A lot of this comparison depends on the specific requirements of the HOA, and how much they change over time. Many of them do NOT require unanimous consent to impose new rules or fees. I'd say the ability to exit is a part of the rules being voluntary. I don't know of any system which doesn't include some level of coercion without underlying consent. The best ones minimize the coercion and allow trade and contracts such that MOST of the decisions and tradeoffs are at least made freely, if not fully euvoluntary.
Property rights are difficult to reason about, because it turns out no house is an island (or at least very few are). There is _ALWAYS_ a tension between individual choice and the impact on neighbors and non-owners. One can frame this as "externality" or as "part of the bundle of rights granted by the deed", but it's not obvious where the boundaries are.
My preferred solution to the exit rights problem here would be to make it a federal or at least a state law that any owner of a detached single-family home can leave their HOA (and lose all rights and responsibilities related to it) at any time, simply by mailing a letter. That way HOAs can only impose rules on a given household insomuch as they also provide equal or greater value to that particular household.
> My preferred solution to the exit rights problem
Take right-to-work laws, which
• prohibit mandatory membership in a labor union as a condition of employment,
and change them to
• prohibit mandatory membership in an H.O.A. as a condition of home ownership.
For example:
No person shall be required, as a condition or continuation of [employment][home ownership], to:
A. become or remain a member of a [labor union][H.O.A.];
B. pay any dues, fees, assessments, or other similar charges, however denominated, of any kind or amount to a [labor union][H.O.A.]; or
C. pay to any charity or other third party, in lieu of such payments, any amount equivalent to or pro rata portion of dues, fees, assessments, or other charges required of members of a [labor union][H.O.A.].
Any agreement, understanding or practice, written or oral, implied or expressed, between any [labor union][H.O.A.] and [employer][any other party] which violates the rights of [employees][home owners] as guaranteed by provisions of this Chapter is hereby declared to be unlawful, null and void, and of no legal effect.
Yeah, HOA boards are usually elected by majority votes and can impose changes that other homeowners object to. I don't see how it's all that different than electing your town mayor, just a smaller town.
Also, the state is the one that ultimately enforces HOA contracts.
I think the parallels between an HOA and a local government are stronger then what Bryan wants to acknowledge. Indeed someone that buys into an HOA is making a voluntary choice to join and therefore submit to its rules. But this would not be the case for the buyer's child that may inherit the property later, and would be bound by the HOA's rules as long as they want to keep being able to live where the may have always lived. This does not seem that dissimilar from being born into a small town and being required to abide by the rules of that small town local governments. Some of these local governments also resulted from people that lived in a certain area coming together in the past and deciding to have local rules.
Also, I wonder what Bryan thinks of a world where more and more new construction is made to ibe part of an HOA. My understanding is that recent data showed that 80%+ of new construction included HOAs. If we got to a world where 95% of all houses one could buy are associated with an HOA, wouldn't this be a situation where yet another level of "government" would be close to unavoidable for most people?
Also, just to add, how different it is to chose which HOA to buy into vs. chosing which town to move to in general with specific local government? My understanding is that HOAs have quite often much more intrusive rules in people's live than the typical local government.
I agree. As a practical matter, it doesn't matter to me whether the rules of a place were obtained via purely voluntary means at some point in the past. If you go back far enough, every place has a sketchy history filled with various injustices. What matters is what the rules are now. My takeaways: (a) we should all realize that there are limitations to our property rights when we buy, and (b) the real injustice comes when the rules are changed after the fact in such a way that the value or utility of your property is reduced. Libertarians seem to fail (a), thinking they somehow bought a sovereign country when they buy a house. Our system generally fails with respect to (b) in many cases. We should work to compensate people who fall victim to it.
I like all the points you make in favor of voluntarism and liberty, and against governmentalization. However, I think that "unanimity" is an awkward way to frame it. You're implicit supposing that unanimity extends _only_ to those whose property and consent are affected in or by the undertaking. That's the key, really, our emphasis on property/consent, which is the substance of "voluntary" (in discussions of this kind). Speaking in terms of freedom, liberty, and voluntarism gets at the heart of the matter more directly, it seems to me.
I think the point of liberty has been made many times by countless people, so Bryan wanted to illustrate something related to individual liberty but concerning mostly collective decision-making.
Suppose we start an organization, voluntarily, of whatever nature (residential, enterprising, religious) that some people out there don't like, although the organization in no way messes with their stuff in the person/property/consent sense, which Smith identified as the staples of commutative justice. Bryan's unanimity principle does not extend to them. The liberty principle would oppose those people or any of their allies from having the legal authority to shut down or prevent the organization. Talking liberty or voluntary seems like a more direct way of getting at the heart of what Bryan is expounding. Also good would be to pay more attention to commutative justice, whose flipside in the governor-governed jural relationship is liberty.
The trouble with at, as I see it, is that if you are not presuming liberty/commutative justice it is very hard to argue for the need for unanimous consent. In other words, once you accept that it is fine to force people to use their property as you see fit, why require unanimity instead of 90%, 60%, 51%? Without the liberty principle you are just haggling over how many votes it takes, and as we have seen from history "100% of votes" is not generally the result of such haggling.
> I have offered a proposal for state legislative action that would provide a procedure for the creation of new private neighborhood associations in established neighborhoods.
> I propose to establish a legal mechanism by which an existing neighborhood could create a private neighborhood association. It would be similar to the incorporation of a new municipality, but it would result in the creation of a private neighborhood based on a private property relationship among the property owners of the neighborhood. In order to approve the establishment of the new private neighborhood association, a large supermajority vote would be required. Assuming the supermajority could be achieved, those who voted against forming a neighborhood association would nevertheless be required to become members. (pp. 44 - 45)
It's almost as though the real objective of "free market" think tanks - like Cato, and others - isn't about individual freedom and liberty, but expanding corporate power under the guise of contract law.
I thought the point of YIMBYism was to get rid unanimous consent. Like my county wants to build a highway onramp, but the town is objecting because a few very vocal and angry citizens don't want it built. I went to the planning meeting and the reason given by the bitter old people was that if we build the onramp it would be more convenient to live her and then more people would want to live here and they don't like so many people being around.
I thought the point of the YIMBY movement was to railroad those bitter fucks and build the onramp.
END THE VETOCRACY!
You want to give every single fucker a complete VETO. Yeah, a lot is going to get built then.
P.S. They had to move one of the onramps over a few feet and now it technically will use a tiny sliver of a local HOAs property that nobody ever would have noticed. This of course gives the HOA total control over a project that they've been trying to build for eight years and you've got to get them on board too. The only solution to not lose matching funds because of all the delays was to ditch one of the four onramps so they could get around the veto in time. So dumb.
If in fact, the dialog that Brian describes taking place, at the beginning of this piece, actually takes place, it says very little about the level of thinking that “economists” have ascended to. It sounds more like a conversation with a freshman in Econ 101.
Somebody who was probably a lot smarter than me once observed that
> HOAs do a great job of illustrating to libertarians (who seem to need to learn this more than the average person, for some reason) that the world is not a deductive system, and all facts about human relations don't follow from a simple logical calculus. Simply spinning out definitions of voluntary and involuntary quickly gets you into a conundrum here.
I think "normal people" (ie. not in our econo/libertarian bubble) would object in two ways:
1. The fact that you vote demonstrates that you consent to the system, even if you aren't a big fan of any particular regulation or policy that the government in question institutes. If you don't choose to exercise that right to vote, it just shows that you don't care one way or another what the outcome is and you're happily subjecting yourself to whatever the outcome is.
2. HOAs don't have unanimous consent. Just imagine the poor old grandma who moved into the HOA to live next door to her grandkids. Sure, she signed the contract, but poor grandma knew this was the only way she'd get to spend enough time with those grandkids, and those kids needed the support since mom and dad are at work all day. Did she *really* have a choice? No, no she didn't, and you're awful for saying she did.
So (1) is the "voting means you consent" and (2) is the "it's not euvoluntary" objection. I agree that both of these objections are flimsy, but normal people see the world this way.
How should we apply this to the US Constitution? No one alive even has a great grandparent who voted for it. Should it be easier or harder to amend it?
As with all law, the problem with long-term consent to words of a natural language in an initially unanimous HOA is that there is no such thing as semantics without pragmatics, and the people who apply the pragmatics change. HOA says "no overt political display". People who created it probably thought a U.S. flag wasn't a political display, simply "honoring the nation". People in charge today probably think a Pride flag isn't political display, just telling your neighbors that they're accepted. Maybe those same people start to think a U.S. flag IS political display. And so on.
I recently signed a software licensing agreement that is a perpetual contract. Unanimously agreed upon. So disagree with 1. Who would agree to 2?
“Subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement, Licensor hereby grants to Licensee a nonexclusive, nontransferable, royalty-free, fee-free, perpetual license to use the Software. The rights granted herein are limited to the Software's executable file.”
As stated the HOA rules would only bind through a couple of house sales. (The first time the house is sold they have to imposes rules 1&2, but not 3.) You actually would need an infinite regress to keep it locked in.
Should there be a new level of government below cities/towns for HOA's so they can also enforce what would be considered "criminal law" on consenting members of the HOA and their guests?
(I do not think this possible possible to do currently under HOA contracts without changes to state charters, or maybe a system whereby local governments set up systems where they automatically adopt HOA passed rules as local law within the HOA and then "deputize" HOA law enforcement of these laws within the HOA juristiction).
Should all HOA's allow anyone who shows up at the gate and agrees to the HOA terms to come in and immediately join the HOA - and then maybe even offer them support and housing until they can afford to buy a house in the community?
(Honestly asked. I come from immigrants and I love immigration- but I am interested in the scale invariance here)
This helpful screed is exactly why I like Bryan. This is good work. But when Bryan is incentivized to show up on Tucker (for 2 or more obvious reasons, nevermind the externalities it imposes on the quality of his comments section), he trains much of society to assume his ideas are bad ... and by no means, should anyone have to endure Tucker in order to parse for a difference.
The right and the left have one thing in common when looking at the large scale social phenomena so beautifully laid out before us as a result of nearly 2 decades of mass, interactive social media: they train each other’s boosters what to like and what not to like, how to think and how not to think.
This is what it is, which is why people like Bryan need to stay away from stinky moths that flirt with bug lamps.
A lot of this comparison depends on the specific requirements of the HOA, and how much they change over time. Many of them do NOT require unanimous consent to impose new rules or fees. I'd say the ability to exit is a part of the rules being voluntary. I don't know of any system which doesn't include some level of coercion without underlying consent. The best ones minimize the coercion and allow trade and contracts such that MOST of the decisions and tradeoffs are at least made freely, if not fully euvoluntary.
Property rights are difficult to reason about, because it turns out no house is an island (or at least very few are). There is _ALWAYS_ a tension between individual choice and the impact on neighbors and non-owners. One can frame this as "externality" or as "part of the bundle of rights granted by the deed", but it's not obvious where the boundaries are.
My preferred solution to the exit rights problem here would be to make it a federal or at least a state law that any owner of a detached single-family home can leave their HOA (and lose all rights and responsibilities related to it) at any time, simply by mailing a letter. That way HOAs can only impose rules on a given household insomuch as they also provide equal or greater value to that particular household.
> My preferred solution to the exit rights problem
Take right-to-work laws, which
• prohibit mandatory membership in a labor union as a condition of employment,
and change them to
• prohibit mandatory membership in an H.O.A. as a condition of home ownership.
For example:
No person shall be required, as a condition or continuation of [employment][home ownership], to:
A. become or remain a member of a [labor union][H.O.A.];
B. pay any dues, fees, assessments, or other similar charges, however denominated, of any kind or amount to a [labor union][H.O.A.]; or
C. pay to any charity or other third party, in lieu of such payments, any amount equivalent to or pro rata portion of dues, fees, assessments, or other charges required of members of a [labor union][H.O.A.].
Any agreement, understanding or practice, written or oral, implied or expressed, between any [labor union][H.O.A.] and [employer][any other party] which violates the rights of [employees][home owners] as guaranteed by provisions of this Chapter is hereby declared to be unlawful, null and void, and of no legal effect.
Yeah, HOA boards are usually elected by majority votes and can impose changes that other homeowners object to. I don't see how it's all that different than electing your town mayor, just a smaller town.
Also, the state is the one that ultimately enforces HOA contracts.
I think the parallels between an HOA and a local government are stronger then what Bryan wants to acknowledge. Indeed someone that buys into an HOA is making a voluntary choice to join and therefore submit to its rules. But this would not be the case for the buyer's child that may inherit the property later, and would be bound by the HOA's rules as long as they want to keep being able to live where the may have always lived. This does not seem that dissimilar from being born into a small town and being required to abide by the rules of that small town local governments. Some of these local governments also resulted from people that lived in a certain area coming together in the past and deciding to have local rules.
Also, I wonder what Bryan thinks of a world where more and more new construction is made to ibe part of an HOA. My understanding is that recent data showed that 80%+ of new construction included HOAs. If we got to a world where 95% of all houses one could buy are associated with an HOA, wouldn't this be a situation where yet another level of "government" would be close to unavoidable for most people?
Also, just to add, how different it is to chose which HOA to buy into vs. chosing which town to move to in general with specific local government? My understanding is that HOAs have quite often much more intrusive rules in people's live than the typical local government.
I agree. As a practical matter, it doesn't matter to me whether the rules of a place were obtained via purely voluntary means at some point in the past. If you go back far enough, every place has a sketchy history filled with various injustices. What matters is what the rules are now. My takeaways: (a) we should all realize that there are limitations to our property rights when we buy, and (b) the real injustice comes when the rules are changed after the fact in such a way that the value or utility of your property is reduced. Libertarians seem to fail (a), thinking they somehow bought a sovereign country when they buy a house. Our system generally fails with respect to (b) in many cases. We should work to compensate people who fall victim to it.
I like all the points you make in favor of voluntarism and liberty, and against governmentalization. However, I think that "unanimity" is an awkward way to frame it. You're implicit supposing that unanimity extends _only_ to those whose property and consent are affected in or by the undertaking. That's the key, really, our emphasis on property/consent, which is the substance of "voluntary" (in discussions of this kind). Speaking in terms of freedom, liberty, and voluntarism gets at the heart of the matter more directly, it seems to me.
I think the point of liberty has been made many times by countless people, so Bryan wanted to illustrate something related to individual liberty but concerning mostly collective decision-making.
Suppose we start an organization, voluntarily, of whatever nature (residential, enterprising, religious) that some people out there don't like, although the organization in no way messes with their stuff in the person/property/consent sense, which Smith identified as the staples of commutative justice. Bryan's unanimity principle does not extend to them. The liberty principle would oppose those people or any of their allies from having the legal authority to shut down or prevent the organization. Talking liberty or voluntary seems like a more direct way of getting at the heart of what Bryan is expounding. Also good would be to pay more attention to commutative justice, whose flipside in the governor-governed jural relationship is liberty.
The trouble with at, as I see it, is that if you are not presuming liberty/commutative justice it is very hard to argue for the need for unanimous consent. In other words, once you accept that it is fine to force people to use their property as you see fit, why require unanimity instead of 90%, 60%, 51%? Without the liberty principle you are just haggling over how many votes it takes, and as we have seen from history "100% of votes" is not generally the result of such haggling.
In 2004 the Cato Institute published a proposal to conscript existing homeowners into H.O.A. corporations with a 70% threshold.
"The Private Neighborhood" by Robert Nelson. Regulation. Vol. 27 No. 2 Summer 2004
@ https://www.cato.org/regulation/summer-2004
@ https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/regulation/2004/7/v27n2-5.pdf
> I have offered a proposal for state legislative action that would provide a procedure for the creation of new private neighborhood associations in established neighborhoods.
> I propose to establish a legal mechanism by which an existing neighborhood could create a private neighborhood association. It would be similar to the incorporation of a new municipality, but it would result in the creation of a private neighborhood based on a private property relationship among the property owners of the neighborhood. In order to approve the establishment of the new private neighborhood association, a large supermajority vote would be required. Assuming the supermajority could be achieved, those who voted against forming a neighborhood association would nevertheless be required to become members. (pp. 44 - 45)
It's almost as though the real objective of "free market" think tanks - like Cato, and others - isn't about individual freedom and liberty, but expanding corporate power under the guise of contract law.
Seven out of ten neighbors agree, they get to take over the property of the other three. The cupidity of humans but rarely rests.
I thought the point of YIMBYism was to get rid unanimous consent. Like my county wants to build a highway onramp, but the town is objecting because a few very vocal and angry citizens don't want it built. I went to the planning meeting and the reason given by the bitter old people was that if we build the onramp it would be more convenient to live her and then more people would want to live here and they don't like so many people being around.
I thought the point of the YIMBY movement was to railroad those bitter fucks and build the onramp.
END THE VETOCRACY!
You want to give every single fucker a complete VETO. Yeah, a lot is going to get built then.
P.S. They had to move one of the onramps over a few feet and now it technically will use a tiny sliver of a local HOAs property that nobody ever would have noticed. This of course gives the HOA total control over a project that they've been trying to build for eight years and you've got to get them on board too. The only solution to not lose matching funds because of all the delays was to ditch one of the four onramps so they could get around the veto in time. So dumb.
If in fact, the dialog that Brian describes taking place, at the beginning of this piece, actually takes place, it says very little about the level of thinking that “economists” have ascended to. It sounds more like a conversation with a freshman in Econ 101.
Somebody who was probably a lot smarter than me once observed that
> HOAs do a great job of illustrating to libertarians (who seem to need to learn this more than the average person, for some reason) that the world is not a deductive system, and all facts about human relations don't follow from a simple logical calculus. Simply spinning out definitions of voluntary and involuntary quickly gets you into a conundrum here.
EDITED TO ADD : JAlanKatz, July 22 2010, comment at http://archive.freecapitalists.org/forums/t/18417.aspx
I think "normal people" (ie. not in our econo/libertarian bubble) would object in two ways:
1. The fact that you vote demonstrates that you consent to the system, even if you aren't a big fan of any particular regulation or policy that the government in question institutes. If you don't choose to exercise that right to vote, it just shows that you don't care one way or another what the outcome is and you're happily subjecting yourself to whatever the outcome is.
2. HOAs don't have unanimous consent. Just imagine the poor old grandma who moved into the HOA to live next door to her grandkids. Sure, she signed the contract, but poor grandma knew this was the only way she'd get to spend enough time with those grandkids, and those kids needed the support since mom and dad are at work all day. Did she *really* have a choice? No, no she didn't, and you're awful for saying she did.
So (1) is the "voting means you consent" and (2) is the "it's not euvoluntary" objection. I agree that both of these objections are flimsy, but normal people see the world this way.
How should we apply this to the US Constitution? No one alive even has a great grandparent who voted for it. Should it be easier or harder to amend it?
Lysander Spooner already did this in "No Treason: Constitution of No Authority".
Interesting!
As with all law, the problem with long-term consent to words of a natural language in an initially unanimous HOA is that there is no such thing as semantics without pragmatics, and the people who apply the pragmatics change. HOA says "no overt political display". People who created it probably thought a U.S. flag wasn't a political display, simply "honoring the nation". People in charge today probably think a Pride flag isn't political display, just telling your neighbors that they're accepted. Maybe those same people start to think a U.S. flag IS political display. And so on.
Dissent on certain things is never allowed, ever.
The Holocaust, for example.
I recently signed a software licensing agreement that is a perpetual contract. Unanimously agreed upon. So disagree with 1. Who would agree to 2?
“Subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement, Licensor hereby grants to Licensee a nonexclusive, nontransferable, royalty-free, fee-free, perpetual license to use the Software. The rights granted herein are limited to the Software's executable file.”
As stated the HOA rules would only bind through a couple of house sales. (The first time the house is sold they have to imposes rules 1&2, but not 3.) You actually would need an infinite regress to keep it locked in.
Stop using "verbiage" like a low-IQ MBA graduate.
Should there be a new level of government below cities/towns for HOA's so they can also enforce what would be considered "criminal law" on consenting members of the HOA and their guests?
(I do not think this possible possible to do currently under HOA contracts without changes to state charters, or maybe a system whereby local governments set up systems where they automatically adopt HOA passed rules as local law within the HOA and then "deputize" HOA law enforcement of these laws within the HOA juristiction).
Should all HOA's allow anyone who shows up at the gate and agrees to the HOA terms to come in and immediately join the HOA - and then maybe even offer them support and housing until they can afford to buy a house in the community?
(Honestly asked. I come from immigrants and I love immigration- but I am interested in the scale invariance here)
This helpful screed is exactly why I like Bryan. This is good work. But when Bryan is incentivized to show up on Tucker (for 2 or more obvious reasons, nevermind the externalities it imposes on the quality of his comments section), he trains much of society to assume his ideas are bad ... and by no means, should anyone have to endure Tucker in order to parse for a difference.
The right and the left have one thing in common when looking at the large scale social phenomena so beautifully laid out before us as a result of nearly 2 decades of mass, interactive social media: they train each other’s boosters what to like and what not to like, how to think and how not to think.
This is what it is, which is why people like Bryan need to stay away from stinky moths that flirt with bug lamps.