Many of us live in HOAs. At the best of times HOAs stay out of our lives, provide a little safety, protect our property values and usually offer us some recreational opportunities that we might not have if we built our homes in the middle of a field.
Unfortunately, many HOAs are started by developers, have underfunded reserves, and people with agendas running them. Most will say that their agenda is to make the community a better and more beautiful place to live.
However, as we all know the devil is in the details. Something like navigating a river with hidden oyster rocks at high tide. When you put people of varying ages together in a community, it is hard to come up with priorities that suit the majority of the people. The guy in his seventies who has given up boating is going to care a lot less about the inlet needing to be dredged than the younger family that just spent $30,000 on a new boat.
HOAs also come with lots of skeletons hiding in their closets. Those are the poor decisions, reckless spending and down right illegal actions that sometimes box HOAs in a corner. The usual advice is to get involved with your HOA. However, there are times when doing just that puts you in one faction or the other in your community. They might even be warring factions.
My advice is to carefully investigate any HOA in a community where you are planning on buying. Talk to more than one person, try to find someone with a broad perspective of the community. Sometimes HOAs drink a lot of their own Koolaide so be careful accepting at face value the pitch from HOA directors. Someone not on the board might have a totally different view.
Here is a cautionary tale of what can happen when HOAs go off the rails.
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