National HOA reputations

This site is very helpful because of the many voices, however it also is a site that shows there are way too many issues with the HOA concept. There are way too many negative personalities that interfere with running an HOA. I believe that the Board of Directors works for the residents, for the betterment of the Association. The Board of Directors in my Association focus on the following: maintain fiduciary responsibility, provide preventative maintenance procedures, and maintain/increase property values for the owners. The Board of Directors attempts to say yes to owners' requests as often as possible by setting up the following: besides updating all governing documents, we have Architectural standards, landscape standards, updated our rules and regulations, developed our own web-site with every document available for an owner to review. We communicate through email blasts and a monthly newsletter because the Board believes in keeping the owners who want to know what is happening. No one person on the Board has the ability to become too powerful because we also have many committees that are involved. in helping to run the association. HOA's are a great place to live if the wrong personalities do not get on the Board.

No. HOA boards do NOT work for the members. They are ELECTED by the members to do the work. They get elected so they can represent the HOA and do the daily work of the HOA. They represent the apathetic to the involved.

HOA's are "sales tools". That is why they were created. (Yes a few people think it's other "reasons"). It was a way for a developer to pass along the continued maintenance costs onto the owners for the amenities they put in. Also putting in rules to make sure the HOA area appears ATTRACTIVE to potential buyers.

What better sales pitch could you hear than "There are rules in place that will enforce your neighbors to keep up appearances?" Meaning your home will be provided amenities and keep appearing uniform/neat. People want to buy in clean with amenity areas.

A HUGE misnomer is that a HOA was created to keep up or keep "Home values". Home values are based on REAL NUMBERS. It is what other similar homes sale/foreclose for in a select area in a 6 month period. Keeping a home area neat and offering amenities does factor in for ATTRACTING POTENTIAL buyers keeping home sales good. They are not necessarily a "value" as some may not find a "tennis court" an attraction.

Also HOA's are formed as corporations so they can collect monies to maintain the common areas and amenities. How else would you upkeep a pool or other amenity without the ability to collect money?

For HOAs that are organized as corporations, the boards due owe fiduciary duties to the members. Those fiduciary duties are relatively limited, but the boards do need to run the HOAs in the best interests of the members of the HOA (i.e., not in the best interests of the property manager, not in the best interests of a specific director to the detriment of owners, etc.).

Hi Melissa, respectfully, in North Carolina, HOA boards do have fiduciary duties under the law; see "Director Standards of Conduct" under http://lawfirmcarolinas.com/blog/nc-condo-hoa-directors-duties-standards-of-conduct-and-liability/. In NY, they also have some duties like these under the law. These duties are typically watered-down versions of duties owed by corporate directors, since the law recognizes that HOA boards are uncompensated volunteers.

Nope George. Nope. HOA's were developed as "sales tools" by developers whom wanted to sell their developments and get out of the long term maintenance expenses.

I didn't buy a house cause I hated the wallpaper. Did that mean that $200K house wasn't worth $200K? No. It means one less buyer available to buy that home.

Management and standards isn't what HOA dues are paying for. It is the ongoing maintenance and insurance to protect the property/board. Management can be hired out or done from within for free.

If the point of a HOA is to maintain property values, doesn’t that assume:

1. The judgment of HOA boards is better than the judgment of each owner re: maintaining homes to keep their values.

2. Ordinary citizens who own homes are at risk of not keeping up their property.

I never lived in a HOA as a child and my parents and grandparents never did. My childhood neighborhood is beautiful, as is my parents’ neighborhood (and as were my grandparents’ neighborhoods). People simply cared about their homes and appearances. Maybe it’s the demographic that I grew up in, but I think that most people, unless they are low-class or the like, will keep up their properties, and any homes above a certain sales price will exclude “white trash”. Clearly HOAs are needed in multifamily buildings but if their purpose is to maintain property values, they shouldn’t be needed in neighborhoods that do not contain low-class people. If there are common areas that need maintenance, just charge everyone a user fee and limit the HOA’s duty to be only upkeep of the common area; that’s how a neighborhood near mine kept its pool: it sold memberships. Social pressure and city codes can weed out any failures to maintain properties anyway.

To be clear everyone has their opinions and they are not right nor wrong.

There's no real evidence to support the industry-wide claim that HOAs protect or enhance property values. That really is marketing.

Deed restrictions began as a way to enforce segregation. That's the unfortunate ugly truth. If you live in an association founded in the early 60's or before, you'll find language specifying which races can live in the neighborhood (hint: just whites).

Even after the Civil Rights Act, deed restrictions were used to keep a certain element out. Why do so many documents have restrictions against pickup trucks parked in view, for example. Well, there was a time when pickup trucks were a vehicle of the working class. Of course now they can cost upwards of $60k but those silly prohibitions against pickup trucks are still gathering dust in some documents. Or work vehicles - how many of you live in associations that prohibit work vehicles? Again, think about who drives a "work vehicle"? Blue collar folks that bougies didn't want in the neighborhood.

The modern HOA however, is a product of the Clean Water Act in the late 70s. To conform to new stormwater management requirements imposed by the government, developers had to add retention/detention ponds or green space into their developments. And of course that land couldn't just exist, it had to be owned and maintained and insured. Common properties are of course owned by the homeowners in common but you can't split the irrigation bill up 200 ways or however many homes are the neighborhood. So HOAs were created to be a corporate entity that owns and maintains the common properties.

Then developers started thinking - hey, we've got this corporate apparatus in place, let's add more than just a drainage ditch. Let's add playgrounds and pools to help us sell houses (Melissa is right - marketing). And lets put a monument at the entrance and call it something like The Plantation of the Estates of Deer Crossing so we can make it sound like it's worth paying even more for this lot.

Cities LOVED this - don't need to spend their money on parks and pools when developers are doing it (of course they will continue to collect property tax!) and with deed restrictions in place, cities can cut back on Code Enforcement because developers are doing that too!

Homeowners often ask me what they "get" for their dues. And I tell them - you get the satisfaction of knowing they have met their obligations as a member of a corporation that has responsibilities.

There absolutely is a national HOA industry - it's the management companies and vendors that work for HOAs. We need to cozy up to developers because that's how we get new business. And it doesn't sound so good to admit that HOAs are a way for municipalities to keep collecting property tax but fob off maintenance and code enforcement to private developers. So we say it preserves your property values. More marketing.

Um, no, Chris, it doesn't.

In a perfect world, the judgement of an HOA board is an extension of the homeowners, because everyone agrees to keep up their homes according to the community rules. Someone I can said to me when you drive through any neighborhood, you shouldn't be able to tell the difference between those who rent and those who are owner-occupants because everyone wants to live in a clean safe attractive community and behaves accordingly.

It's true some owners aren't capable of keeping up their property, but that could be for a number of reasons, such as people get older and don't have anyone to help with maintenance and/or don't have the money to do it, while others simply don't know how. No one gets a class in homeownership and often have to learn by doing. Sometimes those lessons are hard.

I don't know what you mean by low class people - it smacks of elitism and a little more (I'll let you guess what else I'm talking about). I've seen just as many tacky "upper class people as I have people with buckets of pride in what they have, even though it isn't a McMansion and is in the heart of the 'hood or trailer park.

I do agree that personalities can gum up the works in a HOA - that also happens in church, the PTA and (especially) Congress. it's human nature - We fall for the BS and don't apply critical thinking to determine if the person actually said something that made sense. This is why homeowners have to do their page and pay attention to the people the elect for these positions and take some time to find out for themselves what's going on instead of listening to rumors of just stay home and watch TV.

A HOA is NOT an industry. It doesn't make that definition. Every HOA is separate and not connected. (Unless large with sub-HOA's within). Management companies may indeed be an industry but a HOA itself is NOT an industry. When was the last HOA convention you ever went to? None.

OK, that’s fine. We may view this differently due to different life experiences. I never saw poorly-kept properties in my HOA-free days.

And if your post is implying that my post is racist, please note that the only group that I say negative things about are low-class white people.

Yes but if I referred to low-class people without specifying that they are white, I’d be accused of being racist against people of color, which I am not.

No. Low-class. Plenty of low-income people are upstanding homeowners.

Let’s move on, please. Despite the insinuation in the post above by another poster, my statements are specifically not racist against people of color.

AustinD, while I agree with you, we’re getting way off track, starting with the post above that falsely insinuated that I am a racist.

Let’s move back to the topic at hand please.

-- Out West, only "high class" people can afford the homes with amazing views (knock on wood) built by destroying the escarpment, destroying the view of the "low class" people who live at the bottom of the mountains. These "high class" people abet the placement of so much impermeable concrete that flooding becomes high risk for the "low class" people at the bottom of the mountains.

-- Only "high class" people have irrigation systems out West, because they must have grass in the desert, reducing the water supply so badly that rationing must occur in many areas.

-- Only "high class" people have to have air conditioning so frigid that rolling blackouts are the rule in some parts of California, causing a high risk to public safety.

-- Don't preach here about the evils of "low class" people. Any small wrongs these allegedly "low class" people have done simply bears no, none, zero, zilch, nada comparison to the long-term, incredible devastation that so-called "high class" people have caused with the way they "care" for their neighborhoods.

Kerry, pay attention, whoever Augustin is, they are talking about you.

JohnC,

Ya keep jumping in sounding angry - a previous poster did that a lot - sure you haven’t used a different name on this forum previously?

I like the “YOU” all in caps like that - for emphasis, right? 😂

JohnC,

Are ya there?

How about sharing your idea? Unless of course you have patent concerns.

Actually, there is a non-technological, legislative solution to poor governance. I call it Receivership Lite: communities over a certain size need to employ a person whose job is to save them from themselves.

This has problems as well, though. Receivers vary in skill. And where is the point at which the receiver can override the wishes of the board and/or homeowners? Not at all clear, and probably dependent on the individuals involved.

As I said, it's a nice, thorny problem to ponder in the wee hours of the morning.

Interesting idea, but I'd worry about things like:

How much would you pay? Would directors also get a bonus for whatever reason? Where would the money come from?
What would the qualifications be to serve (if you're going to pay folks to serve as directors, I think there should be more to it than being a homeowner)
How would these directors be evaluated (you should be subject to performance reviews just like at your job)
Who does the evaluation?
What would the evaluation criteria be?
What happens if someone falls short of expectations?

It's been suggested elsewhere on this website (several years ago that board service be similar to jury duty (I think I also saw this suggested on a Colorado HOA law firm website). One school of thought says mandatory board service might prompt people to take it more seriously, it'll prevent burnout (and delusions of grandeur?) among board members having to serve year after year after year because no one else wants the job.

Then again, people aren't fans of jury duty either, despite those "thank you so much for serving" videos you see at the beginning of your sitting in a room waiting to be called. Just as some people should be bounced from sitting on a jury because they're incapable of applying careful thought to the evidence instead of being ruled by their biases, we also know some of our neighbors who should NEVER go anywhere near a board position. They may be nice people but are utterly clueless - or have mini-dictatorships in their blood that'll come to the surface.

Homeownership is not, nor has it ever been, a spectator sport, and you have to pay attention to your home and surrounding area whether you live in an HOA or not. It's a shame you have to compel some people to do things like mow the damned lawn, clean up the dog poo, keep the stereo to a low roar after midnight (I don't care if it is Saturday night - some people may want or need to catch up on their sleep and can't do it with the boom boom pow vibrating in the background) or replace the broken glass in a windowpane instead of sticking a piece of cardboard in it and calling it a day.

PS to Chris - I didn't say YOU were a racist, but you and I both know words like "high class" and "low class" are often used as code to describe groups of people and the people using them are thinking of stereotypes, not the real deal. I don't care if you were only talking about white people or not - you could have easily said some people don't care about keeping up their homes and left it there. And as Augustine noted, the so-called "high class" people are often more capable of causing far more damage, but no one says anything because they have money and think that entitles them to step over everyone to get what they wont because they can.

I find some people protest when you call them out on their language because they KNOW they've used it to imply something else. I don't know if I hit a nerve - if so, say "ouch" and think about your word choices carefully next time.

They have an interest in maintaining the status quo and part of the status quo is homeowners who don't understand how their association works.

I started to write a lengthy expansion on that but realized that it isn't what the thread is really about (although I'm not sure what it's about anymore).

Anyway - there are lots of existing technological solutions for community governance but even the best technology requires people who care enough to use it. I'm a huge champion for homeowner education and homeowner involvement but continually run into the wall of homeowner apathy.

How many times have we seen the question posted here: "Is there some sort of agency or government authority that oversees HOAs?"

Well, the body that oversees HOAs is called the membership, and if they aren't willing to speak up and show up, nothing's going to change.

I, too, was taken aback by the language of "low class" and then "white trash." Chris, of course, doesn't want this mentioned anymore.

My sister & I were reared by our hardworking upwardly mobile single mom. For several years, we lived in tiny 1 bedroom apartments. But she finally could afford to rent a tiny house with a yard. We took care of the yard and walkways and pulled weeds. But the house was old, decrepit and badly needed paint. It looked junky. The landlord wouldn't even buy paint for us to do it ourselves. Were we "low class?"

Augie is right "high class" people destroy much of our environment and use far more precious resources than lower and middle income folks.

You're right, George, "JohnC77" is easy to identify even though he's used different names due to his occasional, um, obsession with me. Because he has difficulty forming complete sentences, I have no idea what his allusion to me is.

I like Michael's OP about his HOA. Sounds like a very nice place to live.

When someone posts a nauseatingly incorrect assertion about lower income folks, ignoring the far greater damage higher income folks do, and does not take this assertion back, I do not see good intentions.

One of my neighbors mentioned a community somewhere where all owners were required to take their turns serving on the board. It does have the advantages you mentioned. It also has some disadvantages, such as people who want to serve may do a better job than those who don't.

I think the real problem boils down to the fact that HOAs and COAs commingle home ownership with managing a corporation, and I don't see any way to get around that.

The only qualification for owning a home is being able to afford it. But managing a corporation demands quite a bit more. Which means a certain percentage of HOA/COA owners are utterly unqualified for a certain portion of their responsibilities. Which throws the burden onto the others who do have some - but probably not all - of the necessary skills. This isn't fair to the latter group, and it goes against one of the premises of ownership in these communities, which is equal rights and equal responsibilities.

So I think the whole concept has a fundamental flaw, and it's no wonder all of us smart people can't fix things. :-)