Thinking about living in an HOA? Think again. These folks share how terrible living in an HOA truly is. Content has been edited for clarity.
HOA Fees
“We set up a monthly transfer of 25 dollars to pay our HOA fees so we wouldn’t have to come up with the 300 dollars in a lump at the end of the year. We used the autopay feature that was offered by the HOA. The year went by and we got a bill that said we owed them 275 plus late fees. I was confused so I went and looked up my bank statement to see what happened.
Apparently, their software was faulty and every single time my transfer was processed, it would fail. There was more than enough every time to cover the payment. And no notice was ever sent to us. Here I will state, this is also my fault for not watching it.
Anyway, I contacted them to let them know what happened and that I did not have that much just sitting around so it would take me a little extra time to get it but no one would respond to me, and as time passed my late fees just kept piling up.
After several attempts and people actually blowing me off and giving me the run around ‘Oh it’s too late, it’s with collections now. I have no idea which one but you have to contact them!’
I just gave up and thought, ‘Forget you! See if I care!’
Well, little did I realize, in the state of Texas, they can take your house and they started the process to do so. I was then given a bill for the yearly amount, the late fees, fines that had come up since then for not keeping grass out of my flower bed, and their court costs.
I had to take out a 1.3k loan just to pay the HOA fees and keep my house.
And still to this day I want to run into the street and bash their stupid little cars when I see them in my neighborhood.”
The Barricade
“In 2011, my wife and I built a house in phase two of a really nice neighborhood. The neighborhood had been built during the real estate boom but hadn’t had any new activity for a few years. We were the first house to be built in phase two.
To give you an idea of the types of homes that were in there, in 2006 lots were going for 110k and higher. We bought ours for 40k. Anyway, after we started building our house another one broke ground across the street from us. Homeowners in phase one saw the foundation of the new house and freaked out. They invited us to their HOA meeting to discuss the issue.
The guy who led the meeting, Dennis, was extremely friendly to us and made sure our voices were heard in the meeting. Apparently, the new house was being built by a contractor who only built one type of house. He would go into a neighborhood and build 20 of them. Phase one didn’t want that to happen. When we left, we were assured we would all work together in this matter.
Fast forward five months. The contractor had already built five of those houses. I got home for my lunch break and saw that the owners of phase one put a concrete barricade to separate the two phases. Their reasoning was the construction was creating too much traffic in phase one. With the barricade up, owners in phase two now only had one exit. Many times my wife and then infant child would be unable to leave because of trucks blocking the exit from phase one.
This barricade stayed there for several months. We contacted the sheriff and boatloads of other people and no one could do anything.
In the fall of 2011, I was walking my dog and saw the barricade was gone. I got really excited until I saw it was replaced by a gate. The gate had a large padlock on it so we were still stuck with the single exit.
Phase two homeowners banded together and went to the developer. Things looked like they were getting better until other residents in phase one started talking to each other. It turns out, Dennis the nice guy above, was solely behind this entire ordeal. He was suing the developer on behalf of phase one, he put the barricade in place and he gave the developer a deadline.
Within a week, if the developer didn’t pay phase 1 owners a sum of money, he was going to shut off the water to phase 2. Phase 1 homeowners found out about this and went crazy. My neighbor went out in the middle of the night and pulled down the gate with his truck. Dennis skipped town for a few days and then wouldn’t answer his door or phone calls when he got back.
The developer reached a tentative agreement with Dennis. Our water stayed on and the barricade stayed down. My wife and I decided enough was enough and put our house on the market. It sold in one day and we never looked back.”
A Ballot To Save The Basketball Hoop
“I lived in a middle-class development of about 900 houses in Northern California. Our neighborhood/part of the development was unusual because people spent a lot of time outside, kids playing, people gardening, chatting, etc. (Which is why we moved in there.)
I got a basketball hoop for my 12-year-old daughter. She and lots of neighborhood kids would use it. They all knew to call ‘car’ and get out of the way immediately if a car was coming. We lived on a neighborhood street and into the cul-de-sac. Sometimes us grown-ups would play too. A great situation.
Apparently, some retiree had a habit of walking around the development and called the HOA on us, because basketball hoops weren’t allowed. I knew of several other ones but I didn’t want to mention them because I didn’t want to give them trouble too.
And the HOA said I could only have a hoop if it was put ‘away’ in the side yard when not in use. The 200-pound hoop was a bit beyond my daughter’s ability to take out and put back.
Instead, I surveyed the 65 houses in our neighborhood, putting a slip of paper in everyone’s mailbox. It had ‘yes,’ I should be able to keep the hoop, or ‘no,’ I shouldn’t. I kept their responses anonymous because I didn’t want anyone to feel pressured. I got 22 ‘yes’ responses.
I went to the HOA meeting armed with my data.
One of the Board members said, ‘So 2/3 of your neighborhood is against it!’
I explained, my anger rising, that no, I’d only received responses from 1/3, and no one could know what the other 2/3 thought.
Then they said I would need to change the CC&Rs (basically, the association by-laws), which could only be done by a 2/3 ‘active’ vote of the entire association. ‘Active’ means I would need to get 600 ‘yes’ responses, not just 2/3 of the people who voted.
I told them you couldn’t get 600 people to bother voting yes for oxygen.
And I put away my basketball hoop. And, as it happened, my daughter stopped playing sports.”
False Accusation
“A few years back, I lived in some condos as a renter that had an HOA. Each condo had a street-facing door and garage, as well as a door on the inside facing the pool. I am a typical working middle-class guy with a typical family, a wife, some kids, and the occasional pet. One of our neighbors was a group of families that got together and decided to buy this one unit in the end. They all lived there most of the time and often had questionable visitors come by. The leader of the HOA for the condos was also the majority owner and he lived hours away but would come vacation at his condo during the summer to be by the beach.
One night, my wife and I had just put the kids to bed and we heard this obnoxiously loud knock on the front door. ‘We have a doorbell’ is all I could think, so I walked up to the door and looked through the peephole and recognized the guy, but could tell something was up.
My wife freaked and called the cops right away. I opened the door and the guy started screaming, ‘You’re dealing! I want some! I will pay right now, so hook me up!’
He was accusing me of dealing illegal substances from my house. I explained to him that the family next to us regularly had questionable late-night visitors and he should go over there if he was going to make a scene. But no. He insisted he had seen people that could only be dealers come in and out of my unit for the past week. My wife heard the conversation and relayed it to the cops who at this point were en route.
Frustrated at being yelled at by a wasted idiot this late at night, I told him if he thought he found a dealer, he should call the cops and not go knocking on doors putting himself in danger. He took it as a threat and in return started threatening me. I had enough, so I went inside. About the second I got the deadbolt locked, he started banging again, waking up my sleeping three and one-year-olds.
I stepped into my room, grabbed my weapon, told the kids to go to the back of the house, and opened the door again with my weapon to his face. My wife told me how John, a family friend who was also the on-duty night cop, was coming to the house. I told her to advise him of the situation.
The wasted HOA leader then took my show of arms as confirmation that I was indeed the criminal he was after and started to walk off. I let him because I was not about to walk outside of my house with a loaded weapon drawn. He called the cops and before he got off the phone, John our family friend arrived with lights on and everything.
I put my weapon down and stepped outside to talk the situation through. The HOA leader thought the cops were there in response to his call because he did not know about my wife calling. He started yelling at the cop about how I was a criminal.
John cleverly asked him to cross the street for questioning and then placed handcuffs on him for being in the public domain while wasted. He got arrested that night. The cops told me if he was ever a problem again just to call.
The next week, we got a letter from his wife, the HOA VP informing us we had to move out. I took that to the owner of the unit we were leasing and we threatened to take it to court. I attended the next HOA meeting with the owner, with a police report in hand and the board unanimously voted to remove the leader and VP completely from the HOA and they comped our fees for the next two years.”
Would You Get Offended By That Color?
“My parents lived in an HOA neighborhood when I lived at home.
I worked as a painter, so they asked me to paint their house for a little cash. They wanted a neutral beige color, absolutely nothing obtrusive. I went through HOA, and approved the color, they said it was fine, so I went ahead and did it.
A few days after I was done, we received a phone call saying that the new color of our house was an ‘offensive shade of beige that didn’t fit in with the setting of the neighborhood’, and that we’d have to revert it. Nothing I did seemed to work, I couldn’t win and didn’t really have the time to take it any further, we had to paint it back and lost a ton of money.
Another time, my stepdad and I built a (pretty awesome) trailer from scratch when I was a bit younger, it was a few inches taller than our fence when it was done and could be seen from the front of the house wherever we put it. HOA told us we’d have to dispose of it for this reason, and that we couldn’t just make our fence a little higher instead, because it was an ‘eyesore’.”
Car Break-Ins
“I do not belong to an HOA but the apartment complex I live in has something similar, kind of a Renters Association, that is run by tenants. We have the full staff, leader, VP, treasurer, etc. The landlord stays out of our business and lets us live our lives, only popping up to collect rent and handle the issues the association cannot. Like most other associations here, ours is run by a squad of uber-pricks.
These knuckleheads have been a nuisance since day one but I’ve been able to tolerate them until about two months ago. In the span of two weeks, we had two apartments broken into, three attempted break-ins, and several cars vandalized plus two broken into. My apartment was nearly broken into and my car was vandalized so I took this rather personally. I thought about it for a bit and brought a solution to one of our bi-monthly meetings.
I work for a private security company and talked to our sales guy about making a deal with the association to provide security. Basically, I was willing to do on-call security for free in exchange for a cut-rate deal. I typically patrol an area not too far from where I live in a company vehicle, basically an old police cruiser, so unless something super crazy is happening I can typically respond to things as they pop up. The leader shot down my idea, no big deal it happens, so at the end of the meeting, I talked to those present about what they can do to limit or prevent being victimized in the future.
A week later, we had another car broken into and a bunch of stuff stolen from inside. I took it upon myself at this point to start making random nightly patrols. I let the residence know what was going on and that I would always be wearing the same brown jacket and ball cap. I work nights/evenings and enjoy a good walk so it wasn’t a big deal to me.
After the third or fourth night of this, I received a letter from the Secretary stating that I wasn’t allowed to be out walking around past a certain time. I shrugged and thought to myself ‘At least I tried.’
A few more nights went by and I came out to find my tires slashed. This nonsense was getting out of hand and I started to wonder if maybe it was someone who lived here that was doing all of this.
I reviewed the bylaws to see what I could do only to find out that there was no such rule prohibiting me from walking the grounds at night so long as I wasn’t doing anything illegal. I forwarded this information to the governing body of the association and resumed my walks. Nothing happened for a while and I was starting to wonder if whoever was hitting our buildings had just gotten bored or moved on to better fare. Que last week, I’m out walking with my dog (a very friendly Malinois/Greyhound mix) when she starts barking at something. When she barks it does sound aggressive but all she really wants to do is run up and say ‘HI!’
We walk in the direction she was barking at spy two dirtbags trying to jimmy open a car door with a clothes hanger. They turn around and see me staring at them, my dog beside me, and do nothing.
The light wasn’t too good so I moved forward to get a better look at them and lo and behold it was the leader and Secretary’s sons. Even less of a surprise was that the car they were messing with didn’t belong to them or anyone in their family. Unsurprisingly they ran away, right into the apartment building they live in.
My dog and I ran after them (my desire to stop these guys overrode my common sense) and watched as they ran right into the leader’s unit. I laughed and called the cops while standing outside her door. They showed up maybe 20 minutes later and arrested the two pickled turds. Right now they are sitting in jail, and the leader and Secretary have been deposed.”
The Constant Policy Change
“When I was younger, my dad started a limousine service. Before the company got big enough for its own office space and multiple limos, he’d bring his one limo to our home (detached condos with an HOA) to clean and stock and sometimes leave it overnight when it was needed for a job. It lived in a storage lot the rest of the time.
The presence of a limousine in the neighborhood was apparently distracting to the people on the board, so they passed a rule that you couldn’t have a vehicle longer than X feet parked in front of your house overnight.
Then the main old guy on the HOA board got a huge RV that he would leave in front of his house for days at a time, so they got rid of the vehicle size rule and replaced it with a rule forbidding vehicles that advertised a business (the limo had a decal on the driver’s side door with the name of my dad’s limo company and the phone number).
Then someone else on the board started a landscaping company and had a pickup truck with the name of the landscaping company on the side, so they changed the rule to only allow such vehicles to be in your driveway, not parked on the street (since the pickup could fit in the owner’s driveway, but a limo couldn’t fit in ours).
Basically, rather than just make a ‘no limos’ rule, they kept making rules that disallowed limos, and then kept changing it when it would accidentally apply to anything but a limo.”
Don’t Mess With Her Garden
“My mom is an incredible landscape architect who has written two books on the subject. When my parents first moved in with my wife and I’s home, our entire front and backyard were just grass. My mom didn’t like this, so she spent years outside gardening and developed our yard into something really beautiful and unique. Basically, we had two small patches of grass on either side of our driveway, which was surrounded by a multitude of well-maintained bushes and flowers.
After my mother had spent years on this project, the HOA sent us a letter about how there was a designated amount of grass that every yard must have. Our yard looked amazing and my mom was clearly distraught, so she ignored the letter. They sent more and more until an HOA representative came out.
The person was being a total prick to my mother and threatening legal action, so my mother heard them out and then calmly responded with, ‘Thank you for making the trip out here, sir, but before you take legal action I should have you know my father-in-law is a lawyer, who has been certified to testify before the Supreme Court. And, between you and me, he doesn’t make a habit of losing cases, especially those as mundane as this.’
The man was slightly taken aback and stuttered something before my mom added, ‘I’m a determined woman, and as you can see from my garden, when I start something, I make sure I finish it my way. If you don’t stop pestering us, I’ll see to it that your whole organization is taken down. Get the heck off my property and have a good day.’
Never heard from the HOA again.”
Expired Registration Sticker
“I rented a townhouse in a community with an HOA. We always tried to abide by their rules and never caused any trouble apart from when we’d go on vacation and let our grass get a few days too long.
Then one time, I had to park my car on the street (in our assigned spot), but it was less than 50 feet from my front door. It was the end of the month and with my luck at work, I had to close that night and open the next morning. By the time I got home, I made a bee-line right to bed. As I drifted off to sleep, my brain made that frantic reminder that the next morning was a new month and I needed to put my registration stickers on my license plates or I would be given a ticket by the police.
That would have been less hassle than what happened.
I had come home at 10:00 that night. I opened the door, registration stickers in hand, and was ready to leave at 6:00 that morning. When I saw my car, I thought it had been vandalized. Upon inspection, the HOA’s towing company had placed no less than 15 10″x10″ stickers over every window that explained my car was illegally parked due to expired registration. I had to call out of work because I couldn’t see out of my windshield enough to drive.
I admit to having been a bit lazy in not putting the stickers on, but it expired for six hours on the street. It took me longer than that to get my car cleaned off.”
Red Paint
“The homeowner’s association leader was a crotchety old man who would leave nasty messages on people’s cars that were parked outside his window. These notes would complain about how the parked car spoiled his view, of which the view was the house across the street.
Several of my friends and family had these messages put on their cars, and it was getting ridiculous but I bit my tongue. Then one day I woke up and noticed the old man had painted the entire curb along his home bright red.
This ticked me off. I went to the homeowner’s association meeting and complained about how this behavior was setting a precedent where anyone can paint their curb red. If everyone did that, there would be no parking in the entire community. People listened but nothing was done, and I was later approached by a member of the board who said everyone was scared of the leader and although my argument was valid, nothing would be done.
I was going to test the HOA leader by parking there and see if anything happened, but decided on something better.
My best friend and I bought some concrete-colored paint and at two am in the morning, we completely repainted the entire curb.
Three days later, he painted it back to red. We repainted it grey again. He painted it back to red. Then a few days later I got another job, realized I was moving away, and said to heck with it, I had had my laugh.”