You must log in or register to comment.
Reads like greentext
Not HOA but similar. I was living in a different city during covid. The city closed the outdoor parks in the poor and working class neighborhoods, the rich folk parks remained open.
They started to wrap the swings at the park around the top bar. I’d unwrap them each day and that went on for about two weeks. Then they went to zip tying the swings together so they couldn’t be used. So I would cut the zip ties each day. This went on for another few weeks. Then they brought a sign post and a sign saying the park was closed and using the swings was prohibited. I dug the sign post out and threw it in the woods. Then they chained the swings together with a pad lock so I went to harbor freight and bought very heavy duty bolt cutters and lopped the chain off. That daily chain lopping lasted a week or two then they just took the swings away. I debated about buying swings and attaching them but figured the gambit went on as long as it should have and called it. I had fun.
Meanwhile the whole time the kids in the rich neighborhoods could swing to their daily content.
Good effort! Hopefully some of the local kids got to enjoy the swings after your heroics each day, & that the council/city eventually put them back after restrictions loosened again.
They did eventually, I think it took more than a year. It was ridiculous.
I love it. Perhaps it would have been more effective to just do whatever they did to the swings at the other parks? Either way it’s good stuff
The difference in the swings in the other parks were that they were surrounded by rich people
Are you saying sabotage the rich kids swings? Thats awful. Like something done shit to your park so you’ll pay it forward to other innocent kids. Terrible behaviour. You should be mad at the people doing it and take it out on them or the rule makers.
I think the removed signs should’ve been liberated and re-placed at the rich neighborhood park, and chains should’ve simply been set by the swings there. Make them see what they’re doing and explain to their families why this is happening (if they even bother to use their parks)
It doesn’t damage the park, it doesn’t prevent its use but it does clearly place the problem they created at their doorstep
I mean if the city is gonna actively punish poor kids then fuck them rich ones, they should suffer just the same. Teach them some humility instead of the upper class bubble they’re in.
The correct response is to find out who is responsible for the chaining/closing and start chaining/closing their stuff. Randomly messing with another park doesn’t hurt anyone and just means another park is closed.
My park was close to my house and it was closed by ordinance, the other rich ones were not. There is no difference in the parks at all other than the property values in the neighborhoods in which they sat. I wasn’t going to go to city hall and complain since the mayor and council people were all from the rich neighborhoods. Rule of law is downwards in our class based society.
HOA are bullshit, but the folks who actually use em to cause problems for their neighbors are a different kind of scum.
On the other hand, the guy upstairs me hasn’t fixed their seepage problems in years and my ceiling is watering. Maybe no HOA here.
Can never catch a break, can we?
magnificent and beautiful. it causes no physical harm yet þe fear is unmistakable
Bruh this is literally Stasi shit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zersetzung
OOP should join the FSB lmfao
I’m a little confused how OOP is moving the welcome mat without triggering the camera. Though I’m sure this story is $100% real.
OOP edited it to clarify
EDIT: since people keep asking about the ring camera - the welcome mat is by his side door. camera points at the driveway. but i’m not taking chances so i bought the same ring camera model and spent a month testing angles in my own house. there’s a 2 foot blind spot if you approach from the left hedge. 10 second delay before recording starts. i can be in and out in 8 ;)
Let’s hope his neighbour is not on Reddit.
He’d get a 2nd HOA fine lmao
Oh btw here’s the link
Not the $ sign too
Would that be 100 dollars percent or 100 percent dollars?
That would be, “100% and I can bet $100 on it.”.
Realist
1$00%
Can someone explain why there are so many stories of bad HOAs in America? Don’t everyone in the HOA get to vote on who will be on the board and what rules there should be? Why do many of them seem to have strange and petty rules? What makes them able to issue fines for so small infractions? Where does the fine money go? Who sets up the HOA in the first place and what is the motivation to do so?
We got plenty of similar associations where I live (both for apartments and houses, though not so often for fully detached homes) and they usually work great. Basically you pay a monthly fee to your HOA that the board use to keep the plumbing and outside areas maintained, pay for tv/internet for everyone at a much reduced cost or maintain other common areas like laundry rooms, guest apartment, parking garage, workshop etc. There are of course some restrictions too you need to follow, but those are usually minor and common sense anyways (like you shouldn’t play very loud music too late in an apartment in the middle of the week) and that you don’t get to do whatever you want to the outside of your place.
(Another common rule is that you need HOA approval to sublet your apartment. This can be occasionally annoying to deal with, but is good because it prevents people from buying up apartments just to rent them out. And most of the time the HOA will approve you if you’re just moving away for a year or similar.)
That was the original intent, yes. Then they were tainted by greed and now most of them are in place before anyone lives in the neighborhood, so owners have no choice if they want to live there. Many are owned and operated by private companies that profit off petty fines like this. I once got a letter threatening a fine because I parked my car in my driveway and it had expired tabs. This was during early covid when the DMV was slower than usual. I almost lost my shit.
Check out this episode of Last week tonight if you wanna get more upset.
That’s not the original intent. In the US, HOAs were mostly created after the end of segregation to keep black people out of white neighborhoods, an origin story that puts into context the modern of pettiness and desire to control others we see in stories like this.
In the early postwar period after World War II, many [HOAs] were defined to exclude African Americans and, in some cases, Jews, with Asians also excluded on the West Coast.
A racial covenant in a Seattle, Washington, neighborhood stated, “No part of said property hereby conveyed shall ever be used or occupied by any Hebrew or by any person of the Ethiopian, Malay or any Asiatic race.”
When these were found unconstitutional in 1948, they became private contacts until those became illegal in 1968, but because HOAs had to approve new members/buyers, the rules stayed in effect until the majority of a community decided to stop being racist. On top of that, in 1963 the Federal Housing Administration said they would only insure mortgages on homes with an HOA which is really what created suburban sprawl and the ghettoization of the American inner cities.
If you look at the history of HOAs it’s really a long and protracted fight on all levels by racists and bigots against the Civil Rights movement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeowner_association
TL;DR: Although conceptually HOAs are a good idea, even trending towards communalism, actually existing HOAs are, with a few exceptions, downright regressive, often criminally so.
Thanks! I will give it a watch.
It does seem to suck. I hope it can get better.
Edit: Right, so in summary there is no regulation at all on American HOAs and they are also easily taken over by private companies. Makes sense they are bad. Though it’s still astonishing that an organisation can be so unregulated that it can enforce more fines than the local government, without any oversight.
Hittade svensken
Anybody have any neighbor revenge tips? As in my neighbor is a fucking psycho who tried to break into my house, but is also rich, so he paid a lawyer and got a hand slap?
Obligatory, ACAB and fuck America. Can’t wait to take a position overseas again.
Seems like it should be possible to introduce crab grass to his lawn…
That’s like the bamboo idea. I like it. Really makes me think about how genius the creeping bamboo is.
I find a well aimed missile tends to do the trick
Good ol frozen piss disc. /s
Depends how much revenge you need. There is a sliding scale between pooping on his doormat to planting creeping bamboo to planting an IED.
Somewhere between the bamboo and IED
if he has a dog, you could put broken glass into dog food and feed it to the dog.
Whoa now! His dog didn’t do anything to me!
Also, you have a very appropriate username
While I hate dogs, I can’t really condone this.
I’m just brainstorming here.
I get that.
Just wasn’t very tasty.that’s why you enrobe it in dog food.
A spoon full of dog food helps the broken glass go down.
In the most delightful way.
Check every morning if the cans moved.
Notice they move Wednesday night.
Set alarm for middle of the night (3AM) and check if they moved.
Didn’t move? Next week set alarm for 4.30AM.
Moved? 3.45AM.
Moved…
Shoot the guy trespassing on your property in dark clothes in the middle of the night.
Slightly annoyed by neighbor -> commits premeditated murder.
Yup, perfect solution.
Nowhere does it say they are Americans 🤷♂️ also you sound like a psychopath
Isn’t HOA pretty unique to America (and maybe Canada)?
I imagine all neighborhoods have some local association that fills this function. It’s just that the USA cosplays as libertarians while being authotitarians.
I hate to drag in Iran into this, but that’s a country where property is respected. You owned a piece of land in the 60s that you never developed, then the revolution came and you fled to LA? Well your plot of land is still sitting there, untouched, in the middle of Tehran, now worth tens of millions of dollars.
As a homeowner in Iran, you own a cone with its tip in the Earth’s core and its base emanating to the edge of the universe. The same applies if ypu own an apartment. You have a veto, changes can only happen by consensus.
I live in an andelsboligforening, thats kind of the same i think.
Imagine if an association owned an apartment complex, and the association was owned by the members.
So i dont technically own my apartment, i own a specific part of the association, that is connected with this specific apartment.
We have the same for city gardens called Kolonihave, its actually very common in Northern Europe.
In US we call that a housing cooperative, that’s different, because the co-op owns the building(s), then people own shares in the co-op. An HOA generally only owns (and maintains) the common areas, then individuals own their own building, but sometimes there aren’t any common areas, then you’re just paying the HOA for the privilege of being subject to their extra rules. Co-ops are rare, and harder to finance (since you don’t own something that can be foreclosed on)
We have taloyhtiö which is similar. The one I live in at the moment is pretty good, we even have our own janitor which is rare nowadays. Today I called the janitor about a leaking pipe and they arranged a plumber for tomorrow, no hassle.
The housing cooperative is much liked and there are elderly people living here that were born in these houses and never lived elsewhere. It’s not a posh neighbourhood either, which is nice. Just normal people.
But of course it varies a lot. Here most of the people who own the flats live in them, and the board members too, but the housing cooperatives whose boards are filled with landlords tend to minimize the upkeep and services. And when also the tenants change all the time the community that would look after itself doesn’t have a chance to grow.
Ours is just a little over 100 years old now, and even back from the start, the building won some prize, i dont know what its called but something like best building made in copenhagen from recycled materials in 1918.
We also had own bathrooms, both toilet and showers, from the start. Most other buildings around here had it installed in the 80s.
And many other buildings also had backhouses that were eventually demolished to make room for common areas, where ours had the foresight to never build one.
Oh, and of the 250 apartments, about 70% are still owned by the same families who came together and built the building. That means that when the laws around pricing in andelsboligforeninger changed, people here chose to keep the old low prices.
“I might be able to become a Millionaire today, but then my 3 children would all need millions each to own a home” has been the consensus around here since then. (a million dkk is about 140.000$)
I am very proud that the families all came together around that decision before my time. Its literally one of the only places in Copenhagen where a normal person can own a home without millions in debt.
deleted by creator
HOA plus calling a priest to have the house blessed certainly point in that direction though. But I don’t think that would be legal everywhere even there. Isn’t much use to you though if the neighbour is the kind of psycho to shoot someone over this.
These are creative writing exercises on reddit. It’s gotten a million times worse since LLMs.
A LLM that does not understand that you can’t avoid being seen by a ring camera by ‘approaching from a blind spot. ‘
You’re making the assumption the cameras can see the bins. Might just look at a driveway.
I mean its perfectly conceivable for any camera to have a blind spot. The lens can only see so much. Heck given its a Ring camera its almost certainly on a wireless connection so its trivial to briefly disrupt the connection if you’re okay with violating FCC regulations
A camera was put up explicitly for the purpose of seeing who is moving the bins, and the guy can’t see who is moving the bins, and the guy never thinks to reposition his camera?
No, that’s AI slop.
deleted by creator
If a camera is pointed directly at the trash cans, there would be no blind spot from which they could move them.
the cans would not be in a blind spot
I’m just glad my HOA is chill and I like them.
The only thing they’ve had to bring fines about is people trying to move furniture in the wrong elevator and scratching up the wood finishings, and they should. We have a freight elevator for that.
That sounds more like just an apartment management or smth, no? HOAs are more for separate houses I thought
Fake but still kind of funny.
HOA are such a crazy concept. There is no such thing in Europe.
My parents kinda has one where they live in Sweden. Except everyone is welcome to the meetings. And it’s mostly about planning, upkeep, and budgeting for snow ploughing, play parks and things like that, instead of relying on the local council to do it. And it’s only for the one street they live on. Definitely no where near what an american HOA is like 😅
Look up the word bünzli
We have them for apartment buildings in Romania. Never heard of any for houses, fortunately.
Condo buildings I saw things. Did you know that you can stuff a keyhole with glue and human feces?
Challenge accepted, I just need to find a step ladder to reach!
OTOH, your town planning councils tend to be a lot more restrictive.
Am in US. I will NEVER own a house with an HOA. NEVER
Why not both? 🤣
Of course there are home owners associations in Europe. They’re just not crazy.
This should be green text.
Weird request, but okay.
Monkeys paw finger curls
whooosh.
MY EYEBALLS ARE MELTING
🤌 the fact that you went through the effort to make that text green, too
Imagine being so fucking basic you care about trash cans being visible from the street.
HOA zombies are a plague
Its not about the trash cans, its about making sure your neighbours know YOU are calling the shots. If it wasnt the trashcan it would have been the grass a half-inch too high, or the paint on the door chipped slightly, or gravel leaving the premises, or dirty windows.
Yeah, basic as fuck.
-
grass too tall
-
didn’t respect mah athoriteh
-
