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Comment by teeray | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that municipalities absolutely love HOAs. They get all the tax revenue and get to wash their hands of most responsibilities involved with them. From their perspective, they get to found little vassal townships where they can say “it’s your problem” to little people problems like “there’s too many potholes in the road” and “that sewer lift station is making weird smells.”

Oh, but if you want to do anything, you still need to pay those permit and inspection fees! No, we won’t help you find a paver at a reasonable rate even though putting those contracts out to bid is what we do all day long.

What is really bullshit is that HOAs aren’t granted a property tax abatement for absorbing many municipal functions.

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I understand why they do that though. Cities don't usually make enough money from property taxes to fund the infrastructure in the suburbs. That why they always seem to be on the verge of budget cuts, raising taxes, or bankruptcy.

And Florida plans on making it worse by cutting property tax limits.

> From their perspective, they get to found little vassal townships where they can say “it’s your problem” to little people problems like “there’s too many potholes in the road” and “that sewer lift station is making weird smells.”

Roads and sewer are two things I've never seen an HOA have jurisdiction over; in every HOA community I've lived in, the municipality still owned the roads and the water and sewer infrastructure. The HOA was only responsible for things like mowing the grass in common areas and maintaining play equipment there.

I am a president of an association that handles all aspects of road maintenance (construction, sweeping, snow removal), a full commercial sewer lift station, stormwater drainage, trash / recycling, street lights, interfacing with utilities, forestry maintenance, and permitting along with general Q&A. We are a volunteer 3-person Department of Public Works.

Interesting. I wonder how common this is (as I said, I've never seen it, and I've owned homes in 3 different HOA communities in two different states).

I’ve lived in two HOAs and they both owned and maintained roads in the community. One of them was a new development, and making the roads private was probably a big reason the county required an HOA for it.

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