alt Hacker NewsFlorida's HOAs and condo associations are making the housing crisis worse
Comments
>Is Florida the worst state for HOA foreclosures?
>Florida ranks 1st of the states on HOA Spy for foreclosure suits brought by associations, with 10,296 of 14,168. The count depends on which courts are indexed in each state as well as on the associations, so it is a count of records, not a rate.
Florida is known for having the strongest "sunshine" laws in the country, that make government records transparent. That makes this statistic pretty useless.
This article slightly mixes condo and HOAs. HOAs are covered under 720 and it does not have the same rules (which are less stringent) than condo’s
Condo rules are much stricter than HOAs
State of Florida also puts caps on fines - the max is $100/day or $1000 for a single violation. But that’s after a period to cure and then due process meetings (made up of homeowners not board members) who may waive or not fine at all or defer.
A homeowner can also fix the problem and later have the same problem again but not be fined if they fix in time.
The foreclosures are for extreme cases and a lot of HOA attorney shops don’t charge a retainer but will tack on fees that are paid back to the HOA attorney and association.
To get to that point takes a long time
I had the thankless task of being executor for my parents' estate. I distinctly remember the Florida HOA that made that so much worse.
After expressing their utmost sympathies and saying they'd help any way they could, mere weeks later they put a legal "estoppel" on the sale of the house due to some overgrown vines(?), which of course, were never mentioned by anyone.
I would never buy a house that was part of a HOA. For people that like them, more power to ya. But I don't understand the people who complain, just don't buy into an HOA then?
I used to live in Broward county, Florida, so I'm not surprised that it shows up as number one on the OP article's list. It's totally insane how much power HOAs have in that state. The idea that an entity other than a mortgage lender you owe can "foreclose" and seize the home you live in is total lunacy.
People love to hate on HOAs but not all are bad, and in general they are a good example of self-governance, when the alternative is having people who DON'T live in your neighborhood regulate your neighborhood. Which would you prefer?
Wait a gosh darn second... I was told, by our president no less, that only California had a housing crisis, and it was specifically caused by democrats. Is this the fake news I hear about?
Folks, I suggest before you comment, make it clear whether you're talking about HOAs for condos (shared structures), or detached houses. There's a big difference between the two.
How would foreclosing make the housing crisis worse? Wouldn't another family purchase the home thus creating a net zero?
The way to deal with a bad HOA is to get on the board. Normally, HOA boards attract the most petty minded people because most of the normal people living in the community are too busy but if a bunch of like-minded people get on the board, they can bring sanity back.
The main purpose of HOAs is to privatize government and taxes into managememt company hands
I can prompt an LLM to refute this and it would give me 5 reasons HOAs are making things better. Hard to read this and really come away with a sense of what the truth is. HOAs and homeowners have always been at odds but HOAs do provide some benefit in large communities. I hardly feel like they are making the “home crisis” worse.
This is an ad to buy free public records.
Can someone explain to me (an European) what purpose HOAs serve? I mean do they actually have any benefits? I only know them from videos where people are being harassed by them
Florida has a lot of people. The article never addresses the important questions - are these issues without merit?
If you want to live in an apartment, but - get the tax and investment advantages of owning then you need to do it via buying into a corporation of some sort. So they must exist.
If you are not paying on upkeep of your house they have to do something and that is going to be expensive, they have a right to get that money from whoever didn't pay not spread it out to the other owners.
While it isn't called foreclosure if you don't pay your property taxes your house will be foreclosed on. That an HOA can is just another entity.
There are a lot of people who live in Florida so I'd expect them to have a lot of HOAs. The only surprise is California doesn't beat Florida in this list, but that could well be a case of California has stupid laws and so you can't get the good parts of an HOA.
These is a lot to hate about HOAs. However the idea is sound and they can do good things. We need to stop the bad things that they do, but nothing that in the article points to anything bad.
This is the result if people generally mistrust their local governments, defund them and then create little private villages (HOA governed). Turbo-capitalism wins once again ;)
The problem is that municipalities absolutely love HOAs. They get all the tax revenue and get to wash their hands of most responsibilities involved with them. From their perspective, they get to found little vassal townships where they can say “it’s your problem” to little people problems like “there’s too many potholes in the road” and “that sewer lift station is making weird smells.”
Oh, but if you want to do anything, you still need to pay those permit and inspection fees! No, we won’t help you find a paver at a reasonable rate even though putting those contracts out to bid is what we do all day long.
What is really bullshit is that HOAs aren’t granted a property tax abatement for absorbing many municipal functions.
Sweet f'kin christ that website is unreadable.
Maybe HOA's are bad, maybe they're good, but the intellectual laziness required to shit this kind of garbage out onto the internet in place of genuine thought and analysis will fuckin kill us all.
Thanks to Governor Kotek, Oregon passed a bit of housing reform in 2025 that lets you build 'middle housing' despite anything an HOA says. I was really happy to go to Salem (Oregon's capital) to speak in favor of that.
Home issue will never get solved unless houses are mandated by law to be a shelter, not an investment, or at least, an asset that depreciates over time same way japan did it. As long as housing is considered an investment, it will always go up to the point they become like now, their values become speculative rather than real actual cost, and that will open the doors for many monkey business to keep the speculative prices high. An authoritarian law to change housing to shelter rights will solve it, not a democratic one since majority of voters are home owners or who is in charge it’s in their interests to keep it that way. Will that happen? Not peacefully I assume, so many things are built on the current status, from banks interests and creating credits out of thin air, to countries economy based on keeping people near certain spots to milk more taxes, remember, one of the biggest reasons why WFH was attacked in such coordinated way is to protect the real-estate industry and the things built around it.
We all wanna blame HOAs. Nobody asks why HOA? The legal BS to set one up isn't free, so why?
The near universal proliferation of owner's associations and management groups and whatnot for developments larger than ~1ac (the EPA threshold, some states/towns have lower) is something you can lay at the feet of the Clean Water Act and it's implementation and precedents over the following decades.
Developers don't do anything that costs money, like set up an HOA, without a reason. The developers create the HOA because you need your >1ac residential development to pass stormwater permitting. While you theoretically could make each individual .25ac parcel you're putting a house on compliant as a standalone it's infinitely cheaper to just ignore all that, grade everything toward the road, dig a ditch, send the contents of the ditch through your stormwater treatment features, build in a little margin to those items, show the permitting authority the numbers that prove it passes with flying colors and when some jerk says "but what if X Y Z changes" you point to the excess you built in and tell them to GFY.
Now, where it really gets evil is when you start really pinching pennies or where the rules change over the course of the process making your numbers not work. Say you've got a lot of grade, a lot of rainfall, a lot of stormwater you gotta "treat". Well, you start adding rules to the HOA. Require certain parts of the lots remains grass or planter or whatever. Disallow patios, but do allow wood decks because the municipality considers those pervious, etc, etc. Or maybe the results you've got are marginal but you throw the bureaucrats a bone by saying you'll disallow car-ports and sheds in the HOA rules to prevent people from adding impervious surface. Or maybe you're uphill of some wetlands but not close enough to be regulated by default you promise to disallow working on cars and require people pick up their pet waste and not use lawn fertilizer or some other laundry list of certain things in order to make the local town's wetlands people comfortable not raising objection and claiming jurisdiction.
And of course, however these rules and plans shake out, the HOA is responsible for enforcing whatever those rules and requirements are in perpetuity so it's not like a pissed off majority can show up to vote "ok, this has gone too far, pack it in boys"
But nobody wants to talk about any of that because it's uncomfortable.
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Now I don't trust HOAs but some of this is deceptive weasally writing.
> They foreclose on their own members, over debts that start small
There are members who refuse to pay special assessments or fees for the community. Given that's Flordia, theres an above average population that would believe "they aren't required to" even though they accepted it when starting. (yes there are abusive HOAs and there are non-sense fines.. and sometimes those nonsense fines come from people neglecting the property in a very bad situation)
It's your job to handle it when it's a small situation. Moving to the stage of liens takes more time to do that and then resolving that usually happens on sale or refinancing.
(My comment is about detached houses).
I (thankfully) live in a neighborhood without an HOA. Just one block away, there is an HOA. No reason to prefer that street (and home values aren't higher there).
This isn't an upper class neighborhood. It's mixed. Half of the residents are blue collar workers.
Over the years, I would think of reasons/annoyances where I'd say "Yes, while I'm glad I don't have an HOA, if we did have one it would take care of this or that annoying problem with the neighbor."
Then I spoke to friends who live in HOA neighborhoods and are on the HOA board. They told me clearly that "No, in practice, the HOA is not going to get involved in those (serious) matters. All they care about is the veneer (house appearance) and really petty rules." They also told me the purpose of the HOA was to justify its own existence. The owners get almost nothing for the funds they collect, other than a 3rd party company driving by and noting minor violations.
Another friend just had to spend $4000 to paint the front of his house. He's temporarily living in another state for a work assignment, and he and several others got notices that the HOA has decided to change the "look" of the neighborhood. Otherwise his house looked fine (not worn out paint or anything). I bet someone in the neighborhood has friends with a painting outfit.
I can stomach the idea of an HOA if they solved real problems (sanitation, etc), and not just appearances, but they don't. Even if it's in their bylaws, they don't enforce the serious stuff. Just the petty stuff.
Someone losing a home because they decided to have a window AC facing the street is plain immoral.