We know all too well at this point that HOAs are full of obnoxious type-A individuals who will stop at nothing to make your neighborhood experience a living nightmare. No HOA is immune to these extremes, so it is up to homeowners to find some level of healthy distance from them so that life in the neighborhood is at least slightly bearable. Now, as someone who lives in a city, my personal encounters with HOAs are nonexistent, but I also know full well what it's like to be taken advantage of by…

This guy works for an HOA management company, and it's his job to go around to different communities and provide maintenance work. Trash pick-up is part of the job. So, the OP gets to a community park at 7 in the morning to start his job. He knows the park technically opens at 8 a.m., but the garbagemen come at 7:30 a.m., so he has no choice but to show up before it opens to make sure he can get the trash out to the curb in time. Then enters the neighborhood Karen.

Imagine paying a premium to work your way into this crazy housing market, purchasing a house from someone who paid a quarter of that amount for it 15 years ago. You're probably still going to be coming to grips with the weight of your new mortgage when you're confronted by your new neighbor, a “lifetime” resident, who regards you with disdain because, for one reason or another, they don't think you're worthy of replacing their longtime neighbors whom they had grown fond of. The reality is that…

When you live in a small town, word gets around, and if you have beef with the city council, you had better giddy up for a long ride… of malicious compliance. One woman took on her HOA (that wasn't really an HOA, but more of a city council of sorts, as they were a small town) when they came with multiple complaints on different occasions about her property. The issue this woman had was not with their complaints, but rather with the fact that they did not bug any other of the neighborhood reside…

Common sense isn't gifted to every person. Sometimes things will seem so crystal clear to you, and so obvious, that you can't understand how anyone could mess it up. But without common sense, people do dumb things. This woman in particular had a bone to pick with her neighbor, and I bet you can guess why her neighbor was refusing to mow her lawn for her. While some people really dislike mowing the lawn , others find it cathartic. If you can listen to music or a podcast over the crazy loud sound…

In life, it's not worth worrying about the little things, especially when there are much bigger things to worry about… Yet, each neighborhood somehow manages to have that one neighbor who has nothing important to worry about and spends their days obsessing over petty details and perceived slights, plotting about how they're going to hold their neighbors accountable for that single blade of grass that went unmowed, or that leaf that blew over the property line that one time three summers ago.

HOAs are determined to keep their neighborhoods looking pristine , no matter what. If you happen to live a neighborhood rules by a home owner's association, you don't always have a lot of choice about how to keep your home. For example, you might want to paint your home a nice warm yellow color, but lots of HOAs have a strict color palette you need to choose from. So the HOA could easily reject your request , and insist you paint your place a boring gray color instead.

It's fairly perplexing when a company is particularly bad at providing a service, especially when that company's sole purpose for existence is to provide that service. When you're a leaf collection company, that kind of implies that you're going to be collecting a lot of leaves, and it would be fair for people to expect you to be adept at doing so. Well, it turns out that while a lot of companies brand themselves as providing such-and-such service, really, their main priority isn't providing go…

Moving house is a stressful affair that is capped off by the uncertainty of who your new neighbors will be. It's like you're spending your entire life savings to get a single roll of a D20, which could very well end up in a critical failure. After all, nothing makes or breaks the enjoyment of a peaceable existence like ending up next to the wrong people; you could have the most perfect abode that you'd ever dreamed of and still be more miserable than you were in your little old decrepit one if…

Sometimes, your petty actions go much further than you had originally intended, and without realizing it, you're pulling on a thread that will continue to unravel, causing a cascading effect that knocks over the first domino in a chain that "Rube Goldbergs" into a house of cards and sends the whole thing crashing down. Well, it turns out that when you accuse your terrible neighbor of being a serial cheater, sending anonymous messages pretending to be his mistress, that might be pretty upsetting…

As we age, we have a tendency to become less tolerant of those around us. We might even feel bad about that waning tolerance, yet we find it happening all the same. For example, I, now in my 30s, don't care at all for the screeching sound of children. Am I a Karen? Maybe—but regardless of that, it remains a certain fact that I would never intentionally buy a house adjacent to a park or a school as I can not abide by loud noises like the screeching of children. But here's the trick when it comes…

Every so often, you come across a story where a board member of a local HOA actually turns out to be a three-dimensional human with a soul and a conscience. If this story serves as any indication, sometimes it really only takes one good person to uncover silly systemic issues, to identify real solutions to try and fix said silly systemic issues, and to essentially get something done.

This dude has many problems, the first of which is the fact that he bought a house with a two-car garage despite owning six cars. What was he thinking? If it's a situation where that was the best he could afford, then this dude needs to sell four of those cars. Personally, I cannot wrap my brain around someone who feels the need to own that many vehicles in the first place. If it's your “hobby,” it sure is an expensive one that you cannot afford, sir. This thread was posted to Reddit's r/pettyr…

They say, “You are what you eat." Who are they, you ask? What do they want, and why are they saying this? What are they eating? And what does that, consequently, make them? While all these answers remain unanswered maybe they should change what they're saying from “You are what you eat” to “You are what you throw over the fence into your neighbor's yard.” Still, whatever you're throwing, and no matter what that makes you, throwing something over a fence is always going to make you trashy .

The housing market is insane right now, that's pretty common knowledge at this point. But have you dived into the property insurance crisis? (Feels like everything is in crisis mode these days…) Turns out it's not just the price to purchase a house that has been disgustingly inflated, but also the price to keep and maintain your home. I mean, with the price of gas and eggs these days, are you even surprised that something as money hungry as insurance companies have raised their prices? One tena…

There's no greater nightmare than purchasing what seems to be the perfect home only to move in and realize the reason the previous owners wanted out… The neighbors. The realization might dawn immediately on the first fateful meeting, or it might be a slow burn, with the realization dawning over time.