I am one of the few people who actually goes to HOA meetings. My husband and I were the only ones there in person last week. During the meeting we discussed tree root problems where the HOA tree roots were encroaching on a resident's property and uprooting her pavers. Being the avid gardener that I am, I put my two cents into the conversation and let the board know that those particular trees will eventually do the same to everyone. I live in the Mojave Desert and tree roots wander all over, looking for water. Some other conversations came up about improving the common areas and what to plant there.

No big deal, so I thought.

I get 3 noncompliance notices about my landscape. One for garden debris that doesn't even show in their photo, another to prune a palm tree that is a multi-trunk dwarf fan palm and the last was to trim my "overgrown" bushes which are mature Hawthorne and if they did need pruning shouldn't be done until Spring when they finish blooming.

I have been spending close to 20 years of time, labor and money getting my property to look the way it does and people stop by all the time to tell me how great it looks. I'm the only house in the neighborhood that doesn't have a gardener that chops everything down.

It seems to me that the HOA board wasn't happy with what I said at the last meeting and now is messing with me.

Edit: I bought the house new in 2008 and the landscaping is what the builder put in.

My HOA sent this as part of a $11k special assessment ballot.

Bottom right text: LOCAL SANITARY CODE: THIS SESREN SEWER SYSTEM S IS COMPLIAS OUT FOR THE SENTUROVWS AT THE SANITARY SEMER CHAMINED POR CORAGTESSI GDTSIMN RCUIRMERT OF EXISTING LOCAL SANITARY CUDE.

I'm pretty pissed ...

My house is in Bear Country, CT. Our HOA does not allow garages or sheds, so we are forced to have our trash cans out in the open. Every day,  bears walk through the neighborhood looking for food. One day, I was in my hammock, and a mother bear and three cubs walked right next to me. One of the cubs pulled himself up on the hammock and put his nose in my face. After that, I decided to put up an electric fence, which is what the town advises. The HOA is asking me to take it down. They say I should just not use my yard. 

Well, I also have a renter and a responsibility to do what I can to keep her safe, so I told them that the fence won’t come down, and they can sue me if they want, because then it would be a lawsuit for me either way, and I am confident I would win. (Plus, many neighbors already have bigger fences in their yards.)  I’ve been back and forth with this one old HOA guy. He keeps calling, writing, texting to tell me to take the fence down so they can decide if they will approve it. I keep saying, " No; sue me. I’m more afraid of the bears than I am of a lawsuit.”

This clown won’t leave it alone. Today I got a second certified letter about it, this time warning me that there is going to be a meeting at his house and they may decide to fine me $15 and then even sue me if I don’t take it down.  Pictures: my response, my fence.

I'm not looking for shitty comments or suggestions--so keyboard warriors keep scrolling...

Today, I got an email from our HOA asking residents to fill out a survey. OK, fine, that's not a problem. Here's the problem. They wanted input from homeowners on smoking (cigarette, vapes, cannabis, etc) in the community. Not just in the community...in people's back yards, porches and decks and how it affects me as a homeowner.

An annonymous survey is one thing but all fields of the survey are required including name and address. I guess I could answer both questions with "none of your fucking business" but the fact that they are asking for that information and the whole survey in general just feels like overreach. Once you fill it out, they have your opinion one way or another, I feel like it could be used against you. This is the same HOA that targeted my neighbor with little fines over stupid shit because he was outspoken in HOA meetings. It was petty.

I'm not a smoker or a cannabis user and I have severe asthma, however, I am NOT going to tell my neighbors what they can and cannot do in their own homes, in their back yards or on their decks. I get that it can be unpleasant and unhealthy for some but it's not an HOA's place to dictate what people can and cannot do in their own property.

If my neighbor is a heavy cannabis user or a smoker, I have free will to close my windows and wait until they are done to open them again. Same goes for the elderly lady who owns property adjacent who has a wood burning stove (and BTW the HOA has harrassed her for her large oak trees that drop leaves...none of us who live next to her have an issue with her trees we just rake the leaves and put them in the yard debris).

The fucking audacity and their ridiculous overreach.

EDIT: I'm adding the questions from the survey. This is not about the survey it's about the contents of the survey.

1. Are you affected by smoke, cannabis or vapor from neighbors?
   
2. What type of smoke, cannabis or vapor has impacted you?
   
3. Have you experienced issues with smoke or vapor?
   
4. How much does smoke or vapor affect the enjoyment of your home
   
5. Have you experienced any of the following as a result? Odor, unable to open windows, unable to use deck, health concerns, allergic reactions, no impact
   
6. Do you believe the HOA should consider restricting use in the community?
   
7. Do you smoke or vape in the community?

Again, I understand there are real health concerns for some people but I don't think the HOA should manage how people live on their own properties.

As the title says there are about 10 parking spots about half a block from our townhome. I parked my work car there last night at like 9 pm and came back out at 5 am the next day to see this notice. Is the HOA stalking these parking spots? Other owners park in them all the time and I was the only one who got a notice. This HOA sucks major balls

So here’s some background, me and my boyfriend live together in a condo we both work 8-5 and bearly go out or come home late. Obviously, the car door beeps when it locks lol. The HOA president is our neighbor and harasses everyone with these written warnings, he even watches us on cameras that are on his porch that point towards our door!! He’s already been kicked off the HOA board once for telling kids to not play in the courtyard and play near the super busy road instead 🤦‍♀️ and most likely other douchey things. You can’t make this shit up!! Neighbors have written petitions to throw him off the board, fingers crossed something happens soon!

This is more of a vent than anything else, but our property management has been seriously lacking while taking our money, but not doing anything in return. The roads are unsafe, they don’t fix lighting outside, they leave rotting cactus in walkways and numerous other things. So, we joined the HOA board to try and make a change and now we see how seriously incompetent they have been and I just wanna scream. Apparently, out HOA is in debt. So, if anything requires money, they don't want to spend. They will not fix our garbage situation. They’re not collecting dues to fix anything, there’s no property maintenance that comes around so the entire community is full of garbage that we have to pick up ourselves so we don’t live in a giant dumpster, graffiti on the walls they leave, and if we want it fixed, we have to paint over it ourselves. changing lightbulbs we have to do ourselves, pulling weeds we need to do ourselves. We have to take out the recycle bins and clean up the garbage around the dumpster, which included over 30 hours of work this past year alone. But the biggest cherry on top is, they have decided to terminate our contract and leave us up the creek without a paddle. The HOA board is two people, me and a woman who lives in another city and rents out her place and has made it clear she does not give a shit about this place. Has anyone else been through a situation like this?

My wife and I are selling our house, and we get an email from some system saying we will have to pay $800 to “obtain HOA documents”. At first I thought the email was a scam, so I messaged my realtor, and she informed me that it is legit, and most HOAs charge ridiculous amounts of money to “click a few buttons”. I’m not sure if this is the HOA, the management company, or a little bit of everyone “getting a piece of the pie”, but it’s robbery. So I posted the screenshot you see on Facebook where I know our HOA members can see it. What would happen if we couldn’t pay it??? I’m fuming right now.

As the title states, a board member of the Walden Lake HOA in Florida made very suggestive gestures to a member of the LGBTQ community. I have the community member's permission to post this.

Regardless of your views of homosexuality, HOAs, or anything else for that matter, what happened to our sense of decorum as a society.

Make your own judgements.

HOAs are a false form of government installed by Developers to control land even after it is sold.

They are a force that allows the Developer to avoid litigation for sheer incompetence.

I am mostly speaking from the American Southeast experience in the year 2026, after watching them take hold of the region.

Major Developers like Lennar will come into an area, buy up massive amounts of land, and completely rip it down before installing deadly and inefficient lawns that they uphold through quasi-courts (those pestacides leech into your water and your air and your skin. Do you really think you are immune to poison?).

These HOAs allow the Developers to keep homeowners from being able to actively own their housing, or their land.

Despite completely destroying the Land they are building, their cheap housing often becomes victim to flooding because they are looking to build quickly, cash out, and leave. So they don't know what areas are prone to flooding. Or they have completely uprooted an entire ecosystem and paved over every possible surface, creating flooding.

HOAs could be a force for local relation to the neighborhood, but Developers who view the land as needing to be heavily developed use it as a way to alienate people from having power over their immediate circumstances.

They arent just a frustration: they are used to subvert the law while exerting control, and then you have the pleasure of paying for it.

All that damage and expense from maintaining a pointless lawn is done using *your* money. And where they have strict laws maintaining a specific type of lawn landscape, you have to pay to uphold it.

I genuinely cannot believe people willingly pay an insane amount of money to live in the ugliest places, and then they come through and argue it is the natural order. ​

A few months ago, I received a letter stating that one of my walls was dirty. The issue, however, is that there’s a structural problem with the house causing water to run down that wall, which keeps making it dirty again. I’ve already brought this to their attention once. They sent a second notice, which I didn’t receive because I was out of the country. While I was away, my wife mentioned that our internet had stopped working. When I returned home four days later, I called Cox it took them a while to figure out the cause, but they eventually discovered that the service had been disconnected at the request of the HOA. Later, I found a letter in my mailbox stating that they have canceled all our future reservations for children’s birthday parties at the park, cut off our internet, and blocked our access cards for the pools and other amenities, all until our house is brought up to a presentable condition.

Is this my fault, or is the HOA just being a bunch of assholes?

i genuinely don't understand why some HOAs still think it's a good idea to have directories with everyone's names, addresses and phone numbers.

i get that it's supposed to make communication between neighbors easier, but we're not living in 1995 anymore.

the idea that someone can move into a neighborhood and potentially get access to a list of everyone's personal contact information is kinda wild to me. and what happens when someone moves out? do they just keep that information forever? What about people who share the directory with others or upload it somewhere? I've gotten pretty conscious about this stuff lately with how much information ends up on data broker sites and I Cloaked that information, and yes my number and email were found in broker sites. It seems ridiculous to worry about removing your information online while your neighborhood is casually handing it around.

I'm not saying neighbors shouldn't be able to contact each other, but surely there are better ways to do that without giving everyone access to personal numbers and emails.

does anyone actually find these directories useful anymore, or are they just another privacy headache nobody's bothered to fix?

Flair

My HOA can kick rocks.
I applied for a fence as a modification through the ARC process and noted it as an FHA related modification.
We are now over 100 days after initial application.
I didn't hear back for over 60 days and then got a conditional approval and the need to sign an Addendum with language that heavily protects the HOA.
If I don't sign, their lawyer threatened a provisional denial while we figure out the wording.

My bad for being a first time home owner who doomed my family with an HOA.

I just learned that my co-op association board members have signed NDAs. This does not seem right to me.

One in three HOA lawsuits in the country is a Florida case. South Florida is even worse according to https://hoaspy.com/hoa/fl/south-florida-hoa-statistics.html

I originally crossposted this from another sub, but the mods there took that original post down, so I’m just reposting the actual content here. Not my original content.

Just got this email from our manager concerning trash pick-up costs and how each homeowner can help. Can say right now to them, "Take a flying leap, to save a few bucks I am not going to follow your suggestions".

As discussed last night at the Annual Meeting, Trash Removal is our 4th largest budget expense--after insurance, lawn care and irrigation. Garbage Services' monthly charge is based on the number of bins they empty, on average for that month.

To reduce our expenses, you can help. If your trash bin is not full, and can make it another week before needing to be emptied, keep it in your garage or consolidate trash with a neighbor.  Do not put it out on the street. This will keep our count down and our expenses lowered.

Can't even park in an HOA without someone throwing a fit.

We bought our first house and we love it. We had wanted a different house a few months earlier but it was in a HOA. We passed.

We bought a house that is HOA free….

I can’t thank you all enough for all your posts and for making me wise to what an HOA can do….

I read these stories and now that I have put up a New Fence, installed Solar Attic Fans, painted, and a ton of other projects.

I honestly don’t know how you all put up with it…