11 HOA Horror Stories That Will Make You Want to Move to the Country

If you never hear from your homeowners' association, that may be for the better. The internet is chock full of horror stories about overreaching HOAs and their antics. The Reddit thread regarding homeowners' association horror stories garnered over 1,500 upvotes and 3,200 comments, many regaling stories of HOA missteps and misdeeds. Some of the stories are minor annoyances, but sometimes homeowners' associations go so far beyond their power that their behavior becomes truly problematic. Let’s look at the 20 worst HOA horror stories we could find on Reddit.

To populate this list, we started by looking at threads on Reddit regarding HOA horror stories. There were a few of them, so we didn’t limit our search to any specific thread, even though not all were popular. Once we had a collection of threads to source from, we sorted them all by “Best” to ensure that we had the most upvoted stories at the top. With that in place, we looked through the different posts to find the best stories from the thread.

Reddit user, u/Furlessxp, shares a hilarious story about a neighbor that they say “liked to build strange things in his house.” Furlessxp shares that the neighbor one day decided to take his hobby into the great outdoors, and he built a treehouse in his yard. Seems pretty mild and unproblematic, right? You thought wrong.

Apparently, the HOA president in the original poster’s neighborhood was a city councilman at the time and wasn’t happy with the treehouse being built. The incident turned into a major dispute between the HOA and the inventive neighbor. The HOA served the man with continuous requests to add safety measures, hoping that he would eventually give up and take the treehouse down.

The dispute culminated in a request to have the treehouse’s blueprints assessed, signed, and stamped by a professional engineer to confirm it was safe to have. The neighbor presented his signed and stamped blueprint at the next HOA meeting. The blueprint was signed and stamped by none other than the inventive neighbor himself, who revealed that he was a professional engineer and held a Ph.D. in civil engineering.

Shared by u/wierdaaron, the original commenter starts by mentioning that their dad had started a limousine service. The company at the time was not yet big enough to have its own office space, parking lot, and multiple limousines. So, the poster’s father would bring the one limo from the business back to their condo to clean and service it and would sometimes leave the limo overnight if he needed it for a job. Other than that, they said that the limo lived on a storage lot. However, the HOA in the area decided that the limo on the street was a “distraction” and passed a rule that residents couldn’t have vehicles longer than X feet parked in front of their homes overnight.

However, shortly after the rule went into effect, another resident bought an RV that he would leave in front of his home for long periods. The HOA rewrote the rule to no longer limit the size of the vehicle. Instead, they stated that vehicles advertising a business could not be parked on the street. 

After that, another neighbor started a landscaping business and had a pickup truck with the name of the landscaping company on the side. The HOA again changed the bylaws to allow such vehicles only if they could be parked in the home driveway. However, they could not park on the street—since the pickup truck fit in the person’s driveway, but the limo did not. 

All this to avoid making a “no limousines” rule.

According to the threads on Reddit, anti-trampoline bylaws in HOA-controlled neighborhoods are common. The idea is that the trampolines are a safety risk and should be controlled to prevent injury. u/Justananomaly recalls when they bought a trampoline for their kids. The HOA didn’t like that the poster and several other residents had trampolines and asked the commenter to get insurance for their trampoline. The user got the requested coverage and made a copy of the statement for the HOA. 

The HOA responded by faxing every incident report involving trampolines in the neighborhood to the insurance company. They referenced the user by policy number and sent a letter of disapproval. The user says that they and everyone in the neighborhood had to get rid of their trampolines because of it, saying that Google Earth still shows the trampoline in their backyard. Seeing that made their daughter sad.

Reddit user u/redditaccount314 recalls a story of their friend’s exceptionally strict HOA. They said that one night, one of their friend's cars was jacked up, placed on cinder blocks, and all the tires were stolen. The friend didn’t discover the issue until she went to go to work. She made some calls to get the situation rectified, but these things take time, as we all know. 

Since she still had to get to work, her husband drove her to and from work that day while they waited to get justice for his wife. When they got home from work that evening, they found a notice in their mailbox from the HOA, indicating they intended to fine them for having an “abandoned vehicle” in their reserved parking spot.

Shared by u/ficus_tree, this is the story of a homeowner’s association that never lifted off the ground. u/ficus_tree says that their long-time neighbors were the first to move into the neighborhood, where the user now lives, some 30–40 years ago. The commenter says that one of their neighbors was putting up a cable antenna on his chimney when another man, the developer, came by and said he couldn’t put the antenna up since it violated the homeowners’ association rules. The neighbor looked at him and asked if there were any other members of the homeowners' association and received a negative response. So, the neighbor responded “Then, I hereby disband the association. The vote passes unanimously. Now get off my lawn.”

Another story of an HOA that never was starts with u/LessThanHero42’s father, who caught wind that some of his neighbors had decided to start a homeowners association. Finding the people planning to start this association to be too uptight and knowing that they’d be horrible to have as the ruling body of the neighborhood, the commenter’s father mobilized the other members of the neighborhood to start a homeowners association before the crotchety neighbors could do so.

The poster’s father was able to plan and establish a legal entity for his homeowners' association before the uptight neighbors, denying them jurisdiction over the neighborhood as a homeowners' association already existed in the area. OP says the homeowners' association didn’t do much besides get together and drink beer once a month. They note that they did once ask a man to fix his sprinklers as they were spraying a nearby home’s windows, but no citation was issued, just a polite talking to.

In a harrowing tale of one person’s terrible experience with their HOA, they share that their parents owned several livestock animals: pigs, llamas, turkeys, and chickens. When they decided to move, they had to find a space that could accommodate them and all their animals. They found a house with plenty of land for the animals to enjoy. However, the house had a covenant on the deed that enforced the HOA of a small selection of nearby homes. All the surrounding properties were farms or former farms. So, the restrictions didn’t make any sense for the culture of the area. The home’s sellers removed the covenant from the deed, freeing OP’s parents from the HOA.

When OP’s parents moved into the home, the neighborhood busybodies had a fit about their animals. They attempted to prevent the commenter’s parents from enjoying their new home with their animals. When the parents told the HOA that they were no longer under covenant and didn’t have to follow the rules, the HOA started making bogus calls to the police. The HOA wanted to get OP’s parents fined by the state since they couldn’t fine them under HOA rules. Since the cops couldn’t do anything, the HOA members began actively trespassing and killing OP’s parents' animals. The commenter recalls that someone shot the llama their father had owned for 21 years and due to the spread of the blast, the llama didn’t die right away and suffered for a week before finally succumbing to his injuries.

One person recalls when they rented a townhouse in a community with an HOA. They state that they always did their best to abide by the rules. They never caused trouble, unless you counted when they would go on vacation and let their grass grow out a little more than was typically allowed. The commenter says they had an assigned parking space on the street since they didn’t have a driveway or didn’t have room for all the cars that needed to go in it. OP says they had back-to-back shifts one day, closing the night before and opening the next morning. When they got home the first night, they went straight to bed and as they were falling asleep, they frantically remembered that they had to change their registration stickers the next morning or the police would fine them.

When the OP got up the next morning at 6 A.M. to change the stickers and go to work, they said that they thought their car had been vandalized. The HOA’s towing company had placed large stickers over every window on their car stating that the car was illegally parked due to expired registration. They state that they even had to call out of work because they couldn’t see through their windshield because of the stickers. The commenter admits that they were lazy in not changing their registration stickers, but notes that their car had only had an expired sticker for 6 hours, which was a shorter amount of time than it took for them to get all the stickers off their car.

u/papadoob shares a story about living in a middle-class development of about 900 houses. He says that his neighborhood section was unusual because the people in his area spent more time outside playing, gardening, and doing other outdoor activities than the rest of the development. They said they got a basketball hoop for their daughter to use, and she and the neighborhood kids used it all the time. The kids would call out “car” and get out of the way if there was any traffic, but as a cul-de-sac with no through traffic, there wasn’t as much danger in playing in the street.

Apparently, some busybody retiree who lived in the development called the HOA on OP because basketball hoops were not allowed under the association’s rules. The commenter says they knew of several other hoops owned by residents but neglected to mention them to avoid causing trouble for innocent people trying to enjoy some sunlight. The HOA mandated that OP could only have the hoop if it was put away in their side yard when not in use. However, the hoop weighed 200 pounds and couldn’t be moved easily.

OP polled the neighbors in their block and received yes votes from 1/3 of their neighbors, while the other 2/3 declined to comment. They were told they needed a 2/3 supermajority of the entire association, around 600 people, to make the hoop legal.

Reddit user u/rbf2000 states that their wife (girlfriend at the time) used to live in a rented townhouse with her friends in a community that had an HOA. The community had reserved parking for visitors, and OP states that he never had problems with parking in the community. He just used his visitor pass and was fine. He says he spent the night once or twice a week, but one day, he woke up and found that his car was gone. At first, he thought it had been stolen. However, some detective work uncovered that it had been towed by the HOA.

He reached out to the HOA, and they told him that there was a provision in the bylaws that stated that a car could only be parked in the visitors’ parking for 72 hours. They argued that the language of the bylaws indicated that the car could only be parked in the lot for 72 hours non-consecutively. So, if OP parked for 10 hours per week, on the 8th week, they would be in violation of the bylaws.

The HOA denied their request to recover the towing fee he got charged, so, he sued them in small claims court and got back the towing fee plus the court costs. He says the HOA also got a lawyer and he got a little kick out of wasting their retainer money on the lawsuit.

One person who later deleted their account says they live in a condo and suddenly began receiving $100 fines from their HOA for not picking up dog poo. The area behind their building is a common area, and lots of people walk their dogs in that area. They offered to DNA test their dogs to prove that they were not responsible for the unattended doodies. However, the HOA ignored them and continued to send them notices of fines for not picking up dog poop.

OP started by taking their phone with them on every walk and took photos and videos of them picking up the poop with timestamp evidence. They sent the photos and video to the HOA to prove they were picking up after their dog. When they continued to receive notices of fines, they got a trash can for their patio and kept the dog poop bags in the can. They mailed the box of poo to the HOA along with more videos proving that they were picking up after their dogs, stating that they had provided more than sufficient evidence that they were not responsible and that they’d better not receive any more fines. The OP says the fines stopped after that and they haven’t received another one in over 2 years.