They should be called KOA’s Karen’s of America
this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2026
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No Lawns
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I'm a way it seems bizarre that HOAs should be so broadly despised yet also broadly adopted. I suppose it has to do with the corners of the culture I sit in.
I think the reason for the mass adoption is the surface selling point (higher resale property value) plus the usual minor fee lull people into a false understanding of just how dangerous they can become once a person on a power trip gets into the board
Municipalities are only giving licenses to new developments that have HOA included in, because HOAs transfer the necesario tax burden to the HOA. Americans would do anything for avoid paying taxes, including paying more for worst services paying private intermediates
I had a thought the other day:
If your HOA sues you and YOU WIN, they (usually) have to pay your attorney fees in addition to their own.
But...you're part of the HOA. Your dues will go up to cover the costs of a stupid lawsuit that you beat.
Oh, shit, right, so I get to share something I learned fairly recently.
For much of human history, wealth could be measured many ways but by far the most powerful currency was land. Land meant resources, and the land's value was determined by what respirce it produced: fertile floodplains meant crops, lakes for fishing, forests for hunting, and, worst-case scenario, moorland could be used for grazing livestock. But what if that wasn't enough? What if you had huge tracts of land but your narcissism and insecurity were so overwhelming that you just needed to prove yourself even more?
Enter: lawns. Lawns are fields of grass, which is a useless crop that can only really be used for grazing. But the grass is kept so short that livestock can't graze on it. But grass like that can only be grown on plains that are ideal for crops, so you need to get rid of the crops. And short grass needs tending, tending with more care than any crop, so you need to have workers dedicated to it. That's what a lawn is: it's bragging, it's saying "not only do I have loads of top-quality land and an army of workers, I can afford to piss away huge swathes of it for absolutely no reason other than to prove that I can." It's hard to image a greater and more grotesque display of boujee excess than the lawn.
Of course, this is what makes the modern lawn all the more pathetic: that neatly parcelled-out vast tract of land you can afford to squander as a display of your immeasurable wealth is, like, a few meters across. It's like the Stamford apes experiment: they know what they must do, but not why they're doing it and, if they knew what a lawn really was and where it came from, I can't imagine many would be quite so attached. Then again, maybe they would be. Maybe they really do think their home is a castle and that they live in a kingdom they can walk around in thirty second.
The pic is an island landlocked by fertilizer, pesticides, bug repellents, artificial lighting, etc.
It’s better than nothing.
Can we vote to ban HOAs?
Just ban the fucking HOAs
Kinda funny how Americans call their country "land of the free" but can't even do certain things on THEIR OWN PROPERTY because of the HOAs.
Should we go down the list of things Americans can't do but the rest of the world can? The irony of holding up freedom as their cornerstone while keeping the largest inmate population over bullshit without even a trial.
Number one on that list is health insurance being tied to your job. As in, some people literally die if they quit their job. Very freedom, much America.
When you're in an HOA, you've contracted away some of your rights to property.
But that's the devil's game of "property rights". So many people think they've gained sovereignty because money changed hands. They don't ask how property originates and why it was up for sale to begin with.
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HOAs are the devil - even if I could afford property there's no house cheap enough to put up with one.
Wild you are accountable to strangers to this level.
None of these laws ever get enforced.
You call them out on it a year later and they just say "I didn't know that. Never heard of that law" and then they just keep doing whatever they were doing.
Ironic, I thought America was the land of the free? lol
HOAs are such a fascinatingly American thing. They seem to cause no end of annoyance for those living in them, and have few to no positive effects (at least, we don't hear about any positives), yet they persist.
Can those who are adversely affected not do anything about their local ones, or is it actually a case that they're not too bad for most people most of the time?
I grew up, and have been living in apartment buildings all my life, so that's what I'm used to. It has always been a neutral to positive experience, but nobody really talk about those.
If you want to see the positives of HOAs, Google "What are the legal options for dealing with my neighbor Reddit."
Most people have a significant portion of their wealth tied into their property. Getting a new drug addicted neighbor three years before retirement could lead to unintended financial consequences. There are good HOAs, it's just that nobody complains about them.
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There's very little people can do. In order to fix things you usually need to get on the board, but the people who run HOAs are usually retired nimby assholes and they hold meetings while most in the neighborhood are at work so nobody can oppose them. They then reelect themselves to the board and the cycle continues. HOAs are usually a thing set up by the builders to make their lives easier for some paperwork and stuff. They absolutely suck 99% of the time.
Native plant garden bans aren't just an HOA thing. Many counties or cities ban them too. Much of it stems for chemical manufacturers selling the white picket fence image after WWII to veterans receiving funding to buy a home. The chemical manufacturers pushed hard for that image so they could keep making as much profit as they made manufacturing for weapons during the wartime.
This means that trying to fight your HOA on yards is useless, you have to go higher and it's a big big fight
Thats why you dont dight the HOA, you sabotage them with geurilla gardening.
I'm always down for conscious rebellion but that's a great way to get a lien on your house if you're caught for those who don't know.
Growing any food in our front yard is illegal in my city. Guess who's currently growing sage in the front garden.
HOAs are usually a thing set up by the builders to make their lives easier for some paperwork and stuff.
Builders are encouraged by the local government to set up HOAs because it lets said government shirk its responsibility to maintain infrastructure and services.
If your subdivision is gated, its streets are private and the homeowners are responsible for repaving them, for instance.
(Of course, that's only a motivation cities caught onto relatively recently. The original reason for HOAs -- at least for neighborhoods of single-family houses, as opposed to condos that have legitimate shared maintenance -- was to help keep black people out.)
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You hear about the shitty ones, tbh.
Mine covers the community pool, a few small playgrounds, gym, community garden, etc. Thats it.
No getting approval to have your door be blue instead of white, no measuring your grass height, or any of those shenanigans.
have few to no positive effects
The purpose of an HOA (in theory) is to divide the costs of land maintenance across land owners.
In practice, HOAs are routinely abused for rent seeking and stigmatization of minorities. But that's not a problem specific to the legal arrangement. It's a consequence of the managers and members.
Check out the HBO show "Neighbors". A great look into the mind of a land owner.
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Maryland has HB232 which supersedes all HoA law and says any low impact landscaping / xeriscaping is permissible AND favored if it prioritizes native plants and fauna / pollinators.
The simplest thing to come of it is “you can’t force me to grow grass”
What's the point of even having a yard if it looks like the ones in the picture? Why not just go live in an apartment then. To me, owning a piece of land to enjoy was kind of the key reason I wanted to own a house in the first place.
What’s the point of even having a yard if it looks like the ones in the picture?
Dog bathroom.
Where I live, it's a bathroom for other people's dogs.
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Hey who in US is leading a fight for mandatory 30 day minimal vacations a year and, nationalization of all seashores and guaranteed health care?
I want to join
Let's see...We've got the party that bombs foreigners for no reason, or... The other party that also bombs foreigners for no reason.
More like HOE
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