“Paul is a legendary property-rights ideologue, named for Ayn Rand.”
[QI KLAXONS]
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In a gated community with a string HOA, the relevant property developer is (de-facto; because doing it officially would be so… urban…) pretty close to being all positions of municipal authority(minus police, hopefully, unless those have been regulatory captured or substantially replaced by rentacops); plus a bit of immigration and naturalization control thrown in.
It’s not quite Snow Crash caliber; but it does approach having all the activity of a fairly active municipal government repackaged into contract law, so it’s not a huge surprise that the developer would know. Why he is willing to chat with the press about it; I can only assume that he didn’t enjoy dealing with this particular customer very much.
“Now a Burbclave, that’s the place to live. A city-state with its own constitution, a border, laws, cops, everything.”
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I’m not sure how many just don’t quite understand what they are getting in to(either don’t know how much one can do with a bit of willingness to play contract law and civil litigation; or underestimate the awfulness and durability of whoever has their hands on the levers), how many don’t actually want it; but don’t have the latitude to avoid it under their location and budget constraints; and how many actually believe that Private Sector Efficiency (ideally located in an unincorporated area or area with very limited municipal governance for less overlap) is the better way to do things, free of union thugs in city hall or whatnot.
Unless you are buying seriously large plots out in the sticks, it isn’t much of a surprise that some mechanism for keeping the neighborhood from dissolving into a morass of negative externalities exists; but I would be interested to know both how people perceive HOA vs. municipal control and how the two compare in terms of corruption, unaccountability, and other governance quality measures.
Nothing, in principle, says that the HOA option is going to be worse; but the reports one hears are rarely favorable; though some municipalities have their own share of ugly stories.
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The problem, of course, is that HOA boards tend to select for the people who really like to tell people what to do. Most folks go into an HOA thinking – great, no toilets in the front yard or cars on blocks, and the stuff about green lawns or not keeping the curtains closed, well… no one is going to get too upset about that, right?
I think HOAs would be a particularly great place for election by lot, rather than by vote, so as to avoid the busiest of the bodies.
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I was shoveling shit in Louisiana.
@s2redux, literary allusion +++internets.
Also Bob The Angry Flower via @LurkingGrue “I only know how to pay people to create new alloys!”
I hate HOAs with a passion; it’s been my experience that HOAs tend to concern themselves not only with what you mentioned above (toilets in the yard, etc., etc.) but also with denying small satellite dishes, certain kinds of siding, paint colors, my clothes line, and even for one neighbor, a dog house. Granted it was for a large dog, but it was in a fenced back yard which wasn’t even visible from the street. We decided early on not to ever subject ourselves or any property we wanted to own to such ridiculous external management.
IMO, HOAs always seem well-stacked with large frogs in small ponds. Like so many other commenters, I told our realtor when we were looking for our current house not to even bother showing us anything in an HOA neighborhood because it was an immediate deal-breaker. We found a house (with a necessary mother-in-law suite) in an old, established neighborhood, no HOA, and have lived happily so far for 5 years with my parents in the m-i-l suite.
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If you were a Gated Community property developer, wouldn’t you include concealed surveillance cameras in the design?
Umm, neither would I.
The whole story is about halfway into a J.G Ballard novel. They end badly.
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Oh… and welcome to Boing Boing, comrade.
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I’m genuinely fucking heated that nobody went for the headline pun “Atlas Shrubbed.”
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The suburbs are a dangerous place…
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Mate, you’d be lucky if I read all the comments in the threads I’m actually in, let alone the ones I’m not. Not everybody has an encyclopedic knowledge of every comment made on the site.
But that just makes it even worse - if two(and presumably more) separate people can come up with the same headline pun independent of each other, but nobody’s using it, then it’s not like it’s hard or unavailable. I expect better from people writing headlines.
Why would I be lucky?
It makes me no never mind, either way; I was just trying to help assuage your “being fuckin’ heated” needlessly.
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Often times this isn’t an option.
HOAs are fine in principal. Done right they help maintain property values and deal with the bullshit that comes with managing a community.
It’s just unfortunate that they often attract authoritarian dickheads who are just looking for an outlet to be mini dictators.
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Please elaborate. How is it often not an option, especially for a man of means such as Dr. Paul? Is there any region anywhere in this country where you can’t either buy or build a decent home that isn’t governed by a HOA?
Finding new construction homes that aren’t in a HOA is extremely rare. Even if you buy a plot of land somewhere there may be various CC&Rs you have to follow.
You may be correct if the buyer is looking for a tract home, but we’re talking about a wealthy, self-proclaimed hard core libertarian here. A quick check on Zillow for listings in Bowling Green shows quite a few very nice looking homes in the area as well as large plots of land that are not part of a HOA, so the man clearly had other options.
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