home owners association... good or bad? tell me what you think?

Answer 1

Both, they allow a community to control the individuals. This loses you the ability to decide how you want to live but controls the guy next door too. You end up paying fees every month and having to try to get rules changed if you want to do things that are against rules.
Some have rules like no cars left outside so if you buy a new car and didn't sell the old one you can't leave it on your own driveway. Boats can't be seen from the street so if you have a side yard you want to store your boat in you can't. You can't cut down a tree or paint your door red or your house bright blue, but neither can your neighbor. So your neighborhood will look vanilla no character, all the grass mowed and stuff stowed keeping home values up but might cramp your style.

Answer 2

All depends on how you look at it. Some are very restrictive as in if you want to paint the outside of your house they have to approve the color before you can do it, some restrict against work vans being parked in your driveway, some restrict the amount of cars you can have, some restrict parking in the street next to your house or even won't allow satelite dishes, restrict the height of your bushes, the type of fence you have, the length of your grass. Some can be really restricting to the home owners in order to keep the community uniform and looking nice. Some good some bad, if you have a home and you want to keep the resale value an HOA can be good, it can prevent your neighbor from being a slob with broken down cars in his driveway, trash in his back yard and failing to cut the grass. Some are not that bad. A lot of people don't like to live with rules and therefore they don't move into a neighborhood that has an HOA, without rules I think most people take advantage and don't give a damn bringing down the community.

The advice I give you is read the HOA docs before deciding on the house just to see how restrictive they are. Nothing worse than moving in and finding you cannot abide by the rules.

Answer 3

Good. At the end of the day it's all about maintaining property values. If a few little rules like not parking your car on the street or submitting requests for architechtural changes is all I have to put up with to have a cleaner and safer community so be it. It keeps the riff-raff out.

Answer 4

Never good - if you can avoid one, do so.