Florida lawmaker floats ban on HOAs amid growing backlash

I upvoted you despite entirely disagreeing with your premise. Yes - negotiate with the county to take over management of the playgrounds and lawn mowing. Yes - make the clubhouse and parking lots open, fee-based and voluntary, and controlled by a private corporation rather than an imposed, taxed service. Yes - return the excess money to the current homeowners, or use some of it to effectuate these conversions.

Honestly, the amount of money you have in reserve, plus the list of amenities you list, makes it sound like the HOA has been sitting on a spigot of endless cash for a very long time and finding nice-to-have things to justify the continued fees.

> What do we do with the $500k we have the operating funds and reserves collected over the past 40 years?

Uhm, return it to the property owners?

The real pattern is that HOAs have been abusing their power; or in other cases are required because municipalities don't want to do their job. As a result the lawmakers will, unfortunately, overcorrect.

Not all townhomes have HOAs but it is absolutely insane to say a townhouse that does, where land is owned by the HOA, would have land redistributed to various individuals by legislature fiat.

It's even a crazy proposal for detached single family homes. Will a government official show up and decide what land is owned by each owner and record by government decree what the new property lines are?

A HOA for a highrise is a very different beast than a HOA for a suburban neighborhood.

That is, I agree - but the suburban SFH HOAs are shitshows.

I think he's only planning to try to ban them for single family homes:

>Porras acknowledged condominiums, with shared roofs and common areas, present a more complicated case. But he said single-family HOAs in particular have lost their purpose.

Are HOA officials elected by the residents? I live in a country where building management is compulsory and their meetings are subject to law and even can be witnessed by state officials. I know it sounds a bit fascist and I can't say it isn't, but that's how buildings are taken care of. If you don't like the management you can change it in the next meeting if you gather enough support.

By the way land is usually collectively owned by the apartment owners too.

Agreed. The logical answer here is to limit the things HOAs can and cannot do rather than ban them outright. But that doesn't make for a good headline.

Those things are usually rentals here in Florida. HOAs are a real problem here due to the legal protection they have. They can literally take your house because your mailbox is blue.

The irony here is I've never found my neighborhood HOA problematic. They plan the block party and take care of the landscaping of the neighborhood signage.

My condo HOA experience was so bad I would never again recommend someone buy a condo. They refused to look at a structural issue until I got a lawyer and then refused to let the residents see the engineering report for the building we legally own. (Note: If you ever experience this, get out. There is no louder signal of an unsafe structure than "the engineering report is privileged".)

This.

And then when more of their towers collapse these same politicians will look around with surprised Pikachu faces.

You can't run into a problem if you are the problem.

There is no problem being addressed here. You are salivating over a conversation on "peanut butter bad, lets regulate it!"

Pretty wild that HOAs are not required to have audited books. Where I'm from HOAs are regulated by law, is registered as a legal entity, and therefore needs audited financials submitted to the tax man every year.

There is also a very powerful ombud created to mediate and resolve the kind of hoa horror story bullshit we often hear about online.

We used to have local governments provide that sort of thing (and still do to an extent). One reason for the prevalence of HOAs is that they have a much easier time keeping out the riffraff with uncomfortably dark skin, but maybe people will just have to put up with them.

Privatize it. If I want the road in front of my house fixed, I'll pay for it, I can get a pool membership, gym membership, or other amenities ad-hoc. Fuck the HoA.

Typically there is a special tax assessment district when inside city limits - for example, my property in Georgia inside an HOA has a city millage of 0.003, but the streets of the community were indeed deeded to the city. On the other hand, if someone wants to build not actually inside city limits, of course they’ll need to pay for their own roads and utility maintenance since the county isn’t responsible for things like that.

Sounds to me like the more effective use of residents' time would be to get several of them together to run for town office and break the deadlocks. Assuming you can contact enough other frustrated HOA members and get them onboard, even if the problem is several town board members (or whatever body it is), it could be possible to replace them with sane people.

In some places they act as a kind of local governing authority similar to a town or village council. In much of the US the lowest level of governing body us the county, and those can be pretty huge and diverse areas so HOAs are used to fill that gap.

They're not common everywhere in the US. Here in West Michigan I don't know of anyone that's part of one (other than condo associations, where it's part of the selling point).

America hates government and taxes but occasionally someone thinks wow, it’d be nice if we could split the costs of this road and water pipes we all use! But all the existing standards for how to do this basic function of society are terrible!

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png

I’ve lived in two. They were fine. They collected reasonable dues, provided some services, and that’s about the extent of it.

I still wouldn’t want to live in another one. Even if they behave well, they’re just annoying. It’s another set of de facto laws I have to keep track of, elections to vote in, proceedings to follow. The HOA’s finances are my finances so if they screw up it’s my wallet on the line. (I see so many people asking, the HOA fucked up, can they make us pay for it? You are the HOA, there’s nobody else to pay for anything.)

And they’re just not necessary in most places. Maintain common areas? We have something for that already, it’s called local government. Prevent eyesores? Fuck off, if you want to control what happens on a property then buy it. It’s unavoidable for a condo, but completely unnecessary for detached houses, and even townhouses don’t really need one.

You hear the bad stories. It all depends on who was elected and who votes. Most HOAs are not the horror stories you hear, just a quiet entity that maintains common property and is a backup solution for problems (when talking to neighbor does not work). Mine is cheap, like $300/year and we have a shared park, community space, and where I live lots of irrigation. They only send out letters for egregious violations and don't police or nit-pick.

It is well known that all the suburbs in the US are just an economic time-bomb waiting to happen due to the maintenance cost of the public amenities (especially when water/sewage/electricity infra).

Seems fair that the people who actually live in them are the ones paying for the costs instead of spreading it over to all residents of the city. Maybe we will see some suburbs converted to more dense housing once the public infrastructure needs to be replaced.

Not here in Southern York County, PA. I would not buy any house in an HOA and all houses i have bought (sold) were not in an HOA in the various towns here.

> "Don't Tread on Me"

It's right there in the name: don't tread on me, not us. Rules for thee, not for me.

Well, it's different if you're the government

That issue was resolved several years ago. Both sides have moved on.

Every HOA I've lived in had an elected board.

And everyone I've ever heard complain about HOAs has never tried to serve on the board. They're not universally volunteer orgs, but a _lot_ of them are -- which means that if you run, you'll probably be elected, because nobody else wants to deal with that.

HOAs are small governments, with plenty of the problems of larger governments via unhappy but nonparticipatory voters.

We don't have a procedure to reliably establish a benevolent dictatorship.

Our HOA maintains the roads and the community water system. The county is unwilling to do either. Without the HOA I'd need a specialized vehicle to get through the mud to my driveway in the rainy season, and I'd have to haul in my water, because it's too deep for me to afford a well. So I'd probably end up living elsewhere.

I'd be super happy if the local government managed the infrastructure and shared spaces of our neighborhood. But they can't raise the taxes to do so, so HOAs end up being the smaller government that people say they want but, in practice, get zero participation from the residents and can turn into shit shows.

IIRC, they missed their court appearance and a bench warrant was issued.

Getting people to vote on things for their own Benefit is surprisingly hard. My parents’ condo association is constantly fighting each other because increasing monthly dues requires 70% vote and people have been refusing year after year. And what does increase year after year is maintenance requirements. First the nice to have amenities stopped. Then the elevators stopped. Now it’s 24x7 running water because the association doesn’t have money to fix the motors. Now they’re all trying to get the building to be sold so that it can be developed into an even bigger apartment building and that is also failing because it requires 75% vote. Imagine you voting against getting a brand new apartment in 3 years that’s larger in size and you get your rent paid while it’s being built.

That sounds suspiciously like democratically enacting local government ordinances.

I lived next to a guy who would do maintenance and repair on his motorcycle which had “pipes” until nearly midnight.

I would’ve killed for an HOA back then.

> If the issue is so bad, that 70% of your neighbors actually come to a meeting and vote against what you're doing, it must be something really bad.

Two dangers with that.

First, mandatory votes are ... difficult. They exclude a lot of people, particularly those that gotta work two jobs to make ends meet, thus giving more power to those people who have lots of free time (i.e. pensioners, SAHM busybodies).

Second, tyranny of the majority. The original intention of HOAs was to keep out Black and Asian people and, in some cases, Jews [1]. Getting the majority of 70% in a majority white 'hood is an open invitation for harrassment.

If there is bad behavior, such as someone working on "car projects" at night, or letting junk pile up in their front yard, the solution is zoning, noise ordnances and environmental protection laws. Not HOAs.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeowner_association#History

No idea why you're being downvoted, as this is 100% correct.

HOAs are one of those things that seemingly no one likes, but then people look to buy a house and think it's just some weird coincidence that all of the "nice" neighbourhoods have HOAs. Everyone loves HOAs stopping their neighbours from doing obnoxious things, but are sure that the things they do should be immune from HOA influence.

And FWIW, I live in Canada and here HOAs are very uncommon in subdivisions (though of course condo towers and townhouse complexes with common property and needs have strata/boards that are basically HOAs), because instead municipalities usually have many of the same sort of rules regarding how you upkeep your property, inoperable cars, etc, even if it impinges on "property rights". Indeed, exactly the same stories happen where there are tearjerker stories about how mean the city is bugging someone about their unkempt lawn or junkers in the laneway, when the city in question is coincidentally one of the most desirable cities to live in. It's like people think these are just unrelated things, when the former often follows from the latter.

> You can avoid this by not buying a home that is covered by a HOA.

In many areas these either do not exist or are limited to only older construction. I haven't seen a single '90s or newer neighborhood in my home shopping that didn't have one.

Developers love the stupid things because it allows them greater control over how the neighborhood looks to potential buyers while they're still selling lots, and they're mandatory for new developments in some areas where the local government (reasonably) doesn't want to take on more road/utility/etc maintenance but isn't willing to actually stop sprawl.

> Snark aside, it's clear this guy hasn't thought out how condos will operate without a HOA. Going after SFH HOAs may be the best initial play here.

Someone else noted that in Florida the term "HOA" specifically refers to the kind affecting single-family homes. Condos have "COAs" apparently.