Ugh

Lots of people more eloquent than myself will deal with the social, moral, and societal import of this. But apart from the decline of Western Society, there's another thing at work here: subdivision covenants. The homeowners' association goes about saying things like that because the people who live in the subdivision (including the Samonas) are stupid enough to buy a house with all sorts of restrictions on its title. How this works (approximately) is the developer buys a big chunk of land and builds a bunch of houses on the land, and subdivides the lot so he can sell each house separately. Then he writes a contract that says something along the lines of "you agree that you don't really own this house all the way, because a 'homeowner's association' can establish rules about what your property has to look like, and enforce them on you." That's incorporated into the house title sort of like the easement that the city has in your front yard (they can take x feet of your front yard if they ever want to do something like widen the street) -- it's a limitation on your rights to use the property that you agree to when you buy the house.

Why people agree to things like that is something I have never understood, and likely never will. The whole point of buying a house is that can do whatever you want with it as long as you aren't actually hurting the people around you. Some folks around the corner from my house decided the thing their yard really needed was a 40,000 pound statue of the Buddha. It's kind of bizarre, but hey, it's their house after all.

File Under: Law, Loonies, Tennessee