HOAs, the enforcement arm of planning commissions

Libertarians shouldn't be so quick to give carte blanche to HOAs just because they're private entities. They are set up like mini governments and often are forced to do the bidding of larger governments.

We are the HOA enforcement arm. We are here to inspect your garage for contraband. // photo by Somchai Kongkamsri

HOAs are often excused by libertarians as an organization by which people voluntarily enter into a contractual agreement to maintain a neighborhood. In a libertarian state, this may be true, though I have my doubts, given that HOAs are essentially set up as a government, with elected board members with fairly wide-ranging powers to spend residents' money and dictate violations of private property. But in the state we live in today, HOAs are often used as a tool by which local governments can impose their will on new developments.

Within the past year, the planning commission in San Ramon had been reviewing and pontificating on a project I designed, drafting conditions of approval. This project, fifteen public hearings later through various governmental boards, finally received planning commission approval recently.

One of the conditions of approval was the following: 

52.c. The interior of garages shall be inspected annually by the HOA to ensure the garage is kept clear of items, including workbenches, storage units or personal property, that would in any way prevent cars from making full use of the garages for the primary purpose of parking vehicles as designed.

You read that right.

The planning commission, I believe at the behest of a single commissioner, pushed to require the HOA to enter someone's private home to make sure they're not storing any contraband in their garage.

An arm of the government requiring the HOA to search someone's house and fine them, if they are not following rules, is constitutionally dubious. The Fourth Amendment protects people from illegal search and seizure. If the argument is that the HOA is a private entity, what, so if the police hire a private detective to break into a house without a warrant to search for drugs, that makes it okay?

The city of San Ramon seems to have this weird paranoia of people storing items in garages. The city's zoning ordinance already requires parking spaces to be oversized at 22 feet deep (typical standard is 20 feet), supposedly either to fit extra-large cars, as if everyone owns a Ford F250 Super Cab. Or more likely, it's to fit storage shelving at the end of the garage, evidenced by the city's allowance of tandem parking at 40 feet in depth as long as there are 200 cubic feet of storage adjacent to the garage (typical tandem minimum is 38 feet deep).

I understand the annoyance of people parking their cars on the street because they can't figure out how to throw things away. In my neighborhood, I think we may be the only house on our street that actually parks cars inside the garage and doesn't take up street parking. But hey, that's their choice to do so. 

But requiring HOAs to inspect people's houses for this purpose essentially follows the same logical process as: People without workout equipment at home may overcrowd the gyms so we'll have the HOA invade peoples' homes to make sure they have workout equipment in good working condition at home, whether they need it or not. 

How about mind your own damned business?

You're telling me that a homeowner who may instead want only one car because only one person in the house commutes while the other walks to work, may not use the other garage parking space for something other than parking a car? You're telling me that a couple that drives two Miatas cannot be allowed to utilize the extra nine feet of garage depth for storage?

Even the language of the condition of approval is written so stupidly that even if someone drove a large but not oversized car (even a Ford F250 Regular Cab is less than 20 feet), the extra two feet of depth in the garage cannot be used as storage. As the condition of approval says, the garage must be prevented from making "full use" of the garage "as designed". Well, per the zoning ordinance, the full use of the garage as designed is 22 feet deep.

The arguments for the condition of approval were as stupid as the condition itself. One argued that residents may use guest parking, choking off the parking available for other purposes like going to the park the developer is putting in for the project, or, you know, parking for guests. Here's a novel idea, how about restricting the time limits of parking in those spots, an idea utilized by just about every city and dense housing HOA? In fact in the conditions of approval they wrote, two items down, it says:

52.f. Guest parking shall be appropriately signed as "guest parking only" and maintained available for guests only.

So why the Stasi-style enforcement of garages in private homes? Well, another argument went, people may park on the main street just outside the new development. Really? That street? Has that person ever driven down that street without a blindfold on? There is no shoulder and people drive down that street at 65 miles an hour despite the posted speed limit of 40. Okay, well people may park in the retail shopping area down the street. Really?? The retail area the commissioner pointed to was half a mile away from the closest possible point in the project to three-quarters of a mile away from the farthest point! She really thinks people will routinely walk that far every time they need to get to their car, preferring that because they might store eight hundred boxes of shoes in their garage? To make things more ridiculous, she completely forgot that there is an office park parking lot literally right over the property line of the project. A parking lot that currently, on a busy day, sits at about 10% utilization. Even pre-pandemic, it sat well under half full. People may park on that private property, but the landlord can easily get the car towed if it's a problem. It's just not that big a deal. Even so, given that this landlord was the owner of the property sold to the developer seeking to build the homes, I'm sure that they could easily write up an agreement with the HOA or individual homeowners to utilize some of the empty parking spaces to monetize their space otherwise just sitting empty, waiting for some kids to do donuts on. The utter lack of imagination shown by these planning commission members is purely...to be expected.