If only they had the flag in the flag in the flag...
this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2025
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hmmm
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that was the first thing i looked for.
that's the second step picture, which would be printed to then be hanged for a third picture and so on
We were required by our HOA to hang a flag, so we hung a flag
If I lived in a place that “required” a flag, you bet I’d be taking full credit with malicious compliance.
That really a thing?
Stupid HOA rules? You bet.
As an european, the whole concept of a hoa is so nuts and crazy. And that in the land of the supposed free.
Once more it shows, if a country needs to call it self something a bit too loudly, that's because it needs to convice the population that the lie is true.
As an american, the whole concept of an hoa is so nuts and crazy.
Ah, I see the completely understandable mix-up, there.
Like so many of us 99%ers across the world, you're mistaking the word "freedom" for its corporate product & homonym "Freedumb".
(Often paired with its buy-line "Freedom® isn't free". [FYI, the hate isn't silent -anymore])
Do you mean wohnungseigentümergemeinschaften?
Those only exist if you literally live in the same house where you have constant communal costs and a legal shared responsibility for the house. It would be close to impossible to have freehold apartments (Eigentumswohnungen) without one.
HOAs are quite a different concept.
It's different because the houses are separate? HOAs start as a way to maintain common amenities/utilities.
The difference is that with a flat you buy part of a shared legal thing. You don't buy a flat but part of a building.
Imagine buying a shared car. A few people pool money together and buy a car, and afterward they split up who owns which part. And then the guy with the steering wheel decides that the steering wheel isn't necessary, so he rips it out and sells it. Does it make sense to allow him to do that, thus disableing the car for everyone else too?
If you buy a house, you don't buy a part of a physically inseparable thing. You are buying a stand-alone detached house on its own separate piece of land. There's no shared common part that's inseparably attached to the land. Roads belong to the city/state, so they are already covered that way.
And if there's like a common piece of land for everyone's use (like a playground or something) that belongs to the HOA, then there's no reason that this needs to be coupled to the land you bought.
In Europe there are voluntary village associations or stuff like that too, and that means you are only allowed to use these common pieces of land if you are a member of the association. And the association then only cares for these common pieces of land, not for how exactly your lawn is supposed to look.
No, they don't. That's their excuse for existing legally. 🖕🏽
wohnungseigentümergemeinschaften
What a freight train of a word. Absolute unit.
What that spell do?
I guess Germans have massive lungs. Or strong tongues. 😏
I'd mangle this word so badly it would be probably considered hate speech.
It's not a complicated word. The only thing is that German joins compound words, while English puts a space into it.
If German would follow English rules, this would be a Wohnungs Eigentümer Gemeinschaft, which, translated to english would be a Flat Owner Association.
Or if English followed German rules it would be a flatownerassociation. Would you have a lot of difficulty reading that?
What's flatow nera? Sounds like a yummy Vietnamese dish. 🤪
You're free to not buy into an HOA. That's what I did.
Of course, being able to implement such a construct feels very free to me. You're allowed to get a group of people together for a binding contract in regards to how you should act as a neighbor. To me, the only flaw is that the HOA is tied to the house. It definitely feels dumb to decide you don't want a house because you can't agree to their stupid rules.
The crazy thing is that you can put your will in regards to property into a covenant on a property title and that will then carries on indefinitely.
If you own a piece of land you should own it, and apart from the laws governing the use of the land you should be able to do with it whatever you want.
It's kinda crazy that you can put whatever you want into a covenant and thus "poison" that piece of land in perpetuity. HOAs are part of that.
Definitely.
It takes a special kind of megalomania to believe that just because you paid for a plot of land, that you're entitled to bind it to your will forever...
It's also an issue that's getting bigger with time. In the 50s most areas were freshly built up from the ground. You don't like the rules in one neighbourhood? No problem, just buy some of the empty land around it and do what you want.
By now about every piece of somewhat sensible land is owned. There's not that much completely fresh development in areas where people actually want to live voluntarily anymore.
So most people buy "pre-owned" land. Land with covenants on it. And with covenants often being perpetual, that means more and more land will get poisoned by them.
Most HOAs aren't created by neighbors, but by developers.
Basically, most developers doing greenfield development (most new housing built in the US) build a pretty large tract of land as a development. Constructing all the houses in the development takes years. The developer is selling a particular image of a neighborhood to their buyers, not just a house - the same house can get radically different prices if the neighborhood it is in has good curb appeal. So the developer makes an HOA. When you buy a house in the development early on, the HOA is making sure that you keep everything looking picture perfect so they developer can maximize home sale prices on the houses they are still building. Hence, arcane rules about what colors you can paint your house, what kind of grass you can have in your yard, etc. As well as the stipulation that an absurd majority of the HOA's board must approve any changes to the rules (the developer controls some number of board seats while development is ongoing).
You're free to not buy into an HOA. That's what I did.
A huge percentage of new subdivisions are HOA. You can't deny that avoiding them severely limits your options, especially if you're the kind of person who's intimidated by old houses.
(I live in an ~80-year-old house without an HOA, so yes, I'm well aware it can be done. But that doesn't mean everybody, or even the majority of people, can do it because most of the housing stock is not like this.)
I'm a fan of conservation easements
The nice thing is tho, if a neighborhood is built without one, it's almost impossible to start one. So if we had a way to focus on the shitty developers who want to attract white flight by making racist HOAs, we could see progress. But we can't do things like that, those developers are in charge.
So if we had a way to focus on the shitty developers who want to attract white flight by making racist HOAs
A big part of the problem is that local governments often encourage HOAs so that they can shirk their duty to provide infrastructure.
Y'all aint exactly chock full of liberties over there is ya? Might want to check for glass before you start throwing stones.
Apart from Nazis being banned, I don't see any liberties being cut. Are you confusing Europe with the UK?
And as long as you aren't a nazi, it's a pretty good thing that nazis are banned. The US could have benefitted from the same thing. Now you got a Nazi in chief. Aren't you proud of that?
Yeah, ain't you special. At least I can criticize israel without getting arrested for it.
So you can't find a difference between criticising Israel (which is totally legal in the EU) and being a Nazi (which is not in many EU countries)?
Which means, when you are saying you are critizising Israel it's an euphemism for being a Nazi?
Get lost, Texan.
TIL, ty.
That’s actually new to me too. The opposite is more common, like only the US flag, state flag, or sports teams are allowed. I haven’t heard of an HOA actually requiring a flag.
In this house we stand for the flag 🏴☠️
I zoomed in to look at the flag and I was like, no it's not exactly the same. The real house has a round black window upstairs and ok that's my phone's camera nevermind.
God damn I fucking hate how screens were uselessly expanded...
I'd give up the "extra" screen space for the old status RGB LED 1000x over.
Needs more recursion
Well shit, now I have to do this.