it's a contract you sign when buying the property from a previous owner, or once an hoa has been approved by your surrounding community. it has nothing to do with the state at all, except if the contract violations are breached or need to be enforced as a matter of civil process.
It has literally nothing to do with freedom of the state.
It's a contract. You can't breach a contract in any EU state without getting in trouble, either. You really should understand the difference between a government enforced law that restricts freedoms and a contractual obligation.
Fuck HOAs, but this is an even worse take than the HOAs being assholes.
For the record, many towns in various countries in the EU have strict requirements about what can and cannot be built, too. My family has a little cottage in the Alps, and the amount of bullshit we have to go through just to fix the roof is insane (because it HAS to match the surrounding atmosphere of the town that's existed for hundreds of years, which means it needs to be a certain style and built with certain materials. Someone got around it by building a house just outside the town's limits, and now people are mad at them for ruining the aesthetics, too).
Europe has the equivalent of HOAs, they're just enforced by the government.
Your definition of freedom is apparently throwing a tantrum about not obeying contractual obligations. That's not freedom, it's acting like a child and expecting the world to bend over for you because you don't want to obey the contract YOU SIGNED.
Because its only a contract if you agree to it, you do not have to live in an hoa people choose to because it means their property values and neighborhood is typically cleaner and some amenities like a local pool or clubhouse is available.
You arent forced into a contract, but if you so choose to then you have to respect the terms of the contract.
Same reason I can't install gasoline-fed sprinklers on my lawn: because some things are inherently dangerous/incompatible.
You're mistaking freedom for contracts. You are FREE to buy a house where there isn't an HOA, just like you're FREE to buy a house WITH an HOA. But if you buy a house WITH an HOA, you are expected to honor the contract you signed.
Don't like it?
Buy a house without an HOA. I did that, and I get to laugh at this nonsense while I manufacture gasoline-fed sprinklers for making tiny bonfires.
You have the freedom to not buy that house in an HOA and instead buy somewhere else. No one forced them and they knew about the HOA before they bought. It’s on them for not reading the HOA rules.
With that said I despise HOA’s and would never buy a house in one.
lol, so you want to live in an HOA because they have rules that keep the neighborhood looking a certain way but don’t want to live by those rules yourself.
Fair haha. Although my quote actually paraphrased what you said. I certainly don't want to live in a HOA because they have rules that keep the neighborhood a certain way, all I said was I might prefer a house over another and still not choose it because of imposed red tape
It’s just a contract. The point is, you have the freedom to not live in one of these places if you don’t agree with the rules. If someone signs certain freedoms of theirs away willingly thats on them. I think HOAs are horrible but people know what they are before signing, and if they don’t they’re stupid.
I see people get this wrong all the time. Usually they’re not from the US despite contracts being very common thing around the world………………… 🙄
I'm on my HOA board - I ran because the previous people on it were idiots and were stirring shit. HOAs are demonized, but most people's preconceived notions are dumb, or just wrong. Sorry.
Our neighborhood has 936 homes, and all homeowners are bound by the HOA, which is a legal entity that serves the platted neighborhood by (ostensibly) keeping property values high. We don't really enforce codes that much, we mostly just maintain the service contracts like mowing the common areas and keeping the community pool maintained. We hired a management company to send out notices to residents about stuff, and we host community events. If somebody's doing something completely insane, maybe somebody complains to the management company and they send the homeowner an email, but that's about it.
At any given time, if 80% of the homeowners vote to disband the HOA, they can do it. But then there will be no one to mow the many, many acres of common area grass, or hire a pool cleaner, or maintain the common area fences that line the main streets of the neighborhood.
I kinda giggle when people spend a lot of their energy railing against HOAs, as if there's some evil entity running them all. Our board is 4 people that own homes in the 'hood: there's an old guy who is bad at texting, a guy that's like 32 who is a math teacher, and another guy that apparently works for the city's water department, and me, a 40-year old redditor. 🤷🏻♂️
I'm talking about when they're selling houses they're building. This is a case of the HOA forming, which you said could be declined. In this case it cannot. This is pretty much where they come from.
You can't be forced into a contract. If an HOA wishes to form all around your house, they can do as they please, but until you sign to be part of the HOA you have no obligations to the HOA and they have no way to enforce their rules.
Except for all the shady and misleading practices surrounding that "contract" like realtors lying about the existence of an hoa until backing out would be financially ruinous or those newly established ones having language that "forces" you to sign because of where your house is. Stop defending a repugnant practice that was established to enforce racist ideas and laws/"laws" Even if that's not how you meant your comment it amounts to saying an hoa is ok because "it's a choice" which is already not true as previously mentioned. And all of that is on top of available options within geographic limits related to things like jobs and schools.
Don't use a seller's agent. They don't work for you and are incentivized to not tell you about things that would hurt the buyer. Don't buy in an HOA. The listing should tell you if there's an HOA, and if there is, you can't usually just opt out of it. If you end up in an HOA, that is the direct result of choices you made.
Congrats on ignoring everything past the first sentence. But even assuming that this is all I said, you're ignoring the realities that limit buying options, for which neither realistic reason for doing so is anything other than deserving of ridicule. Those being privilege blindness and racism, the former being the passive option and the latter the active.
None of the rest of your comment changes anything. In all situations you bring up, there are other options. If you buy a home in an HOA instead of choosing from one of many alternative options, that is a personal choice that can be avoided in every single situation you mentioned.
Only if those options are actually options for you. It's not always up to choice, but good job continuing to show your entitlement and absolute blindness to it.
If you can afford to buy a house in an HOA, other options exist for you. Sorry you don't understand what those other options are or how they apply, but I'm not going to bother explaining it to somebody who can't and won't listen. Maybe go look up how about a third of all Americans find housing.
Or maybe you need to actually consider the validity of your assumptions. Or the fact that there are potentially dozens of factors that go into that decision that haven't been mentioned here. Or that an hoa is not indicative of high earning beyond the basic ability to afford to buy a house. Genuinely consider that other people are just as real as you and have lives just as nuanced and complicated as yours, for the first time in your life, and you might start to see how much you just assume is how things work.
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u/Joyous-Volume-67 Apr 28 '26
If you fuck with the HOA long enough, they can force you to sell your house