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Not HOA but similar. I was living in a different city during covid. The city closed the outdoor parks in the poor and working class neighborhoods, the rich folk parks remained open.
They started to wrap the swings at the park around the top bar. I’d unwrap them each day and that went on for about two weeks. Then they went to zip tying the swings together so they couldn’t be used. So I would cut the zip ties each day. This went on for another few weeks. Then they brought a sign post and a sign saying the park was closed and using the swings was prohibited. I dug the sign post out and threw it in the woods. Then they chained the swings together with a pad lock so I went to harbor freight and bought very heavy duty bolt cutters and lopped the chain off. That daily chain lopping lasted a week or two then they just took the swings away. I debated about buying swings and attaching them but figured the gambit went on as long as it should have and called it. I had fun.
Meanwhile the whole time the kids in the rich neighborhoods could swing to their daily content.
I love it. Perhaps it would have been more effective to just do whatever they did to the swings at the other parks? Either way it’s good stuff
My park was close to my house and it was closed by ordinance, the other rich ones were not. There is no difference in the parks at all other than the property values in the neighborhoods in which they sat. I wasn’t going to go to city hall and complain since the mayor and council people were all from the rich neighborhoods. Rule of law is downwards in our class based society.
The difference in the swings in the other parks were that they were surrounded by rich people
Are you saying sabotage the rich kids swings? Thats awful. Like something done shit to your park so you’ll pay it forward to other innocent kids. Terrible behaviour. You should be mad at the people doing it and take it out on them or the rule makers.
I mean if the city is gonna actively punish poor kids then fuck them rich ones, they should suffer just the same. Teach them some humility instead of the upper class bubble they’re in.
The correct response is to find out who is responsible for the chaining/closing and start chaining/closing their stuff. Randomly messing with another park doesn’t hurt anyone and just means another park is closed.
These are creative writing exercises on reddit. It’s gotten a million times worse since LLMs.
Blind spot so big the cans are there too which defeats the purpose of the camera. Got it.
Someone who reports people’s trash cans to the HOA so they can be fined for it probably aren’t someone who understands camera angles.
Even the dumbest person is going to check the feed bro, come on.
They can check the feed all they want. If the angles don’t show anything it doesn’t matter.
The term Gaslighting gets thrown around a lot, but if this story were actually real it would be the perfect modern day example of it.
Ya no way this is real. My ring doorbell detects the damn trees when the wind blows too hard. Not a chance he avoids the camera.
Unless he was behind it, like the post implies.
If the neighbor is concerned enough to call a priest after exhausting all natural means of dealing with the problem, he’s surely going to point the camera right at the trash cans.
Ring doorbell camera can’t be “pointed”, it screws to a flat surface, presumably the doorway. That said, they have a pretty wide field of view.
HOA are such a crazy concept. There is no such thing in Europe.
Am in US. I will NEVER own a house with an HOA. NEVER
Why not both? 🤣
Condo buildings I saw things. Did you know that you can stuff a keyhole with glue and human feces?
Challenge accepted, I just need to find a step ladder to reach!
OTOH, your town planning councils tend to be a lot more restrictive.
Look up the word bünzli
We have them for apartment buildings in Romania. Never heard of any for houses, fortunately.
My parents kinda has one where they live in Sweden. Except everyone is welcome to the meetings. And it’s mostly about planning, upkeep, and budgeting for snow ploughing, play parks and things like that, instead of relying on the local council to do it. And it’s only for the one street they live on. Definitely no where near what an american HOA is like 😅
This should be green text.
Weird request, but okay.
MY EYEBALLS ARE MELTING
🤌 the fact that you went through the effort to make that text green, too
Monkeys paw finger curls
whooosh.
This would be me if I ever moved to the suburbs in an HOA, which I would never do on purpose.
I am enraged by proxy at the very existence of HOAs even though I have never been part of one or indeed interacted with an HOA or even (knowingly) a member of one. I just hate them for existing.
I have had some shitty HOAs and I now live in a home with no HOA for a reason. Fuck those overbearing shitheads.
IDK. I’ve had good and bad experiences with them. But overall more positive than negative. It’s all about which HOA you’re talking about. Yes, you can say you should be able to do what you want with your land. But that isn’t how any kind of land ownership works anywhere on Earth. There are always some entities regulating how you can use it, as you inevitably have neighbors and you don’t have a right to damage the enjoyment of their property.
Can they be overbearing? Sure, the wrong ones can. But they also keep mean that I don’t have to worry about my next door neighbor turning his property into a junkyard.
I’ve had 2 and they were both far, far more than just overbearing (yes, I realize that I used that word in my previous comment). My first HOA had a pair of elderly sisters that were both on the board that would walk around the subdivision a few times a week with clipboards just looking for anything that they would come at you with. One time they had the board lawyer send me a threat of putting a lien on my property because I had left a paint can on my driveway for a few hours… while I was literally painting a room.
The only people that HOAs serve are authoritarians and people who only think of their home as an investment whose value is more important than anything else. I just won’t play that game anymore.
Respectfully, you’re painting with far too broad a brush. I don’t consider it authoritarian to not want my next door neighbor to turn their front lawn into a junkyard. Again, it really depends on the HOA. I know that goes against the Lemmy party line, but it’s my lived experience and the experience of millions of American homeowners.
I don’t consider it authoritarian to not want my next door neighbor to turn their front lawn into a junkyard.
That is authoritarian, regardless of how reasonable the desire is. If the only thing keeping your neighbor from turning their front yard into a junkyard is a threat of force, is that a relationship worth preserving?
I mean, you can masturbate about all laws, contracts, and agreements being a “threat of force,” but I don’t give such libertarian dogma any credence.
Shit Americans will do instead of just abolishing HOAs.
They’ve creeped into Canada. I always call people who voluntarily join an HOA authoritarian morons.
There’s a reason I bought a 14 acre homestead for $225k four years ago than anything in an HOA.
I’d rather live in the middle of no where and shovel snow, carry firewood downstairs, feed chickens and pigs and break up frozen waters and dig out doors, deal with 6ft drifts blowing around my house all winter, than ever share space with fucking Gary.
Fake but still kind of funny.
I’d rather live in a cardboard box behind a wal-mart than in an HOA.
Bruh this is literally Stasi shit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zersetzung
OOP should join the FSB lmfao
HOA are bullshit, but the folks who actually use em to cause problems for their neighbors are a different kind of scum.
I wouldn’t even notice if the bins moved 6"
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.)
That was the original intent, yes. Then they were tainted by greed and now most of them are in place before anyone lives in the neighborhood, so owners have no choice if they want to live there. Many are owned and operated by private companies that profit off petty fines like this. I once got a letter threatening a fine because I parked my car in my driveway and it had expired tabs. This was during early covid when the DMV was slower than usual. I almost lost my shit.
Check out this episode of Last week tonight if you wanna get more upset.
That’s not the original intent. In the US, HOAs were mostly created after the end of segregation to keep black people out of white neighborhoods, an origin story that puts into context the modern of pettiness and desire to control others we see in stories like this.
In the early postwar period after World War II, many [HOAs] were defined to exclude African Americans and, in some cases, Jews, with Asians also excluded on the West Coast.
A racial covenant in a Seattle, Washington, neighborhood stated, “No part of said property hereby conveyed shall ever be used or occupied by any Hebrew or by any person of the Ethiopian, Malay or any Asiatic race.”
When these were found unconstitutional in 1948, they became private contacts until those became illegal in 1968, but because HOAs had to approve new members/buyers, the rules stayed in effect until the majority of a community decided to stop being racist. On top of that, in 1963 the Federal Housing Administration said they would only insure mortgages on homes with an HOA which is really what created suburban sprawl and the ghettoization of the American inner cities.
If you look at the history of HOAs it’s really a long and protracted fight on all levels by racists and bigots against the Civil Rights movement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeowner_association
TL;DR: Although conceptually HOAs are a good idea, even trending towards communalism, actually existing HOAs are, with a few exceptions, downright regressive, often criminally so.
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.
I’m just glad my HOA is chill and I like them.
The only thing they’ve had to bring fines about is people trying to move furniture in the wrong elevator and scratching up the wood finishings, and they should. We have a freight elevator for that.
