Extremely Lame

Homeowner’s association thugs strike again, this time over air drying laundry in the back yard. You know, the part of the yard that no one sees so there’s no way in hell it can cause property values to fall. You would think that having laundry to dry in the backyard would seem to hark back to the ’50s and a sensibility of housewives with phony smiles and husbands who like to smoke a pipe and read the newspaper after his wife cooks him dinner. Isn’t that the kind of ideal neighborhood these people are dreaming of?

I suspect that the people who run homeowners associations are the kind of evil shrews who used to lord over people in social clubs like Elk lodges and Eastern Star chapters. With membership of these kinds of fraternities/secret societies well on the decline, they’ve decided to take their control issues and pettiness out on their neighbors in the supposèd interest of maintaining property values, when in fact they just like being little tyrants.

Maybe this is why I tend to be a proponent of smaller government in most cases. Every time you give someone a little bit of power, it inevitably gets abused sooner rather than later. The same can be said of government. See: local smoking bans, sobriety checkpoints that assume everyone on the road is a criminal, and Kelo v. City of New London (The eminent domain case where the gov’t took land from one private entity and handed it to another private entity. That lot is still empty three years later).

I mean, I understand the point of homeowner’s associations. They’re there to ensure that no one becomes that house, the house in virtually every neighborhood with the bright yellow paint, unkempt yard, and broken down vehicles in the driveway that bring down the property value of all the houses near it. But being at a point where a homeowner’s association foreclose on your house from under you for failing to pay dues to them? That’s downright criminal. And no, that’s not just me being melodramatic. Having your home taken from you because you couldn’t pay your HOA dues for a couple months? Seriously? How can anyone see this as right?

As relayed to me in the comments, apparently they can get away with this because you don’t own your home in an HOA; no one does. You merely own a share in the neighborhood. What’s that word that describes something where no one owns anything and everyone lives peacefully until someone realizes they can wield the rules like a bludgeon against someone they don’t like and eventually creates an oligarchy more harmful to its members than the unsavory people they vilify? Oh yeah, communism.