A homeowner in Goodyear, Arizona is locked in a dispute with his homeowner’s association over his practice of distributing free cold water from his driveway.
If you’re in a state with ballot measures, then you could campaign for rules against single family home HOAs.
HOAs should be treated exactly the same as landlords.
Hanged. From the nearest street light.
Having once been on the board of one, I agree.
I found an update about the vote to remove the three board members.
Homeowners voted 190 to 20 in favour of removal, however the board cancelled the vote claiming there wasn’t a 24 hour notice given to the community and subsequently that 210 votes might not qualify a quorum of more than a thousand homes.
Those kinds of shenanigans get HOAs nullified by court order.
Oh, that will go well. Piss off people and make their vote not count. The people that know where you live and can see your front door…
To play devil’s advocate for a moment, having a sufficient vote notification period is important.
Though if that were the board’s true concern, they surely would have announced intention to notify the community alongside their statement cancelling the vote for this reason, which hasn’t happened insofar as I can tell.
Voting details:
According to recent census data, Goodyear has 2.7 people per household. It doesn’t say for the city specifically, but Arizona appears to have a minor population of 21%. I saw in the statement this association represents “over 1,000” households. In my experience, that could mean anywhere from 1,001 - 1,099 homes. The city of Goodyear held a vote earlier this year to approve a water utility contract, which lists an expected voter turnout of 17%.
By this, I’m guessing less than 3,000 people live in this community, with about 2,400 eligible to vote on an association proposal, but likely around 400 people that would go to the effort of voting on such a tedious issue.
I think that if half of the community shows up with less than a day’s notice to make themselves heard, that’s probably representative enough for how the community feels about these board members.
Donald stated you’ll never have to vote again… retards cheered. This is how it will start.
Well that sucks. I don’t know what their rules are, but having dealt with shitty HOA’s, if all the rules of the agreement were followed and you get their attorneys involved, their attorneys in most cases will tell those dickheads knock it off if the agreement was followed. This sounds like a violation on the HOA’s part of the agreement but again, I don’t know how it’s written. I do know if an update was pushed every single resident shall have received the update for it be valid and they shall have a copy of the agreement ready upon request. I hate shitty HOA’s. Good luck to them.
How anyone that lives in a country that has HOAs can unironically call it “land of the free” is beyond me
Some HOAs can be quite nice as they’re just there to add some basic community rules. However, many are hijacked by a handful of narcissistic individuals who let this insignificant amount of power go to their heads and they turn into a bunch Mussolinis
Having served on the board of my building, you see what slobs and mindless people you share the planet with. Letting their pets piss in the hallway. It gets cleaned by staff, right? What’s the problem? Compost stinks, leave the bin in the hallway! Doesn’t matter as long as I don’t smell it, right?
Handing out bottles of water!
That’s the thing, the sheer amount of imbeciles who occupy these units make you question how society got to this point.
“ProPTeRy VaLUes!”
No one sees any value in just living in their homes. They have to be statements on your personal wealth, and though that, statements on your character as a human being. Living under the thumb of narcissists is a small price to pay so your neighbor doesn’t look poor.
What do you think a city or state is? Gotta have rules, good luck living in a neighborhood without a HOA when the fat shirtless guy next door turns his front lawn into an open air trash heap.
As a European with HOA’s I would like to ask how you if you’ve seen how people handle things outside of “freedom land”
My city has bylaws for that sort of thing. I can’t let my grass turn into a jungle either. That’s also a bylaw. Shoveling snow into the street? Guess what, bylaw.
Don’t need an HOA full of overbearing Karen’s to Lord over me about what color I painted my garage on top of the fairly loose bylaws that I also need to abide by.
At least with bylaws they’re enforced by public workers, not Karen from next door.
You guys are wrong. The city handles what overflows onto ITS property, they don’t care about your property. That’s what the HOA is for.
You can’t leave your trash on the sidewalk (city property) randomly, the city can’t do jack shit if some slob leaves his trash on his lawn.
Until rats set in. You guys comfortable leaving things degenerate to that level until the city acts?
You are the one who is clueless. My city absolutely will fine people for violating the upkeep laws. I know because I’ve been fined for grass before, and I know one of my neighbors had an abandoned, rotting car towed out of their driveway.
This is straight up not true in many places. Where I live they have a long list of things you can’t have in your yard, or in your yard for extended periods of time. They have a list of rules for the flora, maintenance, etc.
The only time your assumption is true is the inside of the house. They can’t do much there until it is a fire hazard, bio hazard, etc. , but that level of hoarding stuff is not common, and even then, there are limits to it before the city intervenes
I just picked a random US city out of thin air.
If they’re that concerned about how tall your grass is, I imagine they’ll also get involved if you let trash pile up.
That’s my point. They’ll do something when it’s three feet tall, but maybe I want the neighbor to cut it before it reaches that level?
That’s my point.
No, that wasn’t your point. Now you’re moving the goal post. Your point was, and I quote,
The city handles what overflows onto ITS property, they don’t care about your property.
Plus, the article explicitly states that the ordinance specifies 12 inches, not three feet.
You can keep digging your hole deeper, but it’s not going to support your claim. Your just wrong here, and one sign of a well adjusted adult is knowing when to admit they’re wrong.
They don’t care about your property, right. No one wants 12 inch grass.
It is you who is wrong. The HOAs exist to make people respect human living conditions, not the contractor-grade specs the city enforces for its purposes.
Try to picture a city with just the city rules enforced. All right, it’s 1 foot tall grass, not three feet. OK, it’s three trash bags with rats, not 12.
That enough? Of course it isn’t.
The grass matters to the city when it overflows onto its property. One hopes that in the vast majority of cases, people will maintain their property a bit better on their own. The HOA just makes it possible to ensure that. The vast majority of HOAs aren’t PITAs, only the extreme stories make it to the news.
If you like your lawn 1 foot tall with trash bags everywhere, move to where there is no HOA. I realize there are fewer and fewer trailer parks these days, but that’s not my fault.
I don’t know how to put it simpler.
" Your just wrong here, and one sign of a well adjusted adult is knowing when to admit they’re wrong."
It’s “you’re”, and I’m not, and take your own advice.
turns his front lawn into an open air trash heap
The town/city is suppose to handle that.
Only at a certain point. Maybe I want it handled before?
Maybe mind your own business?
That’s my next door neighbour!
Sorry, I’ll wear a shirt next time.
No good deed goes unpunished.
The good news is he read the HOA agreement, initiated a special meeting through signatures, and now the neighborhood is holding a special election to remove the dickhead board members.
And the update is… fuck off, 210 votes is not counted for. Someone updated the comments
Dammit! Thank you for the update.
Thank you, comment that summarises what’s in the article, I was afraid I might have to read the article to get the full picture.
Cities make people crazy.
Lol you sheltered as hell, most of these hoas exist outside of cities in suburbs, where people like you live watching fox news, getting paranoid and angry over imaginary threats
I’m not American and I don’t live in the burbs. American exceptionalism is everywhere. Enjoy your dictators. HOA’s, condo boards and Drumpfkins too.
Cities? Money. HOAs are designed to keep the poors out, and by poors they mean other colored people.
HOAs are full of crazies.
Cities are usually fine… Not all cities though.
Doesn’t really have anything to do with location. There are nutters and busy bodies everywhere. Most of the non city people voted for the president and representatives that are destroying the usa.
That is the truth. The bigger, the denser, the crazier. It’s some kind of emergent feedback effect. Like a mass of uranium.
Of course the city dwellers will protest that assertion.
As we can see by the attacks over my statement, city people are in fact crazy as shit.
“attacks”
Nah, Ive been to a dozen cities roughly the population of NYC across asia. None of them have the crazy on display of the average american city or suburb’s Nextdoor.
What a dystopian hell hole. My condolences to everyone having something like HOA in their lives. May you all experience a civilised and free country at some point.
The HOA I live in doesn’t allow motorcycles in the driveway. Garage only.
I have two. They take up more room than you’d expect.
I see many homeless people in my area, I am more withdrawn but I always think of grabbing a case of water for our hot times to hand out, even if it may not be cool. Sort of too shy to follow through previously but it gets like 30-40C this part of Canada in the summer and we sort of need water to live.
Sort of too shy to follow through previously
Worst thing to happen realistically is that you get a “no thank you, i’m good”.
My township finally decided to do something about our homeless problem … by fencing off the area they were congregating in, natch.
That seems like an extremely easy way to waste money on a fence that is about to be cut in 20 places with flush cutters.
Nah, they all just moved somewhere else. Easy portability is the one upside to homelessness.
My favorite HOA conflict:
https://www.jeepforum.com/threads/epic-hoa-parking-boot-battle.572540/
TL;DR - HOA boots a car parked outside a guys house. He puts the car up on dollies and pushes it into his garage.
They accuse him of stealing the boot.
He tells them they can come get it any time they want.
They tell him it’s $140 to remove the boot.
He tells them “Nah, it’s cool, I don’t need to drive the car.” LOL.
Edit Also in Arizona… Something in the water down there?
There’s a new-ish genre of Youtubers these days, Arizona home inspectors showing what a gigantic clusterfuck new house construction is there. I can’t decide which is my favorite disaster: exterior walls that are just paper and stucco, or the gas leaks at literally every house. In AZ, the HOAs are the least of people’s problems.
Epic story, thanks a lot for sharing the link!, sad there never was an ending
fucking photobucket killed all the pics
(also the forum software should have allowed uploading pics even in 2004)
Fair warning for anyone who wants to boot my car I own a cordless angle grinder…
They can get you for destruction of property then. Luckily most non-law enforcement use cheap ass boots. I had an apartment complex boot an old truck of mine because I let the registration expire on since I was about to trade it in for a new(er) car. I simply deflated the tire enough to wiggle it free and threw it in a bush, then I pumped the tire back up and drove it to a Walmart parking lot for a couple of days.
I got booted at university once so I just changed my tire and took the boot with me
Now they use 2 boots
I bought a boot removal tool my first year of college and was the savior of my friend group.
Don’t the boots cover the lug nuts?
On some of them you can just let the air out of the tire and slip them off the wheel. I did that at a parking garage one time and left the boot in the parking spot.
They found me later and said I stole it, I told them to check the camera footage and they saw someone else carry the thing off. I don’t know how I got out of that one but I guess they just went after the other guy instead of me lol
Most boots are also trivially easy to pick open for even an armature.
They arnt generally well made
Folks in my area used to cary around crowbars (the half life style long ones for crates and shit) back when the sheriff deputies were boot happy for a bit. This was before cameras so they couldn’t do much when they found the damned things snapped didn’t help that folks would do it to any car they saw with a boot.
guy with a crowbar walking down the street
“After all, why shouldn’t I do it?”
This one didn’t lol
the heat does something to your brain, or its just the sort of people who move to arizona are already freaks
Ugh this isn’t what HOAs are for!
HOAs are intended to harass and discriminate against black and brown people so that they don’t move in, or at least immediately leave.
Not white guys with majestic beards.
He must’ve been giving water to black or brown people, it’s the only justifiable reason.
HOAs are intended to harass and discriminate against black and brown people so that they don’t move in
Lol I was going to make a joke here about “Redline Homes Inc.” - but it turns out there really is such a company, in Oklahoma of course.
JFC - of course there is 🤦♀️
HOA’s are for people who used to be in positions of perceived power at work but now they’re retired and they miss bossing/bitching at people.
They’re for people who don’t feel dominated enough by daddy government so they add another layer.
Maybe HOA members need to be introduced to kink. There’s a safe way to dom, folks!
I wouldn’t be surprised if prudish repression underlies a lot of their decisions too. Oh, the world we could live in if uptight people could simply indulge in powerplay kink now and then.
HOAs seem like they should be illegal. Having a contract in perpetuity that is attached to the purchase of property seems like it shouldn’t be allowed. So it is not only bound to the person who originally signed, but to whoever purchases the relevant property afterwards, and that gives other people rights over you that can be changed afterwards and are only limited by their conscience.
I basically don’t think you should be able to create a government by using a contract.
The part that I hate about it is obliging future homeowners to participate.
I get that the obligation was the main reason why HOA types wanted to build HOAs, but I’ll never live under an HOA. As soon as I’m aware there’s an HOA involved, I’m out. Burn the paperwork. I’m not buying it.
… Not that I plan on moving ever again.
HOAs are the direct result of racists trying to work around de-jure segregation being abolished, so yeah.
I basically don’t think you should be able to create a government by using a contract.
It’s basically what Anarco-capitalism wants to do. Incidentally, HOAs form the best real world argument against Anarco-capitalism.
HOAs are elected and operated by the residents. Yeah they’re often shitty, but as residents you can change them.
Also, government creation contracts are called constitutions. Lots of countries have them.
If you squint a lot, HOAs could be a mechanism for bringing neighborhoods together. It allows them to self-govern over the shared resources for the neighborhood. Want to get a company to run fiber to everyone’s home, or build a solar/wind farm for fewer dollars per MW than rooftop solar could ever do? An HOA is a legal mechanism to setup the financing and agreements to make that work in an affordable way for the residents.
Most HOAs are not setup for anything like that. They’re for requiring what fencing contractor you have to use and banning natural lawns.
Or could like, be a. Actual city doing that?
Cities are often too big of an institution for this kind of mutual aid to work. It needs to be a social unit where you can know most of the people.
So why not form a tenant union at that point?
It’s basically that, for owners. But with stupid default rules that developers put in.
HOAs formed after a development is built tend to be very cool and much like what is described.
Collective bargaining for trash service, Halloween hay rides, July 4th bbq, etc.
Well, yeah, that’s what it should be.
Also, government creation contracts are called constitutions. Lots of countries have them.
I also enjoy pedantic arguments, but I try to remember to avoid them when I think the topic is important. I had to stop myself from arguing against this point, because even if I won the argument, it wouldn’t mean anything.
FWIW I thought it was a great line - a bit of a zinger, even.
My new neighborhood has a corporate HOA and they won’t hand over control to the residents until a certain % of houses are occupied. The problem is the builder has been building houses for the past 4 years and they’re far away from completion, so we have to deal with the shitty HOA until then.
You “can” change them, but don’t some/most HOAs have it so that the more properties you own in a HOA, the more voting power/votes you have? Like you own 5 properties, thus have 5 votes?
Probably, but are there people who own a bunch of properties in one neighborhood? If they own a majority, isn’t that more like a managed community than an actual neighborhood?
if by people you mean corporations
In my HOA almost all of the board members own multiple units and they don’t even live in our neighborhood. I know one is a realtor, as she sold me my place, and another is just an investor.
They’re not always the most pleasant people, but they do an ok job the majority of the time. People seem to hate owning a house but still getting told no on things.
I don’t know if they actually vote multiple times, but I think we’ve had less than a half dozen rule changes in the almost 20 years I’ve been there.
They have a vested financial interest in making the neighborhood as attractive and successful as the rest of us. While their motivation is purely a financial interest, the petty and self-centered things I’ve seen my fellow residents try to demand is crazier than anything our board has actually done.
Most of the HOAs in my area are a mix of privately owned homes and rental properties owned by the company that built the neighborhood.
Whoever ratted it him out is just jealous of his beard.
I doubt anyone ratted him out. HOA “inspections” are a thing. I was in an HOA once, and i had a shutter fall off my house. They took a picture of it and sent it to me to tell me i had to fix it.
That HOA was good tho. The shutter had been off 6 months and the note said, “most of the time, residents dont even know theyre in violation. So you have a month to prove you come up with a plan to fix it.” Which was like, call and get a quote. Then just sent them a pic when it was back up
Considering board members are made up of residents, there’s a good chance it was one of them then. Even them, that’s some petty nonsense.
My mom’s neighborhood is an HOA, and they have a rule of no work/utility truck overnight parking. I have a shell and lumber rack on my truck that has a conduit box and ladders on it, and she’s gotten flagged for it a couple of times (there’s a specific crotchety old neighbor she suspects), but she’s just told them to go pound sand, and that’s somehow worked.
Fuck HOAs. I’ve vowed to never live in one. I know it’s not an option for some people due to where they live, but I am not dealing with that crap.
Couldn’t you just park outside the neighbor’s house? Or just get a cheap truck and just abandon it, see who they go after then.
You hired somebody to put a shutter back on? It’s just a couple of screws!
Screws are complicated for Americans
Can confirm, am American screw
Man, I could never live with an HOA. It’s just dumb.
They are suprisingly difficult to avoid. Shared units, condos and apartments all have associations that are just an HOA with a different name. The only difference for these are that they are responsible for replacing the shared roof every 20-ish years or so.
Having shared assets to maintain is legitimate, but the vast majority of HOAs (those governing single-family neighborhoods) don’t really have that as an excuse. Even if they do have something to maintain, like a private street or a pool, it’s only because the local government was shirking its responsibility to provide what should have been public infrastructure.
(And that’s why they’re so common: because low-density development is so ruinously unsustainable, governments heavily encourage developers to establish HOAs so that the time bomb of future maintenance is the homeowners’ problem instead of bankrupting the city.)
Would be interesting to know what rule they might have that could be interpreted in such a way to ban giving out water (and which should be referenced in a citation, no?) but the article doesn’t mention anything of the sort.
It does:
The Canyon Trails HOA and its management company, F-S Residential, began issuing citations to Martin last year for having a cooler in his driveway.
My guess is the language about what can’t be visible is very general to cover all kinds of things that could be considered “unsightly” like bikes, clothes, trash, etc.
I’m sure it could be fixed with some provision about the items being actively used but HOAs are dicks.
Free country bro
Don’t tread on me
My guess is…
So in other words, the article doesn’t mention which rule could be interpreted to ban giving out water.
It’s not the water-handing-out in and of itself. Also, yeah these people often suck and enforcement often makes them look like the tools they are, but make no mistake about it, there are people that like it that their neighborhoods are policed by Karens who keep it looking like a sterile movie set. The moral of the story is, stay the fuck away from HOAs.
Here are two common clauses that are probably being applied here:
Residential Use All Lots within the Properties shall be used, improved, and devoted exclusively to single-family residential use. No trade, business, commercial activity, or profession of any kind, whether for profit or not, shall be conducted, maintained, or permitted on any part of any Lot without the prior written consent of the Board of Directors. This prohibition shall include, but not be limited to, any activity that generates regular visitor or client traffic to the Lot.
Prohibition of Signs No sign, billboard, poster, or advertising device of any character shall be erected, placed, permitted, or maintained on any Lot or on the exterior of any Dwelling, except for one (1) “For Sale” or “For Rent” sign of a type, size, and location approved by the Architectural Control Committee, and small signs identifying the occupant’s name or address as permitted by the Committee. All other signs are expressly prohibited without prior written approval from the Board.
So the board could approve Donald Trump boards and deny everything else? This sounds intensely dystopian.
I would give HOA murderers a get out of jail free pass, honestly.
