John Oliver HOA

Last Updated: February 28, 2025

Homeowners Associations: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

John Oliver’s segment on homeowners associations (HOA meanning) exposes the absurdity and far-reaching power of these private “mini-governments” that affect nearly 29% of Americans.

He explains that while HOAs are originally intended to maintain neighborhood aesthetics and protect property values, they often enforce bizarre, arbitrary rules—like mandating that trees be “tree-shaped” or fining homeowners for having visible trash cans, unapproved lawn art, or even the wrong color shutters.

Oliver highlights how these fines can quickly spiral out of control, sometimes even leading to foreclosure, as seen in outrageous examples where homeowners lose their properties over accumulated fees.

He also takes aim at the role of for-profit management companies that patrol neighborhoods for infractions, essentially operating with the unchecked authority of a local government but without the same accountability.

Throughout the 25‐minute piece, Oliver uses humor and satire to underscore the double-edged nature of HOAs: while they can help maintain community standards, they often do so at the cost of individual freedom and financial security—especially in a housing market where over 80% of new homes are tied to an HOA.

Full Transcript

OLIVER: Our main story tonight concerns home ownership. So if you are under 35,honestly, this story isn't for you. It'll never be for you. You will never own a home.

Sorry, that is the deal that you made when you decided to be born after 1988. But we didn't want you to feel left out, so we've actually prepared a full alternative story for you tonight—about Chuck E. Cheese. A different, crumbling American institution that you should go watch now instead. This is real. It is 25 minutes long, and you can find it at… Please go do that now because there is genuinely nothing for you to see here.

Okay, for everyone who remains, this story is about HOAs, which stands for Homeowners Associations. Not, as you might have thought, "Horse on Adderall" (which I believe is the potential sequel to Cocaine Bear).

HOAs—also sometimes known as community associations—are entities set up to govern groups of homes, like a suburban neighborhood development or condos, and they often make local news as the villains in stories like this:

JOE DUCEY: It's a simple story of a man with some simple needs.

TANYA: Sit down, have his little chips and a soda if he wants, and say hello to some people.

DUCEY: Tanya's talking about her neighbor, Ted...

TED: I'll be 92 in September.

DUCEY: ...and the bench outside his door.

TED: I have a place I like to come out here and sit and relax.

DUCEY: Notices from his HOA, the Bethany Villa Association, saying simply remove your bench from the common area or it will be removed.

TANYA: The man deserves a place to rest and enjoy nature, eat his little snacks, say hello to people, and pet puppies.

OLIVER: Yeah! Let that man have his fucking bench! He deserves to eat snacks and pet puppies, which is, by the way, the single greatest way you could spend a day. Nothing tops that. If on the day your baby was born a friend came and told you they spent the afternoon eating snacks and petting puppies, they had a better day than you did. The miracle of life can't compete with the simple joy of munching snacks and scratching backs. Nom nom nom nom nom—and this is true, a rub rub.

Also, quick shoutout to Tanya there, the neighbor billed by that local station as simply "Neighbor and Ted Fan." She may be a Ted fan, but I for one am a Tanya fan because I see the effort it takes to put on a full face first thing in the morning and go on the news just to say, "Stop fucking with Ted!"

But that is not a one-off. Stories of HOAs being petty are legion.

REPORTER: A valley homeowner says her HOA wants to fine her because she installed artificial grass.

REPORTER: A homeowners association told one San Antonio family that their holiday decorations were up too early, so they had to come down.

HOMEOWNER: I got lots and lots of letters from the HOA telling me to stop feeding the ducks.

HOMEOWNER: I mean, when you receive a violation for a tree not being tree-shaped, it boggles your mind.

OLIVER: Yeah, of course it does—because what does “not tree-shaped” even mean? If it has branches, bark, and a place for a squirrel to store some nuts (and get some fucks), it's a tree. It's tree-shaped by definition.

The fact is, a lot of people live in HOAs. 29% of the US population lives in a community association. And it's actually increasingly hard to find a home that doesn't come with one; out of all the new single-family homes sold in 2021, 82 percent were in an HOA. That's up from around just 40% in 1990 which is pretty remarkable, given that when one local station asked viewers how they felt about their HOA, the results were nearly universally negative—with one notable exception.

DUCEY: This was a rare comment: “I like our HOA I guess I’m the lucky one.” But it was quickly followed with, "Don't count yourself lucky too soon. Every HOA is just one vote away from hellish nightmares."

OLIVER: Wow. "One vote away from hellish nightmares" is a pretty intense comment. It's also, incidentally, the DNC's sole campaign message for the last two elections. So if they are this widely used and this widely loathed, tonight let's look at HOAs—what they are, what purpose they serve, and the surprising powers they have to wreak havoc in people's lives. And let's start with the basics, courtesy of this old explainer video.

HOA EXPLAINER: Just what is a community association? The association is a legal entity created as the result of a planned community. A board of directors is responsible for governing your association. Working together with the board and committee members can ensure that your community runs smoothly and effectively. After all, board members are owners just like yourself.

OLIVER: OK, you can really tell that video was from the '90s—not just because it’s shot with a quality that can only be described as "after school porno," but also because the board in question is just three men and one woman that they all ignore. In other words, almost every '90s sitcom.

The point is, HOAs are run by elected boards of your fellow homeowners, and they require the payment of dues—which average around $200 to $300 a month, but can be much more depending on where you live.

In return, the HOA covers upkeep on common areas and amenities in the neighborhood, like playgrounds or swimming pools.

They also, crucially, enforce architectural and landscaping guidelines like "no benches" or "trees must be tree-shaped," which are often trying to push aesthetic uniformity and preserve property values.

You can find HOA rules like “homes may display a maximum of two exterior decorative objects” or “all garage doors must be painted Benjamin Moore Mayonnaise OC-85” and one Arizona HOA required that “front yard landscaping must contain a minimum of one (1) thirty-six inch box tree, one (1) twenty-four inch box tree, ten (10) five-gallon shrubs, ten (10) one-gallon shrubs”...

And I genuinely can't tell if those are HOA requirements for taking care of your lawn or rules to Settlers of Catan.

And those rules aren't just advisory—they're enforced through fines. HOAs can be pretty unforgiving about handing them out.

DIANE WILSON: Take a close look at Debra Blue's Wake County home. The color of her shutters had her facing steep fines with her homeowners association.

DEBRA: They decided to fine me $25 a day.

WILSON: Debra paid close to $2,000 in fines and took down her plum shutters

DEBRA: which was immediately met with a response that now they were going to fine me for taking the shutters off the house and start fining me again.

OLIVER: That is absurd. She got fined for the color of her shutters, took them down, and then got in trouble for the absence of shutters.

It's one of those situations where no matter what you do, you lose. Sort of like going on The Voice. Sure, there are technically winners, but name a single one. This show has been on for a conservative 15 years and not a single winner is a household name. Seriously, tell me the first and last name of just one winner. You can't! No one can. Not even Honky Tonk Frankenstein can do it.

Some HOAs can be surprisingly aggressive about actively seeking out rule violators, as this man discovered.

OMAR LEWIS: Three years after buying this property, the Henrys received a letter from their homeowners association

GAVIN: saying that they were doing an audit and noticed that I had a shed in my backyard and it wasn't approved by my HOA.

LEWIS: Gavin, who is a disabled veteran, told the HOA the shed was there before he bought the property and that none of his neighbors had ever complained. Since you can't see this shed from the front yard and no one came knocking at the Henrys' front door, they asked their HOA how they were able to perform an audit. That's when they were told over the phone that Google Maps was used to scope out their backyard.

OLIVER: Yeah. They spied on him with Google Maps. Which feels extreme—if you're relying on the achievements of the space program to find out what's in someone's backyard, it's probably not your business.

And if you're wondering how HOAs get the authority to do all of this, the answer is: they're basically born with it. HOAs are typically created by developers when they build a new neighborhood. They write the HOA into deed restrictions with membership automatic upon purchasing your home, and they're set up as not-for-profit, private corporations that can often function like a local government. Some HOAs handle “street paving, snow plowing, and lighting and even run private sewer and water systems” and others even dabble in traffic enforcement.

JACLYN SCHULTZ: In the Park View community in Spring Valley, an HOA board email says they installed a speed camera—and they say more are coming. Neighbor Ted Morris says what worries him and some other neighbors is how much a violation will cost you for going slightly over 15 miles an hour. The notice says it's $250 for the first ticket, $500 for the second, $1,000 for the third, and any more violations for you and your guests.

OLIVER: A thousand-dollar speeding ticket given out not by the city, but by the HOA. Basically, the way HOAs work is that they get to set the rules and select the punishment for breaking them. Think of it like Disney World. When you walk into the Mouse’s house, you play by the Mouse’s rules, and if you step out of line, Goofy is allowed to break your fucking knees.

And the existence of HOAs is something that many local governments actually appreciate. “Cash-strapped municipalities like them because developers build roads and parks and pass the costs along to the homeowners…”

In fact “many municipalities mandate the creation of HOAs in new residential developments” which might be why the rise of HOAs has been called “the most significant privatization of local government responsibilities in recent times.”

And that gets to an important point: HOAs can have the authority of a government and collect fees and fines like one, but when it comes to accountability, they can actively resist it in ways that government officials could only dream about.

After the residents of one HOA in Arizona posted some social media comments about an upcoming board election, the HOA demanded that they remove posts that were critical of its board and “threatened to fine residents as much as $250 per day” if they didn't and while they eventually walked that back, that is a pretty striking level of hostility toward basic scrutiny.

Even before you learn that this is how one board member dealt with press inquiries as the story unfolded:

CAMERON POLOM: I gotta ask you

TODD MCCOY: No comment.

POLOM: No, I'm sorry, but you have a lot of

MCCOY: Get away from me!

POLOM: That's Val Vista Lake's board director, Todd McCoy, following a private board meeting tonight in Gilbert. After being shoved, we reiterated to McCoy that the community was very upset, to which he replied

MCCOY: “I don’t care about them right now”

OLIVER: "Holy shit." He came at that reporter with the fire of a thousand Mel Gibsons. There is almost no scenario where yelling, "Get away from me!" that aggressively is called for—aside from maybe bumping into Ezra Miller in Hawaii.

At this point, you probably won't be surprised to learn that private associations, designed to have the force of law in suburban neighborhoods, have a history of being used to exclude certain groups. As we discussed in our housing discrimination piece, many neighborhoods had racial covenants barring the sale of housing to Black Americans, and in some cases HOAs try to enforce those covenants even after the Supreme Court ruled them unconstitutional.

But even today, there are cases where HOAs are used to actively exclude certain types of residents. Just last June, the board of the Providence HOA in Denton County, Texas—which oversees a community of 2,200 homes—passed a rule that would ban renting a house to anyone using a publicly financed or subsidized housing program, such as Section 8. The impacts of that were immediate.

SCOOP JEFFERSON: Revisha Threat fears being homeless soon. That's because the rules have changed in their Providence Village subdivision.

REVISHA THREAT: I sit in my living room and cry because I just don't know what to do.

OLIVER: Now, that is terrible—but it's not just her. That new rule threatened renting in the neighborhood, with Black families making up 93 percent of those households with Section 8 vouchers”. And I know that those HOA officials might not think of themselves as racist, but 93% is a pretty solid "A" for racism.

That HOA's policy is now under investigation, but the fact is “There’s nothing in state of federal law that forbids homeowners associations from enacting such bans” it's basically a segregation loophole, which, by the way, would be a pretty good slogan—for the suburbs.

And if you're thinking, "Well, this all seems fucked up, but thank God there aren't private companies making this worse," hold on—I’ve got some bad news. Because at this point, we should probably discuss management companies.

You see, while all the big decision making in HOAs is done by elected boards of homeowners, they may not have the time or skills to do everything running an HOA entails, or they may not want to get their hands dirty policing their neighbors.

That is why “the majority of HOAs hire professional companies to handle their community’s dat-to-day needs” under the board's direction. Here is how one of the biggest management companies—Associa—pitches itself:

ANDREW BROCK, EVP/CIO, ASSOCIA: "The people who serve on our boards are volunteers, and for most of them, they have other full-time jobs. So our role is to come alongside them and help do the heavy lifting of what it takes to manage that neighborhood that they may not have the time for or the expertise for. Our role is really to help them achieve that vision."

OLIVER: Now, in theory, that sounds pretty good, doesn't it? But in practice, it can get much messier than that. Remember Ted, who was getting his bench taken away? His neighborhood was run by Associa. So if all they want to do is help a neighborhood "achieve a vision," as long as that vision means Ted doesn't get to sit down—I guess mission accomplished…

The problem is, when you introduce for-profit companies to find problems in your neighborhood, things can change fast. Many of these management companies employ people whose job is to drive around neighborhoods looking for infractions. If you look at that letter that Ted got regarding his bench, you'll see that it says the infraction was noted by the “Associa Arizona Inspection Team”.

And just watch as one woman explains how quickly things snowballed after a new management company took over her HOA.

KAITLYN ROSS: First, the HOA told her her trash cans couldn't be visible from the street.

PAT KRAMER: you have to turn your head so far over like this to see it for the second you are passing my house.

ROSS: So she moved them inside

KRAMER: which is very hard to get them in and out.

ROSS: Then, the problem was her hose.

KRAMER: It was, you know, all wrapped up. So it really didn't look bad.

ROSS: Then, it was her lawn art

KRAMER: can't have those.

ROSS: Then, they wanted her to power wash her house and sweep up her driveway. But when she didn't get it done fast enough, she got late fees on top of late fees—twenty-five dollars a day for each infraction.

KRAMER: These are things that are so incidental. They're not important—they're asinine. And you're charging me $17,000?

OLIVER: Seventeen thousand dollars. That is clearly ridiculous. I adore everything about that woman, including her world-class delivery of "asinine." Although, I will say, I do think she could do a little bit better with her lawn art. It's not a 17,000-dollar fine, of course—it’s just a bit of a waste when she could have something spectacular like ducks wearing boots or ducks made of bananas. Your lawn is a canvas, Pat, fill it with whatever duck art speaks to you.

The point is, this is a system that can quickly trap people in a vicious cycle of debt.

Here's how it works: Let's say you fall behind on HOA payments. You might be charged interest and have to pay additional penalties—but that is just the beginning. Once the management company starts pursuing payment, they can involve lawyers whose fees can be astronomical, and things can get out of hand fast.

Consider the bill of one 88-year-old homeowner in Texas: She fell ill and was in a nursing home, so she missed an annual dues payment at the start of 2021 of $423. Her HOA then started charging interest and fees for missed payments, and just five months later her bill was already up to $682.

But things really started escalating when lawyer's fees were introduced—because there are a lot of them. Over the course of just two years, she suddenly owed over $8,000, over half of which was in lawyer's fees.

And if you're wondering why lawyers are even getting involved, it's because they often come in when HOAs are ready to exercise that truly incredible power over homeowners—a fact this woman learned the hard way.

MIESHA ROSS: There was a process server who knocked on my door to serve me with a foreclosure notice. And, of course, I freaked out.

BRITTANY FREEMAN: Miesha had fallen behind on a lot of her bills, but she said she'd work something out with the mortgage company.

ROSS: But this was the HOA, and I had no idea that an HOA could foreclose on you.

OLIVER: It's true—HOAs can foreclose on your home. It sounds ridiculous, but it's absolutely true.

Like how there are four times as many chickens as people on Earth. Or Lenny Kravitz is Al Roker's second cousin. Or that the first song Charlie Puth ever masturbated to was "This Love" by Maroon 5. That's a true fact! And I hate that I know it, but I love that you now know it too.

And this power gets deployed all over the country. Colorado HOAs alone “filed more than 2,400 foreclosure cases from January 2018 through February 2022”. To make matters worse, those homes can then be sold at auction—sometimes without the homeowner even realizing it.

Just listen to one woman explain how, despite desperately trying to pay her late HOA fees, she ended up losing everything.

HOMEOWNER: Walked in, paid them $2,700, and when I walked out, I said, "This is all I owe, right?" "Yes." Then here comes the next set of letters, and now it's up to $6,400.

REBECCA LINDSTROM: Turns out, there were post-judgment legal fees and 18% back interest, so even after she'd paid more than $9,000, she was still somehow behind on her dues. But in 2018, she received the most shocking letter of all—an eviction notice.

HOMEOWNER: You know, it's—you lose your home. That's hard.

LINDSTROM: But sadness turned to anger when she realized the HOA had purchased her home through foreclosure for $3.24, a year before she was evicted.

OLIVER: That happened—they bought her whole house for $3.24. Losing your home is horrifying enough; seeing it sold for so little is genuinely insulting. $3.24 is significantly less than what it costs to buy just one of those banana ducks. They cost $17.89 dollars—and I know that because I bought one, and yes, I too was surprised by how small it is. But I was even more shocked to learn that it technically costs more than someone's entire fucking house!

Most states don't even require HOAs to offer a payment plan before taking legal action against a homeowner. And the reason is simple: HOAs are private organizations. That means the “nation’s 350,000 HOAs are largely unregulated” and the government sees any disputes as private matters. The California AG's office says it does not handle most homeowners associations (HOA) complaints; the Texas Secretary of State says that “no state agency regulates home or property owners’ associations.” And the New York State AG says “In most cases there is no government agency that can help unhappy owners who are having problems with their homeowners association (HOA).” —adding “Good luck!”, which is basically just a cuteway to say "You're fucked!"

It's like, you're fucked, washed her hair and put on a little church dress.

And if after all this you're thinking, "Well, I have learned my lesson. I will never buy a house in an HOA," remember that over 80% of new homes that are sold come with one. Also, you might not know you're dealing with a bad HOA until it's too late.

In most places, you aren't legally required to be given access to all of its rules until after your offer to buy a home is accepted.

Which seems a bit weird, doesn't it? If your HOA can see your backyard from space, you should probably be able to see your HOA documents before you sign. And look, I'm not saying all HOAs should immediately be gone—some people do like theirs.

Besides, local governments right now just aren't equipped to suddenly take over services like trash collection or maintenance that they provide. But at the very least, states should look for ways to avoid the worst possible outcomes for homeowners who simply find themselves in a tough spot—like mandating HOAs offer payment plans on unpaid debt before taking legal action and banning foreclosures based solely on fines and attorney fees.

Because at their best, HOAs are nothing more than annoying, student council adults telling you to trim your shrubs and move your trash cans; but at their worst, they're glorified debt collectors with the power to upend your life and expel you from your neighborhood.

At absolute minimum, from now on, HOAs should be forced to be much clearer about what people are potentially getting themselves into.

♪ (CHEERFUL MUSIC PLAYS) ♪

HOA REPRESENTATIVE: Good morning, Stephanie and Chloe! Hi there. Welcome to Cedar Paradise. The moment you purchased your home, you joined our wonderful homeowners association—whether you wanted to or not.

The HOA is here to take care of you. You give us money, and in return, we maintain all the beauty you see around us.

And if you don't pay up, we'll turn your fucking life upside down.

So let me show you the neighborhood!

Here at Cedar Paradise, each of our lawns requires, somewhere on the property, one tree, six three-gallon shrubs, one bird bath, a garden gnome, a second gnome for that one to talk to, a third one they ignore, one Victorian child playing hopscotch, and an American flag. But no benches.

TED: Please! No!

HOA REPRESENTATIVE: Eat shit, Ted!

When you join an HOA, you're really joining a community that looks after each other. And as your elected representative, I make sure to take a hands-on approach. Ah! Novelty mailbox. That's a violation. Oh, yeah! That's a violation. Wind chimes. Gross. Three violations. Nope. I don't care for that tree. That's a violation. Whew—16 in a 15. That's another thousand dollars, Ken!

KEN: Fuck you!

HOA REPRESENTATIVE: And Ken isn't the only one who appreciates everything the HOA does.

HOMEOWNER: Fuck the HOA! Fascist sons of bitches.

HOMEOWNER: They found my shed by strapping a GoPro to a raccoon. A damn raccoon. Some white people bullshit.

PAM: Apparently, my trash cans are too visible when they're parked up there. But you'd have to turn your neck like this to even see them—and I don't know what else I'm supposed to do at this point.

HOA REPRESENTATIVE: Hey, Pam. Cans aren't allowed to go down to the curb until 4:00 p.m. on trash day. It's 3:57 p.m.

PAM: How long have you been in there?

HOA REPRESENTATIVE: Pam, this is recycle only.

PAM: I know!

HOA REPRESENTATIVE: Pam.

PAM: I know.

HOA REPRESENTATIVE: You know this, Pam.

PAM: I know.

HOA REPRESENTATIVE: Oh! No broken glass on the driveway! That's another fine.

PAM: Are you allowed to do that?

HOA REPRESENTATIVE: There's nothing in the rules that says I can't.

PAM: These rules are stupid. I don't…

HOA REPRESENTATIVE: What did you say?!

PAM: Nothing. Nothing. Have a good day! Bob!

HOA REPRESENTATIVE: And hey, if you fall behind on your payments, we get it. We're not monsters.

HOMEOWNER: Oh. Hello.

HOA REPRESENTATIVE: I'm here for the debt.

HOMEOWNER: I didn't know I owed anything.

HOA REPRESENTATIVE: Well, we sent you a $20 fine three months ago, and we haven't heard from you since.

HOMEOWNER: Well, here. Here's 20 bucks.

HOA REPRESENTATIVE: Thank you. But that's not all—there's this bill now too.

HOMEOWNER: Wait, what is this now?

HOA REPRESENTATIVE: I'll let our lawyer explain.

HOA LAWYER: And… that starts my hour.

HOMEOWNER: Now—Wait. Where'd you come from?

HOA LAWYER: Right there. Now, you've got fees. Late fees, late-late fees, lawyer fees—that's me. Fees for this conversation we're having right now. There's a raccoon fee in there.

HOMEOWNER: A raccoon fee?

HOA LAWYER: Yeah. A raccoon fee. Anyway, it comes to $11,067.38 cents.

HOMEOWNER: Hey, wait—I… I… I can't afford that.

HOA LAWYER: Well, great news then. During this conversation, we foreclosed on your house.

HOA REPRESENTATIVE: I just bought it! Four bucks! Can you break a 20?

HOMEOWNER: Wait, wait, wait, wait—this all feels really illegal.

HOA REPRESENTATIVE: Oh, that's what's so great about it. It's not!

HOA LAWYER: It's not illegal at all! It's not! It's completely legal! I'm a lawyer!

HOA REPRESENTATIVE: He knows.

HOA LAWYER: I know!

HOMEOWNER: You know?

HOA LAWYER: Yes!

HOMEOWNER: Wait, wait—what the fuck?! Yo! Hey! –Ooh-hoo! Damn, y'all are strong!

HOA LAWYER:I never get sick of that!

HOA REPRESENTATIVE Hey, want to come into my new house?

HOA LAWYER: Yeah. Yeah. Please.

HOA REPRESENTATIVE: Let's have a drink.

HOA LAWYER: Yeah, let's see what he's got in the refrigerator.

HOA REPRESENTATIVE: Yeah, good call.

HOA LAWYER: Oh, there's a lot of fun art.

HOA REPRESENTATIVE:So welcome to the HOA. I think you're gonna like it here. And if you don't? Tough nuts. You've got no other choice. Bye!

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