why are HOAs becoming more popular as time goes on?
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You must be referring to new developments in suburbia. None of the new houses in my city are HOA, they are infill
The practical motivation is that it usually takes a year or three to sell all the units in a new development, and the developer wants to enforce rules on the people that buy early in that period so they don’t do things that would make the remaining units less appealing. You don’t want the house you’re trying to sell to be next door to a dead lawn, or a 50 foot tall statue of Taylor Swift.
When the last unit is sold, the developer pulls up stakes and leaves residents of the development running the HOA, so they can all get on Nextdoor and start complaining about the Anderson windows salesmen.
Because even though paying for an HOA is annoying, it’s less annoying than having to watch your redneck neighbor park 5 wrecks in their front lawn and destroy your entire blocks resale value. Hoa’s fucking suck until you “need” them and then they’re kinda sweet
Source: used to live next to a redneck pos until we finally moved and now have an HOA and thank fuck for that
Newer home development tends to be subdivisions built by a developer, with shared elements/amenities. Which need HOAs to oversee the shares amenities.
In the past, it was more common for lots to get sold and owner was responsible for building, communal land was city parks and such rather than privately owned landscaping or pool.
I would challenge your fundamental assertion that HOAs are becoming more “popular”.
While they may be more *common*, that doesn’t necessarily translate to popularity.
Homes are generally built by a developer that’s building an entire neighborhood. Many development codes require such neighborhoods to have a certain number of shared amenities based on the number of housing units, like a pool, a playground, a security gate, a park, pickleball courts, provided exterior maintenance, and so on. But these amenities require ongoing maintenance and upkeep (and insurance), and someone not only has to actually perform that upkeep, which costs money. This is where the developer creates a HOA, and there are then covenants and restrictions placed upon the deed to each property that levies a monthly or yearly fee for this. Cities love HOAs because they can unload otherwise normal city functions like street maintenance, trash pickup, clearing snow, code enforcement, security patrols, and so on to these private organizations.
Reddit is an echo chamber like any other social media site. Most of the people here have probably never been in an actual HOA and a handful of people take their negative experiences and they get repeated until it seems like there’s only terrible HOA’s.
It’d be like someone that’s never been in a car only seeing them on the news and assuming it’s just ultra dangerous and a death sentence to ride in one because clearly everyone is just dying on the road.
My HOA hasn’t met in years. There are vague and unobtrusive rules that are really just common sense for our quiet middle class small private dead end road like no chain link fences, only typical domesticated pets(no chickens, etc), and a handful of rules about not landscaping or clearing within a distance of the stream that runs alongside some of our properties. Basically, just preserve our nice quiet road. It’s also a private road, so we need some sort of entity to collect dues that pay for road maintenance.
I was skeptical at first given the rep of HOA’s but it only improves our neighborhood.
It’s about housing, not HOAs. If you live in a housing development, there’s a symmetry, cleanliness, lack of trash & old junkers in yards, bushes & trees are trimmed, places generally look very nice even 20, 30, or 40 yrs old. To keep the development looking like that, requires all the homeowners to do it and I promise you, many won’t. Homes change hands and new owners won’t comply or their renters won’t. This is why the homeowners created a board to oversee this. Everyone hates HOA boards but loves that if there’s any hope of getting more $$ for their house when they go to sell it, it’s still worth it. And it all comes down to selling for a higher amount than homes not in an HOA development.
Because people build sub-divisions now not just houses and those come with HOAs. Which, I will never live in unless the house is free and even then I will hate living there. My state has a massive shortage of homes, like 80k and much of the residential homes that are being built are sub-divisions with an HOA because it’s simply more profitable for developers.
Cities don’t want to approve new taxes but do want to grow. So when developers propose new builds, the city requires them to be a HOA because that means they build their own infrastructure.
People should really not normalize this bs. There is no reason why anybody should pay over a hundred for hoas for a single house. Everything is becoming a subscription. We pay taxes, that should maintain the roads etc and then on top of that we have to pay hoas for no value.
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