It seems like a weird bit of culture in the Land of the Free, where it's somehow acceptable to be surveilled by drone so people can see what you're doing in your own yard, so they can fine you.
I understand it if someone is doing it in view of other people, causing an eyesore, but if you have to go to such lengths to see what they're doing, then whom exactly are they harming with what they're doing on their own property?
i've always taken this to explain why americans are so obsessed by 'dont tred on me' freedom -- they have so little of it where its actually experienced: at the daily, local, level
And it's self-reinforcing. I live in a rural county the size of Connecticut with just 5k people in it. The people that choose to live out here are frequently the ones who particularly value that extra freedom ... including law enforcement. It is almost routine here for the sheriff to announce that he will not enforce some state or federal code or another. Talk to a deputy about crime and he'll ask if you have guns, and then recommend that you buy one if you don't.
The county government does little and our property taxes reflect that.
I can and have burned very large piles in my yard, but we're not savages. I have to notify the local volunteer fire department first, or they're libel to show up, and not happily.
I don’t have a particular rural vs. urban point to make, only a general observation about law and freedom: a place where law enforcement feels empowered to ignore the law is a place where law enforcement is effectively the sole power. In effect, a dictator’s prescribed freedom.
>a place where law enforcement feels empowered to ignore the law
In the history of the world, there has never been a law enforcement institution that enforced the rules equally to itself. The same is true of every power structure e.g. governance; financial elites; ...
> a place where law enforcement feels empowered to ignore the law is a place where law enforcement is effectively the sole power
Like New York? The above commenter said law enforcement advised them to get guns which is what I've experienced growing up rural; tyrannical power mongers who are as you said, the sole power, try to take people's guns away.
This equivocation doesn’t make sense: New York has so far respected federal court rulings that repeal its attempts at gun control. You can complain about their attempts, but it seems incorrect to use legislative failures as evidence of selective enforcement.
Or it’s a practical statement on how if you have someone breaking into your house, police may be well over 15+ minutes away if they can rush straight over. Hell, there are quite a few places were response time is going to be measure in hours. Same reason it’s good to have a chainsaw and know how to use it to clear a felled tree on a road, waiting for someone to take care of it for you isn’t always a great plan.
Dictators don’t strike me as generally inclined to recommend having the capacity for self defense. I think you are just trying to come up with the worst possible interpretation of intention.
I agree. Rule of law is critical and requires consistency. But given the choice I'd rather live in a jurisdiction where law enforcement tends to use their discretion in favor of less rather than more centralized control. That bias towards less control seems to be inversely correlated with population density.
We spent 25 years out in the rural West, though we preferred to live in a town.
We left because over the last 15 years the decay of uniform public law enforcement has essentially led to "norms" being enforced by the local landowning elites. And they have certain characteristics that make them highly identifiable. IOW, if you look like them, you get all the space you have said you prefer. If not, well, there's not a lot to limit the potential downsides.
This has also led to a large increase in trash behavior out on the public lands. Lots of new wildcat trails/double track for instance. For us it got pretty uncomfortable a few times in the last 5-6 years. We began to post the shotguns in a highly visible place in the camp, or in the truck. That definitely helped.
I guess that works just as long as according to their discretion that you're "one of the good ones". Folks who are in the out-groups have experienced the tyranny of this "discretion" for generations. Sundown towns didn't disappear as soon as the civil rights act was passed.
Odd, I live in a rural area as well. When I cross the state line into the new york state back country, I literally see garbage piles in some people's front yards. Like they don't wanna pay for garbage collection, so it piles up in their yard for months until they burn it all. The fire dept are all volunteers and don't just randomly show up to a fire unless someone calls it in. We burn wood in the yard for leisure or to get rid of brush, but im more of a get garbage to its place kind of guy.
We have no garbage pickup in the county, we haul it to one of four collection areas. Those cost $140/year plus about $7/100lbs, so no doubt some more thrifty neighbors are burning household trash instead, but I just burn slash and take household trash to the dumpsters.
There's a high fire risk in this area and smoke watchers will report it, and the VFD gets dispatched. They don't respond individually.
it feels to me Americans are more legislated: city laws, county, state, federal. That there are more neighbourly oppressions: your community has more rights against you (about what your lawn looks like, etc.). And so on.
Americans also feel more taxed, again, at every level above.
Ironically, I think the more centralised power is, the more uniformly its managed, the more free one feels under it -- since there arent as many competing interests to worry about
Actually it's funny, my grandfather has been cited numerous times for burning brush on his property recently. Apparently it's always been a law on the books where he lives but the fire department never enforced it
This kind of thing makes the news because it's rare. Drawing conclusions about the amount of freedom experienced by everyday Americans from your news reports is like doing the same for airplane safety: you'll come to the conclusion that the aberrations are the norm.
Where I'm at, the city doesn't even care if you put up a fence blocking sight triangles at an intersection, much less what you do with your property that they can't see.
It makes the news because of the state’s (or any public institution’s) obsession with undermining and reinterpreting our rights for their benefit
The obsession with reminding us how flawed and comedic our checks and balances are, how little accountability there is. how “but at least you can talk about it” will be used to invalidate the issue by people indoctrinated by our compromisestitution
> obsession with reminding us how flawed and comedic our checks and balances are
Literally on an article documenting the state being checked. A corollary to those who choose security over freedom deserving neither is those who choose nihilism over truth and activism are choosing a weak form of mental security.
I've always taken comments like this to explain why [whoever you are] are so obsessed by 'dont tred on me' freedom -- they have so little of it where its actually experienced: at the daily, local, level
The first comment I saw coming in here is claiming that this isn't a problem because, "it's not as if the drone is looking in windows."
I don't know how much this applies to that comment, but "the Land of the Free" is actually full of Calvinist predestination.
"A bad thing happened to someone so they must have deserved it. I'll never have a town surveilling my yard from the sky searching for any excuse to fine me."
People choose to live in HOA neighborhoods. Those people running the HOA are normal homeowners, usually like minded. So to bitch and moan about HOAs is like moving somewhere people think differently than you and being mad you have to follow their rules. I prefer to avoid that myself, so I don't live in and HOA neighborhood.
1. Let’s keep our arguments a bit higher brow. 2. Most people have no option other than to live in an HOA neighborhood, which is not a choice. At least short of abandoning their family.
That’s no excuse to say that people are bitching and meaning. In that sense we’re all bitching and meaning about something or another, and dismissing someone’s argument as such just degrades quality.
The important part about a downward spiral is to not continue it. This is doubly true in a context where the parent post is using questionable rhetorical tricks.
No need to make that look sensible, early HOAs where quite blunt about their core purpose: "no property hereby conveyed shall ever be used or occupied by any Hebrew or by any person of the Ethiopian, Malay or any Asiatic race."[1]
Do you think this is valid for todays HOAs in general?
Seems like a weird point to make today. I doubt the main purpose of a Home Owners Association today is keep out unwanted ethnicities.
Rules that prescribe particular materials or levels or methods of upkeep that are significantly more expensive to implement or maintain than others, or that clash with one's culturally-based desires. A common one is a prohibition against small farm animals or front food gardens. Another is part of a hustle where a required exterior finish is only available from a privileged provider or contractor, similar to how apartment buildings limit your choice of ISP.
Failing to adhere to HOA rules (which may not be readily apparent) results in fines and conflict with a group that's empowered to make decisions about your property. When homeowners have these decisions taken away and are forced to shell out, it becomes a financial and psychological strain that prompts people who would otherwise be enjoying the property to leave (or to not purchase it in the first place).
I live in a condo in the suburbs of NH. My neighborhood mostly looks like a series of houses smushed together like townhouses in a city, but with a shared spacious yard in front of them & behind them. Most of them are linked on both sides but there are also ones that are only linked in pairs. It's certainly an efficient use of land and I ended up with something much nicer than if I had bought a traditional house.
My neighborhood has an HOA. I'm not allowed to use a grill on my deck. I can't just leave piles of trash in my yard. I can't install a garbage disposal unit in my sink. There are rules and the kind I would have really rolled my eyes at when I was younger.
Condos are "common interest living spaces", if someone's house caught fire it can spread to the others. If the septic tank gets screwed up we all need to contribute to get that fixed. There are certain liabilities involved here that require some kind of legal entity to adjudicate, this is the role our HOA fills.
While I don't have the numbers, I speculate that the majority of HOAs in the United States were likely created for similar reasons. Fundamentally an HOA is kind of like the residential version of a workers cooperative, they enable high density housing where everyone gets to have equity. Living under an HOA will always be better than living under a landlord, yet I feel few make this connection, especially when considering who is more likely to discriminate.
That’s not really true, when many cities and towns love HOAs—all the property tax income, none of the responsibilities (plowing, paving, trash, fixing broken water mains), but still all of the regulatory oversight (permitting and inspection fees).
Let me tell you about mine. Apart from snow removal and mowing the common lands, we handle curbside trash collection, repairs to water mains, flushing hydrants, maintaining streetlights (and paying for the electricity to light them), capital projects to manage stormwater, paving, sewer maintenance, installing fiber, forest management, etc. We also negotiate group rates for utilities like gas and electricity. A recent major project is replacing the pumps in our sewer lift station to the tune of $17k (an expense we budgeted for, thankfully). So yeah, apart from things like education and emergency services, we are basically a 19 house municipality.
We lived for fifteen years in a development with an HOA. The HOA saw to lawn mowing, snow removal, and perhaps tree replacement. Eventually, after fuss about parking, the HOA painted house numbers on parking spaces to be sure that we could each claim or two.
But garbage pickup was as far as I know managed by the county.
My brother's house is in a HOA and, as far as I know, pretty much the only thing the HOA is concerned with is the maintenance and plowing of the private road. I'm not sure how you do that without some form of organization/agreement. It's not rare for there to be common areas that aren't maintained by the government (which is really the only alternative) unless a group of neighbors just handle things informally and hope it all works out.
My HOA does. It mows lawns and removes snow. That's almost it: the rules are largely about not storing explosives in your house, which is apparently a thing in Wyoming.
Having been a selectboard member in a small town in MA, I can put forth that rigorous enforcement of contracts, bylaws and laws is the best way to avoid issues spiraling out of control to becoming bigger costlier time-sucks affecting more and more people and wasting more of everybody's time.
With many people who push the boundaries, one thing often leads to another, which leads to more costly measures of getting violators back into compliance.
Yes, often the first violation doesn't seem too big, but those violations are often indications of more to come.
Punish them for their future crimes, oh wise precog!
HOA mentality is cult like or a mini police state and the comment here is a perfect example of that. Nothing happening in that HOA is that important, and ultimately does not matter. In other parts of the world people are dying of hunger and being slaughtered, in America there are tent cities, and people in HOA are so isolated and safe that they take to freaking out about Betty 2 streets down not getting approval before putting a sign in her front yard. Spend your lives worried about more important shit, both HOA and zoning (who will roll up on properties snapping pictures too), because the things you are losing your minds over are things that do not matter. At all.
It's human nature. Same reason republics decline into democracies, or why Europe spent centuries on crusades. It's not enough to live your life the way you want to live it, humans need the validation that their neighbors (or people across the country, or even people in other countries) are forced to live that way too.
No, it's actually not at all about forcing people to live the way I (or the townsfolk) want to live, it's actually about making it so that the way you live your life is in harmony with the rules the municipality set. In Massaschusetts towns, zoning laws require a 2/3 vote at town meeting to be enacted - but I'm not sure how it works in MI.
It seems like you folks have never read zoning bylaws which a municipalities use to say what can and can't be done in certain areas. Believe it or not, city planning is incredibly important to ensure that a town can efficiently tax its inhabitants to fund the services that have become an expectation of normal life.
If you don't like your zoning laws, you should get involved in local politics and try to change the things you don't like.
In fact Long Lake Township has a 238 page document that lays this out.
Ok, so, you put stuff in your backyard where it's out of the way. Your stuff, on your property, not even visible to other people. The city zoning workers use a drone to gain access to your backyard because walking back there would be a criminal activity, trespassing, and possible breaking and entering if a fence gate is involved, so they find a way to circumvent privacy and private property laws to illegally surveil you. You have broken no laws and they are not law enforcement, they themselves are likely breaking the law, and now, you have to comply with their orders and make your back yard be in line with something written in a TWO HUNDRED AND THIRTY EIGHT page book of zoning rules about how you are not allowed to live your life on your property that you own.
And your recommending that the solution is to become an expert in a 238 book, which is larger than some of the worlds most infamous novels, then, spend the rest of your life doing the recommended "If you don't like your zoning laws, you should get involved in local politics and try to change the things you don't like." fighting for years to get any attention on your issue, mostly being ignored because they already talk shit about you in the entire zoning department (I used to date a woman who worked zoning and they have nicknames for people, call them trashy, etc), then maybe one day, years down the road, you might get some compromised version of what you wanted, that still doesn't allow you to do as you wish on your property so long as it's legal and out of sight, and you've wasted a bunch of your life's free time, spent most of it frustrated, and ultimately don't get what you want and just say fuck it and go back to doing what you want and saying screw the zoning rules anyway.
The "if you don't like it, get involved and change it from the inside" solution doesn't work well in individual issues (or large issues honestly), and shouldn't be needed in cases like this anyway.
No, not at all punishing for future crimes - just acknowledging issues and making sure they get attention to prevent them from getting worse. Local government has very little power to actually undo things that go wrong - it can often takes years, if it can happen at all. The time spent dealing with stupid shit that goes wrong is incredibly wasteful and means time and money is spent on that instead of actually moving the municipality forward. Therefore, the best medicine is equal and rigorous enforcement.
HOA is a whole different ballgame, not the same as zoning.
They’re getting paid when they discover people are breaking the weird little useless rules they wrote. As Adam Smith wrote in the Wealth of Nations: “Power is money”. Remove their power and you give money back to the people.
It’s weird this is a story about the USA and not somewhere I’d expect it more like Russia.
I understand it if someone is doing it in view of other people, causing an eyesore, but if you have to go to such lengths to see what they're doing, then whom exactly are they harming with what they're doing on their own property?