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Comment by bob1029 | Hacker News Reader

I don't like taxes but I also like having roads, sewage treatment, 100+ psi water pressure, multi-gigabit internet access, and a reasonably constant flow of electricity. The cost of public education and the management of that system is the only serious concern I have with my local taxes.

I actually don't mind the cost of living in my neighborhood going up. The $2500/yr HOA fee is a feature for me. I picked this location precisely because of it. I've lived in many places with virtually no maintenance overhead or economic friction. You may eventually learn that there are two sides to this coin. Neighbors who can afford and are willing to participate in ridiculously scaled housing markets also tend to take better care of their properties and local communities.

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> Neighbors who can afford and are willing to participate in ridiculously scaled housing markets also tend to take better care of their properties and local communities.

Whereas you take great care of your local community by even refusing to live around anyone not as well off as you ?

Imagine the horror of having to live within 10 miles of a low class smelly poor plebeian, you might have to lay your eyes on their 3 days overgrown lawn from time to time.

I wish poorer areas of US suburban localities had overgrown lawns. In many cases, those neighborhoods are blighted concrete jungles with no foliage save the occasional pavement weed.

> Whereas you take great care of your local community by even refusing to live around anyone not as well off as you

Yes, I want to choose who I spend time with and around, and I want to choose what people influence my children in their formative years.

I fail to see what’s wrong with it, especially if it’s also done on my dime.

> Yes, I want to choose who I spend time with and around, and I want to choose what people influence my children in their formative years. I fail to see what’s wrong with it.

Nothing is wrong in wanting that, it's probably a good thing even.

What's wrong in this specific case is that your process of choosing is limited to one single criterion: can that person pay up?

Someone is pocketing a large fraction of that $2500 while paying 2-3 people a minimum wage to get things done.

He's saying he likes to pay a $2500 HOA fee to keep the poors away. It doesn't matter where it goes, as long as it filters out undesirables.

In this country of oh-so-much freedom and journalism how can a layperson like myself check whether in the final degree my tax dollars are really paying for someone’s collection of vintage Ferraris, hidden behind an inconspicuous budget item?

I’ll rather know my taxes where used for a Ferrari in someone’s collection than in two or three javelin missiles thrown who knows where.

False dichotomy

Not saying that these are the only two options, just that it could be worse.

Equating HOA fees to tax dollars is a false analogy.

But yeah, more accountability from governments and other organizations imposing a mandatory fee on you would be great.

This works in other areas of life. A courtesy charge creates a better environment by giving participants skin in the game and filtering out actors who wouldn’t mind abusing you but wont pay to do so.

You should be concerned if you have 100+ psi water pressure. Anything above 70 is atypical for a residence.

They must be mistaken about that number.

I have heard way too many horror stories about obnoxious neighbors in HOAs to ever want to live in one, personally

My friends lost a battle to paint their garage door a slightly different shade of white than the approved Pantone shade. No private entity should ever have that degree of power over one’s private life. Petty tyrants, I tell ya.

They read the contract before moving in though right?

Sure, I meant this more in the sense that my friends' experience trying to very gently and largely unmeaningfully deviate from the petty tyrants' decrees taught me I never want to live anywhere near this type of governance structure. (unfortunately HOA-less developments are becoming more and more difficult to find and so whether you read the contract or not is slowly ceasing to matter - do you want a house or don't you? John Oliver did a great video about this stuff if you're so inclined)

Don't have HOA, have everything you have, AMA

all of those services are ones that should be realized by the city, from taxes paid to the city. If they are not, the problem is that people vote for wrong people

HOAs in general are nothing but classic American privatization of that which would otherwise be public, because counties and cities here either lack the tax base (rural), budgeting skills (urban), or both, to provide the services some subdevelopments are built with.

It’s dumb. Here in Washington it’s rather common, I’m finding, for rural land plots to be part of a “Road Maintenance Association”. Exact same legal construct as an HOA, but scoped only to road maintenance on roads the county didn’t want to deal with. It would make so much more sense for the county to socialize those roads and reuse the same maintenance crews and vehicles for these stretches of road! But instead, a private entity pays through the nose to duplicate all that maintenance infrastructure (or pay contractors).

The way I see it many HOAs are the opposite of privatization, at least when they cannot be opted out of. They control land, impose taxes (sorry, "fees"), have elected leadership, provide services, make rules that they have the power to enforce, and the only way to leave them is to move out of their territory.

In my eyes this is essentially the same thing as a form of local government, just on a smaller scale.

The problem with having the city pick things like your trash pickup is that you end up bound to whatever choices they make.

In Canada for instance, I’ve seen towns where they have pick up once every two weeks and the canister is not even a full size one. It’s a “gentle” push to get people to recycle and compost.

No way that would fly in Freedom Town USA.

This worked in Australia. People complained for like a month, and then just started using the food scraps bin and got over it.

Miracle is garbage doesn’t stink if you don’t put food in it.

My current US city has municipal trash. My previous US city had municipal trash. It definitely “flies” here.

Wait until you get a tyrannical HOA board and realize you have to make a choice between dealing with them or moving. Dealing with them typically involves lawsuits which come out of your HOA fees, which will go up along with all your neighbors who are now angry that their fees have gone up as well. (Ask me about open records my HOA hasn’t delivered for over 350 days.

I pay my city for sewer, water, and trash. I pay an ISP for fiber to the home, a power company for electricity. If you get all those things for $2500/year from your HOA, congratulations.

You’re stilling paying taxes for nothing in addition to HOA fees. Another fee isn’t the answer.

Your comment makes it clear you're American. I just don't get why you guys torture yourselves by seeing your pre-tax income then having to pay taxes yourselves. In the UK most people pay tax via PAYE which means we don't even see our pre-tax income. It's just some numbers on a payslip, but your rarely need to look at. Consequently, I've never heard a single person in the UK ever say they "hate paying taxes" because we just don't think about it.

It works the same way in the US for most Americans. Taxes are automatically deducted from pay before people ever see it.

Unless you are running a business or self-employed it isn't something you have to worry about.

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