re: Have HOAs gone too far?

I live in one and I hate it. I've always hated them. I didn't want to move there because of it but the mrs. won out because she loved the house.

Growing up, my parents bought a house in a very affluent neighborhood here which had one. One of the bylaws was no cars parked on the street for 24 hours. Well when my sister and I reached driving age and bought cars, we parked them on the street so we didn't have to do a Chinese fire drill in the mornings to get out of my parents' way when they had to get to work. They kept sending letters and we kept ignoring them. At some point common sense has to prevail.

My house now has an HOA that formed very shortly after a decent portion of the neighborhood went up. One of the bylaws was that all mailboxes must be uniform. I'm cool with that. Problem is my entire street and the surrounding ones are part of that initial 2003 construction so NO ONE has a sanctioned mailbox. I took the initiative to go cut down a tree and saw a post from scratch so it had that natural/rustic look. Found the perfect "y" joint and everything so it's one solid 7' piece I buried down 2 ft of concrete. Of course the HOA wants to raise hell about it. I told them if they want to remove it they can use my dues to fund the removal job because I'm not fricking doing it.