The big winter storm....

[Firedome]

No Wild west here, we're lucky in that all the neighbors are respectful and considerate, properties are well maintained seemingly out of peer pressure, mostly, and the town itself regulates stuff like overgrown grass and trash/junk/debris, junk cars, very well: one call and the town zoning inspector comes out and drops the hammer with court & big fines for non-compliance, so no HOA is needed, thank heavens.

[electra225]

I've never been lucky enough to live in a community like that. Seems like I either move into a neighborhood with a junky property next door, or one moves in after I'm already there. Our old neighborhood in Phoenix was the best we ever lived in, but now all the older neighbors are all gone and the neighborhood has really gone downhill. We had a loosely-knit HOA, but it was all volunteer and better than nothing. More on people's word and honor than anything else, it didn't have any real legal teeth. Out here, we only know the neighbor on each side, nobody else. That's the bad part about neighborhoods like this. I remember when I was a kid, we could drive to town and I could name the people who lived in each house on the way.

[TC Chris]

I'll cast another vote for city living. I've always lived in cities that had and enforced their zoning and blight ordinances and also looked into noise complaints. HOAs? They sound like a pain in the behind.... either a bunch of busybodies tut-tutting over a weed that exceeds 6" in a corner of the lot, or calling you to task for throwing a tarp over the boat. The problem with HOAs is that they are small, and small units of government--what they really are--are easy to capture and abuse. Bigger populations like cities are generally more reasonable. The local scold can't take over.

I left Lansing, our capital city, almost 28 years ago. It had sprawled so it was harder and harder to ride my bike out into the countryside after work. I would pass one new suburb with one of those paint codes--all the houses had to be mud-colored. The whole thing looked like a mud pile. My neighborhood there was just a bunch of homes built at different times and in different styles, mostly in the first half of the 20th century. . Paint? Choose your color. Same thing in my current place. House were built between about 1900 and 2021 within a two-block radius. The city governs setback and percent of lot covered (and height) but beyond that you're on your own. It works.

Chris Campbell

[electra225]

The HOA's that are managed by volunteers tend to be like you said, busybodies tut-tutting weeds and barking dogs. Our HOA has a professional, paid manager whose can stay impartial and makes the rules apply to nobody or to everybody. She doesn't live in the community, so she doesn't know anybody and has no biases toward or against anyone. The volunteer HOA's get too personal. We have an elected board, but the manager lady gets to call the shots and gets to take the grief. As long as you mind your manners (and keep your coach lights burning. That's her hot button) we don't have a problem. Our fees are really cheap compared to lots of HOA's and they do a good job of managing and maintaining the common areas. They never have built the pool, but that would open up a new can of worms, along with increased HOA fees. Vandalism would be the biggest concern, so you'd have to hire a lifeguard and an armed guard to keep the taggers and knotheads under control. The guy who runs around here on a four-wheeler pulling a trailer, allegedly doing maintenance, is the HOA snitch. If he passes your house and sees a violation, he'll stop, take a picture of it, text it to the HOA lady, then you get a text or email. Don't ask how I got so smart.

They have been griping about people parking on the street. People's garages are full of junk, so where are they going to park? To my surprise, several have put their cars elsewhere besides the street. They can't get into their back yards, so they must be using the garage or putting them in storage somewhere.

Houses in our development, about 3500 homes, have to be painted a color depending on the roof color. If you have round, red roof tiles, you can paint your house three shades of brown. If you have flat concrete tiles, you can paint your house three shades of gray. You can install a front security door, but you have to have HOA approval as to design and color. Nobody does that. They just put on what they like and it works out.

[walyfd]

-4 8 miles north of scranton this morning. -8 in the Poconos. Wasn't too bad because the sun is so strong, it felt warm. Worked on watches today... both Hamiltons are losing excessive time.

I was going to move the tires for the '62 Cadillac off the front porch today (FINALLY GOT THEM AFTER 10 MONTHS!!!) but I have a snow pack to deal with.

[Firedome]

Minus 12 in Bingo this AM! - at least is was brilliantly sunny, but yikes!

We do have some very loose regs in the VT lake place, but fortunately that old Vermont saying:
"I'm a Vermonta and I do what I wanta" prevails, only the most gross negligence or behavior will be called out,
and we do get common play-field, road, and right-of-way maintenance plus trash pickup for our $400 a year.

[MEZLAW]

We have been "white" since the second of January, unusual for this part of Virginia! We have been getting one storm on top of another for a few weeks now. One of the storms was heavy wet snow and I watched the trees start to bend from all the weight. I new we would have massive power outages and we did. When the power went out I decided to clean the driveway with my snowblower. The first thing I had to do was start the generator in order to use the electric start on the snow blower. We had 10's of thousands of people without power for 8 days! No sooner than we get all that cleared up, hears comes another storm! This next storm was not sticking to the trees and we did not loose power, but it did turn to a heave rain/sleet storm which turned to ice! We have had very cold temperatures ever since that storm which left a thick coating of ice on top of the snow. I could go on but what's the point, I'm too old for all this crap and I need a warmer climate!

[William]

So, where are you moving to? Virginia is farther south than Michigan where I live. Shouldn't it be sunny and warm down there?

Bill

[Firedome]

It is in summer! I'm a Baltimore native, just an hr or 2 north of VA. MD/VA can get some real winter "weather". When we lived in MD (50 yrs worth) we had a bunch of storms well over 30", iirc: 1966 (will never forget it, school was closed for an entire week!), '68, '77, '93, and '97 come to mind. I have a pic from '77 showing only the roof of my '68 Dodge Dart showing above the drifts in my driveway. Though the ground stays clear much of the winter and the winter is shorter than here, evidently weather & jetstream patterns of cold/warm/wet/dry tend to converge over certain areas of the Mid-Atlantic, specifically MD/DC/nothern VA. In 20 yrs living in NY and VT only the 41" monster we got here last year was bigger than some of the big storms we got in MD. The good news for them is the stuff melts much sooner in MD/VA than here, but we do have good snow removal here at least. The flip side of the nice long Springs & Falls in MD were the HHH hazy-hot-humid summers that the Mid_Atlantic can have, like a sauna bath sometimes, yucky.
I'm told British diplomats to the US, before a/c, used to be advised to dress as for a tropical climate.

[19&41]

There seems to be a weather track here that spans from Louisiana to up across the Virginias. Sometimes we here get caught in it and other times it will pass north of us.