Homeowners Associations: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)
LastWeekTonight1 HN recommenders · 2023–2024
8.5M views · commentary · evergreen · Uploaded 2023-04-10
A John Oliver Last Week Tonight segment on homeowners associations, covering the surprising power they hold over residents and how arbitrary their rules can be. It mixes investigative comedy with examples of HOA overreach.
HN uses it as the go-to reference in threads about HOA absurdity, such as fines over small violations and authoritarian rules.
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4 comments from Hacker News
John Oliver recently did a show on this. HOAs were awful enough in my mind before that, now they’re downright scary. [VIDEO]
> Nobody else has any rights to what I own Nobody else, except perhaps your local HOA [1]. So much about your "property". /s [1] [VIDEO]
HOAs are in many cases a collection of opinionated amateurs making binding decisions on behalf of their disinterested neighbors. See also 'special assessments' And that's the best case scenario. HOAs can get a tad 'authoritarian' at least according to John Oliver: [VIDEO]
You do not have the freedom to choose an HOA, only the freedom to move somewhere else. Unless you define "freedom" as "not held captive", I don't think that really counts. A fun John Oliver video on how corrupt HOA's are: [VIDEO]