<story><title>Housing should be affordable except for when I sell my house for $1M</title><url>https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/housing-should-be-affordable-except-when-i-sell-my-house-for-a-million-dollars</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bbarnett</author><text>This is like women&amp;#x27;s pants, and women complaining about the lack of pockets.&lt;p&gt;If everyone refused to buy with a HOA, then they would vanish in new builds, and could even be uniformly voted to disband in old builds.&lt;p&gt;But apparently some like HOAs (don&amp;#x27;t ask me why).</text></item><item><author>dataflow</author><text>Sure if you have a separate home on your own dedicated land, but what about everyone with HOAs, property taxes, etc. to deal with? For many people they still have to pay &amp;quot;rent&amp;quot; and still can&amp;#x27;t really do whatever they want with the land and roof, so they don&amp;#x27;t see much of these benefits either, right?</text></item><item><author>notyourwork</author><text>Exactly, I just want my own place. The land and roof to do what I want with. It’s not monopoly for most people.</text></item><item><author>7speter</author><text>At this point, I think people of a certain age would just be happy to have a parcel of land with a roof over their head to call their own as opposed to buying a house as some sort of long term investment whose value keeps accumulating (and whose tax value will continue to increase as a result)</text></item><item><author>datadata</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve never understood how real returns on house prices could be believed to be sustainable. If the value of a house appreciates in terms of purchasing power for some other good at a constant rate, at some point in the far future just a single house would become valuable enough to purchase the entire global supply of the other good.&lt;p&gt;The illusion of house price appreciation is due to historical population growth creating scarcity, and cheaper money allowing for higher and higher leverage. At some point the music has to stop.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nkrisc</author><text>Like most things in life: it depends. I live in an HOA. We pay about $150 a year, they keep the common areas maintained, coordinate with the county for road and other municipal work, and … that’s basically it. They’re pretty much otherwise invisible and are just my neighbors.&lt;p&gt;Sometimes I even break the rules and put my garbage bins out too early and leave them out too late and I’ve never heard a word about it.&lt;p&gt;There was even a foreclosed house in the neighborhood that was increasingly unmaintained, and the HOA hounded the bank and got them to take better care of the property until it was finally sold.&lt;p&gt;Overall, our HOA is a net positive.&lt;p&gt;I also was part of an HOA for 4-unit condo building I lived in previously. It was perfectly fine and its purpose and necessity was very apparent.&lt;p&gt;I’m sure there are nightmare HOAs out there, just like there are nightmare neighbors in places with no HOA.</text></comment>
<story><title>Housing should be affordable except for when I sell my house for $1M</title><url>https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/housing-should-be-affordable-except-when-i-sell-my-house-for-a-million-dollars</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bbarnett</author><text>This is like women&amp;#x27;s pants, and women complaining about the lack of pockets.&lt;p&gt;If everyone refused to buy with a HOA, then they would vanish in new builds, and could even be uniformly voted to disband in old builds.&lt;p&gt;But apparently some like HOAs (don&amp;#x27;t ask me why).</text></item><item><author>dataflow</author><text>Sure if you have a separate home on your own dedicated land, but what about everyone with HOAs, property taxes, etc. to deal with? For many people they still have to pay &amp;quot;rent&amp;quot; and still can&amp;#x27;t really do whatever they want with the land and roof, so they don&amp;#x27;t see much of these benefits either, right?</text></item><item><author>notyourwork</author><text>Exactly, I just want my own place. The land and roof to do what I want with. It’s not monopoly for most people.</text></item><item><author>7speter</author><text>At this point, I think people of a certain age would just be happy to have a parcel of land with a roof over their head to call their own as opposed to buying a house as some sort of long term investment whose value keeps accumulating (and whose tax value will continue to increase as a result)</text></item><item><author>datadata</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve never understood how real returns on house prices could be believed to be sustainable. If the value of a house appreciates in terms of purchasing power for some other good at a constant rate, at some point in the far future just a single house would become valuable enough to purchase the entire global supply of the other good.&lt;p&gt;The illusion of house price appreciation is due to historical population growth creating scarcity, and cheaper money allowing for higher and higher leverage. At some point the music has to stop.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>throwaway646465</author><text>Many local municipalities actually require the developer to include a new HOA as part of the permitting process for new development.&lt;p&gt;This is because small local governments are often too cash poor to foot the additional road maintenance, utilities, etc so they want to offload the cost to the developers&amp;#x2F; the developers customers.</text></comment>