HOAs are all about conformity. Hell, most of society is all about forcing the square peg into the round hole. Don’t live somewhere with an HOA if you want the ability to do what you want with your house. HOAs suck. They’re indefensible except from a property value standpoint. Even then, atrocious and nasty controlling jackasses.
I can see the point in regulating safety issues and truly objectionable decorations (e.g. swastikas). But you seem to be misunderstanding the purpose of your neighbors' homes. Their purpose is not to maintain or increase the amount of monopoly money you one day will be able to exchange your home for. Their purpose is to provide enjoyment and security for the people who live in that home.
So I’m watching Along Came A Spider from 2001 in which a web camera connected to “cyberspace”, as the computer expert calls it, is able to zoom in from their CRT monitor on a mirror and enhance the label on a medicine vial to read the name and address of who it was prescribed to.
In the United States at least, homes are very much about maintaining the amount of money one has, as well as enjoyment and security. That’s the point of home equity. Whether an HOA is necessary to do that is something that I question.
It isn't needed for that, but an HOA can drive values up. Sometimes so well that the homes become too valuable and unaffordable even for their current owners. And with the current market conditions many houses are now liquidity traps, unsellable becaues nobody can afford to buy them.
So where I live, you can have long grass if it’s a specific type that was typical in the area before Europeans settled here. There’s a house a few blocks away with long prairie grass and last time I went by there they had small little signs on the edge that explained what the type of grass is and some other info. There might be some city ordinances you have to follow, I am not sure of that part.
On the other side of the coin, my HOA voted to remove almost all the trees in the neighborhood (a variety of willows and oaks) and replace them with Bradford Pear trees. My wife hates these trees with a passion. They're weak, so after every storm you have new scratches on your car from flying branches. They smell bad. And they're an invasive species. But they were uniform in appearance, and I'm sure one of the people in the HOA council made a nice profit selling them to the HOA. So, yay capitalism.
Oh what a horrible decision! Our development had Bradford Pears planted when it was first built because they were cheap and grew quickly. 30 years later, there are few of them remaining. All the rest have been taken down by storms over the years, and replaced with better trees by owners.
