Bacon's Rebellion

Democracy Thrives in Sunlight

Another Self-Destructive Homeowners Association

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by

James A. Bacon
in ,

Determined to enforce its covenants, the Lansdowne Potomac Club Homeowners Association has cracked down on some 40 homeowners who operate small businesses out of their homes. The Loudoun Times-Mirror highlights the plight of a day care run by Oksana Downs, who caters to Russian-speaking children.

The Association is probably within its legal rights to order homeowners to close their businesses. But association board members should at least be honest with themselves: They’re part of the broader problem, not the solution. Small home-based businesses should be encouraged, not discouraged, as long as they do not prove disruptive to the neighbors.

The business owners have three alternatives: shut down, move to a neighborhood with a friendlier home owner’s association, or move the business to a location zoned for commercial activity. None are desirable. The notion that business and residential activities must be rigidly separated is an underlying cause of dysfunction in contemporary human settlement patterns. People working at home… people dropping off kids at the neighborhood day care… people seeking services from tax preparation to lawnmower repair from someone working out of their home… translates into people not overloading collector and arterial roads as they rush between scattered destinations to procure those services.

Furthermore, a community where residents interact as vendor and customer enjoys a richer network of personal interaction — something that is sorely lacking in the neighborhoods of strangers that dominate American suburbia. Permitting limited business interactions helps build trust and community. Homeowners associations should foster those attributes, not squelch them.

The Lansdowne Potomac Club Homeowners Association should consider revising its covenant. Far from hurting property values, the convenience of accessing unobtrusive services locally, and the feeling of community that the business interactions engender, will make the neighborhood, and the homes within it, more desirable and more valuable.

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8 responses to “Another Self-Destructive Homeowners Association”

  1. E M Risse Avatar
    E M Risse

    Good points.

    The first step in evolving functional governance structures for New Urban Regions and Urban Support Regions is to match economic and social reality with governace structures at the Alpha Cluster, Alpha Neighborhood, Alpha Village and Alpha Communitiy scles.

    As bad as it is to not have democraticly elected New Urban Region-scale governance, it is worse to have nothing for citizens to rely on but lame HOAs.

    EMR

  2. Ms. Place Avatar
    Ms. Place

    Ah, the burdens of a free society. We want OUR freedoms and restrict the rights of others in the name of order and property values.

    Excellent points you made! I live in a “messy” neighborhood. Some yards are kept better than others; some of us rent portions of our homes to students or elderly renters; and some of us operate businesses out of our home offices. We have the maturity to leave each other alone.

    People who enforce these homeowner covenants should move to countries like China or Singapore, where laws regarding personal behaviors and restrictions of freedom are kept strictly. In Singapore one can be jailed for tossing away chewing gum or painting graffiti on buildings.

    Hey y’all. Get real lives or move, and leave the sloppy business of living in a democracy to those of us who can handle it.

  3. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    Home Owners Associations have a purpose but unfortunately can serve as a fascist-style strong-arm private government where the defendant has no rights. The HOAs claim that you have no right to question because you signed those documents to buy your house. The rules were written by faceless lawyers who are paid for writing extraordinarily one-sided agreements. With HOAs, you have no due process, no rights, You abdicated your Constitutional rights by buying property. If you challenge them, well, you signed the covenants to buy your property and gave away your rights.
    Real governments such as counties and cities like HOAs because they are lazy and under-funded. HOAs represent the kind of privatized government that only a Republican can love. But they represent the worst challenges to the civil rights of many Americans (such as the right to make a living).
    Hope all you GOPers out there in Bacon-land are paying attention.They are coming after you, next. They don’t care if you voted for George Allen or not!

  4. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    And their rules can backfire. My husband had owned a townhouse in a HOA type community for years when I retired and moved down to Blacksburg. Most of the people there were older people, many retired, several older women living alone. He and another guy took on the responsibility of dealing with upkeep vendors, seeing that common area bills were paid, etc – all unpaid work and very time-consuming. Both of them taught at VT and had plenty to do without this.

    When I moved down there, we asked the HOA to allow us to put 2 bedrooms on our end unit because the unit was too small and we wanted room for guests to stay. The vote was like 13 to 4 against us. That left us no choice but to move so we built about 2 blocks away, where we are much happier.

    The reason that we were given was that a 4 BR unit would be too attractive to students if we sold later. We would have lived there for years and I was more than willing to take on the unpaid work that Jim had done for the HOA for years.

    When we put it on the market, no fewer than 3 sets of parents of students at the new osteopathic medicine school looked at it and we could have sold it to 2 of the 3 on the spot if we could guarantee that we’d be out by the end of July. (We couldn’t.) This would have been perfectly within the rules of the HOA – the parents would own it and their children and a friend or 2 would have lived there.

    They were lucky this time – we ended up selling to a librarian at the med school, but it is only a matter of time before thay have students there. And they ended up having to hire somebody to do all of those unpaid chores.

  5. Larry Gross Avatar
    Larry Gross

    I think the similarities as well as the dichotomy between, zoning, HOAs (as well as property covenents) … interesting.

    I watched a public hearing the othr night for a homeowner to put a hair salon in her garage.

    The Supervisors expressed suprise that the covenants and HOA did not automatically rule out the enterprise – and voted in down – after the neighbors, including those next door opposed it.

    The long and short was that some home enterprises that are not “service” are okay but one’s that bring “traffic” into the neighborhood are not.

    Folks may recognize that the same “outside traffic” criteria can become a more passionate issue usually characterized somewhere along the lines of kids in the streets with their bikes and complete strangers cruising those same streets.

    And then of course, we have the next step – gated communities.

    I try to understand all of this in the overall context of zoning… and.. strangely enough.. with respect to EMR’s settlement pattern concepts.

    One thing is for sure at least in my own mind – Covenants, HOAs and gated communities are usually considered additional “protection” that is sought explicitly prior to signing a contract.

    Folks who “accidently” but willingly acquire a property with additional resistrictions on it than local zoning laws… are … hmmm… unaware, not careful, clueless … use your own descriptive term….. but most folks do this – on purpose – and not infrequently as a result of a prior circumstance where they felt less protected from others activities that they would have liked.

    HOAs are voluntary… right?

  6. E M Risse Avatar
    E M Risse

    Larry:

    HOA are in general not voluntary.

    They were originally created to let the municipality get off the hook from maintaining common land which is a prerequiste of some forms of non-rental housing.

    HOAs can be a pain or a blessing. As the drafter of HOA documents and the manager of HOAs of Cluster, Neighborhood, Village and Community scales in places where 85 to 95 percent of the owners in surveys listed as a primary benefit the existance of the HOA, I can attest to the fact that if well drafted and well administered they are a blessing, especially in large “municiplaities” like Fairfax County where the “Local” government has over a million citizens.

    EMR

  7. Ray Hyde Avatar
    Ray Hyde

    “We have the maturity to leave each other alone”

    I think that says it all. See mycomments above on making NIMBY’s social outcasts.

    “The HOAs claim that you have no right to question because you signed those documents to buy your house.”

    And they are right. When you sign a contract, it is enforceable by law, even if the law itself has no such conventions. Shame on you for signing.

    “They were originally created to let the municipality get off the hook from maintaining common land which is a prerequiste of some forms of non-rental housing.”

    And eventually they ran intot he same problems that led the municipality to shed the responsibility in the first place: not enough income to maintian the common spaces. As a result, HOA’s are now engaged in the same practices as municipalities: charging higher fees or intitiation fees for newcomers, in addition to the (lower) fees paid by the earlier resients.

    It is the tragedy of the commons, and it is why private property, fully protected, works best.

  8. Larry Gross Avatar
    Larry Gross

    “And eventually they ran intot he same problems that led the municipality to shed the responsibility in the first place: not enough income to maintian the common spaces. As a result, HOA’s are now engaged in the same practices as municipalities: charging higher fees or intitiation fees for newcomers, in addition to the (lower) fees paid by the earlier resients.”

    This is simply not true on either side of the equation and it is a continuing confusion in my view on some things that really are not that complicated… to start with.

    HOAs are for people who want MORE amenties and MORE restrictions where they live than the locality will impose on all the residents within that locality.

    If you think about this – the locality will not provide the extra amenities or stricter restrictions – because the same folks vote and will not support it.

    So the folks who want MORE, willingly enter into these arrangements (with others who think like they do)… purposely seeking .. in essence – restrictions on others to prevent them from what they consider to be obnoxious activities – like cars on blocks, backyard kennels, etc. or even seemingly benign things like satellite dishes visible from the front of the house or even flags.

    You pays your money and youse makes your choice. If you join an HOA and subsequently don’t like it.. then you have two choices – leave or work with others to change it.

    Comparing HOAs to local governments especially with regard to infrastructure provisioning is … well.. confused in my view.

    Ray persists with the theory that existing residents should pay for INFRASTRUCTURE (not HOA amenities) for new folks – as opposed to new folks paying for the infrastructure that will be needed by them.

    If we followed this logic – existing residents would pay for water/sewer hookups for new folks and be financially responsible for extra bedrooms and sunrooms or upscale appliances, etc.

    Using this logic.. Ray would be forced to pay for a new road that went to the guy who bought land next door to him…

    Not only that – if the guy wanted a road twice as wide as normal and landscaped on both sides and covered with 4 inches of concrete or asphalt – Ray would still be responsible….

    Oh.. and the road would be on Ray’s property.. until it crossed over to the new guys house.

    Same deal with the water/sewer – Ray would be billed for the guys connection .. or in the country for his well and septic.

    We’d have to do this – because “it’s always been done this way” and “it’s not fair to make new folks pay for infrastructure”.

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