What are HOAs good for?
In the season 6 episode of The X-Files “Arcadia” Mulder and Scully deduce that residents of a planned community are being murdered by a demon summoned by the homeowners’ association president to kill whoever breaks the rules. It was inspired by
a real (less deadly) incident when television writer Daniel Arkin was fined a thousand dollars for moving into his new Greenwich Village co-op after hours. This got him thinking about Home Owners’ Associations’* “horrifying” grip on their residents and it only took a characteristically over-the-top backstory about “Tibetan mindforms” and life-or-death consequences to make it a proper episode.
Right out of college I found work amidst the Great Recession in a law office that exclusively represented HOAs. It was some of the most gut-wrenching work I’ve ever done. I wrote letters all day, telling banks and bankruptcy attorneys that, yes, Sunset Gardens at Sarasota Bay was filing as a creditor for $800 in greens fees. I once heard a lawyer say, “I don’t care if she survived the killing fields of Cambodia, that doesn’t mean she can plant whatever tree she wants in her backyard.” And he’s right! These small, elected boards can restrict all sorts of things that —if these edicts were to come from a federal or state government—would easily be labeled authoritarian.
Given that suburban housing stock is meant to maximize consumer freedom and convenience it is weird to imagine anyone willingly subjecting themselves to the dictates of their most busybody neighbors. The only explanation I can come up with is that since this is all voluntary any accusations of tyranny can be met with “just move.” It doesn’t matter, for example, that you have chosen “four muted earth tones that sum together in an eye-pleasing Gestalt at a distance” for your over-sized log cabin. You will be ground to a fine paste in Park County, Wyoming district court by the Cody Ranchettes Homeowners’ Association and no one will come to your aid. No matter that your HOA board is “a latter-day socialist commune chock-a-block with spiteful troglodytes addicted to coercion like crack babies.” (Really, you gotta click that link.)
Because HOAs are commonly associated with petty disputes over paint and plants it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that these organizations do have some serious responsibilities and their origins are more than a little insidious. HOAs rise in the 1960s were an integral part of Jim Crow segregation and, as a 2019 Bloomberg headline put it, “HOAs Are Popular Where Prejudice Is Strong and Government Is Weak.” That article walks through this paper which shows that HOAs seem most popular where taxes are low and the HOA fees are high. That means the American Gentry can focus their money on the houses and the people immediately adjacent to them and less on public education and other services that create a more equitable society.
In fact, these organizations seem to be good at segregation and little else. HOAs can control millions of dollars but it’s never enough to make significant repairs to vital infrastructure. The fees and fines are social control mechanisms first and anything else second. Case in point: On June 24, 2021 a 12-story condo in Surfside Florida collapsed, killing 98 people. While the exact cause of the collapse has still not been officially declared by federal authorities, The Miami Herald has pieced together a comprehensive and surprisingly tasteful presentation of events and their precipitating causes. I recommend going through the whole thing, but the overall story is clear: a poorly-built building approved by a development-hungry local government, had been managed for 40 years by a penny-pinching condo association. The vibrations and a neighboring building’s renovation work was likely the last push that caused a retaining wall to break which cascaded into a catastrophic failure.
Within a year a $1.2 billion settlement was reached and the land was sold to a Dubai based developer for $120 million. And while there was a lot of back-slapping over how quick and efficient the victims’ families were compensated, next-to-nothing has been done to prevent this from happening again. Champlain Towers South condo association, the HOA** in charge of the Surfside building that collapsed, has been assessed the year before as being critically underfunded. No one wanted to raise the fees to make core fixes, instead –and the metaphor is almost too on-the-nose to be true, they made a lot of cosmetic fixes to cracks in the deck that made it difficult to see how deeply compromised the whole structure truly was. It is estimated that 3 out of 10 condo associations are in a similar situation. Few states regulate how often HOAs need to be audited to determine if they’re saving for big repairs. In May 2022 Florida passed legislation tightening the inspection requirements but it remains unclear whether anyone is looking to fix the deeper systemic fiscal problems of these organizations. All of which goes to show you don’t need a Tibetan mindform to kill with your HOA.