Honestly, if you bought a house that was part of a HOA, it's on you. Like, what did you think was going to happen?
Apparently the developer owns half the homes and has voting power.
This isn't the homeowners' faults. This is beyond predatory.
This shit needs to be illegal, and the company doing this needs to pay.
Most HOAs exist to do common area maintenance and make sure neighbors don't paint their house purple, install neon exterior lights, and chase away buyers.
This is something else entirely. It's malicious theft.
It's a home, yes.
It's a significant portion of most people's net worth, yes.
But it's also a subscription service.
Read my comment, I specifically mentioned about not getting a house with an HOA in the first place. Again, if you chose a house that's in a HOA, it's on you.
> This is beyond predatory.
Of course, they're predatory, what did you think was it about? It's always someone with a power trip sitting on their boards. For a "HN contrarian", you sure get upset about a logical argument.
This should flip to the HOA being used by residents to control builders and landlords. Builders would stop using HOAs if they could not control them, just like it used to be when houses were built just fine without HOAs.
Voting for billionaire conspiracies is more important to a lot of people than voting for themselves.
This is getting worse, by the way. What will people do once the city council decides HOAs must run schools as well?
Second, it sounds like you are saying they need to run for their HOA to end it and run for city council to tax rich people again so we can pay for basic bare minimum services again. Giving tax breaks for the rich and telling people to form an HOA for garbage collection is not a solution to anything. Vote out the current people who set this nonsense up.
Won't work if the HOA is a private company that owns 51% of the houses.
And there's no point if the HOA was smart enough to use debt to make this happen.
> ... and run for city council to tax rich people again so we can pay for basic bare minimum services again ...
If that's possible. I think in a lot of locales this is not possible, maybe even most. Frankly we'll need to change regulations again so housing/roads/sewage/water/electricity builds and repairs can become a LOT cheaper again, but I'm guessing nobody's up for that.
And income tax is bleeding local governments dry right now. I imagine Washington (and London, and Brussels, and ... because it's not like this problem is limited to the US) sees that as a feature and not a bug, but it's still something that can't continue indefinitely ...