How to Get Along in an HOA
A Guide to Peaceful Living Homeowners’ Associations are notorious breeding grounds for hostility and disagreement. Comedians make jokes about it. Advice columnists offer tips on how to manage it. Lawyers make big bucks trying to resolve it. Why are HOAs so ripe for conflict and adversity? Simply put, HOAs are made up of people and people sometimes have a hard time getting along, and the larger the group or the more diverse the worldviews, the harder it can be. As community consultant Diana Leafe Christian reports in her book on communities, Creating a Life Together, 90 percent of intentional communities fail—in large part because of conflict. An intentional community is a group of people, like us, who have chosen to share resources, in our case, a farm. As a community…