There was a bit of danger in all this expansion. The look of utter horror on my Dad's and Uncle's face when we turned off all the breakers and the stove was still on makes me laugh but was deadly serious at the time. Fixing that was a bit of an adventure. Dad and Uncle traced every wire in the damn house and I learned some new insults.
I'm aware that some HOAs limit (sometimes to what seems like an extreme) what can be done with the yard and lawn, but I wasn't aware of any governments that ban growing vegetables. Is that more common in water-restricted municipalities? (I live in midwestern US, where backyard gardens are very common.)
It’s almost unheard of to see suburban or wild orange trees in south Florida anymore.
I have fond memories of visiting my grandparents in Florida and going to their backyard to pick oranges and grapefruits to make fresh juice in the morning.
It’s unfortunate the orange lobby can ban something that just seems so Florida to me.
Dear Modern Farmer: Can I Legally Grow Food in My Front Yard?
https://modernfarmer.com/2013/06/dear-modern-farmer-can-i-le...
oak park hates veggies- trying to make sense of oak park's war on vegetables:
https://oakparkhatesveggies.wordpress.com/about/
Homeowners Across the Country Face Citations for Illegal Gardening:
https://www.motherearthnews.com/organic-gardening/right-to-g...
I’m sure some suburban guy decided to plow his front yard and be a corn farmer, but generally I find nobody minds a garden.
Backyard gardens are generally unobjectionable, it is the front yard that gets neighbors riled up when they see dirt and messy looking plants. Even then, if you make an effort to have it present as ornamental (eg. herbs, cherry tomatoes, mini peppers, etc. in attractive raised beds and containers that don't displace the entire lawn) you may be able to get away with it.
Oh, and definitely keep the compost pile out of sight.
Where I live, watering outdoor plants is only allowed 3 days a week, and only before 9AM or after 6PM on those three days. That doesnt mean growing vegetables is specifically illegal, but it does mean starting seedlings requires breaking the law during the warmer months.
I could see the time window applying to the actual act of watering the plants ("don't water during the hottest/brightest part of the day, to avoid wasting most of it to evaporation"), but the specific days seem to me like they're just for load balancing...
I believe some areas object to the use of rain barrels, so I wonder if this option would fall under the same or similar restrictions.
I find it so strange that such restrictions only seem to exist in the US, where there is normally so much emphasis on individual freedom.
This is common in colorado.
Being debt-free within a few years of the house being completed has a lot to be said for it. But when a loan payment is 80% or more interest at the start, that's a lot of profit for a lender to give up - they're not exactly going to be jumping at the opportunity to write those loans.
Then with that in place you modify it toward a house.
Or drag a mobile home onto the lot for temporary.
When you can afford Air Conditioning, or have too many babies you build under.
So our pattern is build high first, fill in later. The one here is "build basement first, digging under the ground with a house on it, is a pain"
(also raised because termites: gumtree hard stumps treated with CCA can survive them, siding and framing wood less so. Modern build tends to be either a slab of concrete and single storey, or a mcMansion, or units)
It‘s not uncommon to see unfinished concrete structures. Basically the raw skeleton often with exposed rebar at the top or sides, indicating future work.
They may stay in this state for years. As apparently everything is paid in cash and so building only advances whenever the owners have enough at hand.
However, that is absolutely not true for most Spanish cities.
It is a very different world from the ones most of us live in.
You were told wrong by more than 30 years. The US was officially more urban than rural by the 1920 census but the demographic trend had been going on for 50 years before that.
By 1900 1 in 10 Americans lived in just 5 cities (NYC, Chicago, Philly, St Louis & Boston).
The machinery during the 50s-60s eliminated a lot of agricultural jobs, and drive down prices. Not just for farmers, but also in processing agricultural products.
Thinking about codes and permits, I think the idea of self-reinforcing change is interesting here. As more people rent or frequently buy/sell, it makes more and more sense to have strict safety codes and permitting rules because the people building and making money off the structure don't bear the safety risks of bad construction. But as this raises costs and places barriers, it makes renting more common, etc.
Somehow, while we were all busy debating for or against this or that political view, we, common people, lost control of more and more of our existence.
We lost control of the food we eat, the kind of houses we live in (as this article explains), the way we invest our money, our work schedules, our means of production, our means of transportation (and more).
Saying this, immediately triggers alarm bells (ah! He is saying that buildings should not be regulated, he must be a libertarian right winger! Oh! He says we need to own the means of production? He's obviously a communist!) and this prevents us from discussing many of the things that really matter.
--
> I want you, dear reader, to set aside all the squirrelly feelings you may have about the political Left or Right. Perhaps you hate the evils of Big Government or the evils of Corporate Capitalism. Maybe you like cities. Maybe you don’t. Maybe you like the kinds of people who live in them. Maybe you don’t. Maybe you like places that are a bit messy. Maybe you need a place that’s orderly and tidy. That’s not the point I’m making here.
> Look at these images of the Summerlin West development on the far edge of Las Vegas. The scale is massive and the same dynamics are at work. Everything about this place is enormous and predicated on vast amounts of institutional complexity and debt. Somehow, as a society, we’ve drifted from ordinary people being able to build their own homes on a cash basis in an interactive iterative way, to these immense hyper elaborate habitats. You may not aspire to live in a small underground home that takes years to complete. The Summerlin West homes may be better in many ways. But there are trade offs involved. Both individuals and the larger society have agreed to a set of interlocking delicate systems that are simultaneously highly effective and spectacularly vulnerable to disruption. That’s my point.
Not if the SF Board of Supervisors has anything to say about it. They’ve actively blocked the transformation of parking lots into dense house as recently as this year. SF is anti housing somehow wrapped in a veneer of progressivism.
I'd actually figured it as someone making the best of what was left after a tornado or other disaster.
https://www.archdaily.com/797779/half-a-house-builds-a-whole...
[1] - https://twitter.com/zillowgonewild/status/152662553013669478...
On some other streets, people have added a floor to what were originally built as one-level homes.
That means those in the minority. The crazy guy growing gourds instead of a lawn. The loon with the purple house. The impoverished who can’t paint their house every other year. Those kinds of folk need representation the most.
After ten years of one neighbor parking cars on their lawn, another growing more weeds than blades of grass, and another with 8 vehicles parked along the street I was done.
When I bought my second house I specifically wanted an HOA. After another 6 years, I couldn’t be happier. Yes the HOA prevents me from doing a handful of things, things that aren’t really a big deal in the grand scheme of things. While the HOA keeps the entire neighborhood looking nice and slaps people on the wrist when they need it.
Also keep in mind that getting together to organize a set of common standards and restrictions is the basis for all exclusive communities. That's OK if you are on the casual compliance side of the rules, or if you get to write them to suit your preferences. But it is discriminatory. Similar covenants have been used to keep out ethnic minorities (because of the way they live, like animals!).
Being for or against HOAs is like being for or against laws. It's meaningless without context.
Some HOAs are traffic lights. Some HOAs are civil forfeiture.
An HOA can morph from tolerable into unconscionable. Deny the HOA the right to exist in the first place, and it will never go bad. This is an appealing tradeoff for many.
We bought our house in 2016, next to an old tear down house. (I’m talking about plants growing inside because the roof doesn’t keep the water out.) Recently someone bought the house, tore it down, and built a million dollar house in its place. The other day, he gets into a fight with my wife—over various things, but among them the fact that he’s mad we won’t clean our porch. I told him that he’s the idiot who built a million dollar house next to people who were happy living next to a tear down for years.
Now before, I felt a little guilty for keeping the pool toys out there all year, but now I’m definitely not going to put them away.
My partner and I started sending yearly thank you gifts to the HOA board after our first year here. They manage contractors and landscapers to handle upkeep and repairs on the property, coordinate information among neighbors, contract and negotiate with service providers, and even pass along helpful maintenance tips. (Most recently it was "most people still have their original hot water tanks and several people have had theirs start to fail -- it's a good idea to start replacing yours before it becomes a problem" which, as someone newly moved in, I hadn't thought about but sincerely appreciated.) It's like having an advisor on hand who cares as much as we do because they live there too.
I still side-eye the idea of HOAs, but I'm coming around. People talk about the horror stories but "everything is fine with my HOA" doesn't make for exciting reading.
My neighborhood growing up had a HOA that just maintained a little shared beach. They had a couple rules for yards, but nothing too onerous (don't have someone stay in a camper in your front yard -- a rule we actually broke, but just for a weekend or so, family visit with not enough rooms in the house). Annoying neighbors will find a way to be annoying, reasonable ones will find a way to be reasonable, the HOA is just a medium for this sort of behavior.
Fortunately the HoA board didn’t look kindly on it for a variety of reasons/ issues.
He eventually moved. I hope he found a good place with a big garage and fewer neighbors to do that thing.
Same with the rental party house (before the days of air bnb(but same issues)).
HOA or not
Good folks or not
The balance between the two is nuanced and it sounds like you landed on a different side of the debate to me. I’m sorry to hear that, and I respect that, as a result, you have a different view of HOAs to me. Peace.
* One house near the entrance was bordering on being uninhabitable; rotting roof with tarps covering the holes, rotting siding, gutters hanging half on. Always shocked the city didn't declare it a public hazard.
* The people behind me would drag their TV and sofa out in the front yard every time the state's football team was playing, be noisy and would leave discarded beer cans all over the lawn.
* The people in front of me left a disabled car in the road for more than a year. Suspension shot, tires flat, windows busted out and left in the rain. After a year I finally called the city, who sent a code enforcement officer out. The person's response was to push the car out of the road ... into the front yard.
* My next door neighbor mowed his yard about 4 times a year. I even offered on several occasions to mow it for him, just because I didn't want to look at it.
My current neighborhood has none of the above problems. We have a low-BS HOA that basically exists just to be sure the common areas are maintained and that the homes are maintained to a minimum standard as specified in the rules. Otherwise, they stay out of your life. I was even on the board for a few years; we issued a grand total of about 8 warnings and zero fines in that entire time - and IIRC all of the warnings related to parking. Often, just having rules and an enforcement mechanism is enough to ensure minimum standards are maintained by the vast majority of people.
Also, an underrated HOA benefit we discovered is that they are great for collectively getting the city's attention when we need something fixed. We've had problems with potholes forming in some of the roads and, for a long time, the issue was ignored by the city despite numerous homeowners complaining. Until we got our HOA's legal representative to draft a letter to the city. The next week all the potholes were fixed.
I have never had a problem with the HOA preventing me from doing something, even if it was technically against the rules. Last year our HVAC went out and it was going to be a week before we could get it replaced. The HVAC contractor loaned us some window units to keep the house cool until everything could be ordered. Technically window units are against the bylaws. I didn't even run it by the HOA, just put a sign in the window above it saying it was temporary until next week. No issues at all.
The key with HOAs is to be involved! Think of them as mini-municipalities, like a town within a town. And, as an owner, you are entitled to attend the meetings, introduce measurs to change the bylaws, vote on business and hold office in them. This is why "Karens" tend to get and retain power - because no one opposes them. In our HOA, about 60% of the houses never voted and most rarely attended meetings. Sometimes it was hard to even get quorum, and elections were often uncontested. The way I ended up as secretary was because literally no one ran for it. Don't like the way your HOA is being run? Change it. There's a pretty fair chance you'll succeed.
I know the Internet largely hates HOAs, and it is true that there are a fair number of really bad overbearing HOAs out there. A friend of mine once got cited for having grass a half-inch too high. But I think people focus too much on the extreme; there are actually a lot of fairly nice, low BS HOAs out there as well.
Negative liberties ("freedom from") are limited and relatively easy to regulate. If you ban people from killing each other and stealing their property, almost everyone agrees it's not a huge burden. While these liberties sometimes come into conflict, such situations tend to be rare.
In practice, people care more about positive liberties ("freedom to"). In particular, they want the freedom to live a good life. Unfortunately people have different ideas of a good life, and those ideas usually require other people living their lives in a certain way and providing various services. If you try regulating this, you start quickly making choices who is allowed to live a good life.
Because laws are insufficient for a good life, people make voluntary agreements to ensure it. If certain kinds of agreements (such as HOAs) become popular, they can effectively prevent some minorities from living their idea of a good life. But the agreements are only a symptom, not the cause. The real cause are other people. Without HOAs, the same people would try getting actual governments regulate the same behavior. And failing to do so, they would often feel that the society prevents them from living a good life.
Open town meetings, which are pure democracies, have been working pretty well in New England for quite a long time now, with the biggest issues in modern times being low attendence and committee overstep.
That's the statement, but it's never worked that way. Of course minority groups have been steamrolled
An understandable sentiment. How much are you willing to pay for it? If you have a $1.5 million mortgage and that loon shows up next door and paints their house purple, your house might lose $300,000 in value. Same with the other neighbors, who also pay mortgages but aren’t as compassionate as you.
What happens when your spouse gets a sudden offer to relocate and you can’t make your money back on the house?
HOAs started as a way to handle common infrastructure, like drainage. They allow a few homes to share drainage, without sticking all of the costs of maintenance to the homeowner who happens to have the pipe on their property.
In my case, my HOA carries property insurance for undeveloped land, maintains a grassy cul-de-sac, and maintains a fire road. (I personally spend about 2 hours a year trimming growth on the fire road because so many people walk on it.)
As far as saying that an HOA is to keep the loons out, we did have a hoarder live around the corner from the HOA. The people who lived across the street couldn't sell their home. (They had kids and wanted a larger house.) Could the HOA really do anything about the hoarder? I know the people who lived around the hoarder all put a lot of pressure on hee, the town condemned the house, and eventually it burnt to the ground. At least my with HOA, there isn't any good way to "evict" a loon who makes a mess.
Dramatic license aside, I'd hate to live anywhere where property value (or residents' senses of well-being) was so fragile that it couldn't handle a purple house.
How is that someone else's problem? Ironically, in some areas around me properties without HOAs are priced and selling a couple of 100ks higher than ones within HOAs.
So again, USA is country with most freedom? Freedom™, but you can't grow vegetables on your own property. Or you will be punished for having too long grass. Lmao
Individuals freely enter agreements with homeowner's associations which dictate land use. One is also free to choose to live in a place not governed by these rules. But, they are not the law of the land and they do not implicate a lack of freedom in the U.S. relative to other countries. Its quite silly to suggest as much.
Depending on the location, the only houses available may have mandatory HOA membership. If the choice is "Join an HOA or add 30 minutes to your commute.", that isn't a free choice. If the choice is "Join an HOA or find a job in another city.", that isn't a free choice. Depending on the area, mandated HOA membership may be the de facto law of the land, even if it isn't the de jure law of the land.
Choices must always be compared to their alternative, and using a non-existent Hobbesian state of nature as the alternative is overly simplistic.
It's about as free as entering into an arbitration agreement. You freely decide to get yourself a cellphone or credit card, and there aren't any on the market where you don't have to sign your rights away. It approaches shrinkwrap license territory.
So, in a way HOAs are sort of endorsed/franchised by the towns and counties which create them.
Sure, you can avoid them if you want to live in a rural area or buy an older home. But almost anything in the suburbs built since the 1970s is in an HOA.
HOAs can be good. But many of them are run by narrow minded petty despots. Or worse, outsourced to a corporate management company.
Generally though I think your point stands, the USA is big enough and varied enough one can usually chose a nearby location which permits hobby farming.
I'm not saying USA is not free country - of course you are free. I'm only saying that telling that you have the most freedom is at least funny.
The only way to guarantee things like this don’t happen is with some sort of rules in place.
If that means I hate freedom, oh well.
Nobody is likely to be happy when these two groups have to live next to each other, so it's an elegant solution to sort the population into more compatible subsets. Everybody wins.
If you look at this article about it I think you can see why it would be banned: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/illegal-kitchen-garden_n_1687...
Though I can see how the same thing without constant upkeep would go to hell in a hurry.
When I was poor, I just wanted a home I could afford in a safe neighborhood. Now that I have money, I just want poor people to be homeless.
/mockery
I live in a pre-zoning code suburb in Maryland. The current minimum lot size is 20,000 square feet. Our house and most of the neighboring houses are on 2,900 square foot lots. At least on this side of the neighborhood, nobody tattles on each other for doing unpermitted work. The result is real diversity and a tightly packed community. (Though as housing prices increase, our neighborhood, being so close to DC, is under threat from PMCs.)
Disgusting.
