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.
Instead of parking in their two/three-car garages, I see gargantuan pickup trucks (aka emotional support vehicles), SUVs and trailers parked all over driveways and front lawns.
They turn otherwise lovely properties into unsightly parking lots. No good for homeowner values.
The Meadows HOA got it right. And they did it almost 50 years ago.
Our HOA protects against squatting. The owner and the renter have to go by the office and fill out a form listing who is actually living in the apartment and the automobiles parked there. So the “We have a lease!” scam won’t work.
Buy an inexpensive home.
HOA problem solved.