Why are covenants allowed to run with the land? There's no other kind of ownership that can control people forever like it can. Regular contract law seems way more restrained in comparison. If there were a new blanket rule that covenants couldn't run with the land, wouldn't that completely and immediately defang every mandatory HOA (effectively turning them into the benign voluntary HOAs) with no other negative side effects?
The covenant is simply something you have agreed to with the purchase of the property. And yes, you agree not to sell to anyone who doesn't also agree to the covenant. Are you saying that after you have signed this contract you should be suddenly let out of it? That could create actual damage to other property owners (via lower property values) who only bought there because everyone has to abide by the covenant.
> The covenant is simply something you have agreed to with the purchase of the property. And yes, you agree not to sell to anyone who doesn't also agree to the covenant.
That makes it sound like covenants that run with the land are something you could simply implement via contract law, binding the first purchaser to them via contract and requiring that they only sell to people who sign a contract agreeing to being bound and the propagating the covenant.
In fact, covenants that run with the land are stronger than that. The contract approach might work as long as the land was only conveyed through contractual arrangements between the conveyor and the conveyee. But there are other ways land can be conveyed.
My land could be seized by the state because I stopped paying taxes and then sold at auction, for instance. Or I might die intestate and with no close relatives, and the land ends up with some distant relative I've never met or had contact with. Or I go bankrupt and the bankruptcy trustee sells my land to pay my creditors. These and many other ways could result in my land ending up owned by someone else with no contract between me and them, and hence no way for me to impose the restrictions on them.
A covenant that runs with the land would still work after all of those. I've not looked into the history of it, but I'd guess that the need to have a way for arrangements to stick no matter how the land is conveyed is why covenants that run with the land were developed.
Okay, let me clarify/amend: keep condos and other cases of split ownership of a single building as they are now, but do what I said for single-family homes and other cases where every structure is wholly owned by a single person.
A large amount of HOAs are on land leases, so they ARE shared ownership.
If you made the rule you suggest, all it would change is that new HOAs would all be on long term land leases (and you'd have a lot of chaos in the current ones that didn't do this because with existing laws it was not necessary).
Seems like it would be better to have a pool (or other common amenities) via voluntary contributions, leaving out the rules forced on homeowners' properties.
And a voluntarily financed pool makes a certain amount of sense. Why should someone who doesn't want to be involved be forced to contribute against their will? That's not easy to justify.
I'm not talking about banning HOAs, just defanging them. So people who just like being in them wouldn't mind, since they could stay in them. The only people who would mind are those who like forcing all of their neighbors to be in them against their will.
Of course they would mind. The fact that they can enforce their vision of the neighborhood is exactly why people like them.
You make a choice to live in a neighborhood with an hoa. If you don’t like it, leave or don’t buy. Not sure why we should pull the rug out from under those who choose to live their because others would prefer not to.
And I say this as someone who does not live in a neighborhood with an hoa.
> The fact that they can enforce their vision of the neighborhood is exactly why people like them.
I wonder if the love/hate opinion on HOAs boils down to that, i.e. some like forcing others to their way of thinking, and others are very opposed to such things.
I don't think it is about forcing others to their own way of thinking. Rather, I think it is about having a community that works according to one's own vision of the good life.
Some people want to live in Bohemia; some people want to live in vibrant cities; some people want to live in places where all the lawns are nicely manicured and Billy Bob down the street can't have his car up on blocks and Jennifer next door can't have a stream of cars showing up for her private pilates class.
The world is filled with many different kinds of people, with many different visions of the good life. Just because one particular vision doesn't match mine doesn't mean it should be banned or destroyed, or that they are terrible people.
