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"...and then the evil sorcerer said 'Your fence is the wrong shade of brown!'" (thelemmy.club)
submitted 21 hours ago by to c/whitepeopletwitter@sh.itjust.works
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[–] 0 points 13 hours ago* (8 children)

By joining a HOA you already proved you're an asshole though.

Heternormative Overlord Associations are fucking creepy, you telling me some fucking busybody with no life can tell me what colour to paint my fence if I lived in America?

Fuck right off. I thought y'all were the Land of the Free.

Here in Europe, we can do what we want as long as it's within health and safety rules, without some weird stepford cult being like "it's not approved by the council of elders!"

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  • [–] 3 points 6 hours ago

    HOAs do exist in Europe too. Because it's impossible to coordinate maintaining shared property without them.

    The central heating system is showing its age. With what technology will it be replaced? Gas? Oil? Heat pump? A connection to district heating?

    If it's a heat pump, should you put solar panels on the roof? If so, who pays for them? Everyone? What if some don't want to? How will revenue be shared if only some are willing to pay the cost? How will you calculate how much it costs to heat one apartment whose owner shares ownership of the solar panels versus how much it costs to heat one apartment whose owner doesn't?

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  • [–] 5 points 13 hours ago (6 children)

    I don’t have a fence. Or a yard.

    I just handle the roofing and painting contracts, and any sort of local landscape concerns.

    This HOA looks after five buildings holding twenty-seven townhomes. There’s no lawns to mow here, no real interpersonal conflict. Residents pay into an HOA fund and then their building gets maintained.

    I have never enforced any sort of rule otherwise.

    But I can be an asshole if you need me to be.

    Also, how are you assuming that I’m heteronormative? I’m a disabled trans woman. :/ I sign contracts for neighborhood maintenance.

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  • [–] 5 points 11 hours ago (5 children)

    Hi tanis!

    how are you assuming i'm heteronormative

    Yeah I laughed when I read that one, always fun seeing someone you know from a smaller community "out in the wild" 😝

    Crazy that commenter couldn't be bothered to scroll through your post history even a little.

    But yeah generally HOAs are pretty bad (although for townhomes/condos they're kinda necessary). I believe Last Week Tonight had a great segment on them. A lot of them have pretty shady part-corporate part-governmental authority in ways that just does not go well for the residents. (Often) They're basically for-profit government bodies.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 hours ago (4 children)

    Yup, I would rather drag Finnmark out here one time and do five buildings of roofs every twenty-five years (I’ve been in this two years), rather than have every single homeowner call their own roofer out here to patch the twenty horizontal feet that is directly over their house, necessitating a new service fee each time, with the quality varying from segment to segment of each block of townhomes.

    For people who’re shitting on me for having this role, for some reason, the alternative to an HOA is a capitalist nightmare where everyone is on their own.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 hours ago (2 children)

    Honestly you've turned me around on this

    I still don't think HOAs should exist, but it's obvious now they need to in places that are a capitalist hellscape

    But only if they're run by people who aren't petty bourgeoisies, which sadly there's too many that are.

    In places that have some amount of social democracy, the job of the HOA is done by the government.

    If Jeff down the road ain't fixed his leak in 3 years, then people report it to the gov, and the gov gives Jeff two options; fix it, or we charge you money and fix it ourselves

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  • [–] 2 points 3 hours ago (1 child)

    Well, I’m a disabled trans woman who does fine art photography, and I was mustered into this role. I don’t like the responsibility, but I’m the only one who accepted it, so I’m going to do it right. I’m not being paid, I just sign contracts and oversee work crews and look at a budget report every month, and make sure all my dudes in their houses they own, don’t start dying cause their house is falling apart.

    I promise you, I’m really not an asshole. I pay more HOA fees than anyone else out here cause I fucked up the math, and rather than call a meeting to try to get a quorum together to fix it, I just eat the $90 extra a month.

    I just want my tiny neighborhood to keep being a neighborhood.

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  • [–] 1 point 59 minutes ago*

    Yeah like, you've shown to me that I've only ever heard of the bad cases, but there are cases where it actually works.

    My new opinion is it's a necessary evil like how charities are, in a perfect world they should not need to exist as social policies will meet the needs of the people. But in the imperfect world we actually live in, those needs are not met, and so charities have to pick up the slack.

    Same for HOA, USA and some of the less socialist parts of EU need them, cause the gov aren't doing their fucking job, so somebody needs to do it.

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