The Ethics of HOAs

I’ve commented from time to time about Homeowner’s Associations (HOAs), and how little I care for them from a libertarian (note: not Libertarian; there’s a difference) standpoint, but I’ve never written about the ethics of the situation. The concept is simple enough: when a neighborhood or subdivision is built, the first owner of each property (most often the real estate developer who built all of the houses in the first place) signs an agreement that stipulates how each house and yard will appear from the outside. Alternately, all of the people who live in a specified area may decide to write and sign such an agreement at some later point. The idea is that if every house in the Association is well-maintained, has good landscaping, is freshly painted, and so on, the neighborhood looks nicer and more prosperous, which has the overall effect of raising the property values. On the surface, this would appear to be in the best interest of all of the homeowners involved. Unfortunately, like so many other ideas, this one often gets ruined by people…

The problem with these agreements is that while some people love the idea of a uniform neighborhood, and relish all of the houses being painted, decorated and landscaped alike, other people hate the idea because it stifles creativity, costs them a lot of money, or gives one of their neighbors the power to tell them what they can or can’t do on their own property. It’s easy to get most people to agree that having random junk strewn around the property looks bad; it’s also easy to get most people to agree that requiring every house in the subdivision to look exactly like every other house is unreasonable, or that requiring people to spend large sums of money during an economic crisis is a bad idea. Where this becomes truly problematic is when the residents disagree on how much money constitutes a “large” sum, or how much uniformity of detail is unreasonable – and when some of them decide to settle the issue with high explosives, of course…

A story that popped up on the local television news website in St. Petersburg, Florida, tells about one HOA president who sent out a warning letter to the members about mailboxes. It would appear that this particular HOA had a provision in their contract requiring everyone to have those large, brick mailboxes, and a number of people in the neighborhood had been refusing to comply with this requirement. The president of the HOA warned everyone that “appropriate action” would be taken against anyone who did not shell out the money and upgrade to an approved mailbox. Unfortunately, it would seem that someone in the HOA took the letter as a threat, or perhaps a personal attack, and retaliated by blowing up the HOA president’s own brick mailbox…

Now, for the record, I don’t approve of violence or vandalism as a means of resolving this sort of difference. But if you read the comments left by other viewers at the end of the online story, there’s about a 12-to-1 ratio of people who apparently support the unknown bomber’s actions. So I suppose we really need to ask: does the fact that you signed a contract agreeing to submit to specified authorities regarding what type of mailbox (or landscaping, or paint, or whatever) you can have on your house mean that you have an ethical responsibility (as well as a contractual one) to comply with that agreement? Does it matter if the requirement is beyond your means? What if compliance will cost more than you can afford, force you to attempt to sell the house, or if you can’t, declare bankruptcy? Is your answer different if you need to live in that location for some reason (e.g. work, school, family, other obligation) and can’t avoid the HOA agreement and its attendant expenses?

By the same token, is it reasonable to allow one (or a few) homeowners to lower the property value of the entire subdivision because their property looks like a crack house and they are too cheap and/or lazy to keep it properly maintained? Do they have an ethical responsibility to their neighbors to keep their house looking reasonably well cared for, even though it is their property? It seems obvious that no one should have the right to protest civil or contractual issues using high explosives, but do the residents have the right to protest them at all? Or should they abide by the contract they signed of their own free will when they bought the place?

It’s worth thinking about…