Contrariwise: HOAs Have Gone Too Far

As Americans, we like to think of ourselves as fiercely independent. We’re drawn to iconoclasts in our books and stories. We have an entire day devoted to commemorating the ousting of England that sees us literally setting fire to the sky in celebration of how we won’t be told what to do.

However, there’s one area of subjugation that Americans willingly sign on for over and over again, and the Powers That Be in that region have gone too far. What we’re talking about, of course, are Homeowners Associations, commonly called HOAs. They, like the bushes you’ve probably gotten official complaints about, are in need of some serious pruning.

It’s not like we haven’t known that this was a problem; The X-Files tried to warn us about HOAs in 1999. In the season 6 episode “Arcadia,” a community conjures a monster to eliminate neighbors who commit heinous crimes, such as … having a basketball hoop or a burned-out porchlight. The writer of that episode, Daniel Arkin, was inspired after he was fined in 1991 for accidentally moving into his community outside of approved move-in hours. Seriously.

Late last year, my own son parked his Jeep on the street so we could play basketball. He meant to pull it back in the driveway but forgot, and it was parked on the street overnight. Later that week, we got a letter from property management complaining about the ostensible transgression, but the irony is that the neighborhood had given control of the streets back to the town a couple of years earlier, so it wasn’t really even their jurisdiction anymore. So the point was … what, exactly?

To us, it was just an annoyance. But how much time and money went into the execution of that letter? It took staff time to generate the letter, and it took postage to mail it. In isolation, that’s a pittance. But all told, when you add up all the notifications for things like grass height or leaning mailboxes or Christmas lights left up a day too long, how much are homeowners paying just for someone to bother them? How much of that money could go into actual community improvements that instead wither and die on the vine of extremely petty infractions?

When I brought up the notion of HOA overreach to friends, it definitely struck a nerve. I instantly had dozens of stories regarding letters from HOAs about fence repairs, grass height, and painting approval. One friend related that her neighborhood used to have a rule that garage doors had to be down unless you were “actively loading and unloading.” That would be the height of absurdity if it weren’t for other stories I received of HOAs that tried to prohibit Jewish residents from the very common faith practice of hanging mezuzahs (tiny decorative cases that include scripture) on their doorposts, or other groups that still have decades-old bylaws on the books that try to clandestinely define the ethnic makeup of the neighborhood.

Yes, there’s such a thing as taking pride in your home. But is that pride achieved by bullying and harassment? Does lying on the ground with a ruler to see if your neighbor’s grass is too tall that week make anyone’s life better? HOAs should exist for common purposes like snow removal, upkeep of common areas, and general safety, not for telling your neighbor what color their shutters get to be.

This article is featured in the July/August 2023 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.