Maybe HOAs in the UK or in Germany would seem crazy. I lived in those two places for years and in both places people generally BEHAVE. In Germany, you DO NOT throw glass bottles into the recycle bin on Sundays because of the noise they make. People just expect to be civil.

In contrast, here in Mexico (where I am from) you need a HOA (or the equivalent) to avoid all sorts of crazy neighbours. From people blasting music and shouting at 1am, people leaving their trash out in the sidewalk permanently, parking their cars in front of your garage. To really making dangerous modifications to their house that will undoubtedly affect their neighbours.

But leaf blowers 7 am are fine xD

7am is well after sunrise in most places, most of the year. Your personal tolerance for sounds at that hour should not be regarded as universal.

Leaf blowers are noise pollution regardless of the time of the day, which has short and long term effects on health.

Well, I don’t disagree with that. My point is only that 7am is a perfectly fine hour to be out doing something productive. Make hay while the sun shines.

A lot of my friends who in their younger years held this position rapidly backpedaled after they added babies to their homes. There are very effective sound mitigation solutions available though, if you're willing and able to afford to remodel the room(s) you want to defend against such external sounds.

I interpret such actions as what to normally expect in a lower trust society and culture. We pay for such settings in many different ways.

And electric lighting exists. If you're going to define when noise is acceptable based on when any significant contingent of people are up and active, then noise at 1AM (3AM on weekends) also falls under that definition. Yet the early riser coalition tends to complain about that...

And never mind that the main value add of leaf blowers (over the traditional rake) is to coat your neighbors with debris and dust, thus necessitating even more cleaning (inside too, if they dared to have their windows open).

Also I'd say it's your characterization of freedom that is a narrow misunderstanding. I'd define freedom as the ability for individuals to make their own choices in the presence of society. Being the only person for miles and thus being "free" to do whatever you want isn't some sensible ideal of freedom, rather it's a pathological case that has made freedom irrelevant. In other words, freedom itself directly depends on tolerance. And by the time a city is forcing someone to build yet another ticky-tack fence to hide the mere sight of a perhaps-ill-advised boat it's clear that there is very little tolerance aka respect for freedom.

Nope. You'd be hard pressed to construct a narrative short of failed-state-need-24-hour-armed-security-to-survive where I'd entertain the notion of allowing 3rd parties any kind of say over what I can and can't do on my property.

You say that, but I bet you already live in a village, town, or city that has quite a lot of rules about what you can and cannot do. Noise ordinances, building codes, safety rules, fire codes, historical preservation, it goes on and on and on.

No I don't, I purposely bought a property with no code inspections and no covenants and there's been no code or fire check or noise ordinance for 20+ years. None of the scare stories you hear on here came true, but what did come true is you can actual afford a home because you're not the subject of constant harassment and corruption of code enforcers when building.

You are in a minority. The huge salient fact about the last 200 years is the continual movement of the population from rural areas into urban areas.

There's quite a bit of difference between building codes and empowering my neighbors to bitch about the color of my mailbox...

Yes but I bet everyone will disagree about exactly where to draw the line between the two types of rule. It's the middle where it gets fractious.

Question - Have you ever lived in a high-density environment? apartment block, terrace row etc.? Someone who has will have a different stance on what is acceptable regulation to someone that's only lived in the density of typical US suburbia.

Not exactly comparable but as someone who has lived all my life in apartments in Sweden have to say that people who grew up Swedish suburbia and moved into the city seems to be the most into deciding what others are allowed to do compared to people who have lived a long time in dense environments.

Could just be that are used to different rules but I would not say we have more rules in the cities.

I've lived in trailer parks, downtown apartments, mid-town housing projects, suburban neighborhoods, hyper rural farming communities, and my car on a few occasions. I don't fuck with my neighbors and won't tolerate being fucked with, regardless of setting.

> won't tolerate being fucked with,

OK. So you have your own rules, which you enforce on others? That's swell but I can imagine it could lead to problems. Maybe some form of committee where people can settle disputes and agree on standards?

It's like the concept of common decency is mysterious to you people. Rules? Sure, don't be a complete gaping asshole. Short of that I can generally figure out a way to get along with folks. Do you need a committee to instruct you on how to act?

Do I? Hell no, I'm a model citizen. The trouble, you see, is with all these other assholes...

You are positing an individualist solution (don't be a "gaping asshole" by some vague standard) to a society-level problem (people disagree on behavioral norms, and even if they agreed not everyone would comply). This doesn't work and is tantamount to just pretending the problem doesn't exist - a pretty common failure mode in the conservative mindset. See also: gun control is unnecessary because all you have to do is not shoot people...

In theory juries only examine facts but in practice they are equal with judges in they decide both matter of law and fact and can nullify or convict without regard or with regard to either.

The system we use in rural countryside where police basically don't exist, ultimately, is a direct jury of your peer neighbors. It's better if you don't like those decisions centralized to some far away assholes with even less aligned motives.

This is an argument against centralisation of authority - which most on the libertarian left and right would agree with.

I personally think it's a thorny problem with no easy solution - which is why I'm not a libertarian.

Not sure who "you people" is referring to but if you're speaking to me then my response would be something along the lines of "I admire your optimistic outlook but even a cursory study of society would show that social consensus is incredibly fragile and to regard it as anything else smacks of naivety".

So - as a society we've tried multiple different strategies to make it easy for people to live in close proximity and they all have different success rates and different trade-offs. Pick your poison.

Private real estate property satisfaction and attainability for the common man hasn't improved much if at all since suffocating regulations and active committees really ramped up 50 years ago.

The peoples' glorious committee have never been a good way to protect property rights. Which is part of the reason why many rights are set up to not be subject to democratic opinion.

Do you live in the country in a town with no zoning? You might be surprised...

I lived in a pretty small town growing up and we were forced to sell the car I was going to get at 16 because I was 15 and it had been sitting for months. The city gave us a warning and was going to start fining us everyday until we got rid of it

What was the warning for? Not being registered, not moving, etc? Those are things that your parents can fix without you being 16.

To put it as bluntly as possible I don't give a flying fuck at a rolling donut what you or others likeminded think is nonsense here. I live on 20 wooded acres surrounded by undeveloped forest lots ranging in size from 40 to 200 acres, the closest neighbor is half a mile away, and I couldn't pick anyone that lives there out of a police lineup if my life depended on it. I chose my location precidely to avoid this creeping horseshit notion that you've got rights over the things I own.

Funny I lived on 11 acres carved from a 180 acre plot. The 90 year old owner of the surrounding plot died and his children had it logged. For three years loggers were running chainsaws near daily and 18 wheelers were tearing up my small road as they built new ones to feed it. The road was shared from my house to his through my property. Then his teenaged grandkids started running motorcycles through the clear cut and shooting guns. Sitting on my porch used to be pleasant but now it was constant noise. Since the land was unmaintained and unincorporated I had no recourse. I moved before they finished. I check google maps every few years and they are STILL logging.

I forgot to mention that the lack of forest now means I can see floodlights from the local high school sports fields 20 miles away and can hear the freeway traffic that passes through the nearby town, also 20+ miles away. It’s not deafening just annoying and persistent instead of wind blowing through thick forest.

So you wouldn't mind if someone bought the property closest to wherever your house is on your 20 acres, cut down the undeveloped forest, and built an abattoir right on the property line?

HOAs are not the only thing that controls where people can build abattoirs. In much of the US, this is controlled by zoning. And zoning is decided on via local politics, not via a HOA.

I'll take a small town politics over an HOA any day, because the few local HOAs are far more likely to make weird and obnoxious requests.

I live on a dirt road in the woods. I don't care whether my next-door neighbor cuts his lawn or what color he paints his house, or whether he decides to start keeping goats. The landowner across the street is running a tiny part-time farm, and I'm a fan. I know most of my 20 closest neighbors.

I don't mind the occasional HOA for people who want that sort of heavy community control. For me, it was an automatic "no" when buying a house.

HOAs are local politics. You're making a distinction without a difference.

Some local politics sucks, some does its job with minimal fuss. The difference is not made by the label you put on the political entity.

Small town politics is based on voting and laws. I can participate in Town Meeting, or call the town manager, or volunteer for a role in town government. And unless I make a spectacular nuisance of myself (or ruin the groundwater or dirt roads), the town doesn't much care what I do with my land.[1]

HOAs are basically private pseudo-governments, and most of the ones around here seem to impose far more stringent rules about how people use their land than the towns do.

[1] If I were operating on a scale beyond an individual homeowner or a small farm, the town would pay more attention. Want to keep a dozen goats or turn 5 acres into a truck farm? Go for it. Want to raise 1,500 pigs with a manure lagoon? You'll need to go through a permitting process.

The general rule of thumb I've personally observed (YMMV) with those who hold such absolutist externality related positions is they hold it right up to the minute that someone else much more powerful and deep-pocketed than they start unilaterally imposing externalities upon them. Your abbatoir example is a good one, and the other one I've seen in real life is when a Swift, Cargill or other similar mega-agribusiness setting up a CAFO feedlot next door.

The odor externality from the manure piles/lakes usually riles such characters right up, but that is the least of it. Even when the manure management challenges are properly mitigated (and there are no such CAFO feedlots that can mitigate to only 2-3 incidents per year, it is more like 20-30 per year for the average one), neighboring properties like your parent commentator's are adversely impacted with sharply increased pathogen and contaminants control in their groundwater. As rural properties like your parent poster's usually rely upon well water, this becomes a pretty acute issue for neighbors.

Fracking operations also are frequently very sloppy with their adverse impact upon groundwater, even though they are very diligent upon staying on their property. Redress that makes whole including judicial system interaction expenses is difficult, expensive even for single-digit liquid assets millionaires, and rare.

At the end of the day, this has many characteristics of a classic engineering modeling problem, subject to unperceived historical biases. People who hold absolutist property rights interpretations like your parent poster are generally historically biased to a time period when such interpretations were couched in an energy-poor and population-sparse time of our civilization. Back then, as long as one was within approximately human- and animal-power scales of energy over the generational time span, and rural population densities, externalities from large scaling scenarios were rare for most people, and mostly theoretical. With our current access to energy and ability to rapidly densify neighboring properties, the available externalities to present materially change, and the interpretations (which are actually the mental models we work with) break down in the face of a engineering-like scaling step change that requires categorically different solution spaces.

I'm personally very sympathetic to your parent poster's position, but realistically, my personal experience has informed me of the dynamic I've shared, and I've since substantially modified my position.

They couldn't if they tried, zoning laws, local labor costs, and the hyper-consolidation of the meat packing industry make that a complete non-starter. You're trying to goad me into admitting obnoxious neighbors are obnoxious which is self-evident. Generally there are ways to deal with obnoxious neighbors that don't require entitling the rest of the neighborhood to make decisions about one's property. Ironically I've taken the starch our of more than one asshat neighbor by threatening to build a hog pen next to their house, so there is that I suppose.

What exactly do you think zoning laws are if not the wider community making decisions about one's property?

Zoning laws are a combination of unelected civil servants, elected legislators, and the legal system establishing a minimum set of guardrails to prevent shit like building strip clubs and toxic waste incinerators in inappropriate places. They're far from foolproof, are frequently gimmicked to the benefit of wealthy political donors, and they're not something the public gets any kind of real say in. There's no relationship between zoning laws and HOA covenants around what color your mailbox can be or how many cars you can have in your driveway (for example). Some kind of minimal social contract is provably necessary to prevent society from devolving into some kind of libertarian Mad Max you-keep-what-you-kill hellscape, but that hardly requires granting the people around me authority to make arbitrary decisions around trivial aspects of how I choose to maintain my property.

seems someone actually did that:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40255509

Oh sure yeah. That's actually a very old strategy I learned from my (now 94) year old grandfather. My impression is that was one of the intermediate steps on the continuum between trying to sit down with a neighbor and work things out and exchanging sporadic small arms fire. Country life was wild back in the day.

You described nearly exactly my little place here in the countryside too. I noticed property taxes were up this year, and the electric co-op cut down two of my favorite trees while I was on vacation because they said they were too close to the lines.

There’s always something. sigh

The power co-op cleared three problem trees after I called them out which opened things up enough that I've been able to drop a bunch more myself with no issues. Got an Alaska mill on the way to process the trunks into lumber, the greenhouse is going in this fall. My only real complaint is the bizarre amount of mice we have on the property, but that's a solvable problem.

I think you did well to isolate yourself. But many people are willing to come to agreement on what type of community they want to live in and explicitly regulate antisocial behavior.

It’s great this country is large enough to accommodate all types.

You'll be paying taxes on that land, do you actually own it?

Of course I own it. I also utilize all of the public infrastructure around my land and enjoy the fact that I don't have to resort to armed patrols to protect it from roving bands of raiders, so yeah, taxes.

Not necessarily. Much of Alaska has no property tax, plus you get a paycheck on oil dividends.

It’s because you don’t give a flying fuck why HOAs exist. It separates those who are of different likeminds. There is a neighborhood in Austin called Apache Shores for people like you but who do give a flying fuck to know their neighbors. It’s best described as a series of junkyards next to zero scapes next to 70s A-frames next to medieval manor homes. It’s awesome for people who don’t care if their neighbors house looks like a donut shop.

I don’t give a flying fuck that you don’t give a flying fuck about your neighbhors. I want neighbors that care about me and ask if they can have a stick of butter or borrow my table saw or carpool my kids to school. My neighborhood is a true community. We help each other. We organize with each other. We raise kids with each other. All from our huge McMansions with perfect lawns adorned with labradoodles who don’t bark at strangers. It makes my life better and I have never once gotten worked up about some bullshit notion that the HOA is treading on me. It’s possible to like conformity while eating suburban Chipotle while reading Kant. You can be a free thinker while also agreeing to not park your car on your lawn. If you want a pink mailbox and want to use your chainsaw in your birthday suit at 6am go right ahead, in any thousands of neighborhoods or hermitages that allow it in the land where the ratio of eagles to hamburgers is nearly equal. I’ll be in my garage with my neighbor smoking weed with our shirts off, making sawdust, listening to Steely Dan. Oh the tyranny

Not sarcasm but this sounds amazing, show me where to sign on the HOA docs.

Hoa are the mushroom head of covenants, which I see as one of the greatest threats to liberty. Boomers unilaterally reaching out the grave to encumber property on all transfers and heirs. The contract of course is unsigned by the counterparty yet somehow runs with the land. Due to this nonsense it was almost impossible finding land allowing me to build a tiny house for my family despite no zoning or codes against it.

Yep, this is my problem with HoAs. Everyone supporting them loves to bleat about how "voluntary" they are - but any new construction since perhaps the late 80's in my area have been nearly 100%, if not 100%, HoA. This is not voluntary - it's pay to play, and you are practically forced into these living arrangements if you are within a certain socioeconomic class and want to own a home. That I won the lottery and can "opt out" of the situation personally is immaterial. I find the situation at best unethical.

These don't even exist for the standard reasoning any longer. It's turned into a financial grift for developers to avoid paying for improvements, and municipalities to expand the tax base without having to pay for infrastructure. Plenty of "communities" out there currently having their cake and eating it too - at least for the first one or two generations of owners. It's about as sustainable as you'd expect such arrangements to be the more you look into them.

If you want suburban new home construction in my area you have had to buy within a HoA for the past 30 years. It's getting to the point where only the older "city core" and inner ring suburbs come devoid of a HoA. So it's either exceedingly expensive dense urban living or a 2 hour drive from a rural property. Such "choice" indeed.

HoAs kill freedom more than they offer it from my experience. They also slowly suffocate any future development forcing everyone into exceedingly hard to break covenants of the past. The ossification and hollowing out of middle class America continues.