why are HOAs becoming more popular as time goes on?
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Because HOAs are responsible for caring for common areas- parks, sidewalks, plants, etc. the stuff your taxes normally would care for. Now the HOA pays for it thru your fees. City collects the same taxes, but doesnt have to spend as much.
New housing comes with an HOA that is operated by the builder. Once all units have sold, the HOA transfers to the owners. Someone has to maintain the common areas and the HOA already exists, so it’s easy to just keep it.
Edit: The builder creates the HOA so they can maintain a uniform look for the neighborhood. Those rules tend to stay in place since the since the people buying into the neighborhood were fine with that look and leaving things alone is much easier than changing them.
In the case of condos or anything else with shared walls / roofs, you need someone to handle insurance and maintenance. HOAs fill that need.
They are written in when the neighborhoods are built. They are intended to provide upkeep to common areas and raise property values. There are now third party “management” companies that come in and run the HOAs, and they make alot of money off fines so naturally they get worse and worse as time goes on.
It’s probably less that they’re more “popular” and more that most new builders contract with them prior to ever starting construction. In some places, like Vegas, it’s almost impossible to find a recently built house that isn’t already part of an HOA.
As a non American, they seem mental to me. Nothing screams freedom like getting a fine for having a meadow
Common areas, parks, roads, etc used to be maintained by the town/city.
They require new developments to have an HOA, so they can pass the maintenance of these things to the homeowners. They don’t lower taxes, just lower expenses. And the homeowner is basically paying a double tax.
HOAs are often required by law as most new subdivisions have storm water facilities, like detention ponds or basins. These storm water diversion devices are often required by the clean water act.
So if a developer has to build a storm water pond, they need someone to look after it. That means an HOA needs to be created to own the land, cut the grass, and hold insurance.
That’s the root for most of the HOAs. Once the association exists, many also add in playgrounds, clubhouses, gold clubs, or swimming pools, or other amenities.
Lot of answers coming from people with no/poor experience with HOAs, here’s my take as someone who lived under a very well managed one.
HOAs give residents local control over a lot of elements of landscaping, maintenance, general “vibes” of the neighborhood.
If you bought a very nice house, in a very nice neighborhood, you generally want it to maintain the same overall style, level of quality, etc, over the years you live there.
HOAs can stop your neighbor from letting their house fall into disrepair, make sure lawns are properly mowed, no one leaves a broken down car in the street, no one does something *really stupid* (literally had a neighbor try to use a rusted out burn barrel in their back yard, the HOA was there in under 20 minutes to make them put it out), and that generally the neighborhood you moved into doesn’t detract from the potential appreciation of your home.
A small percentage are poorly run, get “little tin gods” on the HOA council, etc, but something like a third of all single-family homes in the U.S. are in HOAs, with most being quietly, professionally, and competently managed.
Fun fact – HOAs we’re initially organized to prevent minorities from moving into an area. I’ll hack a quick summary from what I recall on the subject but I highly encourage you to find your own resources – mine is based on what I recall from reading The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein.
After WWII the US hads concerns of communism spreading and started to encourage the development of suburbs. Buy a piece of America and own it with your hard earned money – good for government because of federal loans, good for people because they have a stake in the country, harder for communism because when you have a bunch of people who have paid for land/homes it’s harder to get them on board with giving away home/land…. But that’s not the point.
Developers are building the burbs, but there’s some rules. First rule, some developments are white only and not just white; only the “good” whites, no Irish. Also, the home couldn’t be resold to a minority otherwise the developer could bring a lawsuit and take the house back – this was to prevent the home values from reducing. So as a developer is building a neighborhood and selling they care about the home value but once that area is done and they’ve made all their money they didn’t really care and didn’t really waste their time filing claims if a home was sold to a minority. Well this then caused home values to drop in neighborhoods. To prevent this the HOA was formed and given the power to sue the homeowner if a home was sold to a minority.
So there’s a brief history on how HOAs we’re started.
I don’t think people live in HOAs or the suburbs because they don’t value diversification or cultures, I think it’s more about having a bit of room, privacy, security and peace.
Different strokes for different folks.
It’s not really that they’re getting more popular. They’re just generally unique to master-planned communities, which are a post-WW2 phenomenon, and the legal concept of an HOA didn’t exist until the last 50 years or so.
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