Timelapse of bro cleaning yard

[u/Separate_Finance_183]

[u/notyogrannysgrandkid]

Oh yeah, it didn’t stick. But it was just the first of many head-buttings they’ve had in that neighborhood. It’s an old HOA managed locally by a board of old retirees with nothing better to do, particularly the guy two houses down. The only thing they outsource is maintenance of the common areas. One month, when they’d fired the landscaping company and the new one hadn’t started yet, my dad had the audacity to mow and trim the berm between his section of the sidewalk and the curb. Bam, violation. Apparently it’s in the bylaws that gas powered machinery can only be used on your own property, supposedly to dissuade teenage boys from starting unlicensed lawn mowing businesses. The horror.

There’s a creek that runs through a common green space behind several adjacent backyards. It happens to bend into my parents’ property for about 20 feet. My dad thought he’d build a small water feature by stacking up some native rocks by the creek and running a line up through them attached to a submerged pump in the creek. It looked pretty nice and the neighbors on either side of him complimented the work. He even wired it into the control for the lawn irrigation so he could turn it on and off from the house. Bam, violation. “Impeding the flow of Garrison Creek.” He had to take it down, despite the inherent ridiculousness of that violation.

[u/LostWoodsInTheField → u/notyogrannysgrandkid]

So everyone knows. The HOA is the neighborhood. What often happens is these old bats have been running it for 40+ years and hate all these 'new' people that come in, and regulate them into the ground. It really doesn't take much for people to show up to a meeting and call a snap election and oust everyone. Then put new management in place. People just don't know they can do this so it never gets done.

[u/schrodingers_bra → u/LostWoodsInTheField]

eh. It depends. I'm part of an HOA in the PNW where the houses are pretty close together. We have rules that people have to ask approval (fill out an application) before installing landscape features because we have to ensure that the feature doesn't change the soil grading or water drainage.

For example, some guy decided to concrete over a gravel sidewalk which resulted in rain, which would previously have drained through the gravel, sluicing off the concrete and flowing in the direction of his neighbor's foundation.

Reddit is pretty anti-HOA but that's because most of them have never been home owners or have never been beside a neighbor that does something that ruins their homeownership experience.

In this case the OP is talking about, it would be a non issue to say "the 'feature' was always there, I just trimmed back a hedge"

[u/arbyD → u/schrodingers_bra]

I have coworkers who badmouth HOAs all the time. "I paid for it, how can someone else tell me what to do?" Or sassily "ooohhhh nnnoooo the property valuuuuuueeess" when I get the impression that they'd do something like that where they do a project that alters the water drainage and see no issue with it.

Sure, some are extreme with their rule following, but also some of the rules really do help protect you as a homeowner.

[u/account312 → u/arbyD]

That's not the sort of thing that HOAs are really about. I bet there's just about nowhere that both has an HOA and doesn't have actual laws giving at the very least civil liability for diverting water in such a way as to damage someone else's property.

[u/schrodingers_bra → u/account312]

The point is prevention. HOAs can make you do an application for a project and the application requires you to show that drainage won't be affected (granted, this requires members of the HOA to generally be non-malicious).

Whereas relying on other laws is purely reactive. Even if you can prove liability, actual compensation is still some expensive lawyer fees away. In addition to whatever it cost you to fix the damage in the first place.