If I ever get the idea that I should purchase a home anywhere with an HOA, someone please tase me in the face until I become less of a moron.
I don’t yet have a unified theory of HOAs, but it seems like another haven — much like the police force — where bullies from middle and high school congregate in adulthood.
Never will I buy where there is an HOA. Never.
Then you’re stuck with an older home in an older neighborhood. Which might be acceptable to you, but you might not be the handy type and want something that has, like, modern plumbing and modern electrical outlets and a kitchen and bathroom that isn’t a tacked-on lean-to shed at the back of the house. Because every newer home that I’ve looked at had an HOA, because the city required the developer who built the neighborhood to have an HOA that would maintain the streets and sidewalks and landscaping in the neighborhood. What about the property taxes that we pay to maintain the streets and sidewalks and landscaping? Well, there’s a crony of the mayor that needed a contract to provide paperclips at $5 apiece to City Hall, I guess… because those taxes sure don’t go to maintain anything in these newer neighborhoods.
When we buy a home, doubt we’ll have an HOA because it will be on 10+ acres of land in the middle of nowhere, perhaps even off the grid. I’m not sure we’d ever buy a main home in the city.
But yeah, if we ever did buy in a city, it’d almost certainly have an HOA. (Which is not the main reason — but certainly a large one — why we wouldn’t do that.)