What is No Lawns?
A community devoted to alternatives to monoculture lawns, with an emphasis on native plants and conservation. Rain gardens, xeriscaping, strolling gardens, native plants, and much more! (from official Reddit r/NoLawns)
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Where can you find the official No Lawns socials?
Rules
HOAs are such a fascinatingly American thing. They seem to cause no end of annoyance for those living in them, and have few to no positive effects (at least, we don't hear about any positives), yet they persist.
Can those who are adversely affected not do anything about their local ones, or is it actually a case that they're not too bad for most people most of the time?
There's very little people can do. In order to fix things you usually need to get on the board, but the people who run HOAs are usually retired nimby assholes and they hold meetings while most in the neighborhood are at work so nobody can oppose them. They then reelect themselves to the board and the cycle continues. HOAs are usually a thing set up by the builders to make their lives easier for some paperwork and stuff. They absolutely suck 99% of the time.
Native plant garden bans aren't just an HOA thing. Many counties or cities ban them too. Much of it stems for chemical manufacturers selling the white picket fence image after WWII to veterans receiving funding to buy a home. The chemical manufacturers pushed hard for that image so they could keep making as much profit as they made manufacturing for weapons during the wartime.
This means that trying to fight your HOA on yards is useless, you have to go higher and it's a big big fight
HOAs are usually a thing set up by the builders to make their lives easier for some paperwork and stuff.
Builders are encouraged by the local government to set up HOAs because it lets said government shirk its responsibility to maintain infrastructure and services.
If your subdivision is gated, its streets are private and the homeowners are responsible for repaving them, for instance.
(Of course, that's only a motivation cities caught onto relatively recently. The original reason for HOAs -- at least for neighborhoods of single-family houses, as opposed to condos that have legitimate shared maintenance -- was to help keep black people out.)
Good input. I was definitely doing some "draw the rest of the owl" for brevity about their history and impact.
HOAs offsets the cost and maintenance of roads and other civil services, so many counties love them because it keeps costs down for the government while charging the neighborhood. It keeps taxes down overall.
HOA benefit to have their own fiefdom, that allows them to weld near unchecked power because the turn out for board elections are even lower than most local elections.
Homeowners have the ability dissolve their HOA but they don't because people don't vote.
You hear about the shitty ones, tbh.
Mine covers the community pool, a few small playgrounds, gym, community garden, etc. Thats it.
No getting approval to have your door be blue instead of white, no measuring your grass height, or any of those shenanigans.
Dismantling them would require somehow introducing a vote to abolish the hoa, and a lot of people involved in hoas are ancient NIMBYs that have nothing better to do after retirement that be in other people's business. The purpose of an HOA is to ostensibly preserve property values, and only homeowners are allowed to vote, not any poor suckers that are renting and actually living there.
and like most things that are bad about the us, they exist because of racism
You just can't handle all the freedom.
To add to some of the other replies (road repair, etc) the one we used to live in also offered access to a full pool area with life guards. This included a lap pool (with certain adult only times), toddler shallow pool, a medium (standing/walking) depth that had some fountains in it and a splash pad. A decent sized play ground. There was also a larger event space with a kitchen that you could rent (price was free, just had to schedule a slot and sign a damages waver). The fee also included “beautification” things like all the flower beds and landscaping/grass maintenance in all the public areas, which included a 2 mile loop running/walking path with the various body-weight workout stops. Tennis courts, community events with food/games/etc. It’s about $880 a year now i think, and the only rules were really just keep your place looking decent. We didnt have any issues because i always mowed the lawn and trimmed the bushes anyways…there’s also guidelines for not painting your house crazy colors or building really weird structures, but it was pretty easy for your average lifestyle all things considered.
I guess really like an apartment complex, but you have your own house you can do whatever you want to with- for better or worse. Im no advocate for HOAs, not even this one. I will never live in one again…but not all HOAs are equal is my only point. Some are $1000 year with literally nothing to “give back”. Eff all that.
HOAs have a lot of applications that aren't horrible, you just probably dont hear about them. Neighborhoods with HOAs are often centrally planned, so there will be common areas that require upkeep like pools, clubhouses, parks, etc. They essentially take on a form of government role. In a lot of neighborhoods that are not part of an incorporated city, they do things like trash collection, road upkeep, snow plowing, etc.
I've lived in 2 places with an HOA, and in the one, all they did was the landscaping, even around all the yards of the houses. In the other, they handled the park/pool/clubhouse, and they did trash collection.
The down sides are often because the people in charge are just retirees who hunger for power, and there isnt much oversight from real government. Most people dont care enough to try to oust the bad leaders, so they stay in control, and they often do things that are illegal, but no one calls them out on it.
They were made to harass minorities as far as I'm concerned.
Maryland has HB232 which supersedes all HoA law and says any low impact landscaping / xeriscaping is permissible AND favored if it prioritizes native plants and fauna / pollinators.
The simplest thing to come of it is “you can’t force me to grow grass”
Kinda funny how Americans call their country "land of the free" but can't even do certain things on THEIR OWN PROPERTY because of the HOAs.
Should we go down the list of things Americans can't do but the rest of the world can? The irony of holding up freedom as their cornerstone while keeping the largest inmate population over bullshit without even a trial.
Number one on that list is health insurance being tied to your job. As in, some people literally die if they quit their job. Very freedom, much America.
When you're in an HOA, you've contracted away some of your rights to property.
But that's the devil's game of "property rights". So many people think they've gained sovereignty because money changed hands. They don't ask how property originates and why it was up for sale to begin with.
What's the point of even having a yard if it looks like the ones in the picture? Why not just go live in an apartment then. To me, owning a piece of land to enjoy was kind of the key reason I wanted to own a house in the first place.
What’s the point of even having a yard if it looks like the ones in the picture?
Dog bathroom.
Where I live, it's a bathroom for other people's dogs.
Oh, shit, right, so I get to share something I learned fairly recently.
For much of human history, wealth could be measured many ways but by far the most powerful currency was land. Land meant resources, and the land's value was determined by what respirce it produced: fertile floodplains meant crops, lakes for fishing, forests for hunting, and, worst-case scenario, moorland could be used for grazing livestock. But what if that wasn't enough? What if you had huge tracts of land but your narcissism and insecurity were so overwhelming that you just needed to prove yourself even more?
Enter: lawns. Lawns are fields of grass, which is a useless crop that can only really be used for grazing. But the grass is kept so short that livestock can't graze on it. But grass like that can only be grown on plains that are ideal for crops, so you need to get rid of the crops. And short grass needs tending, tending with more care than any crop, so you need to have workers dedicated to it. That's what a lawn is: it's bragging, it's saying "not only do I have loads of top-quality land and an army of workers, I can afford to piss away huge swathes of it for absolutely no reason other than to prove that I can." It's hard to image a greater and more grotesque display of boujee excess than the lawn.
Of course, this is what makes the modern lawn all the more pathetic: that neatly parcelled-out vast tract of land you can afford to squander as a display of your immeasurable wealth is, like, a few meters across. It's like the Stamford apes experiment: they know what they must do, but not why they're doing it and, if they knew what a lawn really was and where it came from, I can't imagine many would be quite so attached. Then again, maybe they would be. Maybe they really do think their home is a castle and that they live in a kingdom they can walk around in thirty second.
OP, this was introduced September 25, 2025 (you mention this), sponsored by 14 of the Pennsylvania House's 203 members (all Democratic in a split House), and its only action so far after introduction was to be referred to the Housing & Community Development Committee (read: nothing).
It's not dead per se, but it's made no progress whatsoever in six months, and the next session starts January 2027. This bill categorically is not evidence that it's "becoming law across America".
(Here's the bill on the official General Assembly website btw. I have no idea where Fast Democracy gets its summary you pasted here; an LLM?)
Can we vote to ban HOAs?
Just ban the fucking HOAs
HOAs are the devil - even if I could afford property there's no house cheap enough to put up with one.
God forbid you have native plants that thrive for the entire local ecosystem it supports. This spreads out as the local habitats need to leave their native homes to find other sources for their foods. Plant native. It’s good for our planet!
I had a thought the other day:
If your HOA sues you and YOU WIN, they (usually) have to pay your attorney fees in addition to their own.
But...you're part of the HOA. Your dues will go up to cover the costs of a stupid lawsuit that you beat.
I'm a way it seems bizarre that HOAs should be so broadly despised yet also broadly adopted. I suppose it has to do with the corners of the culture I sit in.
I think the reason for the mass adoption is the surface selling point (higher resale property value) plus the usual minor fee lull people into a false understanding of just how dangerous they can become once a person on a power trip gets into the board
Municipalities are only giving licenses to new developments that have HOA included in, because HOAs transfer the necesario tax burden to the HOA. Americans would do anything for avoid paying taxes, including paying more for worst services paying private intermediates
The adoption is coming from the Epstein class who owns the property.
We are all just trying to find a place to live and pay rent.
For a supposedly Capitalist country, it's amazing that the US allows neighbours to decide themselves what others can or not do in their own land and force them to do it or not.
I'm thinking it's the bastard child of extreme aversion to having oversight institutions working for the common good, so instead of like in having Europe regional/country-wide rules which apply to everybody and are enforced by some oversight autority on what cannot be done in residential areas to avoid things like for example people operating poluting industries in residential areas, you get local groups with quite arbitrary power to decide what their neighbours can or cannot do, each local and with rules not at all consistent across the country (or at last a State).
It's a system incredibly open to abuse, especially by the kind of people we in my country call "small dictators" (the kind of people who, when they have some power over others, force them to do things purelly because they derive psychological enjoyment from imposing their will on others)
But what about my property values? /s
Wild you are accountable to strangers to this level.
HOAs are criminally oppressive, born from the desire to prevent colored families from moving into white neighborhoods, and should be outlawed.
Hey who in US is leading a fight for mandatory 30 day minimal vacations a year and, nationalization of all seashores and guaranteed health care?
I want to join
Let's see...We've got the party that bombs foreigners for no reason, or... The other party that also bombs foreigners for no reason.
I don't know if MN has this law but I did get a grant this year from the states Board of Water and Soil Resources to plant native as a lawn replacement. It's amazing. It's called Lawns to Legumes
MN passed a law in 2023 preventing cities from banning native lawns. It said notbong about HOAs, though. Even the state don't wanna fuck with them, it seems. Link
