why are HOAs becoming more popular as time goes on?
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Simple: The municipality gets to tax at the same rate while forcing the HOA to take care of the responsibilities it would ordinarily have. It’s free money for the city / town.
To maintain all the common areas and ensure people take care of the homes to maintain property values.
State and local governments are not allowed to take on debt. Small governments which cannot run deficits will do everything they can to lower their expenses; the alternative is to raise taxes, and that will get you unelected in the next cycle.
Therefore, if they can offload public service maintenance to HOAs, even if the system would be more efficient and effective under one roof, they will do it because it lowers expenses.
It’s only the federal government, which takes on a trillion or two of new debt every year, which doesn’t have to worry about balancing its budget.
Are they? According to what?
Why? Because building codes, permits, taxes.
Very condensed answer; an area gets hot, and a developer buys land and wants to build a community of homes out here. The city/county comes back and says “no way, this new community is going to have sidewalks, grass that needs to be watered, roads that need to be maintained. It’s not in our budget so no” the developer then says “fine, I will make it private property and this HOA will pay for it”. And thus HOAs have gotten popular
It’s become the preferred way of financing new subdivision development in the world. In the US some of the rules are a bit more aggressive… but all over the world it pushes the costs of development and maintenance off to private firms. What HOAs get in return is the ability to groom the neighborhood to look like something that will sell and help maintain the standards of the neighborhoods so as to maintain or increase property values for future sales.
Since people buying into HOAs tend to be okay with how things are they tend to use whatever power they have to make sure things stay the same. That’s why whenever you hear a story about one person with an extra potted plant in their front step getting fines from the HOA there’s usually no one in the community defending them.
An HOA is supposed to keep your neighborhood looking good and housing values high. They prevent people who leave rusted junk and filth in their yards from dragging the community down. They can also foster a sense of community by scheduling and hosting neighborhood events.
It’s important to get involved with your HOA if you don’t think you’d be a good fit because the people who think they will be are ussually the egotistical power trippers who ruin HOAs for everyone.
For every horror story you hear remember there are plenty of great stories you don’t hear because why would they go online to talk about?
People can be self-centered jerks who place a higher importance on themselves than they do on the community as a whole. A subset of these people do things that they enjoy, but everyone around them doesn’t like. HOAs give everyone the same rules and should make sure they all follow those rules. Each individual person may enjoy their home less than if they could do whatever they wanted, but more than they would if their neighbors could do whatever they wanted.
HOAs formalize a social compact that society used to have and has kinda abandoned. In rural areas where “don’t be a dickbag” is still the social norm, you don’t see a lot of HOAs. In neighborhoods where there is a large concentration of dickbaggery, there also don’t tend to be HOAs.
The people who tend to hate on HOAs the most are the people who don’t actually give a shit about being in a neighborhood. They want to throw loud parties, skip mowing the lawn, park four broken-down cars on the street. They live in a house, not a community.
They aren’t becoming more “popular,” but:
1. Developer buys land.
2. Developer hires builder to clear land and build homes.
3. Developer draws up contract of bylaws.
4. Developer sells homes, and forces buyers to sign contract. If they don’t want to, developer won’t sell.
That’s why there is always an HOA now. If you want newer construction anywhere close to a city, you pretty much don’t have a choice. A buyer’s only hope to not have one is to get elected to the board and try to garner enough votes to dissolve the association.
What? They aren’t more popular. Most people hate HOAs.
They’re being built more frequently because developers make more money building and maintaining them. It’s basically the subscription model for housing. Why build and sell when you can build, sell, ***and*** collect money in perpetuity?
Tldr: screw HOAs with pineapples.
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