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Comment by hospadar | Hacker News Reader

Yeah sick burn! (not sarcastic!)

I'm put in the mind of the other thread today about wrongly judging something as over-complex.

What you can do on your property definitely affects nearby properties and it seems to me that we need a fairly subtle, localized, maybe complex way to deal with this. Different rules in the city/country, different rules for the industrial park/a neighborhood. I usually lean pretty "do what you want on your property" - in my town there's a lot of "we must preserve the character of our town [and prevent apartments or anywhere poor folk could possibly afford to live]" folks who seem to always be white and living in the expensive part of town.

I don't think any simple "TOTAL FREEDOM" or "NO MESSY CARS" rule is every going to be very just or effective.

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I live in a semi-rural farm town with a lot of small scale farming and orchards. (It's a right to farm town which means people can farm and raise animals if they're over some (low) acreage.) No one generally pays much attention to rusty farm equipment, and yes, the odd broken down car here and there.

But much as I dislike "Your grass is too long and your garden too unkempt" school of HOAs, it's not hard to see why neighbors in a neat suburban development might object to someone moving in with a bunch of junked cars on their lawn.

Those people concerned about the potential for some new neighbor's junk cars can get everyone now to sign an agreement (attached to deed) preventing said. Of course there will be some holdouts, which you'll have to bribe. So it's clear that making a local law in lieu of said agreements is effectively a subsidy to those who would have had to pay this bribe.

Pretty hard for me to see that working most places. Why would the seller want a restriction on a property they're selling which can only decrease the value of the property? And if you're going to ban junk cars you probably want to ban a bunch of other things too. Congratulations! You've just created a HOA.

> Congratulations! You've just created a HOA.

I'm pretty sure that's the above commenter's point. You don't need the county to implement some blanket law (that, in my experience as a former Sacramento County resident with family still there, is very inconsistently enforced). If you want to be an insufferable prick who micromanages your neighbors' properties because you're too patently greedy to accept an entirely-hypothetical and negligible drop in your house's value (thanks, by the way, for your contribution to Sacramento's housing crisis! We all appreciate being priced out of homeownership by wannabe investors!), then do what other greedy insufferable pricks in that situation do and form an HOA.

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