never buy a house in with HOA.
I’d rather live in east Detroit than an HOA. It’s cultish. You’re inviting bossy people who aren’t your friends to tell you what to do with your most personal possession. I do not feel that need to “belong”.
I'm all for protecting property values but yeah. HOAs have entirely too much power to impact a person negatively for me to ever want to deal with one again. We only dealt with the one as renters and that was awful enough.
I used to do accounting work for about two dozen HOAs. When they work of which one I did the work for, they are Wonderful. This HOA had Wireless Internet for everyone in about 2001. Not bad for a bunch of retired people. When HOAs do not work which is too often, they are a disaster. The only thing I learned is never get into a gated community. Gates do not work. By that I mean, they are always needing service and are not reliable. They also do not keep people out, as was demonstrated recently in Florida.
I live in a deed restricted community which is like an HOA lite. They have a decent amount of rules that the owners have to follow but they are selectively enforced. I'd like to see less cars allowed per driveway. So many houses have like 4-6 cars parked out front and a lot of them are work vans and rusted out beaters. They don't enforce appearance rules much and the deed restrictions haven't been updated since the 50's. Its a lot cheaper than HOA fees though. I pay $30/year.
I have a computer issue hopefully one of the tech geniuses on here can help me solve. Up until two weeks ago, geolocation on my computer wasn't an issue. We had a slight power blip during the tropical storm and ever since then, every website I go to that needs geolocation to allow me to use it, can't verify my location. To say this is frustrating is beyond words. I've done a bunch of low level things to try and fix this. Resetting my router. Unplugging the fiber coming into my house. Swapping my network card around. Flushed DNS. Nothing seems to be working and I'm out of ideas of how to fix this. It happens on every browser, every device as long as it is going through my internet. If I hot spot off my phone using just cell service and data, it's fine. Help me TiB, you're my only hope.
It sounds like it must be using your IP address for geolocation, and you must have gotten assigned a new IP after the power outage, and that address might not be listed in the geolocation databases correctly. You could try contacting your ISP. I would expect that the phones would still work correctly even on the WiFi, though. It is my understanding that the browsers will always use GPS if it is available.
My experience is the opposite. The HOA for condo I lived in was run by residents. It was dysfunctional and they selectively enforced regulations. My current HOA is managed by a company while the builder is still building. The more vocal neighbors who want to get ride of the company are also the one's complaining about the more common rules that protect property values. They're also the same people posting on the community forum about every little thing they see in the neighborhood that the HOA has no power over (wanting to install speed bumps; roads are maintained by the county) or doesn't concern them. With the company, those people are only minor annoyances on a community forum that I can ignore. If the HOA becomes residentally run, they become a real threat.
I was doing some kind of site plan for an existing house in an old neighborhood, maybe an addition. The deed restrictions didn't allow lots to be sold to colored people. I don't know why it shocked me so much to read it, I knew it happened long ago, but my jaw dropped when I actually went through the restrictions. Apparently those restrictions hadn't been updated and re-recorded, either, though they stopped enforcing the colored people ownership many decades ago. This has got me wondering who was the last racist asshole in that neighborhood to hold up the restrictions and say, "Nope, you can't buy this lot!"
had the same deed restrictions on my old house. They were very old and handwritten, we figure from when the whole area was likely a plantation. However, it also said that “persons of color may not be housed on the premises.” You can guess what the neighborhood looked like. we joked that if my sister ever needed to get away from her recently ex-husband, who was black, she could just move in there and he couldnt touch her. I think he’s in jail now.
It was still kind of a thing in a wealthy suburb of Columbus into the 70s. When the restrictions on selling to black people were struck down, they switched to requiring approval from a neighborhood association and giving those associations the first right of purchase before a property could be sold to an outsider.