Reminds me of a park that was at my college. It was left to the school under the condition that it always remain a park. While I was a student the school built a parking deck that took up the whole site and slapped a couple basketball courts on top. Still waiting for the Peters family to claw it back.
We need HOAs or some idiots will paint their house purple or put tractor tires in their front yard. If you want tractor tires, don’t move to a HOA neighborhood.
I couldn’t even fathom how horrifying it must be to live somewhere there are…purple houses and and yucky stuff in people’s yards. Thank God I don’t have any real problems like that.
listen my Nonna and Nonno live right by a purple house (it’s a nice lilac) and as a kid I was fucking obsessed with it because purple is my favorite color. I’d go nuts whenever we passed by it. Also it had a purple mailbox to match and it blew my mind.
No more HOAs. More purple houses.
imagine trying to control what someone else can do with or on their own property just because you don’t agree with their taste in decor
NO MORE HOAs MORE PURPLE HOUSES
Related, becuase I just had to move: “just don’t move into an HOA” Do you know what a PAIN IN THE ASS it is to find NON-HOA Housing? Very nearly everything in the CO front range that isn’t a rental has an HOA these days!
Short list of the Shit the HOA at my pervious house tried to pull:
Banning personal and community food gardens (The reason the tag for my garden is “The garden of earthly HOA violations”)
Banning people from using thier personal yards as Native Plant Restoration microzones, something that looks gorgeous and is extremely helpful to the local ecology
trying to get the city council to remove protections on adjacent city Open Space/Native Plant restoration zone so they could mow it.
mandating the use of ONE landscaping company in the neighborhood, coinicdentally owned by the HOA president’s son
Mandating the use of an unecessary water purification company on all properties.
suing city animal control for collecting lose dogs and cats and returning them to the addresses on thier collars. You know. that thing animal control does so the animals don’t get run over or disemboweled by the coyotes or catch and spread rabies. The thing that’s illegal to let your pet do out here for those reasons Karen.
Suing the city council to remove a city bus stop in the neighborhood that was heavily used by many residents. They damn near got away with it becuase the HOA meetings were always in the middle of the day on a weekday. You know, when the residents that use that stop are working.
Sending people letters threatening to fine them for having “Out Of Season” holiday decor. Specifically targeting my Indian neighbors who were celebrating Diwali, not Christmas and the Jews with visible Menorahs.
Fining people for doing thier own appliance and car repair on thier own personal property
Fining people for operating a business out of thier house, specifically targeting a disabled neighbor that does comission tailoring and garment repair out of her home. never bothered a soul except the one snoopy bitch who didn’t like that her clients were allowed to park in the tailor’s designated and otherwise unused parking space.
Trying to fine a neighbor for flying a Pride Flag
HOAs are invasive, bigoted, corrupt and cruel institutions that should never have been allowed to be created. If you live in and HOA area, showing up at the meetings to tell people what the fuck is wrong with them, Joining your HOA board to protect your neighbors and possibly organize the dissolution of the HOA is one of the best things you can do to protect the marginalized members of your community.
FUCK HOAs AND LONG LIVE THE PURPLE HOUSES AND TRACTOR-TIRE GARDENS OF THE WORLD.
Are y'all telling me this shit is actually LEGAL?
Here’s how to get an HOA to leave you and your purple house tf alone
cant stop thinking about this post. 😔
direct action
HOAs, IN THEORY, could be such a force for public good, and that’s what’s maddening. Imagine if an HOA was like “well we’ve got all these houses and this one empty lot, pay your HOA dues and we can install a community food garden!” or “leave your contact information on the HOA residents-only webpage if you’re willing to be an after-school dropoff for children in our community who may not have a parent at home” or “hi, Sally, we’ve noticed your yard’s gone rather hogwild and things weren’t like that before your husband passed last year, do you need some help? We have some folks in the HOA who can help you with maintenance, no charge.”
Instead they choose isolation over community in the name of a unity that’s in image only, and that’s really, really sad.
Friend of mine bought a small house, an old one in an old neighborhood. She had no idea it was an HOA neighborhood until the day she moved in. They arrived with paperwork she “had” to sign or things would get “complicated”, aka do this or we’re gonna make life hell for you. She immediately told them no, she has no desire to be part of the HOA, and they about blew a gasket. Went from civil to wtf real quick. They tried sending her violation reports, demanded she pay fines, threatened her, etc. What they didn’t know is she’s petty and gives zero fucks. She also lives keeping paperwork nice and tidy.
Shit hit the fan when she installed a wall around her property. A 3 feet tall 2 foot wide wall around her yard. Topped with gorgeous iron work with sharp points that make climbing dangeous. Think Addams Family Lite. They tried to stop the construction because she was using the /wrong/ company (a mutual aid group she worked with). Send her fines and fees, and made the mistake of sending a copy of the HOA contract with a forged signature.
Ooooo…it got so ugly! She remembered the HOA post here about that happening to others and, well, the HOA broke up because of other fuckery on top of this. But it was mostly due to her dragging them in court for fraud, harassment, disturbing the peace, trespassing, stalking, and a few other things. She was petty about it too, looked into every fucking thing she could to destroy them.
I was informed that you not, in fact, obligated to sign the HOA contract. It’s not a legal requirement. When you look for a home, make sure to ask about the possible HOAs, and look at the details of your homeowner’s contract. Sometimes HOAs have that shit written into the purchase. If you see it, change the contract, put your initials and date in the changed sections, and see how the real estate agent handles in. This is legal, btw.
Don’t sign the HOA contract, learn the laws regarding yard stuff (did you know you can apply to have your yard declared a wildlife reserve?), and be petty af when the nosy neighbors won’t mind their business.
Fuck HOAs, long live the purple houses with the tractor tire garden!
Friend of mine used to write these for new developments when she was in her 20s. She liked to add in stuff like “only x color mulch” and other useless bullshit just to fuck with people. Keep in mind she lived in a downtown industrial loft.
Long live native plants and purple houses! (But the old tractor tires are usually a town or city violation because of the mosquito nesting grounds they create.)
They built a roundabout in eastern Kentucky and it’s not going so well 😂
WHY. WHY would any traffic engineer do this??? You don’t just plop a whole new type of intersection down into a place that doesn’t use them!!! This is worse than those highway bridge/on-ramp lane reversals in south Mississippi. And it’s stupid expensive compared to normal intersections.
KNOW WHO YOU’RE DESIGNING FOR and don’t import counter-intuitive accident-creation scenarios to a place that doesn’t use them unless you’re planning to personally stand there and explain how to use it to the next 4.5 million drivers that will pass through it.
Americans love Disneyland because it’s a walkable city
That’s actually a really popular analogy. Howard Kunstler wrote about Disneyland as a “capital of unreality,” where “the public realm is packaged for sale as a commodity.”
“Through the postwar decades Americans happily allowed their towns to be destroyed. They’d flock to Disneyland at Anaheim, or later to Disney World in Florida, and walk down Main Street, and think, gee, it feels good here. Then they’d go back home and tear down half the old buildings downtown and pave them over for parking lots, throw a parade to celebrate a new K Mart opening—even when it put ten local merchants out of business—turn Elm Street into a six-lane crosstown expressway, pass zoning laws that forbade corner grocery stores in residential neighborhoods and setback rules that required every new business to locate on a one-acre lot until things became so spread out you had to drive everywhere. They’d build the new central school four miles out of town on a busy highway so that kids couldn’t walk there. They’d do every fool thing possible to destroy good existing relationships between things in their towns, and put their local economies at the mercy of distant corporations whose officers didn’t give a damn whether these towns lived or died. And then, when vacation time rolled around, they’d flock back to Disney World to feel good about America.”
If anyone’s interested, The Geography of Nowhere is unrivaled as a crash course on and scathing critique of American postwar urban planning.
Also Semi trucks have lifted seats so the driver CAN SEE ANY ROAD HAZARDS
Also, like, in the United States, huge semis are mostly driving on the major highways and Interstates. They’re long-haul trucks designed to travel cross-country on specialized roads. They’re not vehicles for small residential streets in the slightest.
I’ve known a lot of truckers. They literally cannot use a lot of the roads that regular cars do. But the big fuckoff vanity trucks barrel through those same roads without a care in the world.
Honestly whenever I see one of these oversized pickups with leather seats and a 4’ deep bed I laugh out loud. What a joke.
“It’s for my job!” LOL. Then why is it the most impractical overpriced vehicle on the market? My 2-door hatchback holds more in the back, was a quarter the price, and has actually been off road.
One more thing. People driving these oversized trucks are safer than those in smaller vehicles. But they’re much likely to kill anyone they come into contact with. And drivers of smaller, more nimble vehicles are more likely to avoid an accident in the first place.
A train or a bus cannot stop at your house, or carry with you a fridgeload of groceries, or allow you to transit reliably in inclimate weather.
Not everyone can walk the mile or more to the nearest bus stop, or have time to do so.
Your adult conversation is going to invariably be about how to use the law, and thereby the threat of violence, to demand people act the way you want, consequences and individual choice be damned.
I want to ask if you’re aware of the public transit setup in most European and Asian countries, or even just NYC in the states. I ask this because your objection seems to stem mostly from “this isn’t fully convenient/empowering”. But bases and trains, in fact, can and do take you conveniently to and from your house, job, grocery store, and more.
It’s actually incredibly common to use these things instead of cars.
We can get to your assertion that we’re throwing people in jail for having cars , but the actual post is “public transit is a Good and we should treat it as such.”
Yes, I am aware of these things.
I am also aware of the fact that Europe is not the US, and NYC is a miserable place to live (for people like me), in no small part because people functionally live on top of eachother, which is part of what allows their transit system to function, if it can be called that.
I am also aware of the massive disparities in living cost that places like Europe and NY have, compared to where I live currently, as well as the…tendency towards certain policies which violate my principles, which, again, seem to result from people living on top of eachother.
I consider public transit to be a positive thing which deserves to be funded, so long as my money is being taken, even when I don’t use them (for example in my city, because carrying a firearm on them is illegal).
There would be no realistic way for me to get to my work, which is across state lines, using public transit, unless either my work changed locations (which, due to tax, zoning and state laws, cannot occur), I relocated (and abandoned my father who needs daily assistance due to an injury) or take a significant pay cut, since the ones which theoretically allowed for me to work in public transit range literally failed to meet either my work requirements or offered a horrendous pay rate, likely due to the higher density of people who could fill that role, in that area.
It isn’t about convenience. It never was.
For context, I work in a highly technical, skilled field which requires me to transit to industrial plants of many varieties. My office is located in to utilize a central location between these points, while maintaining technical and network infrastructure. If I were to work in the city, my options for this skilled labor would be impacted by lower costs of labor, due to a variety of factors, and greater personal expense.
I am also aware of the massive disparities in living cost that places like Europe and NY have
Median cost of living for a single person in the US is $3,262 a month,
Median cost of living in France is 3.2% cheaper than the US ($3164 a month). Portugal is 35.6% cheaper ($2,107). NYC was an example of a place where we have great public transit, despite vague assertions you have to the contrary, and European Countries are frequently cheaper to live in than the US.
There would be no realistic way for me to get to my work, which is across state lines, using public transit, unless either my work changed locations (which, due to tax, zoning and state laws, cannot occur), I relocated (and abandoned my father who needs daily assistance due to an injury) or take a significant pay cut, since the ones which theoretically allowed for me to work in public transit range literally failed to meet either my work requirements or offered a horrendous pay rate, likely due to the higher density of people who could fill that role, in that area.
I want to ask you why you don’t consider how a significant investment in public transit would change this fact. You seem to be presuming this is an attempt to shame you into going out and using Public Transit immediately and Throw Away Cars. You’re reading a lot of context into this that isn’t there.
I didn’t know that about Europe, though I would wonder if this includes adjustment for median salary, and possible weird stuff.
I’m sure that transit would have some possible jmpact on my commute, but I am not generally (as I have very little technical or literal experience in the field) in the business of divining the knock-on effects of the generations of transit policy change and transit infrastructure changes that may occur.
Now, if it were about electrical or industrial infrastructure, I might be able to realistically weigh in with some weight of expertise.
That said, if I may attempt the divination merely for the sake of argument, it’s markedly unlikely that my 25 mile, one way, 30 minute drive to my small-business office in an industrial/rural part of Indiana, from my home in a suburb of Chicago is going to be improved by a theoretical train and bus interconnection, even considering reduced traffic, since I go against the standard flow of rush hour in both directions, and any form of transit service to this location would be highly unlikely, or at least highly convoluted.
Which, I admit is a somewhat edge case situation (my whole life is a complex mixed assembly of edge cases, this is just how it is, I guess), and as I said, as long as the state deigns to aim a loaded gun at me and ask me nicely for my money, I’d absolutely rather it go to public transit (even though I cannot legally use it) than to, for example, another MRAP for a local PD.
What I disdain about this discussion, if anything at all, is the vitriol and condescension that people relish in, when they (not you, our interactions have always been positive, if at times heated) have this conversation. A quick browse of the notes shows that in spades on both sides (though to markedly differing degrees), to everyone’s mutual detriment.
I didn’t know that about Europe, though I would wonder if this includes adjustment for median salary, and possible weird stuff.
It’s not adjusted for anything funky that way. It’s largely a combination of much cheaper rent (France is just over half the usa price), public infrastructure, and less health spending. If rent, medical bills, and public infrastructure is drastically cheaper it more than compensates for higher petrol prices.
Your case may be an edge case where a better public transit network wouldn’t be much better, to be sure, but it would be a massive boon to a number of people, including reducing/removing the need of having a car for many households (having a car is fine, but needing one is a problem). I know someone from the Local who drove 2.5 hours each way to go to work. There is frequently high-hopes talk about NEPA finally putting the rail to connect NEPA to AmTrack to get travel times down around an hour, rather than the current 2-4 hours.
Heavily rural areas would likely have to take a car to a train station, or something like that, but it still could easily be better all around. Especially if there’s continued, consistent funding to keep ticket prices low.
It’s a proportional thing. It’s not that 100% of trips can or should happen via public transportation. But if you can get to the point where 95% of trips can be via public transit, then not only do you have significant improvement for the people on the trains and whatnot… but the remaining 5% also become much easier.
Even if you can’t benefit directly you benefit indirectly from reduced load.
Even if you can’t benefit directly you benefit indirectly from reduced load.
Just look at the graphic. If I’m in a car, i would much rather have one train running nearby than 625 extra cars. Heck, even 16 buses on the road with me wouldn’t be a big deal compared to 625 cars.
People who love to drive should be the biggest proponents of public transportation, if only because it makes driving way, way easier, faster, and more enjoyable.
I loved not having a car in NYC, but I honestly also enjoyed driving around Manhattan at night and on the weekends after I’d moved out of town.
I hate, hate, HATE the term “affordable housing.” I hate that we’ve normalized it. I hate that we just accept that the majority of housing, a basic human right, is unaffordable to much of the population. Housing should be affordable as a baseline. If rich people want to add arcades and gold-platedhot tubs on top so be it, but everyone, everyone, regardless of income level, should have access to a clean, comfortable home with enough light and space to make life worth living.
it’s wild how people outside America lack so much understanding of how car-centric this country is that they can’t grasp that subdivisions are commonly built without sidewalks, because there’s nowhere to walk
And the really wild thing is “there’s nowhere to walk to” is usually legally mandated through local zoning codes.
Every town and city in America writes its own zoning laws, which dictate what you can and can’t put in any one area of the town. And there’s good reason for this! You don’t want to put a big huge factory that makes lots of noise 24/7 in the middle of a place where people live, for example. Pretty much every place has zoning. Zoning is not inherently the problem.
The problem is the type of zoning the US uses. Most of the US has extremely restrictive zoning. For example, something like 90% of all post-WWII urban and suburban housing in the US is in neighborhoods zoned R-1 (Residential 1) or the equivalent. And R-1 is crazy restrictive.
You can put exactly four things in an R-1 zone. You can put single-family houses, schools, parks, and places of worship.
You can’t put: little neighborhood shops, grocery stores, hair salons, multi-family dwellings, or anything else. You are an accountant who wants to set up shop in your garage because that’s cheaper than renting office space? Too bad for you! No businesses are allowed in an R-1 zone, even if you’re running them out of your home, and if you try and your city finds out, you could be in a lot of trouble.
Oh, but wait, there’s more! R-1 zoning also has laws about density! Each home has to have a good-sized lot. Usually there’s a requirement for how much front yard there has to be (20 feet from the house to the curb is a fairly standard number) as well as a requirement that the house can only take up a certain percentage of the lot (often around 15-20% of the land). This means that the houses are fairly far apart.
You can’t build apartments, condos, row houses, or any form of high density housing there, because it is illegal. Everyone is very spread out. When you combine that with “nothing but houses, schools, parks, and churches,” and 90% of housing zoned R-1, you can have vast expanses of suburbs where the nearest thing other than houses and parks is miles away. It would take hours to walk anywhere from your house, so nobody does it. So the cities don’t build sidewalks. Which also cuts down on the people walking.
This is what is known as “urban sprawl.” This is why Americans drive so much. This is also why American cities are so congested: everyone has to drive everywhere, and you have to drive relatively long distances. Even just going to the store for a gallon of milk can be a ten mile drive. And if every single person has to drive for every single trivial errand, well, for any decently-sized city it simply isn’t possible to build enough streets and highways to accommodate all the traffic.
This is also why housing in America is so expensive. People who would be just fine with an apartment are often forced to rent a suburban home because there aren’t enough apartments. And R-1 houses are designed for the upper middle class. If you can’t afford that … sucks to be you. It drives the prices up for everyone.
And it’s also why so many cities in the US have infrastructure problems, financial problems, and regularly teeter on the verge of bankruptcy! Infrastructure is expensive, and a lot of it (roads, water and sewer pipes, etc) has expenses based on how far it has to go. It costs the same amount to repave a block of street whether there are eight households along that street or twenty households along that street. The taxes on houses in R-1 zones would have to be absurdly high to pay for the cost of maintaining the infrastructure. To the best of my knowledge, no city in America breaks even on R-1 suburbs. They spend more maintaining the infrastructure than they take in in taxes.
So for people who aren’t American and are sitting here wondering what the fuck, here’s why it stays that way:
1) Lack of imagination. For eighty years, this has been the way most American homes are. This is normal. People assume that it is inevitable and the way things just naturally should be.
2) Privileged assholes. Upper-middle-class white people are the ones who are by far the most likely to go to the city council and city zoning meetings where such things are decided, and they overwhelmingly oppose changes to the R-1 zoning code. Why? Because they are afraid it would damage their property values. They are sure that if the zoning in their neighborhood changes, someone will come in and build a huge concrete block of an apartment complex right across the street. And if there were low-income housing built anywhere in the city, the city would attract poor people! And addicts! And criminals! And people of color! And if there were too much low-income housing, why, even if it wasn’t in their neighborhood, it would bring housing prices down everywhere in town, which would mean their house would be worth less than it is now, and their investment would be damaged! (because of course the most important thing about housing is “does everyone have a safe place to live” but “how much money can I make by buying and selling houses.”) … and then they wonder why their kids can’t afford to buy a home like they could at that age …
It’s even worse than just having R-1 zoning, for anyone that doesn’t know the history. For decades upon decades, US neighborhoods were specifically required to follow Federal Govt guidelines on street design, which mandated winding and confusing cul-de-sac designs as a means to save asphalt. Over time, this pattern dramatically increased congestion by limiting the number of possible routes, increased the distance between destinations by routing all cars and people back to major thoroughfares, and isolated anyone who could not drive. That last item was a feature, not a bug; it kept others out just as much as it kept residents in. Soon this new pattern also effectively eliminated the centuries-old city street concept from all new US development from about WWII on.
This wasn’t some natural progression of city-building. It was a radical anti-urban idea that was briefly popular and became so rapidly and deeply codified into law that we have generations of people here who know nothing else. Promotional videos glorifying the carefree, sunny, all-white utopias of greenbelt suburbs were shown nationwide, depicting “old” cities as poor, decrepit and dirty dens of vice. The videos urged Americans to move away from their diverse and crowded neighborhoods, portraying them as practically communist and un-American by comparison.
Undoing these radical (and deliberately racist) requirements has been difficult and controversial. The New Urbanist towns of the 1980s & 90s were so successful that they quickly became unaffordable for most buyers. In fact, one of the biggest criticisms of new developments built on older urban principles—even within existing cities—is that the demand is so great for them that prices all around them rise too fast. Ironically, these developments are often opposed for uprooting nearby minority residents, when their recent predecessor was created specifically to exclude those same people.
But mostly, proponents of suburban-style development know it’s still easier & cheaper to build, even if it’s much more expensive to maintain. The vast majority of town & city codes already require it, and the design, planning and construction require much less creativity and government approvals. The industry has evolved to do little else. It’s now the simplest and lowest form of building available. So the push for less-desirable and inefficient mid-century planning continues apace. While there are finally some alternatives making headway, this destructive US style of land use (destructive to farmland, to open space, to community, to mental health in general) isn’t slowing down.
The thing about car-dependency is that… it sucks for people without a car. Big news, right. But, it’s not like that incentive curve is something we can just ignore. When our desire or ability to leave our house at all is conditional on being in a car, that affects all of our behaviour on every level.
Kids are the prototypical ‘person without a car’, and in a car-dependent area, they become dependent on their parents. In a normal, walkable city or suburb, children walk on their own to school, they cycle, they take the bus. Instead of needing to get parental approval - and enough enthusiasm to dedicate the time - to be shuttled around to any given activity, children walk to the park, or to a friend’s house. Even in rural areas, with the infrastructure, children will cycle to school. In a car-dependent suburb, a child is trapped in a single-family McMansion on the edge of town, forced to beg their parents to be able to go anywhere, always under supervision - is it any wonder they’d rather stay inside?
Even in a city, if it’s car-dependent, this is still an issue. When the roads are 100-decibel, 6-lane monstrosities, with cyclists expected to intermingle with traffic, and the busses stuck in the exact same jam, kids aren’t going to be able to get anywhere, assuming their parents even let them cross the street. This isn’t just about proximity, it’s fundamentally related to safety. Car-dependent places are a lot more dangerous to be in, on account of all the cars, so parents feel it’s safer for their kid to be in one of those cars. To boot, when everyone’s in a car, there are less people around, less people who can notice someone in trouble, less people who can help. When places are built with the assumption that everyone will have a car, they become places for cars, which humans can stupidly venture into.
This doesn’t just apply to children. We are all, at some point or another, a ‘person without a car’ - in fact, we’re a ‘person without a car’ most of the time, until we get into one. A lot of people would prefer to remain that way; driving a car is stressful, it takes a lot of effort and concentration, and not everyone likes it at 6AM. But, when your environment is built with the assumption you’re inside a soundproof, crash-proof metal box, that becomes a requirement. The second you’re outside of those conditions, scurrying across deafening, hot tarmac, and dodging heavy-duty pickup trucks (carrying solely one guy and his starbucks order), of course you’d decide that not being in a car sucks. But, the thing is, it’s designing for cars that made it suck, even for the car-drivers.
A place designed for cars, a place that people cannot walk, or cycle, or take public transit through, is a place full of cars - you are not stuck in traffic, you are traffic. Studies have shown that the average speed of car traffic, over sufficient time, is completely unrelated to the thoroughfare of roads. Eventually, because of induced demand, the new seven-lane arterial road will have exactly the same congestion as the two-lane it replaced. The one factor that sharply determines how slow road traffic gets is, listen to this, the speed of non-car travel. It is solely when alternatives become faster that people stop driving and free up traffic. Shutting down main street, only allowing buses through, would drastically increase the speed of the rest of the road network - because each of those buses is 40 cars not in traffic. If you like driving, you should want as many people as possible who don’t want to drive to stop doing it - and whoever you are, you should want to be able to travel without depending on cars.
When I was in the biggest depressive slump of my life, and I could barely get out of bed, I still went shopping for food nearly every day, and even traveled to visit my partner. The supermarket was 10 meters out the door of my apartment, and I could walk five minutes to either train station if I had to. It was peaceful and quiet outside. My disabled mother doesn’t like living in cities, but she loves public transit, and will always take a train ride over a long, tiring car journey - and when every store doesn’t need a parking lot twice as big as itself, whatever walking she does have to do is over a much shorter distance. When I’ve had to call an ambulance in a ‘car-hostile’ place, it has arrived inconceivably faster, on those clear roads, than when sitting in the traffic of the highway-lined carpark that makes up so many cities.
Car dependency sucks for everyone, including car drivers, but it sucks the worst for people already suffering. It strips you of independence, and forces you into a box you might not fit in - and I haven’t even touched on pollution. Car-dependency makes cities and suburbs into dangerous, stressful places, devoid of everyone except the most desperate. The only people it benefits are, really, the CEOs of car companies.
