this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2026
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I'll never understand why some people choose to live in minimum security prison.
HOAs are a mixed bag. Many are awful, but deed restrictions can also be beneficial if the rules are reasonable and the buyers are aware of them. This is especially true if you live outside of a City and don't have code enforcement.
My parents now live in the county without an HOA, and the neighboring property is an abandoned collapsed house full of trash and surrounded by decades of dead brush. It's a massive fire hazard that's full of pests..
On the flip side, their old HOA when they lived in the suburbs when I was younger freaked out if we did an oil change on our cars or had the wrong color paint on our window trim.
And unfortunately, we only really hear about the bad ones. The HOA in my neighborhood is actually pretty good. The dues mostly go towards maintenance in the canyons between rows of houses. This maintenance is necessary because I live in an area that is higher risk for wildfires. They pull old brush, keep the waterline working, and stuff like that.
It's not an easy decision for a lot of people. I struggled to buy a house for 10 years, partly because HOAs are the name of the game in most areas in the US. One time we got all the way to due diligence when we found out that we couldn't even hang our clothes outside on a clothesline! So we said no. That was five years in to the search, and it was another five years before we finally found something.
But, that was ten wasted years of my life, and I can understand someone making a different decision than I did. Hell, I wish WE had made a different decision!
New developments are more likely to be HOAs, as city governments realized that they can't afford the money bomb that is car-based infrastructure to support single-family housing. So they foist those duties onto the HOAs, essentially making small municipal governments for every new housing development.
So.... you can avoid them for now, but only if you live in developed cities.
How do countries do this without widespread HOA equivalents? In the UK we have similar arrangements for shared spaces but not anywhere near the comical level of control on private land as in the US
Perhaps the difference is that the UK is not so full of dickheads.
It is my understanding that suburban UK housing is still much more densely developed than US-style suburbs where having a few acres per house is normal (but makes the cost of roads unsustainable).
Most suburban lots in the US are definitely not an acre. Census Bureau Survey of Construction data says it's closer to 0.25 acres or less per house as of 2023. Most suburban sprawlscapes around me are closer to 0.15 acres per house.
Especially in the southwest, like Arizona, they're doing shared side yard nonsense to cram more mcmansions.
What about when you factor in land used for the suburb but not on lots, like roads?
The road outside my house now is pretty typical for everywhere I've lived (five states and counting). It's two lanes wide, so let's say 25 feet across (pretty sure it's not actually that wide but we'll go with it). One lane goes to neighbor across the street, one to me, so 12.5 feet by the width of my yard. It's been a while since I've measured my full yard, but it's somewhere around 60 feet I'd reckon. We'll go with a house that's wider rather than deeper for maximizing road space and round up to 100. That's 1250 feet squared for the road, or roughly 0.03 acres.
If you added up every tiny little bit of everything you could maybe add 0.1 acres with the neighborhoods that have entry signs or something, but I really don't see how you'd get up to an acre. And certainly most people aren't talking about lot sizing doing all this extra math. There's certainly inefficiencies in urban sprawl that come into play though.
I was thinking someone might have gone and simply taken the area of some suburb and divided by number of houses.
If you do this at a large enough scale you'd also catch stores and parking lots.
Stores shouldn't be included though. You still need stores whether the housing is dense or not. People still need to eat and need clothes whether they walked to the store next door or drove from their house. And parking lots again is weird because that's not a suburban sprawl thing quite as much either. You could do parking garage and walkable downtown areas much more than is done in the US. Sure it's still not the most efficient, but it should be counted separately from housing.
Stores should be included for both clearly. It's all part of the overall density.
Parking garages are expensive and still take space. More people driving also inflates roads, around stores just as much as elsewhere.
And the fact that suburban sprawl stores simply don't build garages and instead have massive lots should definitely be counted into density.
If you call it housing density or suburban density or any other density I don't really mind, but this is the metric to cut down to make places nicer. And cheaper. Since ultimately all of this is also paid for with the economy, i.e. the peoples money.
If your road bill is small but your store's bills huge, you'll still pay more.
But that's not housing density which is what this entire discussion has been about. That's city density (or urban density, depending on which city planner you talk to), an entirely different metric. You should not conflate the two as then discussing city planning becomes impossible because nobody will be using the same terms.
Housing density is, should be, and will always be, how many residences you have per chunk of land (acres in us, hectares in UK).
I would read that as the entire settlement. Same way as replacing "suburbs" with "cities" would also include commerical and utility.
If americans don't consider commerical areas part of suburbs, where do you go to buy stuff?
Suburb is specifically residential. You might have a pharmacy here or there but by and large it's residences. Thats the definition of suburb. The commercial area at the edge of suburbs you go to get groceries and clothes is exactly that, a commercial district.
There isn't choice in a lot of places. Every new development since at least the 90s has an hoa.
I can understand it for condos where you functionally own an apartment, that way it can pay for building/grounds maintenance, but if you've got a street where none of the houses are connected, then I dont see a point, there's no benefit beyond everyone's grass looking pretty uniform and no one having outlandish holiday decorations (which, where's the fun in that). Actually now that I think about, I'm setting up an HOA who's only rule is you can't put up Christmas decor before Thanksgiving.
There are all kinds of things people can do that you might not necessarily want from your neighbors even if your houses aren't connected especially outside city limits.
Mundane things like as neighbor with german rottweilers walks his small horses off leash but doesn't pick up their poop. Maybe they only sort of listen to him and like to chase your kids or small pets.
Maybe one of the people decides they will park a trailer on the street for their mother in law for the summer that makes it hard for you to see backing out of your driveway. Or put 4 "antique" cars on cinder blocks in their front yard to work on but can't find the time and now there are rabbits that live under them and eat your garden.
Or your neighbor get chickens or small livestock next door that come alive every morning at 5a and their son decides to take up the bagpipes to play every night at 11p.
And we of course have to remember all these neighbors move in 3 years after you, and now you can't even move because nobody else wants to live next to Rottweiler guy, bagpipes guy, or the guy from hoarders storing cars on his lawn.
This is why it makes a lot of sense to have a small HOA with a handful of rules, but it still doesn't make sense to have someone with a ruler come measure your grass.
My neighborhood of over 150 lots has been terrorized by ONE SINGLE DUDE. Almost everyone is at least reasonably considerate, but it only takes one who isn't technically breaking the law to make everything kind of suck. As our local sheriff's department likes to say, there's no law against being a bad neighbor.
There is in many (most?) cities - every one of these is against city ordinance where I live. It's better these sort of things are handled by the city; applied to many more people it's harder to pull grass-measuring or other shenanigans.
Rabbits do not need cars to eat your garden, furry little buggers are perfectly happy with a hole anywhere in the ground. The excuses against 'car guy' are always the weirdest, especially the HOAs that don't even let you do basic oil changes yourself.
I see you read over the part where I explicitly said "outside city limits".
Seems I did.
To your point though, inside city limits the value proposition for an HOA is vanishingly small.
Yeah it sounds like we don't need a whole bunch of rules but rather a less formal arbitration process. Like, a community council that can settle disputes even if there's not a law being broken if one party is acting unreasonably. Of course, the loser could then elevate to an actual court if they feel their rights were/are violated.
No punishments, no fines, no lawyers, just a mediator to help settle minor disputes whose decisions are somewhat binding. Ideally several individuals that are elected by the community.
That would be a great way of doing it, honestly.
Edit: It was nice to have some guidelines in case you've never been a homeowner before though I will say.
All of these things are just against the law where I am.
I'm an old guy, and got my entire life I've said the same. When buying the two prior houses, no HOA was a hard requirement. But my wife and I split up later year - had to sell the house and split the money. She moved away, but I wanted to stay in the area where my friends and family are. So what I could afford was a condo, and all condos have HOAs.
Mine actually seems fine so far. I almost wish they enforced the rules more, but none of the rules seem egregious. And since the neighborhood/complex has common facilities like a pool and a meeting room, it's kind of unavoidable having some common body to be responsible for them.
For the same reason people choose to pay 50 % of their income to their landlord.
For the greater good.
Crusty jugglers
Very, very basic people who are more concerned with their property values than having a hobby.
“Small government” people want “freedom” so they eschew normal things like bylaws, but then the problems with that appear - whether it’s legitimate or Karen - and the control freaks in the neighborhood form up a HOA to deal with it, instead of offloading it to a (theoretically) uninvolved third party.
And now it’s the default way to enforce community standards.