Damn those homeowners' associations: This year, Mr. McDonel began flying a yellow “Don’t Tread on Me” flag on his roof in this unincorporated area just outside Phoenix. The historic banner — which dates to 1775, when it was hoisted aboard ships during the initial days of the Revolutionary War — has been adopted by the Tea Party movement. But Mr. McDonel said that he had unfurled the flag for its historical significance and nothing else. He notes that the banner, the Gadsden flag, has been widely used over the years and was even featured on the cover of a rock album. “Am I a Metallica fan because I’m using the flag?” he asked. This month, he received a letter from the homeowners’ association ordering him to remove “the debris” from his roof. It threatened fines if the debris (i.e., the flag) did not go within 10 days. But Mr. McDonel, 32, a logistics operation manager, has vowed to fight the order. “It’s a patriotic gesture,” he said of his banner. “It’s a historic military flag. It represents the founding fathers. It shows this nation was born out of an idea.” The Avalon Village Community Association, which sent the letter, takes a strict interpretation of the state statute that allows Arizonans the right to fly a variety of flags — the Stars and Stripes, the state flag, flags representing Indian nations as well as the official flags of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guard. (Lacey) Let me state at the outset that while the general intentions of "CCRs"—codes, covenants, and restrictions—in various neighborhoods has certain appreciable logic, I can't really say that I like them. I know people who live just a couple miles from me, where the CCRs make it an offense to have the wrong flowers in your garden, or (seriously) leaving your garage door open for too long. But in this case, it's not just the homeowner's association causing the problem: The listing of acceptable flags stems from a dispute several years ago in nearby Chandler, Ariz., in which a woman with a son serving in Iraq was challenged by her homeowners’ association for flying the Marine Corps flag. State legislators intervened. The Arizona law, says the homeowners’ association butting heads with Mr. McDonel, does not give residents authorization to fly anything else on their properties. That means no pennants bearing sports team logos, no Jolly Rogers, no rainbow banners celebrating gay pride and no historic flags showing a coiled rattlesnake bearing its fangs. As Javier B. Delgado, a lawyer for the homeowners’ association, put it in a statement on the association’s Web site: “Should the Arizona Legislature expand the Community Association Flag Display Statute to include the Gadsden Flag, the Association will accommodate Mr. McDonel’s desire to display it. Bottom-line, anyone considering residing in a community association should carefully review the association’s governing documents beforehand to ensure that the community is a good fit for them.” (ibid) Of course, the whole thing gets even more ridiculous. After all, how can it not? Mr. McDonel was, until July, a member of the homeowners' association; he resigned in a dispute with the board president and shortly thereafter received a debris notice for a treadmill on his porch. The notice for the Gadsden flag is the second he has received in a short time. The ACLU has entered the fray on Mr. McDonel's behalf. Dan Pochoda, legal director for ACLU's Arizona operations, says the flag "meets the spirit of the law", and has asked the homeowners' association to resolve the dispute in his client's favor without requiring a lawsuit. I rather quite disdain homeowners' associations and their silly rules. They are, in some ways, like petty legislatures that make and enforce dumb codes for lack of anything better to do. Imagine getting a parking ticket for parking your car in your own driveway. Yes, that can happen in that community near me. To the other, they also have the power to keep the proverbial Chevy Nova on blocks out of your neighbor's front yard. ____________________ Notes: Lacey, Marc. "Homeowner’s Fight Involves Flag Tied to Tea Party". The New York Times. August 31, 2010; page A10. NYTimes.com. August 31, 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/31/us/politics/31flag.html
The problem is homeowners associations. It's a contract that you accept when you move it. I would never buy a house in such a situation. I do have a car up on blocks on my yard.
There are many types of deed restrictions that homes have on them depending upon where you buy them from. I know of a gated community that tells you what exact color the house must be , when the lawns must be mowed, how many cars you can have in the driveway, no satellite dishes, no parking on lawns and on and on. So whenever you buy a home or any property be sure to read to see if there are any deed restrictions placed upon your home and if so do not buy the home unless you can comply with the orders. It is perfectly legal to place deed restrictions upon property in any state.
What bugs me is the proliferation of HOAs. That there are going to be stupid rules and regs in that fancy gated community was always a given (and, indeed, much of the point of moving to one in the first place), but in my area it's gotten to where you can't buy a house anywhere near a desirable part of the city without having to agree to a whole panoply of minutae about what color the backs of your drapes are, what kind of mailbox you have, what style of window trim is allowed, etc. The whole thing seems to be the product of little cabals of authoritarian housewives bent on enforcing some sort of 1950's conformist utopia. And for that matter, most don't seem to provide any benefits in return - it's the expensive, grown-up equivalent of a public school dress code. A friend of mine bought a "detached condo" which looks and quacks like a house, but the HOA actually owns all of the surrounding property and building exterior. Which sucks in a lot of ways, but the upshot is that it takes you out of the loop of having to track and follow their rules. They just do all of the maintenance and upkeep themselves, according to their own standards. And then charge you for the pleasure, of course.
I also hate Homeowners' Associations and their rules, and so I'd never live in that kind of neighborhood. The downside is that, by controlling homeowner behavior, the neighborhood property values may be higher (since no one can let their property turn into a crap-feat, reducing the sale price of nearby parcels). By choosing not to live in that kind of community, I lose that benefit, and gain the freedom to make more questionable aesthetic decisions without consulting a rulebook. That's just my choice though, and others may prefer the rulebook and an orderly looking neighborhood to the hippie, un-mowed lawn lifestyle that I require. In theory, the restrictions are a way of controlling negative externalities. I am not convinced that these sorts of contracts work as well as intended (since being subject to the restrictions should also depress home prices, and more stupid the rules, the more prices should be theoretically depressed), but moving in is a voluntary act. If he wants the purported benefits of living in that community, he has to take obey the rules as well, even if they are stupid. If he does not want to, he can always move.
This is true enough, and let's not forget that the alternative to HOA's preventing people from keeping rusting old cars on blocks on their lawns is not some libertarian Utopia where everyone gets to do whatever they want on their own property. Rather, it will be the fusty homeowners going to local government and using state power to get rid of the rusting hulks - and probably doing a lot of other damage besides. They aren't going to sit on their hands and eat the impact on the value of their house, so it's a question of the best, fairest way to express those impetuses. But it just seems to have run amok, at least in my part of the world. Once the rusting hulks and bright-orange sidings have been done away with, the ideal HOA is supposed to back off and await other serious offenses against taste and property values. But instead they become vehicles for control-freak housewives to insist that everybody's welcome mats are matching colors, and that nobody puts up Christmas decorations before Thanksgiving, and other such asinine shit with negligible impact on anybody. It's very much about establishing a powerful milieu for authoritarian-minded social climbers. And there's no way to opt out except to move far to the outskirts or ghettos - every halfway decent neighborhood is in the firm grip of an HOA controlled by a cabal of uptight nags. The ones with decent schools, doubly so. Strangely, this has me identifying with scenes from NYC-set sit-coms wherein characters must deal with building control boards dominated by prissy, exclusivist cliques. Wasn't the freedom to avoid that nonsense supposed to be part of the appeal of the suburbs? Or do I have to buy a farm in rural Idaho to enjoy the autonomy to select my own window trim?
You mean, he can always wait 5-10 years for the value of his house to exceed the outstanding debt on his mortgage, and then move. No, I don't actually know about that individual's financial situation, but the whole "you can always move" thing is a canard these days. There's a significant chunk of homeowners out there for whom that recommendation is equivalent to "you can always declare bankruptcy and rent a 1-bedroom apartment for the rest of your life."
Schedenfreude I presently live in a condo development made up of row townhouses grouped in threes and fours. Having just moved from an apartment complex, the CCRs aren't particularly problematic to me. But then I think of the neighborhood where my mother lives, in Oregon. Those are free-standing houses, and, to the one, they enforce a few strange CCRs about where you can park your boat when it's out of the water (e.g., nowhere anyone can see it) and such, but ignore others about home improvement; they also threaten to sue anyone who complains about the unenforced CCRs. However, Mr. McDonel appears to live in a free-standing house. Perhaps the NYT photo is too close to show me what I'm missing, but my impression is that he ought to be able to fly whatever damn flag he wants. In the neighborhood I lived in before the apartment complex, one house flew an Ohio State Buckeyes flag right before a big football game against a local team. Nobody complained, and the flag—faded and tattered in the weather—still hangs several years later. I don't see why this is a problem. It seems to me a far cry from having a stupid "SoDo Mojo" sticker (Seattle Mariners) in your window to parking a rusted-out Camaro in your front yard for five years while the "restoration" involves doing nothing anyone can figure so that the only apparent change is more oxidization of the paint, brown evergreen detritus in the rear-window louvres, and dirt on the glass. To the other, I can almost imagine this going all the way to federal court if Mr. McDonel loses, and part of me would like nothing more than to see the HOAs thrown into a panic as their power to be arbitrary and useless is reduced.
I'm torn between "Caveat Emptor". . . or would it just be "Assumed Risk" and my obsession with individual liberties. In truth, I have no problem with strict HOA's. It's not like this guy didn't have the ability to dig a little deeper before buying a house. I mean, it's not like he was signing up for cable service. We're talking about a HOUSE here. If he didn't have the foresight to read the fine print on his home, then I have not pity for him. And where to we draw the line at drawing the line? Should the HOA's be forbidden from having upkeep rules? I would hope not. It's the "thing" that maintains the value of these little communities. NO offense, but I would rather have my prostate biopsied (again) than live in a community that didn't enforce strict upkeep standards. While I think the rule about the flag is idiotic, it is nonetheless a rule he agreed to. ~String
Amen, or something like that This is exactly why I haven't voted in my own poll yet. I haven't decided on the boundaries I would apply to First Amendment expression: Exactly. But I'm having trouble deciding whether or what limits should apply to HOA restrictions (e.g., drawing the line at drawing the line). I wonder what AVCA's rules say about Hallowe'en and Christmas? Then again, I wonder if I really want to know? For instance, we got a notice recently all through the neighborhood about street parking, which is forbidden. But I doubt anyone would have said anything if the morons parking in the street hadn't pulled onto the sidewalk and even damaged a few sprinkler heads (the latter, of course, maintained by the HOA). Where I'm at isn't so bad, but some of my friends and family did wonder why I was so nearly anal about the CCRs in various neighborhoods.
I keep coming back to some--impossibly utopian--"common sense" clause for the Constitution and/or fourth branch of the US government that has the ability (and only that ability) to throw out any law, contract, decree, entity, agreement, regulation (or part thereof) on the grounds that it violates "good common sense". Who am I kidding?!!! ~String
Yeah, this stuff is squarely in the "I don't want to see it when I drive by," or even "I don't want other people who see it while driving by to think that I live in the sort of neighborhood where people can make overt political statements on their own property and not be slapped down" territory. We aren't talking about issues of health, safety, sanitation, etc. here. Frankly it seems that the main offense is that he's demonstrating that not every aspect of the neighborhood is micromanaged by an iron-fisted HOA, which is presumably the image that the HOA wants to project. It's the same with the arcane rules about matching window trim and what color your roof can be - it's not that these features really increase home values appreciably as such. Rather, what they're selling is the appearance of a neighborhood that is ordered, coordinated and controlled. In the town where I grew up, HOA's are unheard-of. The upside is people do whatever they want with their own property. The downside is that the inevitable black sheep on the block get dealt with via lawsuits instead of via the HOA. There was one guy that displayed a large (5'X5') painting of a mushroom cloud with the phrase "PEACE?" above it that caused a stir. But so far as I know, nobody was able to force him to remove it (anyway, it stayed up for years). The upside of using the courts to deal with this stuff is that a homeowner has to actually be violating somebody's rights in some substantive way for the law to come down on them (not that it's free to defend one's self in court, but the full benefit of the First Amendment is at least theoretically available). There's a lot of this sentiment floating around this thread. And while I consider "buyer beware" to be a pretty damned apt rule for the housing market in general, I think it skips a lot of detail on its way to damning this particular homeowner. In the first place, we're assuming that the HOA as it exists today was in force back when he bought the house, and hasn't sprung up more recently. Even if the fine print of the agreement hasn't changed since he bought the house, the actual operation of the HOA may have changed drastically. It's been noted that a lot of this stuff gets basically left to the discretion of the HOA, and that discretion can change wildly with the composition of the HOA boards (or their personal feelings towards some resident - maybe he was insufficiently deferrent to the wrong uptight yuppie bitch at a dinner party or something, and this is all just a revenge ploy). And even if none of that stuff has changed, it isn't necessarily possible to divine what an HOA agreement actually adds up to just from the fine print. In the first place, you need to untangle all the legalese and technical language. But even once you do that, you're left with the question of how it is actually interpretted in practice, and how the HOA will respond to things not explicitly foreseen by the agreement. And there is no useful set of HOA precedent for you to rely on there - this isn't the US Supreme Court. The only way to really find out is to propose things and see if they fly, after the fact of purchase. And at the end of the day, buyers have so many other pieces of fine print to worry about that the system is set up with the expectation that nobody will read the fine print. That you like the neighborhood enough to stake your family's lifetime financial security on it is thought to be endorsement enough of their practices that you should be happy to oblige. But again, let's not lose sight of the fact that strong HOAs are essentially extensions of the local housewive's clique into a neighborhood junta. Its purpose is not the consistent, fair application of useful rules, but the exertion of social power. Those that have good relations with the ruling clique will not be cited for anything but the most egregious offenses. Those that are disliked by the ruling clique can expect to have a constant stream of complaints and citations directed at them, often on flimsy pretexts. It's the local hen clique's way of telling you that you aren't welcome in their neighborhood.
A minor point It's not that I would dispute the general theme of these comments, but I do feel I would be remiss if I failed to reiterate that Mr. McDonel was, himself, a member of the HOA board, but resigned after a dispute with the AVCA president, whose name is Bill McGee. Three of the four current serving members of the AVCA are men (Pres. Bill McGee, VP Tito Comparan, and Director Mike Koury). If we presume that the open director's seat was occupied by Mr. McDonel, that means the board is 60% male, reduced by said resignation from 80%. Sounds more like a cockfight this time around. ____________________ Notes: Avalon Village. "Board & Committees". (n.d.) AvalonVillageHOA.com. August 31, 2010. http://avalonvillagehoa.com/Board-&-Committees~96673~13375.htm
So what? It wouldn't be the first instance of a social/domestic hierarchy wherein males hold all of the titular positions, but females actually run the dominant clique and call the shots. This is a gated community in a wealthy suburb of Phoenix we're talking about, after all - it's teabagger central, so stilted gender roles (and specifically, a conflict between the male role as officiant and the female role as manager of household, here) are the expected norm. Yeah, yeah, I'm probably wrong on the specifics here, and being sexist, etc. But I have yet to encounter a situation where a pushy HOA was going after a homeowner for cosmetic reasons that wasn't driven by some set of bossy housewives who view the neighborhood as the personal fiefdom of their clique. Males seem to almost-uniformly complain about HOAs and their rules and costs, and profess a preference to deal with conflicts "man-to-man" without unduly publicizing or shaming anyone. Of course, they never follow through on that, but the point is that the sort of collective action that HOAs represent goes against typical masculine gender roles (particularly of the conservative/libertarian variety).
head vs. wall :wallbang: Am I too far off, then, if I conclude this is an issue of who wears what pants? Then again, as I said, I would be remiss if I didn't mention it. I'll leave it be, now.
Now that's something that should be held by a woman! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
This and That Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! • • • I hadn't thought you were trying to kid anyone. After all, when you use words like "impossibly utopian", you're reasonably disclaiming realistic boundaries. More to the point, though, the problem with common sense is at once simple and mystifying. It's a statistical result, but not one based on objectivity; rather, perspective and sentiment determine the outcome. To wit, I doubt our ubpringings were radically different. Certes, we weren't taught exactly the same things, but: • If principle X • then obligation Y • thus result Z In the context of common sense, many people depart at Y. But you and I could easily agree on X and Y if the rhetoric is structured just so, while calculating different values for Z. Indeed, I suspect we often do. To use my father as an example: During the music wars of the 1980s, my Dad argued that it wasn't censorship because, say, my right to expression infringed on his right to ... um ... well, that's just the thing. Peace and quiet? Sure, that's what noise ordinances are for. Decency? Far too subjective. The right to not be annoyed? Well, this is America, where we all have the right to be annoyed at something, but how do you enforce the right to not be annoyed? Ozzy Osbourne once explained that one of the things he adored about America was that we had the right to be offended. Like a PSA I saw yesterday reminding parents to be role models; it picked on Lady Gaga and featured two little girls singing along to "a thinly-veiled Lady Gaga ripoff". It didn't call for censorship, but, rather, reminded parents that they need to be role models. (I can say, from personal experience, that it's one to appreciate the wrongness of Noodle shaking her ass° in a Gorillaz video, and quite another to see my seven year-old daughter swinging her booty to "Axel F" during Aliens vs. Monsters, or some hideous Disney Channel series.) And, sure, Lady Gaga irritates me, but not for content or attitude; it's just that her particular sound doesn't please my sense of aesthetics. Life goes on. There are certainly more annoying musical artists than her. But what would be the point of trying to ban Britney Spears or Christina Aguilera's hideous music? To me, common sense says there are far better artistic models to appreciate than something so artificially calculated to titillate for the cynical purpose of encouraging record sales. To others, though, common sense says such calculation doesn't matter, as long as one can dance to it. In the Avalon HOA issue, I would probably scorn the assertion of artistic expression in a rusted car sitting on blocks in the front yard, but I'm not enthusiastic about the idea that people should not display heritage or other flags just because someone might be offended by a St. George's Cross, Ohio State Buckeye, or Gay Pride Rainbow flag. Obviously, the Gadsden flag falls squarely within those boundaries as well. I mean, sure, I don't particularly want to see a Nazi swatstika flying in my neighborhood, but at least I would know who to keep my kid away from. Still, though, I have no idea how to translate such boundaries into policy. Quite clearly, neither does Arizona or the AVCA. Anyway, enough of my rambling ... for now. ____________________ Notes: ° wrongness of Noodle shaking her ass — I believe, by the chronology, Noodle is an underdeveloped fifteen year-old in the "Dare" video. That young girls feel such energy is its own fact; that we should witness it is something else altogether. Given the overall "mildness" of the video, though, I should also note that the sentiment has something to do with watching her grow up from the goofy little girl in "19-2000" to the weary young girl riding 2-D's back in "Rockit", the (again, mild) intimacy of "Dare", the tragic heroine in "El Mañana", and even the intense militant of the Plastic Beach era. It's been a hell of a trip so far. Works Cited: Egan Morrissey, Tracie. "Anti-Gaga PSA Warns Parents About Dangerous Pop Culture Icons". Jezebel. September 1, 2010. Jezebel.com. September 1, 2010. http://jezebel.com/5627458/anti gaga-psa-warns-parents-about-the-dangers-of-pop-culture Gorillaz. "Dare". Demon Days. Parlophone, 2005. Music video. YouTube.com. September 1, 2010. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6yantixZ5c&ob=av2n
