A homeowner in Goodyear, Arizona is locked in a dispute with his homeowner’s association over his practice of distributing free cold water from his driveway.
How anyone that lives in a country that has HOAs can unironically call it “land of the free” is beyond me
No good deed goes unpunished.
The good news is he read the HOA agreement, initiated a special meeting through signatures, and now the neighborhood is holding a special election to remove the dickhead board members.
Thank you, comment that summarises what’s in the article, I was afraid I might have to read the article to get the full picture.
What a dystopian hell hole. My condolences to everyone having something like HOA in their lives. May you all experience a civilised and free country at some point.
The HOA I live in doesn’t allow motorcycles in the driveway. Garage only.
I have two. They take up more room than you’d expect.
I see many homeless people in my area, I am more withdrawn but I always think of grabbing a case of water for our hot times to hand out, even if it may not be cool. Sort of too shy to follow through previously but it gets like 30-40C this part of Canada in the summer and we sort of need water to live.
My township finally decided to do something about our homeless problem … by fencing off the area they were congregating in, natch.
That seems like an extremely easy way to waste money on a fence that is about to be cut in 20 places with flush cutters.
My favorite HOA conflict:
https://www.jeepforum.com/threads/epic-hoa-parking-boot-battle.572540/
TL;DR - HOA boots a car parked outside a guys house. He puts the car up on dollies and pushes it into his garage.
They accuse him of stealing the boot.
He tells them they can come get it any time they want.
They tell him it’s $140 to remove the boot.
He tells them “Nah, it’s cool, I don’t need to drive the car.” LOL.
Edit Also in Arizona… Something in the water down there?
There’s a new-ish genre of Youtubers these days, Arizona home inspectors showing what a gigantic clusterfuck new house construction is there. I can’t decide which is my favorite disaster: exterior walls that are just paper and stucco, or the gas leaks at literally every house. In AZ, the HOAs are the least of people’s problems.
Epic story, thanks a lot for sharing the link!, sad there never was an ending
fucking photobucket killed all the pics
(also the forum software should have allowed uploading pics even in 2004)
Fair warning for anyone who wants to boot my car I own a cordless angle grinder…
They can get you for destruction of property then. Luckily most non-law enforcement use cheap ass boots. I had an apartment complex boot an old truck of mine because I let the registration expire on since I was about to trade it in for a new(er) car. I simply deflated the tire enough to wiggle it free and threw it in a bush, then I pumped the tire back up and drove it to a Walmart parking lot for a couple of days.
I got booted at university once so I just changed my tire and took the boot with me
Now they use 2 boots
I bought a boot removal tool my first year of college and was the savior of my friend group.
Don’t the boots cover the lug nuts?
On some of them you can just let the air out of the tire and slip them off the wheel. I did that at a parking garage one time and left the boot in the parking spot.
They found me later and said I stole it, I told them to check the camera footage and they saw someone else carry the thing off. I don’t know how I got out of that one but I guess they just went after the other guy instead of me lol
Most boots are also trivially easy to pick open for even an armature.
They arnt generally well made
Folks in my area used to cary around crowbars (the half life style long ones for crates and shit) back when the sheriff deputies were boot happy for a bit. This was before cameras so they couldn’t do much when they found the damned things snapped didn’t help that folks would do it to any car they saw with a boot.
This one didn’t lol
the heat does something to your brain, or its just the sort of people who move to arizona are already freaks
Ugh this isn’t what HOAs are for!
HOAs are intended to harass and discriminate against black and brown people so that they don’t move in, or at least immediately leave.
Not white guys with majestic beards.
He must’ve been giving water to black or brown people, it’s the only justifiable reason.
HOAs are intended to harass and discriminate against black and brown people so that they don’t move in
Lol I was going to make a joke here about “Redline Homes Inc.” - but it turns out there really is such a company, in Oklahoma of course.
HOA’s are for people who used to be in positions of perceived power at work but now they’re retired and they miss bossing/bitching at people.
They’re for people who don’t feel dominated enough by daddy government so they add another layer.
HOAs seem like they should be illegal. Having a contract in perpetuity that is attached to the purchase of property seems like it shouldn’t be allowed. So it is not only bound to the person who originally signed, but to whoever purchases the relevant property afterwards, and that gives other people rights over you that can be changed afterwards and are only limited by their conscience.
I basically don’t think you should be able to create a government by using a contract.
HOAs are the direct result of racists trying to work around de-jure segregation being abolished, so yeah.
I basically don’t think you should be able to create a government by using a contract.
It’s basically what Anarco-capitalism wants to do. Incidentally, HOAs form the best real world argument against Anarco-capitalism.
HOAs are elected and operated by the residents. Yeah they’re often shitty, but as residents you can change them.
Also, government creation contracts are called constitutions. Lots of countries have them.
If you squint a lot, HOAs could be a mechanism for bringing neighborhoods together. It allows them to self-govern over the shared resources for the neighborhood. Want to get a company to run fiber to everyone’s home, or build a solar/wind farm for fewer dollars per MW than rooftop solar could ever do? An HOA is a legal mechanism to setup the financing and agreements to make that work in an affordable way for the residents.
Most HOAs are not setup for anything like that. They’re for requiring what fencing contractor you have to use and banning natural lawns.
Or could like, be a. Actual city doing that?
Cities are often too big of an institution for this kind of mutual aid to work. It needs to be a social unit where you can know most of the people.
So why not form a tenant union at that point?
It’s basically that, for owners. But with stupid default rules that developers put in.
HOAs formed after a development is built tend to be very cool and much like what is described.
Collective bargaining for trash service, Halloween hay rides, July 4th bbq, etc.
Well, yeah, that’s what it should be.
Also, government creation contracts are called constitutions. Lots of countries have them.
I also enjoy pedantic arguments, but I try to remember to avoid them when I think the topic is important. I had to stop myself from arguing against this point, because even if I won the argument, it wouldn’t mean anything.
FWIW I thought it was a great line - a bit of a zinger, even.
My new neighborhood has a corporate HOA and they won’t hand over control to the residents until a certain % of houses are occupied. The problem is the builder has been building houses for the past 4 years and they’re far away from completion, so we have to deal with the shitty HOA until then.
You “can” change them, but don’t some/most HOAs have it so that the more properties you own in a HOA, the more voting power/votes you have? Like you own 5 properties, thus have 5 votes?
Probably, but are there people who own a bunch of properties in one neighborhood? If they own a majority, isn’t that more like a managed community than an actual neighborhood?
In my HOA almost all of the board members own multiple units and they don’t even live in our neighborhood. I know one is a realtor, as she sold me my place, and another is just an investor.
They’re not always the most pleasant people, but they do an ok job the majority of the time. People seem to hate owning a house but still getting told no on things.
I don’t know if they actually vote multiple times, but I think we’ve had less than a half dozen rule changes in the almost 20 years I’ve been there.
They have a vested financial interest in making the neighborhood as attractive and successful as the rest of us. While their motivation is purely a financial interest, the petty and self-centered things I’ve seen my fellow residents try to demand is crazier than anything our board has actually done.
Most of the HOAs in my area are a mix of privately owned homes and rental properties owned by the company that built the neighborhood.
Whoever ratted it him out is just jealous of his beard.
I doubt anyone ratted him out. HOA “inspections” are a thing. I was in an HOA once, and i had a shutter fall off my house. They took a picture of it and sent it to me to tell me i had to fix it.
That HOA was good tho. The shutter had been off 6 months and the note said, “most of the time, residents dont even know theyre in violation. So you have a month to prove you come up with a plan to fix it.” Which was like, call and get a quote. Then just sent them a pic when it was back up
Considering board members are made up of residents, there’s a good chance it was one of them then. Even them, that’s some petty nonsense.
My mom’s neighborhood is an HOA, and they have a rule of no work/utility truck overnight parking. I have a shell and lumber rack on my truck that has a conduit box and ladders on it, and she’s gotten flagged for it a couple of times (there’s a specific crotchety old neighbor she suspects), but she’s just told them to go pound sand, and that’s somehow worked.
Fuck HOAs. I’ve vowed to never live in one. I know it’s not an option for some people due to where they live, but I am not dealing with that crap.
Couldn’t you just park outside the neighbor’s house? Or just get a cheap truck and just abandon it, see who they go after then.
You hired somebody to put a shutter back on? It’s just a couple of screws!
Screws are complicated for Americans
Can confirm, am American screw
Man, I could never live with an HOA. It’s just dumb.
They are suprisingly difficult to avoid. Shared units, condos and apartments all have associations that are just an HOA with a different name. The only difference for these are that they are responsible for replacing the shared roof every 20-ish years or so.
Having shared assets to maintain is legitimate, but the vast majority of HOAs (those governing single-family neighborhoods) don’t really have that as an excuse. Even if they do have something to maintain, like a private street or a pool, it’s only because the local government was shirking its responsibility to provide what should have been public infrastructure.
(And that’s why they’re so common: because low-density development is so ruinously unsustainable, governments heavily encourage developers to establish HOAs so that the time bomb of future maintenance is the homeowners’ problem instead of bankrupting the city.)
I would give HOA murderers a get out of jail free pass, honestly.
Would be interesting to know what rule they might have that could be interpreted in such a way to ban giving out water (and which should be referenced in a citation, no?) but the article doesn’t mention anything of the sort.
It’s not the water-handing-out in and of itself. Also, yeah these people often suck and enforcement often makes them look like the tools they are, but make no mistake about it, there are people that like it that their neighborhoods are policed by Karens who keep it looking like a sterile movie set. The moral of the story is, stay the fuck away from HOAs.
Here are two common clauses that are probably being applied here:
Residential Use All Lots within the Properties shall be used, improved, and devoted exclusively to single-family residential use. No trade, business, commercial activity, or profession of any kind, whether for profit or not, shall be conducted, maintained, or permitted on any part of any Lot without the prior written consent of the Board of Directors. This prohibition shall include, but not be limited to, any activity that generates regular visitor or client traffic to the Lot.
Prohibition of Signs No sign, billboard, poster, or advertising device of any character shall be erected, placed, permitted, or maintained on any Lot or on the exterior of any Dwelling, except for one (1) “For Sale” or “For Rent” sign of a type, size, and location approved by the Architectural Control Committee, and small signs identifying the occupant’s name or address as permitted by the Committee. All other signs are expressly prohibited without prior written approval from the Board.
So the board could approve Donald Trump boards and deny everything else? This sounds intensely dystopian.
It does:
The Canyon Trails HOA and its management company, F-S Residential, began issuing citations to Martin last year for having a cooler in his driveway.
My guess is the language about what can’t be visible is very general to cover all kinds of things that could be considered “unsightly” like bikes, clothes, trash, etc.
I’m sure it could be fixed with some provision about the items being actively used but HOAs are dicks.
Free country bro
Don’t tread on me
My guess is…
So in other words, the article doesn’t mention which rule could be interpreted to ban giving out water.
Without reading the article and having dealt with an HOA in the past I will guess he was causing more traffic in the area
It’s not paywalled. You could actually read it. As a spoiler alert, your guess appears to be wrong. They don’t mention that as the issue.
It’s not paywalled.
It is however impossible to reject all the cookies. So I’m going to give it a wide berth
I always knew that dihydrogen monoxide was a threat to the population
In a nation of so many firearms how are these people ballsy enough to pull this nonsense. It seems like a great way to end up trapped in a burning house.
As in pissing off someone that lives in your neighbourhood by being this level of awful seems like a supremely bad idea.
What now?
Unless I’ve misunderstood, which is entirely possible, HOA people aren’t anonymous remote bureaucrats - they live there, don’t they?
Antagonising someone with batshit stuff like this seems like a good way to cause significant problems. Such as being forced, through the threat of mortal violence, into a situation involving arson. It feels like a plausible level of rage in response to this kind of unreasonable arseholery.
As in:
Being an absolute piece of human garbage and treating someone the wrong way + recipient of shoddy treatment has easy access to the threat of mortal violence = bad news bears
