Grandpa’s Basement House(granolashotgun.com) |
Grandpa’s Basement House(granolashotgun.com) |
There was a bit of danger in all this expansion. The look of utter horror on my Dad's and Uncle's face when we turned off all the breakers and the stove was still on makes me laugh but was deadly serious at the time. Fixing that was a bit of an adventure. Dad and Uncle traced every wire in the damn house and I learned some new insults.
I'm aware that some HOAs limit (sometimes to what seems like an extreme) what can be done with the yard and lawn, but I wasn't aware of any governments that ban growing vegetables. Is that more common in water-restricted municipalities? (I live in midwestern US, where backyard gardens are very common.)
It’s almost unheard of to see suburban or wild orange trees in south Florida anymore.
I have fond memories of visiting my grandparents in Florida and going to their backyard to pick oranges and grapefruits to make fresh juice in the morning.
It’s unfortunate the orange lobby can ban something that just seems so Florida to me.
Dear Modern Farmer: Can I Legally Grow Food in My Front Yard?
https://modernfarmer.com/2013/06/dear-modern-farmer-can-i-le...
oak park hates veggies- trying to make sense of oak park's war on vegetables:
https://oakparkhatesveggies.wordpress.com/about/
Homeowners Across the Country Face Citations for Illegal Gardening:
https://www.motherearthnews.com/organic-gardening/right-to-g...
I’m sure some suburban guy decided to plow his front yard and be a corn farmer, but generally I find nobody minds a garden.
Backyard gardens are generally unobjectionable, it is the front yard that gets neighbors riled up when they see dirt and messy looking plants. Even then, if you make an effort to have it present as ornamental (eg. herbs, cherry tomatoes, mini peppers, etc. in attractive raised beds and containers that don't displace the entire lawn) you may be able to get away with it.
Oh, and definitely keep the compost pile out of sight.
Where I live, watering outdoor plants is only allowed 3 days a week, and only before 9AM or after 6PM on those three days. That doesnt mean growing vegetables is specifically illegal, but it does mean starting seedlings requires breaking the law during the warmer months.
I could see the time window applying to the actual act of watering the plants ("don't water during the hottest/brightest part of the day, to avoid wasting most of it to evaporation"), but the specific days seem to me like they're just for load balancing...
I believe some areas object to the use of rain barrels, so I wonder if this option would fall under the same or similar restrictions.
I find it so strange that such restrictions only seem to exist in the US, where there is normally so much emphasis on individual freedom.
This is common in colorado.
Being debt-free within a few years of the house being completed has a lot to be said for it. But when a loan payment is 80% or more interest at the start, that's a lot of profit for a lender to give up - they're not exactly going to be jumping at the opportunity to write those loans.
Then with that in place you modify it toward a house.
Or drag a mobile home onto the lot for temporary.
When you can afford Air Conditioning, or have too many babies you build under.
So our pattern is build high first, fill in later. The one here is "build basement first, digging under the ground with a house on it, is a pain"
(also raised because termites: gumtree hard stumps treated with CCA can survive them, siding and framing wood less so. Modern build tends to be either a slab of concrete and single storey, or a mcMansion, or units)
It‘s not uncommon to see unfinished concrete structures. Basically the raw skeleton often with exposed rebar at the top or sides, indicating future work.
They may stay in this state for years. As apparently everything is paid in cash and so building only advances whenever the owners have enough at hand.
However, that is absolutely not true for most Spanish cities.
It is a very different world from the ones most of us live in.
You were told wrong by more than 30 years. The US was officially more urban than rural by the 1920 census but the demographic trend had been going on for 50 years before that.
By 1900 1 in 10 Americans lived in just 5 cities (NYC, Chicago, Philly, St Louis & Boston).
The machinery during the 50s-60s eliminated a lot of agricultural jobs, and drive down prices. Not just for farmers, but also in processing agricultural products.
Thinking about codes and permits, I think the idea of self-reinforcing change is interesting here. As more people rent or frequently buy/sell, it makes more and more sense to have strict safety codes and permitting rules because the people building and making money off the structure don't bear the safety risks of bad construction. But as this raises costs and places barriers, it makes renting more common, etc.
Somehow, while we were all busy debating for or against this or that political view, we, common people, lost control of more and more of our existence.
We lost control of the food we eat, the kind of houses we live in (as this article explains), the way we invest our money, our work schedules, our means of production, our means of transportation (and more).
Saying this, immediately triggers alarm bells (ah! He is saying that buildings should not be regulated, he must be a libertarian right winger! Oh! He says we need to own the means of production? He's obviously a communist!) and this prevents us from discussing many of the things that really matter.
--
> I want you, dear reader, to set aside all the squirrelly feelings you may have about the political Left or Right. Perhaps you hate the evils of Big Government or the evils of Corporate Capitalism. Maybe you like cities. Maybe you don’t. Maybe you like the kinds of people who live in them. Maybe you don’t. Maybe you like places that are a bit messy. Maybe you need a place that’s orderly and tidy. That’s not the point I’m making here.
> Look at these images of the Summerlin West development on the far edge of Las Vegas. The scale is massive and the same dynamics are at work. Everything about this place is enormous and predicated on vast amounts of institutional complexity and debt. Somehow, as a society, we’ve drifted from ordinary people being able to build their own homes on a cash basis in an interactive iterative way, to these immense hyper elaborate habitats. You may not aspire to live in a small underground home that takes years to complete. The Summerlin West homes may be better in many ways. But there are trade offs involved. Both individuals and the larger society have agreed to a set of interlocking delicate systems that are simultaneously highly effective and spectacularly vulnerable to disruption. That’s my point.
Not if the SF Board of Supervisors has anything to say about it. They’ve actively blocked the transformation of parking lots into dense house as recently as this year. SF is anti housing somehow wrapped in a veneer of progressivism.
I'd actually figured it as someone making the best of what was left after a tornado or other disaster.
https://www.archdaily.com/797779/half-a-house-builds-a-whole...
[1] - https://twitter.com/zillowgonewild/status/152662553013669478...
On some other streets, people have added a floor to what were originally built as one-level homes.
That means those in the minority. The crazy guy growing gourds instead of a lawn. The loon with the purple house. The impoverished who can’t paint their house every other year. Those kinds of folk need representation the most.
So again, USA is country with most freedom? Freedom™, but you can't grow vegetables on your own property. Or you will be punished for having too long grass. Lmao
When I was poor, I just wanted a home I could afford in a safe neighborhood. Now that I have money, I just want poor people to be homeless.
/mockery
I live in a pre-zoning code suburb in Maryland. The current minimum lot size is 20,000 square feet. Our house and most of the neighboring houses are on 2,900 square foot lots. At least on this side of the neighborhood, nobody tattles on each other for doing unpermitted work. The result is real diversity and a tightly packed community. (Though as housing prices increase, our neighborhood, being so close to DC, is under threat from PMCs.)
Disgusting.
After ten years of one neighbor parking cars on their lawn, another growing more weeds than blades of grass, and another with 8 vehicles parked along the street I was done.
When I bought my second house I specifically wanted an HOA. After another 6 years, I couldn’t be happier. Yes the HOA prevents me from doing a handful of things, things that aren’t really a big deal in the grand scheme of things. While the HOA keeps the entire neighborhood looking nice and slaps people on the wrist when they need it.
Also keep in mind that getting together to organize a set of common standards and restrictions is the basis for all exclusive communities. That's OK if you are on the casual compliance side of the rules, or if you get to write them to suit your preferences. But it is discriminatory. Similar covenants have been used to keep out ethnic minorities (because of the way they live, like animals!).
Being for or against HOAs is like being for or against laws. It's meaningless without context.
Some HOAs are traffic lights. Some HOAs are civil forfeiture.
An HOA can morph from tolerable into unconscionable. Deny the HOA the right to exist in the first place, and it will never go bad. This is an appealing tradeoff for many.
We bought our house in 2016, next to an old tear down house. (I’m talking about plants growing inside because the roof doesn’t keep the water out.) Recently someone bought the house, tore it down, and built a million dollar house in its place. The other day, he gets into a fight with my wife—over various things, but among them the fact that he’s mad we won’t clean our porch. I told him that he’s the idiot who built a million dollar house next to people who were happy living next to a tear down for years.
Now before, I felt a little guilty for keeping the pool toys out there all year, but now I’m definitely not going to put them away.
My partner and I started sending yearly thank you gifts to the HOA board after our first year here. They manage contractors and landscapers to handle upkeep and repairs on the property, coordinate information among neighbors, contract and negotiate with service providers, and even pass along helpful maintenance tips. (Most recently it was "most people still have their original hot water tanks and several people have had theirs start to fail -- it's a good idea to start replacing yours before it becomes a problem" which, as someone newly moved in, I hadn't thought about but sincerely appreciated.) It's like having an advisor on hand who cares as much as we do because they live there too.
I still side-eye the idea of HOAs, but I'm coming around. People talk about the horror stories but "everything is fine with my HOA" doesn't make for exciting reading.
My neighborhood growing up had a HOA that just maintained a little shared beach. They had a couple rules for yards, but nothing too onerous (don't have someone stay in a camper in your front yard -- a rule we actually broke, but just for a weekend or so, family visit with not enough rooms in the house). Annoying neighbors will find a way to be annoying, reasonable ones will find a way to be reasonable, the HOA is just a medium for this sort of behavior.
Fortunately the HoA board didn’t look kindly on it for a variety of reasons/ issues.
He eventually moved. I hope he found a good place with a big garage and fewer neighbors to do that thing.
Same with the rental party house (before the days of air bnb(but same issues)).
HOA or not
Good folks or not
The balance between the two is nuanced and it sounds like you landed on a different side of the debate to me. I’m sorry to hear that, and I respect that, as a result, you have a different view of HOAs to me. Peace.
* One house near the entrance was bordering on being uninhabitable; rotting roof with tarps covering the holes, rotting siding, gutters hanging half on. Always shocked the city didn't declare it a public hazard.
* The people behind me would drag their TV and sofa out in the front yard every time the state's football team was playing, be noisy and would leave discarded beer cans all over the lawn.
* The people in front of me left a disabled car in the road for more than a year. Suspension shot, tires flat, windows busted out and left in the rain. After a year I finally called the city, who sent a code enforcement officer out. The person's response was to push the car out of the road ... into the front yard.
* My next door neighbor mowed his yard about 4 times a year. I even offered on several occasions to mow it for him, just because I didn't want to look at it.
My current neighborhood has none of the above problems. We have a low-BS HOA that basically exists just to be sure the common areas are maintained and that the homes are maintained to a minimum standard as specified in the rules. Otherwise, they stay out of your life. I was even on the board for a few years; we issued a grand total of about 8 warnings and zero fines in that entire time - and IIRC all of the warnings related to parking. Often, just having rules and an enforcement mechanism is enough to ensure minimum standards are maintained by the vast majority of people.
Also, an underrated HOA benefit we discovered is that they are great for collectively getting the city's attention when we need something fixed. We've had problems with potholes forming in some of the roads and, for a long time, the issue was ignored by the city despite numerous homeowners complaining. Until we got our HOA's legal representative to draft a letter to the city. The next week all the potholes were fixed.
I have never had a problem with the HOA preventing me from doing something, even if it was technically against the rules. Last year our HVAC went out and it was going to be a week before we could get it replaced. The HVAC contractor loaned us some window units to keep the house cool until everything could be ordered. Technically window units are against the bylaws. I didn't even run it by the HOA, just put a sign in the window above it saying it was temporary until next week. No issues at all.
The key with HOAs is to be involved! Think of them as mini-municipalities, like a town within a town. And, as an owner, you are entitled to attend the meetings, introduce measurs to change the bylaws, vote on business and hold office in them. This is why "Karens" tend to get and retain power - because no one opposes them. In our HOA, about 60% of the houses never voted and most rarely attended meetings. Sometimes it was hard to even get quorum, and elections were often uncontested. The way I ended up as secretary was because literally no one ran for it. Don't like the way your HOA is being run? Change it. There's a pretty fair chance you'll succeed.
I know the Internet largely hates HOAs, and it is true that there are a fair number of really bad overbearing HOAs out there. A friend of mine once got cited for having grass a half-inch too high. But I think people focus too much on the extreme; there are actually a lot of fairly nice, low BS HOAs out there as well.
Negative liberties ("freedom from") are limited and relatively easy to regulate. If you ban people from killing each other and stealing their property, almost everyone agrees it's not a huge burden. While these liberties sometimes come into conflict, such situations tend to be rare.
In practice, people care more about positive liberties ("freedom to"). In particular, they want the freedom to live a good life. Unfortunately people have different ideas of a good life, and those ideas usually require other people living their lives in a certain way and providing various services. If you try regulating this, you start quickly making choices who is allowed to live a good life.
Because laws are insufficient for a good life, people make voluntary agreements to ensure it. If certain kinds of agreements (such as HOAs) become popular, they can effectively prevent some minorities from living their idea of a good life. But the agreements are only a symptom, not the cause. The real cause are other people. Without HOAs, the same people would try getting actual governments regulate the same behavior. And failing to do so, they would often feel that the society prevents them from living a good life.
Open town meetings, which are pure democracies, have been working pretty well in New England for quite a long time now, with the biggest issues in modern times being low attendence and committee overstep.
That's the statement, but it's never worked that way. Of course minority groups have been steamrolled
An understandable sentiment. How much are you willing to pay for it? If you have a $1.5 million mortgage and that loon shows up next door and paints their house purple, your house might lose $300,000 in value. Same with the other neighbors, who also pay mortgages but aren’t as compassionate as you.
What happens when your spouse gets a sudden offer to relocate and you can’t make your money back on the house?
HOAs started as a way to handle common infrastructure, like drainage. They allow a few homes to share drainage, without sticking all of the costs of maintenance to the homeowner who happens to have the pipe on their property.
In my case, my HOA carries property insurance for undeveloped land, maintains a grassy cul-de-sac, and maintains a fire road. (I personally spend about 2 hours a year trimming growth on the fire road because so many people walk on it.)
As far as saying that an HOA is to keep the loons out, we did have a hoarder live around the corner from the HOA. The people who lived across the street couldn't sell their home. (They had kids and wanted a larger house.) Could the HOA really do anything about the hoarder? I know the people who lived around the hoarder all put a lot of pressure on hee, the town condemned the house, and eventually it burnt to the ground. At least my with HOA, there isn't any good way to "evict" a loon who makes a mess.
Dramatic license aside, I'd hate to live anywhere where property value (or residents' senses of well-being) was so fragile that it couldn't handle a purple house.
How is that someone else's problem? Ironically, in some areas around me properties without HOAs are priced and selling a couple of 100ks higher than ones within HOAs.
Individuals freely enter agreements with homeowner's associations which dictate land use. One is also free to choose to live in a place not governed by these rules. But, they are not the law of the land and they do not implicate a lack of freedom in the U.S. relative to other countries. Its quite silly to suggest as much.
Depending on the location, the only houses available may have mandatory HOA membership. If the choice is "Join an HOA or add 30 minutes to your commute.", that isn't a free choice. If the choice is "Join an HOA or find a job in another city.", that isn't a free choice. Depending on the area, mandated HOA membership may be the de facto law of the land, even if it isn't the de jure law of the land.
Choices must always be compared to their alternative, and using a non-existent Hobbesian state of nature as the alternative is overly simplistic.
It's about as free as entering into an arbitration agreement. You freely decide to get yourself a cellphone or credit card, and there aren't any on the market where you don't have to sign your rights away. It approaches shrinkwrap license territory.
So, in a way HOAs are sort of endorsed/franchised by the towns and counties which create them.
Sure, you can avoid them if you want to live in a rural area or buy an older home. But almost anything in the suburbs built since the 1970s is in an HOA.
HOAs can be good. But many of them are run by narrow minded petty despots. Or worse, outsourced to a corporate management company.
Generally though I think your point stands, the USA is big enough and varied enough one can usually chose a nearby location which permits hobby farming.
I'm not saying USA is not free country - of course you are free. I'm only saying that telling that you have the most freedom is at least funny.
The only way to guarantee things like this don’t happen is with some sort of rules in place.
If that means I hate freedom, oh well.
Nobody is likely to be happy when these two groups have to live next to each other, so it's an elegant solution to sort the population into more compatible subsets. Everybody wins.
If you look at this article about it I think you can see why it would be banned: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/illegal-kitchen-garden_n_1687...
Though I can see how the same thing without constant upkeep would go to hell in a hurry.
Not once in my live have I complained about a neighbours yard, or had them complain about mine. And if they did, I'd laugh them off the property. What business is it of theirs?
At least a couple of households nearby have composting drums in sight from the street.
Yeah, it's totally ridiculous that I would want to live in a neighborhood of like-minded people who would want to maintain and improve their most valuable possession.
I should be totally happy putting time, money and effort into the upkeep and improvement of my plot of land while my nextdoor neighbor adds to their collection of front-yard beer cans and beater cars.
This kind of system doesn’t let people do something as simple as postpone repairs until they can get favorable financing, and ends up a tax on the poor or different to protect an asset for the majority landowners in my view.
Each state generally sets its own standards for HOAs. There are legal frameworks, insurance laws, etc. which are fairly similar across the country.
>If they have equivalent legal status to a government or a police department, are there constitutional rights which they cannot violate?
They do not have equivalent legal status to a government or police department. HOAs are limited in their powers by federal, state, and municipal guidelines. Every state has its own laws in this regard. There are also federal laws prohibiting certain bylaws, e.g. the Fair Housing Act prevent HOAs from enforcing racially discriminatory covenants.
>Can two competing HOAs exist in the same geographic area, and home owners are free to setup additional ones if the incumbents don’t meet their needs?
I don't know exactly what you're referring to, but generally speaking, nobody is forced to buy in an HOA neighborhood unless they want to, there are generally a multitude of HOA-managed (and non-HOA-managed) neighborhoods to choose from within a single town/school district/etc. The only exception might be things like specific lakes/small island communities, where the entire geographic feature is managed under a single association (e.g. for lakes they generally pay for the maintenance of the lake itself, stocking fish, removing trash, etc.)
In the case of the hoarder, she owned her home outright. The town put liens on the property to cover the cost of cleaning up the lot. But, she still owns the lot and hasn't put it on the market. (She also places things on it, too.)
I understand people will have different preferences, but someone making tar or smoking fish on their lawn 24/7 affects all neighbors, while an HOA rule restricting that only affects that one person, and everyone else can enjoy their yards unsmoked.
Dude operated at all hours with air tools and etc and took up all the guest parking with broken down cars, leaking all sorts of stuff. He was also dumping all sorts of shit in storm drains and dumping his greasy parts and trash in other people’s trash.
The catch was this wasn’t a constant thing (well not until he chose to go full asshole), just often enough to be a pain, then stop, folks hope he was done, and then he would start up again.
Even had his customers wandering around looking for where he stashed their car and asking to park in front of people’s garage… other times not asking. A few would empty their car trash on the lawns and streets.
Edit I was curious and I googled him, someone with the same name got into tax trouble a few years later. I would not be surprised.
Put a car repair sign up then yeah. Be more “quiet” about it and claim and you are fixing a friends car and it becomes less easy / an ordeal for the city or county to act. Unfortunately the car repair guy was not honest and that was an issue.
Party house was a bit of an ordeal.
HOAs tend to fill a lot of zoning gaps.
However the concept of nuisance has existed in the common law for centuries and insofar as someone’s behavior might be a nuisance it has always been actionable.
Tangentially, Victorian houses were frequently very colorful. The lack of color photography leads people to think of them as drab, depressing shades of gray. But nothing could be further from the truth. HOAs that restrict colors to a boring beige are doing a disservice to their neighborhoods.
I'd rather live in a real suburb - e.g. large plots, wells, septic. I'm not ideally fond of dirt roads in general, but nobody is going to be road racing a 1AM. It's at worst a minor inconvenience.
But for 80% of people its a deal breaker. Good! Now I found something I don't mind too much that saved me loads of money. And dirt roads come with no HOAs as a bonus.
Find something where your preferences run counter to the masses and profit!
“Many cities” and “all new construction” are going to need serious citations. If your lens is through big home builders, then it looks like that but it’s completely false.
Similar issues in a suburb. One person with rusted out cars on the front compromises the entire street. No one will care if the rusted cars are inside a shed though.
Sounds monotonous with a lack of free expression and personality.
Not necessarily true. Some HOAs will prohibit you from building the shed in the first place and some even go so far as to regulate the contents of your garage.
I agree this restriction is ridiculous. I don’t know the purpose except maybe to make the neighborhood all look the same.
Most people consider “small town” to be rural though it’s technically not as it’s a city.
A friend of mine lived in an unconscionable one and managed to turn it tolerable by running for President on a platform of vowing not to enforce any rules. Stayed in “power” for quite a while.
It's had mixed results. The neighborhood is surrounded by a brick wall that had a gap below (why??). The mortar is failing in several places. But the entry ways are kept pristine (developer is a big one in the area and has been slapped by lawsuits for not holding up their end before).
I suppose essentially that's just living in a society, i.e. as anywhere without a 'HOA', but codified.
I don't live in the US, and at best the concept is very rare here, and I don't like the idea of it, but that sort of thing is exactly what I would like.
Flying a flag (why?!) has much more impact (probably negative) on your neighbours than it does (presumably positive) you.
In the UK flying a union flag (residentially) would be extremely unusual - I'm aware of one, not where I live, and indeed it attracts scoffs and eyerolls - you do see England flags (St George crosses) more, particularly at certain times of year or certain years; that's more a signal that 'I am a football fan' than of patriotism, though.
Maybe that biases me against them in general. But even for things I do 'support' in some sense (I noticed a Ukraine flag covering a garage door recently, for example) I don't want a flag waved at me, and I wouldn't want a neighbour that did that.
That said, I’m -1 on HOAs. I’ve heard far too many complaints and too few people happy with them to deal with one.
A couple months ago a coyote decided to poop on my front door. Obviously, it was sending a message, but I'm not sure what it was.
Certain types of invasive plans are noxious, outright poisonous, encourage hay fever, or just spread so fast that they can end up destroying neighbor's yards as well.
Plants don't obey property lines.
Edit: Unkempt yards can also be breeding ground for pests. From mosquitoes in still water to hoards of rats. Most people don't want to put up with those styles of annoyances that are trivially avoidable if everyone in the area cares just a little.
Rats come from having edible garbage available and fruit trees dropping fruit.
The most annoying things about neighbors are dogs that bark all day, and the leafblowers and lawnmowers.
You know weeds are only weeds if you don't want them, right? Everywhere else they're just wild plants.
Incorrect. In ordinary usage, “racism” means prejudice based on race. There are efforts by some to muddy its meaning, to encompass both racial prejudice and “disproportionate effect,” but that’s not the common usage.
Thank you. For some reason I've never been able to explain it so succinctly when two people I respect get into an obviously semantic argument around something being or not being racist and then getting lost in the weeds of the intentions of the long dead.
Sounds like you are referring to a connotative value which is common to a subculture of English speakers. I learned to use the dictionary definition from sociology 101.
https://www.google.com/search?q=racism&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=...
> noun prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against a person or people on the basis of their membership in a particular racial or ethnic group, typically one that is a minority or marginalized. "a program to combat racism"
I know HN loves the muh freedoms angle but surely its easy to understand how forgoing the freedom to paint a very small portion of the property is largely beneficial.
And, I promise you, you can find a home to purchase that is non-HOA. It just might not be in the area that meets all of your other preferences. But this is your choice. This is not evidence of a lack of freedom. You are not coerced into buying any house.
Of course they do.
If you don't like income tax, move to WA. If you don't like sales tax, move to OR. (If you like them both, move to CA!). These choices have inherent compromises.
If you don't like HOAs, choose a different neighborhood. Again, inherent compromises.
But freedom of movement is guaranteed to all (non-incarcerated) US citizens. If you choose not to exercise it, that's 100% on you and your choices of prioritization.
Just don't say that you Americans are more free than other nations. Because you are simply not.
And also mischaracterizing the state of things. Some HOAs say you must have a lawn, not a garden, in your front (or street-facing) yard. They do not prohibit you from growing carrots in your back yard. They do prohibit other things.
I'm not a fan of HOAs. But HOAs are voluntary communities. You sign the contract, you are bound by the terms. That's true in your country too.
And as for American Freedom.. It's just part of the exceptionalism mythology. Just like the One True God, or the World Champions of Sport, or what have you. Intelligent people have a more nuanced view. Unintelligent people are more common, alas. And so the world turns...
You're relatively new here, so here's a tip: what you're doing (trying to incite, posting flamebait) is specifically against HN's guidelines.
But your example is shit, because Americans are free to move a place without an HOA (I’m in one).
Probably didn't like my HackerNews posts!
I just meant that you could also deliberately have rules (as opposed to come into office after them) and you do intend that people follow them, create new ones, update them, etc., but they're just not enforced, and everyone knows that.
As in just codifying some social expectations that would probably exist in roughly the same form anyway.
No. The contract you freely enter into governs this. This is sort of like asking, "Can I decide not to pay you, per our contract, after you've rendered services?" No. And that restraint doesn't make me "less free". Not by any common understanding of the word "freedom", anyway.
The U.S. has some 300+ million citizens. I'm not sure we can make monolithic statements about how each of us views the relative freedom of our country. Personally, I wouldn't know how to make such a comparison. However, I strongly suspect we're "more free" than, say, a person living in Iran.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Some people _like_ living in neighborhoods with these bylaws/HOAs. You are fully made aware of the bylaws before you purchase the property and you can decide for yourself whether or not it works for you.
I live in the US and in my immediate area there are neighborhoods without these bylaws, some with, and there is even agricultural use land mixed in. So if you don't like the places with the bylaws there are many other options. In the US you have the freedom to choose among many different ways of life.
Freedom isn't about being able to do whatever you want, wherever you want, at anyone's expense. It is about being able to find and construct a life that makes you and those around you happy. The _only_ way to do that is to not have one over-bearing set of rules (even if the rule is there are no rules), but to allow people to voluntarily set up their own systems of rules in their own communities.
So... like in almost any other country in the world.
A few houses ago my hoa could be ended automatically after 2018. I moved out just after then, but the only limit I remember was no more than five cows were allowed, I didn't find that a problem.
I cant figure out how this works in a country with more guns than people. If those egomaniac HOA people enter someone's property - wont they get shot?
The HOA is an agreement that is designed to keep a neighborhood from going downhill by residents parking on the street, or turning their yard into a parking lot, or from painting their house some atrocious color. As normally designed, they are little more than a codification of "don't be a jerk."
The problem comes when people get involved. The sort of person who really, really wants to be on the governing board of the HOA is exactly the sort of person who should NEVER be allowed anywhere near a lever of power. These are the sorts of people who are out on the street with calipers to see if your lawn is over the prescribed length, or measuring the height of your mailbox. They take great joy in meddling with other people's lives, and they hide behind the veil of "I'm just enforcing the HOA contract!" to be douchemobiles.
Whether this is an improvement over "either get your car out of your yard or I'm gonna punch you in the nose," is an exercise left to the reader.
1. Trash can was outside more than 24 hours after trash pickup. Do it again and you’ll be fined.
2. Outdoor Christmas lights in a tree more than 30 days after Christmas. Remove within 10 days or get fined. Those lights have been there for years from the previous owners. I never turn them on and just ignore them. Well, they are gone now.
1. This is just bigotry. You have been fed lies from culture and the media about what American's with guns are like. The vast, vast majority of gun-owning Americans are responsible and level-headed. Despite what most people gather from the news and pop culture people don't just take potshots at people entering their property.
2. People enter into these associations _voluntarily_. People who start to complain about the rules after agreeing to them just didn't read anything they were agreeing to. And no, this is not fine print. Every HOA I've been a part of provides a binder and a website with all the info you need to make the right choice.
3. Freedom, including gun and home ownership, are about personal responsibility. It is an important cultural value in the US and I understand that it is not something that is valued elsewhere. Which is why people like you end up so confused.
Do you not encounter leaf blowers and lawn mowers in a HOA community? I would have expected it to be much worse because there would be maintenance crews doing it for every house in the area vs maybe a few houses on a ~20 house block.
If you have a plan for reforming the local judiciary to be so effective that HOAs are no longer necessary I am all ears, but I have not heard any proposals for doing that.
2. It's not me, who is constantly telling that I live in the country with most freedoms (I don't say you do, I'm just long enough in the internet to know how it is _in general_).
3. It wasn't any flamebait. I just laughed at this ridiculous thing. It's you all who felt offended and are bashing me because (of cource, as always) _I don't understand it_.
4. If you want - I can do you a favour and stop posting my comments here. It's still worthless tho
Does it always go this way? No. Does it go this way often enough that people worry about it? Yes.
If you have to change the dictionary meaning of a word to make your argument work, it's your argument that is broken, not the dictionary.
We have similar motivations to thank for our cabaret laws in New York, which literally fined restaurants without the proper licences if their patrons danced.
Restricting nazi flags also restricts pride flags.
The question is "Would you be okay if I hung flags?"
What about other forms of displaying support? Are posters just a cheaper flag?
Otherwise all you're doing is saying "this neighbourhood only allows support for these politics".
Are you sure you want to go that way?
Pride is not hate, despite modern recasting of homosexuality in scripture by conservative religions.
There's already hate-speech laws to address actual hate-speech. I'm still asking if it is a good idea for HOAs to dictate what politics may be openly supported and what politics are not welcome in the neighborhood. There's a lot more nuance here than simply using the most extreme possible case and basing all the rules around that case.
> Pride is not hate, despite modern recasting of homosexuality in scripture by conservative religions.
It's funny that you bring up religious positions :-)
I had pretty much the same conversation recently with a very religious person who was appalled to find out that Satanism isn't against the law, being a Satanist isn't against the law and openly worshipping Satan isn't against the law.
They pretty much said what you are saying:
Them: "But they do animal sacrifice!"
Me: "Yeah, that's not legal".
Them: "So Satanism must* be illegal then."*
Me: "No, you can worship whoever you want to; you just cannot torture animals while doing so. The torturing is illegal, the worshiping is not."
So yeah - proclamations that are in fact hate-speech will run afoul of the law. Political support is not. IOW, Hate speech is illegal, political support is not.
The problem you will often run into when carving out your legal exceptions (for example, saying support for Nazi(ism) is hate speech) is that where do you draw the line?
Okay, we agree - support for Nazis is hate speech.
How about support for a political group that is formally sympathetic to Nazis but is otherwise not active in that regard at all? Do you now move the line to include this case?
What if that group is only informally sympathetic to Nazis?
What if the group is neutral towards Nazis but some members are openly supportive of Nazis?
What if the group is simply neutral to Nazis?
What if the group is only neutral and refuses to issue any formal statement on Nazis, even when asked?
What if the group actually is against the Nazi policies, and formally states this position, but also doesn't think they are a large enough or viable enough threat to spend their time on?
What if the group is only loosely associated with a group which is loosely associated with a group that fulfills one of the above criteria?
At each point above your exceptions get muddier and muddier. At some point your rules will become, in practice, a whitelist of what politics are allowed (all the rest are disallowed).
Basing all rules on the most extreme example is the most reliable way for an authority to extend its power.
"But they are Nazis" is the new "Think of the children".
I didn't buy the "Think of the children" argument back when, and I'm not buying it now just because someone slapped some lipstick on it.
I don’t find the concept “hard to understand” I’m just talking about what commonly used words mean. “Racism” is a word that describes individual animosity. It’s confusing to try and overload it with other meanings.
Disagreed. Our laws about discrimination against protected groups do not care about intent, nor do I care about intent when I am talking about a piece of code that serves to discriminate between one chunk of data and another in some fashion. In fact, even when I talk about people who discriminate, I rarely care about their intention.
I find the dictionary definitions suitable. I believe you have been arguing in favor of the overloaded social (connotative) meaning on this thread. Color me impressed.
