Thanks! I will give it a watch.
It does seem to suck. I hope it can get better.
Edit: Right, so in summary there is no regulation at all on American HOAs and they are also easily taken over by private companies. Makes sense they are bad. Though it’s still astonishing that an organisation can be so unregulated that it can enforce more fines than the local government, without any oversight.
Can someone explain why there are so many stories of bad HOAs in America? Don’t everyone in the HOA get to vote on who will be on the board and what rules there should be? Why do many of them seem to have strange and petty rules? What makes them able to issue fines for so small infractions? Where does the fine money go? Who sets up the HOA in the first place and what is the motivation to do so?
We got plenty of similar associations where I live (both for apartments and houses, though not so often for fully detached homes) and they usually work great. Basically you pay a monthly fee to your HOA that the board use to keep the plumbing and outside areas maintained, pay for tv/internet for everyone at a much reduced cost or maintain other common areas like laundry rooms, guest apartment, parking garage, workshop etc. There are of course some restrictions too you need to follow, but those are usually minor and common sense anyways (like you shouldn’t play very loud music too late in an apartment in the middle of the week) and that you don’t get to do whatever you want to the outside of your place.
(Another common rule is that you need HOA approval to sublet your apartment. This can be occasionally annoying to deal with, but is good because it prevents people from buying up apartments just to rent them out. And most of the time the HOA will approve you if you’re just moving away for a year or similar.)
Only 2 hours of recreation a day seems like a terrible time to me, unless you have kids, in which case I get that’s how it is when they’re small.
I spend like 1 hour in the morning to get ready and travel to work, then about the same to get home and have dinner. Let’s say 1 hour for chores every day (though even if I do both laundry and cleaning the same day it won’t take that long, and I don’t do those every day.) That leaves me with at least 5 hours a day for recreation.
But weekends are 14 hours of recreation per day, not 6.5 surely? 8 hours sleep + 2 hours for some extra time to cook good food etc. and we already did most chores during the week.
I sometimes spend a weekend gaming, but most of the time many of those hours are spent on a variety of things like visiting family, sports, crafts, going downtown etc. because I like a lot of different recreation. But yeah, we can certainly agree on fuck arbitrary restrictions, and everyone should be able to own their own things. Would just be very interested to know where you are coming from with those numbers.
I can only imagine you might be in the US and a lot of it is driving? That seems to suck, I would hate to drive for hours every day :(
They can, and I think it makes a lot of sense.
Lets say you start a lawncare business and buy a lawnmower for $1000. You don’t manage to get that many customers the first year, and only make exactly $1000. You haven’t lost money, but didn’t make any profit either.
Should you now have to pay tax on those $1000 dollars of revenue, causing you to have lost money despite your hard work? Where would you even get that money from to pay the tax?
I think the problem is not the basic system, but that the rules are too complex and have loopholes that allow you to pay less tax if you are an expert on the rules - or have enough money that it’s worth it to hire one.