Neighborhoods with properly drafted and enforced covenants or architectural standards have been shown to retain property value better than those with poorly enforced covenants or no standards at all. Neighborhoods that follow their covenants and standards tend to be safer, look better, maintain better relationships with local governments, and better retain or increase the investments that homeowners have made in their properties.
Again, HOAs aren’t necessarily bad. You want to live in a community with a pool, clubhouse, gym, landscaping, curb striping, pothole repair, and such the HOA takes care of it (or more likely they pay a management company to take care of it). They also ensure rules enforcement so that your neighbor doesn’t keep cars on blocks in their front yard or that someone doesn’t paint their house black or whatever thus ensuring consistent property values. HOAs are comprised of volunteer homeowners and they aren’t supposed to be compensated. They aren’t inherently evil entities.
But of course you have people that decide to turn HOAs into their own personal fifedoms and these stories are a dime a dozen.
Even if you manage to buy some land in a desirable area with no HOA, chances are there there’s still a HOA-like entity that can and will control what you do on your property.
It’s not? For Rand Paul? I’m sure he’s at least a moderately wealthy person who has more options than most people. I’m sure where he lives there are plenty of nice, affluent neighborhoods with no HOA.
“Neighborhood” almost always implies HOA (especially in newer areas), and even if there isn’t one is highly likely the land or tract itself is subject to strict CC&Rs enforced by the city (which really isn’t much different than an HOA in any enforcement sense) - especially so in affluent areas. And that’s not even getting into zoning laws and such.
Basically, what I see people arguing for when they are anti-HOA (just on principle) is the ability to live however they want without The Man harshing on their freedoms and this just isn’t a reality for many unless you want to build a Unabomber style shack out in some unincorporated area far away from others, or you need to be lucky enough to find a property in an old neighborhood that predates HOAs and strict CC&Rs.
I may sound like an HOA apologist and I really am not. That raid I’ve seen how they work on the inside and I’ve also seen how they have a knack for attracting authoritarians and becoming corrupt institutions. They also do a lot of unseen and thankless work beyond simply fining people for the lawn grass being 1mm too tall.
Again, one of the means of Paul can afford to live in an area that is not inside a city (especially in Kentucky, a largely rural state).
I don’t think you are. I also don’t think there is anything wrong with people deciding to live under a HOA. I’m not for or against them.
I just don’t think that for a state like Kentucky avoiding either of these would be onerous for someone of Paul’s position. He made the choice to live in a community with an HOA, for whatever reason and then violated those terms. I think we’re just saying if he didn’t want to live under an HOA, why did he decide to live under one? Maybe he felt he had no choice, but I don’t see how that can be the case, honestly.
In the US most new construction neighborhoods are planned communities and the city doesn’t maintain roads or landscaping. Amenities are important as well. It’s different when you’re in a very urban area but most can’t afford to live in the city center.
Can you post a story that backs this up? I think this is the major point of disagreement here. And do you mean within cities or in suburbs? I’d think that building patterns are very different with regards to cities, vs. suburbs and exurbs (and different size cities as well).
I’m specifically referring to suburbs and exurbs. It’s definitely more possible to get new construction homes closer to the urban centers without HOAs but in my experience these are priced astronomically high.
Speaking from my experience in the Seattle area (but this has been the case everywhere I’ve lived) if I want a new construction house without an HOA my only real options are to get lucky near the city center and pay millions of dollars, or live way out in BFE.
My neighborhood is a planned community whose HOA basically serves as the local government. I’m not actually sure how it all works specifically and how the schools relate to it.
Results from both ordinary least squares and instrumental variable regressions indicate that an increase in HOA presence exacerbates black–white and Hispanic–white residential segregation.
Minor quibble, I suppose, but rational actors (individuals and businesses/corps) is a cornerstone assumption of capitalism as a whole, not just its more extreme variants. Whenever mainstream capitalist Econ eventually comes around to the fact that actors can not be assumed rational (the cracks in the facade are appearing, finally, oddly enough generating from U of Chicago) they will have to revisit a whole trove of functions that rely on the rational assumption. Literally, the math behind capitalist theory will need to be reworked.
Rational action is exactly what Smith was getting at with “the butcher and the baker…”
As for State Communism, individuals and businesses are assumed to be irrational, the only possible rational actor is the state, hence central planning. The problem there of course is that a state can only be as rational as the people who run it, so…
I know my neighborhood is a bit of an outlier, but it is extremely diverse which has been really nice. To get to the segregation you have to hit gated communities or go a dozen miles further away from the freeway.
Now somewhere like the Woodlands is a lot different, they almost advertised that community as a white sanctuary and it worked. Same for the ones to the west of Houston.
Interesting that the city is allowed to download the cost of public roads and other civic responsibilities onto the HOAs. In theory, they’re reducing city taxes by the same amount. (Ha, that trick never works!) These scams assume that city taxpayers and HOA members are two different groups of people. (Saving taxpayers money by making HOA members pay more.)
Once that kind of scam is in place, there’ll be no getting rid of it. No city mayor or councilor will cut their throats by jumping the taxes back up.
And city infrastructure in have-not neighborhoods will rapidly decline.
I guess that society is rendered tolerable in part because we delegate certain rights and responsibilities to government. Start clawing those back, and the ability to commit violence is also necessarily distributed.
I guess that the thinking behind dictatorship-of-the-workers socialism is that while individuals are and remain irrational, a government can collectively generate more rational decisions and then legislate/implement them. Best not to allow such a system to fall into the power of one individual, then… This ignores the fact that there remain decisions which are taken at the individual basis, whether the interpretation of existing legislation or simply decisions which fall below the level of abstraction for government policy and thus fall outside the scope of written directives.
