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Heh. This is actually a peeve of mine as well. I live in a fairly upscale neighborhood and damn near ever driveway has a rusty, tattered basketball goal. I do see them as eyesores, but of course, don't feel it is my place to legislate them out of existence (even though my pretentious homeowner's association goes so far as to tell me what shingles and paint I can have, what type of fence I can have, and that I can't have a shed for the lawnmower...).
The guy is right. Kids belong inside, in front of the tv with a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos, a Big Gulp soda and the remote. Seeing kids play outside enrages me. The very idea that my son might want to play basketball with his friends, outside, on our driveway ... this cannot be allowed to happen. I need legislation to be sure it doesn't happen. How's my kid gonna get obese if he's playing outside? NO HOOPS!!!
Yeah, that guy's a jerk. (And the dad from Just The Ten Of Us, apparently) However, I think people tend to sign on to HOA's because it gives them the power to tell other people what to do and forget that it also gives other people the power to tell them what to do. Gotta pay the piper.
My tattered net is currently lying down in my driveway because the wind knocked it down. If that bothers my neighbors, well, their lives must be very small.
Wasn't that part of the X-files episode where the sod monster was eating people in the planned community and Fox & Dana were Rob & Laurie Petri (as in dish)?
This is already a common restriction in CA homeowners' associations. No hoops, and no basketball standards out on the curb. I interviewed a guy once who was fined the maximum for refusing to remove his kid's basketball standard from foot of the driveway. The kid had been a troublemaker, made the high school basketball team, and then his grades and rabble-rousing improved. So this guy refused to remove it -- didn't have anywhere to put it in the backyard. The HOA kept fined him to the max, and he still refused to get rid of it.
Then it turned into a criminal case because one of the neighbors (presumably the one who kept complaining) ran over the basketball standard, repeatedly, with his car.
This enrages me. Neighborhoods are for living, not to be put on display. As long as I mow my lawn and don't store junk cars on my front yard, that should be enough. And you can take my backyard clothesline away from me when you pry it from my cold dead hand.
It is my fond hope that I NEVER have to live in a community with covenants like this.
Neighborhoods are for living, not to be put on display.
Exactly. Life is a little messy. Kids will make a little noise. Basketball hoops are a little ugly. Sometimes they'll leave soccer balls out on the lawn where taxpaying adults will have to look at them.
I'm reminded of one of those home-renovation shows I saw a while back. The decoration guru would work on a house that was getting ready to sell. By the end of the show, the house went from looking like a place where human beings actually lived to a bland corporate hotel room.
I suspect that people like this guy would like to apply a similar aesthetic to his entire community. Blandly "tasteful" but not really alive.
And besides which, it's YOUR PROPERTY. You should have the right to do whatever you want with it, as long as you are not intruding unreasonably on your neighbors' sensibilities.
As long as you're not running a slaughterhouse or a brewery onsite, or making unreasonable amounts of noise and disorder, it's nobody's business what you choose to do with your property.
As a Californian in exile in Austin, transplants like this perpetuate John Kelso columns blaming people from California for everything wrong in Austin. Fuck you John Kelso. The "Californians are ruining everything" joke got old in 1983. And why did the AAS even mention he moved here from LA? When I read the sub head "LA Transplant..." I thought for sure it was going to a Kelso rant. The guy might be douchebag but there are plenty of douchebags infiltrating the ATX from Dallas, too.
The basketball hoops are against the rules in that neighborhood. So when he moved there he had an expectation his neighbors would follow the rules. IF THE PEOPLE IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD WANT FUCKING HOOPS IN THE STREET LIKE IN ROUND ROCK THEY CAN CHANGE THE RULES. Then this guy can either live with the new rules or move to one of a dozen other developments by the lake that have the same rules but enforce them.
Christ that seems awfully petty. Of course, the BOD at the place where my folks live (and me) has recently gone batshit and my dad is leading the charge to completely dismantle them. It's awesome to watch.
My dad can be an asshole, but once he gets his mind set on doing something, there is NOTHING that will stop him. It's a bit scary at times. (He actually went to the courthouse and looked up all the property records and old maps and stuff to find out who the 'illegal' voters were that had put the current BOD into place. Just so he could fuck them in the end.)
Of course, the fight still isn't over, but it's fun to watch from the sidelines.
Oh yeah, birdherder, the California blame game started up (in force) in Austin around 1999. I was there during the influx. I kind of agreed with it then. Now, as an Austin exile who's been converted to California-ism, it doesn't really fly.
Austin had/has growing pains. It doesn't really matter where the people are from. It's just easy to pick on Californians, because California is one of the few states that has (almost) as much of an identity/personality as Texas does, and that makes Texans uncomfortable.
Another fact that gets lost in that whole thing is that when the high tech companies were relocating to Austin (and several relocations happened during one boom year), one of the biggest actually moved from Florida, not CA. I don't remember which. But I do remember that there was a bit of a furor over how there was no kosher food and no kosher deli in NW Austin when the company was building its campus, so they were scrambling to bring in one of those kosher-blessing rabbi dudes before the Florida Jews arrived en masse.
Ah, Texas, I don't miss you much.
But OMG, promise me a Curra's Kahlua flan and a margarita and some breakfast tacos and a dip in Barton Springs and I'll be back in a heartbeat.
And besides which, it's YOUR PROPERTY. You should have the right to do whatever you want with it, as long as you are not intruding unreasonably on your neighbors' sensibilities.
As long as you're not running a slaughterhouse or a brewery onsite, or making unreasonable amounts of noise and disorder, it's nobody's business what you choose to do with your property.
You'd be surprised, though, at how untrue that is now. I'd have to dig up the research I did on HOAs, but I think the figure is that something like 90% of all new housing developments have HOAs set up before the first residents even move in. The development companies charter the HOA, then turn its management over to elected residents after a year or two. It's the development company's perverted way of protecting property values while the development is being populated. And for the most part, it's the development corporation (and to be clear, there are like ten big ones in the country that control all this) that sets the CC&Rs -- not the residents. The Covenants and Restrictions are in place before the houses are ever even sold. This enables the development company to continue to market the "neighborhood" in a manner consistent with its billboards and sign wavers.
In other words, all the homes will forevermore look like the model homes, and that's good for the developer.
Some of you may be interested to know that even the dog breeds you are allowed to have are restricted in mamy places. Not just pit bulls are banned, either.
Give me my lower middle class messy neighborhood with kids and yappy dogs and stray cat gangs that poop on your yard rather than that.
I'd have to dig up the research I did on HOAs, but I think the figure is that something like 90% of all new housing developments have HOAs set up before the first residents even move in.
Damn. So much for "a [person's] home is his castle." If you're going to be responsible for mortgage and upkeep and still have somebody telling you what kind of dogs you can have (as per above) or whether you can keep the garage door open or what you can paint your front door or any one of a million petty and idiotic things, you might as well rent.
I'd have to dig up the research I did on HOAs, but I think the figure is that something like 90% of all new housing developments have HOAs set up before the first residents even move in.
Damn. So much for "a [person's] home is his castle." If you're going to be responsible for mortgage and upkeep and still have somebody telling you what kind of dogs you can have (as per above) or whether you can keep the garage door open or what you can paint your front door or any one of a million petty and idiotic things, you might as well rent.
I consider the "L.A. transplants are ruining [my hometown]" trope to be a sad overgeneralization, especially since most of the people like Kirchenbauer who cause these problems had moved because they were too obnoxious for Los Angeles. (YES! There is such a thing!) It makes it just that much more difficult for me, since I relocated to SLO because I am not obnoxious enough for L.A.. But it's so hard to convince anybody...
photo by splunge
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