HOA requires garage doors stay open all day

We've had this...uh, debate...with our HOA. We never use our front door, almost exclusively enter and exit the house through the garage. They're whined about us having it open, my response is to go pound sand.

HOAs should be outlawed and abolished. Can't stand them.

I agree- I see nothing worthwhile about them.

That sucks, there is no way I could do it and thankfully that isn't common here.
I can't imagine not having much choice and having to deal with some committee making up stupid rules that I have to follow.
I take back the no sympathy, for people where there really is no place there isn't an HOA I feel for you. I didn't realize that in some areas it is just how it is.

I can't imagine paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for a house and property and then letting a couple power hungry people with nothing better to do lay down a bunch of rules over what I can and can not do to my property. My friend actually has to paint her house in only "earth tones" with her HOA- can't even imagine not being able to choose my own homes color! If my neighbor wanted to paint their house purple, what business is it of mine??
 
I can't imagine paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for a house and property and then letting a couple power hungry people with nothing better to do lay down a bunch of rules over what I can and can not do to my property. My friend actually has to paint her house in only "earth tones" with her HOA- can't even imagine not being able to choose my own homes color! If my neighbor wanted to paint their house purple, what business is it of mine??
We have house color rules here too. We actually had to get our house color approved by the board (it's a grey with blue undertones but it looks a lot more blue). The darkest shade of any color isn't allowed because in our area the sun tends to fade it really bad thus it looks bad and needs to be repainted more often.

Anyways house colors matter quite a lot in terms of desirability. It can bring down values of homes. But on a simple level a prospective homebuyer usually doesn't want the task of repainting that bright yellow house for example; same as how the colors of the interior of a house can become a negative to a prospective homebuyer.

HOAs aren't for everyone but not all HOAs are the same not even close.
 
I agree- I see nothing worthwhile about them.



I can't imagine paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for a house and property and then letting a couple power hungry people with nothing better to do lay down a bunch of rules over what I can and can not do to my property. My friend actually has to paint her house in only "earth tones" with her HOA- can't even imagine not being able to choose my own homes color! If my neighbor wanted to paint their house purple, what business is it of mine??
I’m not a fan of HOAs but if you were trying to sell your house and the neighbor’s house was purple that could pose a problem for you. Same as if your neighbor parked rusted out junkers on his lawn. It’s not your business but the ability to sell or even price your home could suffer because of it. It’s the reason HOAs we’re developed in the first place. It’s just that a lot of them have gotten out of hand.
 


That’s insane! Here it’s more likely stuff will get stolen from your garage if it’s left open.
That was my first thought. Maybe HOA needs to be held responsible if stuff gets stolen. In this day and age leaving your garage door open is inviting thieves to come and take whatever they want :/
 
They would love us. We have 3 kids college stuff in ours including middle ds’s who seemed to move every 3 months. It also includes the stuff he brought with him when he moved back home after breaking up with his girlfriend. All 3 are moving soon so it should be empty then, but until then robbers would never find anything.
 


We lived in an HOA once. Their worst issue was wanting to increase the dues when sufficient money was coming in to pay for expenses. We had more money in our account than we were spending. BUT the HOA wanted to up the dues b/c it was technically able to say that we were operating at a deficit. (We weren't. But if you claim that you SHOULD have earned X amount, and only earned Y (still turning a profit), they'd up the dues b/c we weren't making the anticipated profit.
 
We have house color rules here too. We actually had to get our house color approved by the board (it's a grey with blue undertones but it looks a lot more blue). The darkest shade of any color isn't allowed because in our area the sun tends to fade it really bad thus it looks bad and needs to be repainted more often.

Anyways house colors matter quite a lot in terms of desirability. It can bring down values of homes. But on a simple level a prospective homebuyer usually doesn't want the task of repainting that bright yellow house for example; same as how the colors of the interior of a house can become a negative to a prospective homebuyer.

HOAs aren't for everyone but not all HOAs are the same not even close.


I lived in a townhouse neighborhood with an HOA that did no enforcement. I kid you not; we had people with hot orange, neon shutters and bright pink. These were dark brick homes. It looked hideous. I think stuff like that also discourages prospective homebuyers from buying resales when they come in and start seeing all the weird things going on.

All the homes in my current neighborhood are built with cedar siding (or vinyl that looks like cedar siding) and stone fronts/trim. There are definitely rules on the choice of colors you can use when restaining and I'm thankful for that.
 
Sorry that is comparing apples to oranges, HOA are not police officers and letting someone crash in your garage is not the same as illegal drugs.
But that is why I would never live where there was an HOA, if I let someone live in my garage nobody can tell me I can't, nobody can tell me to keep my door open and nobody can just randomly check.

I agree it isn't exactly the same thing, but I don't think that an HOA should reach to where someone is inspecting inside a home that is privately owned. Especially if that was not in the paperwork when the people bought the property.

Random inspections on my personal property is a ridiculous amount of intrusion into my privacy.
 
Well..here we have a rule on how tall the grass can be both at the HOA and at the City level.

City ordinance:
View attachment 293471

HOA rule:
View attachment 293470

Since our HOA says 6 inches that's what rule you would need to adhere to but no matter what if your grass is above 8 inches you're in violation of the City's ordinance regardless of living in our specific neighbhorhood or not.

My assumption was when you said how long you were talking about height of the grass. Apologies if that is incorrect.

Yep, that is what they wanted to do. Our subdivision is actually in what used to be a big farms pasture so all the yards had to have sod put in them and I think that might have been put in the HOA as well. We are out in the country and not in any city limits, we have an address in one city that we are 12 miles from and are in a different county than that city. The county we are in is pretty laid back, only small towns and a lot of country. We can even burn trash if we want to.
 
Yep, that is what they wanted to do. Our subdivision is actually in what used to be a big farms pasture so all the yards had to have sod put in them and I think that might have been put in the HOA as well. We are out in the country and not in any city limits, we have an address in one city that we are 12 miles from and are in a different county than that city. The county we are in is pretty laid back, only small towns and a lot of country. We can even burn trash if we want to.
Well I can understand where you are coming from now.

In a different city (but in my metro) it's repurposed farm land since development has moved south as there is still open land there but I'm pretty certain most new developments are HOAs there. But most of the land already had grass and what not (prairie grass if you will). I haven't looked up but I'm sure that city has an ordiance too on grass anyways.

But my best friend lives in the country. She's on the road that is the border between the county we are in and the other county. They burn trash, and I don't know that the city she lives in (still in our metro) has a rule on grass but I could be wrong. There are some stricter rules for some things because they live in our County but other things they are pretty lax on because of the city she lives in.

But I will say the subdivisions even in the country do tend to have rules that otherwise wouldn't be there at least in my area because they want to be that way. There are plenty of homes in the country that don't have rules (other than city ones/county ones) much less an HOA but they aren't usually grouped in subdivisions (and the ones that are tend to be HOA) because at least a lot of people I know who moved to the country as opposed to be in the suburbs is because they want that freedom and room to breathe, etc.
 
Because they're pointless, IMO.

.

Certainly not pointless from my point of view.

Our previous home was a gorgeous 3000+sqft Victorian in immaculate condition. Sold for $115k due to the neighbors— houses unpainted and in horrible exterior condition (on purpose because people believed their taxes would increase if the outside looked nice), houses replaced by trailers after they burned down, people burned their trash in their yards, four wheelers and dirt bikes racing up and down the streets, and on and on. And, we were lucky that we were able to sell. Other renovated homes on our street sat with no offers for 5+ years.

When we moved across country, we purposely chose a community with an HOA to avoid those issues. Everyone’s home looks lovely, there are parks, hiking trails, pool, and we don’t have to worry about resale value.
 
Count me as a supporter of HOAs. We have an active one with strong rules. Our neighborhood is beautiful but it takes work. I grew up in a more rural area and it is amazing how some people turn their property into garbage dumps when there are no rules. When you have neighbors close enough to see your house or lawn or deal with vehicles clogging the streets then it becomes more than just what the property owner wants to do.

If you don’t care what your neighborhood looks like then you probably don’t fit in with one with HOA controls. That is a valid choice but make that choice before buying into an area controlled by a HOA.
 
The HOA in question has dropped the garage door rule for now.

Well that's good news!

My thought is that the HOA was trying to deny residents reasonable use of their property. In my mind, there's no difference between saying your garage door must remain open and saying your front door must remain open. The garage is just as much a part of the home as the rest of it. You can park cars in it. You can use it for storage. You an even put a couch and a TV in it and hang out. I think it's reasonable for an HOA to say you can't rent out the garage and allow people to live in it. However, a resident can use it for most any (legal, of course) purpose they choose.

I can just imagine my dad having such a rule imposed upon him. He took up woodworking as a hobby when he retired. He has literally thousands of dollars worth of power tools and carving equipment. He used to spend hours in the garage, building clocks, jewelry boxes and other cool stuff. He even wired the garage so he could flip on the light and his radio with the same switch. He put in special lighting so he could work on his intricate carvings. He's 92-years old now and doesn't get out to the garage much anymore. But his equipment and tools are still there. If he was ordered to keep his garage open, his tools would certainly have been stolen. Or, he would simply have been forced to give up his beloved hobby because he had no place to safely store his tools. If he did come up with a way to keep his tools safe, he couldn't work out there on cold days with the garage door wide open. Seriously I cannot think of a more intrusive rule. I'm glad it's been dropped and hope it stays that way!
 
I can just imagine my dad having such a rule imposed upon him. He took up woodworking as a hobby when he retired. He has literally thousands of dollars worth of power tools and carving equipment. He used to spend hours in the garage, building clocks, jewelry boxes and other cool stuff. He even wired the garage so he could flip on the light and his radio with the same switch. He put in special lighting so he could work on his intricate carvings. He's 92-years old now and doesn't get out to the garage much anymore. But his equipment and tools are still there. If he was ordered to keep his garage open, his tools would certainly have been stolen. Or, he would simply have been forced to give up his beloved hobby because he had no place to safely store his tools. If he did come up with a way to keep his tools safe, he couldn't work out there on cold days with the garage door wide open. Seriously I cannot think of a more intrusive rule. I'm glad it's been dropped and hope it stays that way!

No HOA, just CC & Rs but no enforcement body. My subdivision was built in 1976 and some of the CC&R's might be unenforceable these days, like the one banning home based businesses. Even ones that don't bring customers to your house. So if anyone is tele-commuting in my subdivision ,they are breaking the rules.
 
I can't imagine paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for a house and property and then letting a couple power hungry people with nothing better to do lay down a bunch of rules over what I can and can not do to my property.
It's going to be an extremely rare case where you buy a house and then the HOA puts out restrictive laws (yes, it happens, but it's rare). Usually the HOAs are in place before the sale, but home buyers don't do their due diligence, and then claim they shouldn't have to follow the rules.

My friend actually has to paint her house in only "earth tones" with her HOA- can't even imagine not being able to choose my own homes color! If my neighbor wanted to paint their house purple, what business is it of mine??
It would be your business if you try to sell your house and prospective buyers don't want to buy because they don't want to look out their window at a purple house.

I'm willing to wager 90%+ of HOAs are fine, do a good job, and actually benefit the neighborhood. It's the other 10%, including the one from the OP, that people then point to and say "see, HOA's are evil!"
 
Due to the location of our subdivision
off a major interstate and a state highway, there are a lot of break-ins and car thefts. Thieves can take the interstate or highway and be gone in a mater of minutes. As a result, our city police department has asked our neighborhood and one near us to make sure we keep garages closed at all times unless we are in the garage or in the front yard.

Our neighbor was working in the yard, went in for a drink, came back and his bike and his son's bike were gone. They were there when he went to get his drink because he had just moved them.

Glad the HOA reversed it's decision.
 
I agree- I see nothing worthwhile about them.



I can't imagine paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for a house and property and then letting a couple power hungry people with nothing better to do lay down a bunch of rules over what I can and can not do to my property. My friend actually has to paint her house in only "earth tones" with her HOA- can't even imagine not being able to choose my own homes color! If my neighbor wanted to paint their house purple, what business is it of mine??

Yup! When I was young and naive we bought our first house in a community with an HOA - I just didn't really know anything about them or why they were so horrible. Within a year we were told our house door was the wrong color (we hadn't changed it, and they'd signed off when we bought the house that it was fine) and that our deck had to be restained.
We did neither. No way am I living in a neighborhood where the resident busy-bodies get to decide what I do with my house and property.

So we stayed in that house less than three years and now live in a wonderful, non-HOA neighborhood. And yup, sometimes one of the neighbors does repairs to his boat in the drive way, and there's a purple house in the neighborhood, and I'll cop to being the neighbor who still has her Christmas decorations up. And I love it.
 

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