Never buy a property subject to an HOA’s dictates - I made that mistake when I moved to Texas last year and one of the reasons I’ll be selling next year is to escape the HOA. Never again.
You didn’t read the HOA docs before purchasing?
It’s extremely difficult nowadays to buy a pre-existing home in many states and areas that is not under some sort of HOA. The trick is to make sure that the HOA isn’t one of these ridiculous ones that’s measuring your grass and giving you fines for parking your truck in your driveway. It also helps that the HOA is under the control of the people in the neighborhood and not by the builder or some external HOA company. HOA companies are known to actually have a business model that involves finding the crap out of people and then for closing on them.
HOA do have their uses, like nobody wants Jethro to set up a pig farm next-door or put 18 rusty vehicles up on cinderblocks in the front yard. But at the same time, this is an example when the pendulum goes too far the other way.
A lot of outside vehicles are pickups, which leads me to a major grip. Texas house builders have designs that don't include larger garage openings and doors. In many cases, if you have medium-sized or larger vehicles, you can't get more than one in the garage. If I were custom building a house here, I would avoid any builder who didn't allow for a larger garage and opening.
I did. Hard not to in some places in Arizona. Happily, the HOA was disbanded about 10 years ago. The vote to disband it passed 90% to 10%,
I’m in a very strict HOA. Definitely has warts. But overall, it does keep the values going up. We have two golf courses which really drains our bank account. They are beautiful, but extremely expensive to run. And golf isn’t as popular anymore now that corporate world doesn’t have that play golf Wednesday afternoon mentality anymore. So the young never learn to play. But overall it’s a nice place to live. It’s in Florida, but in the middle of the state.
Every time we house hunted, NO HOA’s were even considered.
No matter how perfect the house looked and it’s location, we would not even think about it.