Bill was introduced in Sep/25, but I only got a whiff of it in the last couple of weeks
See House Bill HB1878: https://fastdemocracy.com/bill-search/pa/2025-2026/bills/PAB00038963/
Are there any other states/countries taking similar initiatives?
Summary:
Pennsylvania homeowners deserve the right to choose native plant species they desire for landscaping around their homes. However, work is needed to remove bottlenecks for homeowners to select native vegetation for their desired landscaping.
This legislation will prevent homeowners associations (HOAs) from unreasonably prohibiting the use of native plants for landscaping on private property. This ensures homeowners residing within an HOA the same ability to choose native landscaping as other homeowners.
Native plants provide many beneficial functions that many homeowners desire. These include being aesthetically pleasing and providing habitat for pollinators while being adapted to the site and typically requiring lower maintenance than non-native plants. […]
Why are HOAs dictating what home owners can and can’t grow?
short answer: there’s a misguided perception that a small patch of grass makes a house more valuable
long answer: HOAs are an illusion of self governance. in reality they serve banks and have become a common feature of nearly all housing developments. the banks originally acquired the land via violent means, declaring it their own despite the land already having residents in the form of indigenous people. it was then the banks who funded the violent enslavement of Africans and their trafficking accross the globe into the African Diaspora. the banks exist to serve white supremacy. they have done this in a variety of ways through the centuries. these are not all the ways:
- creating a split deed between the surface rights and mineral rights
- enforcement of structures of poverty through coagulating wealth
- entering contracts with slavers demanding perpetual enslavement of trafficked humans
- sponsoring segregationist policies
- redlining (not approving loans for minority homes and business purchases in certain parts of a city)
- the creation of HOAs to enforce white upper middle class ideals on lower middle class and working poor families
Grass, when constantly mowed, is completely useless. I’m all for clovers and native plants growing on my lawn.
For a supposedly Capitalist country, it’s amazing that the US allows neighbours to decide themselves what others can or not do in their own land and force them to do it or not.
I’m thinking it’s the bastard child of extreme aversion to having oversight institutions working for the common good, so instead of like in having Europe regional/country-wide rules which apply to everybody and are enforced by some oversight autority on what cannot be done in residential areas to avoid things like for example people operating poluting industries in residential areas, you get local groups with quite arbitrary power to decide what their neighbours can or cannot do, each local and with rules not at all consistent across the country (or at last a State).
It’s a system incredibly open to abuse, especially by the kind of people we in my country call “small dictators” (the kind of people who, when they have some power over others, force them to do things purelly because they derive psychological enjoyment from imposing their will on others)
HOAs are a patently un-American idea and are generally speaking viewed as such within the United States. I’m sure there are those who view them as a necessary evil, but by and large if you mention the acronym HOA in the U.S. you are more likely than not going to receive a look of unhappiness in return.
Yeah that’s interesting. I wonder if HOAs are an accepted implementation of “small government” or libertarianism.
Kinda funny how Americans call their country “land of the free” but can’t even do certain things on THEIR OWN PROPERTY because of the HOAs.
Should we go down the list of things Americans can’t do but the rest of the world can? The irony of holding up freedom as their cornerstone while keeping the largest inmate population over bullshit without even a trial.
Number one on that list is health insurance being tied to your job. As in, some people literally die if they quit their job. Very freedom, much America.
I used to work in healthcare and bad news, the last 10 years the shit show has become even shittier in a way that feels like an acceleration. I left because I just couldn’t deal and feel better working for a tech company that is at least transparent what they do. However, somewhere in the middle of my career I had a patient with an aggressive brain cancer that took him from being a middle class working guy to basically unable to move without assistance. However, when I met him he was not receiving chemo or radiation or any specific care because he was diagnosed with cancer after collapsing at work. He was diagnosed and directly lost his job. He had to wait for a new month to be covered by the insurance his family purchased through the ACA market place. He had already earned too much that year to qualify for Medicaid. He sat around for three and a half weeks loosing function and possibly metastasizing because no one would treat him.
When you’re in an HOA, you’ve contracted away some of your rights to property.
But that’s the devil’s game of “property rights”. So many people think they’ve gained sovereignty because money changed hands. They don’t ask how property originates and why it was up for sale to begin with.
That’s not a contradiction. HOAs suck but they’re a contractual relationship that you enter voluntarily.
“voluntarily”
Somehow I’ve managed to avoid being forced to buy a house at gunpoint.
and you’ve never run afoul of an HOA in a property you rent? my first time getting an HOA infraction was in an apartment i was renting for $400 a month because i put my clothes out on a drying wrack while i was at work because i couldn’t afford to run the drier
it’s just that any development built after Clinton requires you to enter that contract or the bank won’t approve your loan
Which is needed in developments since the houses are closer together and it just takes one person turning their front yard into a used car lot to drive down property values and annoy everyone else.
Sane countries handle this with local public authorities.
If your garden becomes a tip in the UK the council will step in
Your example of a sane country is the UK? One of the largest surveillance states in the world…
What’s that got to do with HOAs?
A. Thats what zoning board is for.
B. If you dont want bad neighbors, dont buy near neighbors
If you don’t want an HOA don’t buy in an HOA.
somehow my point has been again lost so let me state it more clearly this time:
most people subject to HOAs are so because being picky about housing is a privilege it’s rare to have access to
Oh no, not the poor upper middle class homeowners who were forced to buy in a neighborhood that has a strict HOA whose primary purpose is to keep property values high.
Oh, shit, right, so I get to share something I learned fairly recently.
For much of human history, wealth could be measured many ways but by far the most powerful currency was land. Land meant resources, and the land’s value was determined by what respirce it produced: fertile floodplains meant crops, lakes for fishing, forests for hunting, and, worst-case scenario, moorland could be used for grazing livestock. But what if that wasn’t enough? What if you had huge tracts of land but your narcissism and insecurity were so overwhelming that you just needed to prove yourself even more?
Enter: lawns. Lawns are fields of grass, which is a useless crop that can only really be used for grazing. But the grass is kept so short that livestock can’t graze on it. But grass like that can only be grown on plains that are ideal for crops, so you need to get rid of the crops. And short grass needs tending, tending with more care than any crop, so you need to have workers dedicated to it. That’s what a lawn is: it’s bragging, it’s saying “not only do I have loads of top-quality land and an army of workers, I can afford to piss away huge swathes of it for absolutely no reason other than to prove that I can.” It’s hard to image a greater and more grotesque display of boujee excess than the lawn.
Of course, this is what makes the modern lawn all the more pathetic: that neatly parcelled-out vast tract of land you can afford to squander as a display of your immeasurable wealth is, like, a few meters across. It’s like the Stamford apes experiment: they know what they must do, but not why they’re doing it and, if they knew what a lawn really was and where it came from, I can’t imagine many would be quite so attached. Then again, maybe they would be. Maybe they really do think their home is a castle and that they live in a kingdom they can walk around in thirty second.
I’m new to this sub and consider myself anti-lawn. Can you recommend non-grass vegetation that is still easy for kids to play on and people to walk through?
Red and white clover, provided you live in an area where they’re native. They introduce nitrogen to the soil and pollinating insects love it, and it nice to lie on. You can grow clover mixed in with grass: because grass is more tolerant to being regularly walked on than clover, it creates nice natural-lookint pathways.
It really depends on your location and it could even include native grasses. I’d even recommend creating a post in the community asking for help so it gets more visibility
It is okay if you still need to have grass for children/high traffic areas, you don’t need to remove it all, as even small patches with native plants can make a big difference
HOAs are such a fascinatingly American thing. They seem to cause no end of annoyance for those living in them, and have few to no positive effects (at least, we don’t hear about any positives), yet they persist.
Can those who are adversely affected not do anything about their local ones, or is it actually a case that they’re not too bad for most people most of the time?
HOAs have a lot of applications that aren’t horrible, you just probably dont hear about them. Neighborhoods with HOAs are often centrally planned, so there will be common areas that require upkeep like pools, clubhouses, parks, etc. They essentially take on a form of government role. In a lot of neighborhoods that are not part of an incorporated city, they do things like trash collection, road upkeep, snow plowing, etc.
I’ve lived in 2 places with an HOA, and in the one, all they did was the landscaping, even around all the yards of the houses. In the other, they handled the park/pool/clubhouse, and they did trash collection.
The down sides are often because the people in charge are just retirees who hunger for power, and there isnt much oversight from real government. Most people dont care enough to try to oust the bad leaders, so they stay in control, and they often do things that are illegal, but no one calls them out on it.
There’s very little people can do. In order to fix things you usually need to get on the board, but the people who run HOAs are usually retired nimby assholes and they hold meetings while most in the neighborhood are at work so nobody can oppose them. They then reelect themselves to the board and the cycle continues. HOAs are usually a thing set up by the builders to make their lives easier for some paperwork and stuff. They absolutely suck 99% of the time.
Native plant garden bans aren’t just an HOA thing. Many counties or cities ban them too. Much of it stems for chemical manufacturers selling the white picket fence image after WWII to veterans receiving funding to buy a home. The chemical manufacturers pushed hard for that image so they could keep making as much profit as they made manufacturing for weapons during the wartime.
This means that trying to fight your HOA on yards is useless, you have to go higher and it’s a big big fight
HOAs are usually a thing set up by the builders to make their lives easier for some paperwork and stuff.
Builders are encouraged by the local government to set up HOAs because it lets said government shirk its responsibility to maintain infrastructure and services.
If your subdivision is gated, its streets are private and the homeowners are responsible for repaving them, for instance.
(Of course, that’s only a motivation cities caught onto relatively recently. The original reason for HOAs – at least for neighborhoods of single-family houses, as opposed to condos that have legitimate shared maintenance – was to help keep black people out.)
Good input. I was definitely doing some “draw the rest of the owl” for brevity about their history and impact.
Thats why you dont dight the HOA, you sabotage them with geurilla gardening.
I’m always down for conscious rebellion but that’s a great way to get a lien on your house if you’re caught for those who don’t know.
Growing any food in our front yard is illegal in my city. Guess who’s currently growing sage in the front garden.
Man none of that is true.
You make a compelling case
I made my case in a different comment because responding to a user that claims board members can reelect themselves completely disqualifies them from having an actual conversation about the topic. Everything they said is made up from someone who has read too much online from other people that have no clue what they’re talking about.
All they had to do is qualify with some hoa’s do that… There’s a million different types of them, each state will have different limits.
I’ve heard horror stories about some, I’m sure a lot of them are fine… I would never move somewhere with an HOA personallyExactly, maybe 1 in a thousand is as bad as they say, but they literally would not exist if they were that bad across the board, because HOAs are pitifully easy to dissolve.
If you like videos, you should definitely watch Climate Townś “America’s Dumbest Crop” when you have the time:
Your link doesn’t work for me, but in any case, none of what that person says is true. Maybe they have had anecdotal things happen like that, but the majority of it makes no sense. HOAs are built with boards, residents can vote out those boards. If those things actually happened the boards would get voted out and the HOA dissolved. HOA boards can’t reelect themselves (this should have been the first sign that what that user was saying was bullshit).
HOAs offsets the cost and maintenance of roads and other civil services, so many counties love them because it keeps costs down for the government while charging the neighborhood. It keeps taxes down overall.
HOA benefit to have their own fiefdom, that allows them to weld near unchecked power because the turn out for board elections are even lower than most local elections.
Homeowners have the ability dissolve their HOA but they don’t because people don’t vote.
You hear about the shitty ones, tbh.
Mine covers the community pool, a few small playgrounds, gym, community garden, etc. Thats it.
No getting approval to have your door be blue instead of white, no measuring your grass height, or any of those shenanigans.
Dismantling them would require somehow introducing a vote to abolish the hoa, and a lot of people involved in hoas are ancient NIMBYs that have nothing better to do after retirement that be in other people’s business. The purpose of an HOA is to ostensibly preserve property values, and only homeowners are allowed to vote, not any poor suckers that are renting and actually living there.
and like most things that are bad about the us, they exist because of racism
You just can’t handle all the freedom.
To add to some of the other replies (road repair, etc) the one we used to live in also offered access to a full pool area with life guards. This included a lap pool (with certain adult only times), toddler shallow pool, a medium (standing/walking) depth that had some fountains in it and a splash pad. A decent sized play ground. There was also a larger event space with a kitchen that you could rent (price was free, just had to schedule a slot and sign a damages waver). The fee also included “beautification” things like all the flower beds and landscaping/grass maintenance in all the public areas, which included a 2 mile loop running/walking path with the various body-weight workout stops. Tennis courts, community events with food/games/etc. It’s about $880 a year now i think, and the only rules were really just keep your place looking decent. We didnt have any issues because i always mowed the lawn and trimmed the bushes anyways…there’s also guidelines for not painting your house crazy colors or building really weird structures, but it was pretty easy for your average lifestyle all things considered.
I guess really like an apartment complex, but you have your own house you can do whatever you want to with- for better or worse. Im no advocate for HOAs, not even this one. I will never live in one again…but not all HOAs are equal is my only point. Some are $1000 year with literally nothing to “give back”. Eff all that.
They were made to harass minorities as far as I’m concerned.
I grew up, and have been living in apartment buildings all my life, so that’s what I’m used to. It has always been a neutral to positive experience, but nobody really talk about those.
have few to no positive effects
The purpose of an HOA (in theory) is to divide the costs of land maintenance across land owners.
In practice, HOAs are routinely abused for rent seeking and stigmatization of minorities. But that’s not a problem specific to the legal arrangement. It’s a consequence of the managers and members.
Check out the HBO show “Neighbors”. A great look into the mind of a land owner.
Or sooner move into a pile of feces than into a house with a HOA
You end up with what you put up withIf you want to see the positives of HOAs, Google “What are the legal options for dealing with my neighbor Reddit.”
Most people have a significant portion of their wealth tied into their property. Getting a new drug addicted neighbor three years before retirement could lead to unintended financial consequences. There are good HOAs, it’s just that nobody complains about them.
My god your comments are idiotic. Not only are you racist from other comments I’ve seen, but now you tell us you think drug addiction is a common issue in neighborhoods… hint, it’s not.
Honestly if you just ignore anyone with a new user flag on the threadiverse your experience will be better imo. A lot of them seem to want to being the reddit bullshit onto here and its just not worth getting into it with them. Trolls leave when you ignore them and all that.
I don’t see flags on usernames on the Connect app. Maybe I should switch apps.
Highly recommend summit. Just had a redisgn and even before it was my favorite looking app.
They’re fine to terrible depending on where you’re at. In our neighborhood they make sure no junky cars (cars on blocks) are left outside and that you don’t leave massive oil spills in your driveway and that your house is painted when it starts to peel. They also have planted a bunch of native gardens and maintain them and the dog bag dispensers and poop bins. Would just be better if the city did it, but whatever.
Pretty much nothing of what that other user said is true. HOAs host meetings at night usually, anyone can come, yes people don’t come and vote but that’s usually because people are fine with their HOA. They can’t vote themselves back in. If they sucked 99% of the time they wouldn’t exist, because getting rid of them is dead simple, literally show up and vote.
I’m a way it seems bizarre that HOAs should be so broadly despised yet also broadly adopted. I suppose it has to do with the corners of the culture I sit in.
The adoption is coming from the Epstein class who owns the property.
We are all just trying to find a place to live and pay rent.
I think the reason for the mass adoption is the surface selling point (higher resale property value) plus the usual minor fee lull people into a false understanding of just how dangerous they can become once a person on a power trip gets into the board
Municipalities are only giving licenses to new developments that have HOA included in, because HOAs transfer the necesario tax burden to the HOA. Americans would do anything for avoid paying taxes, including paying more for worst services paying private intermediates
Americans would do anything for avoid paying taxes, including paying more for worst services paying private intermediates
Which is very weird. Property owners are still paying a tax for their property. Instead of going to a municipal government it goes to a private organization.
Oh god that’s terrifying. I’ve heard of HOAs technically owning the roads and local infrastructure and then residents still get nailed on paying full property tax anyways
actually, they are not broadly despised, as evidenced by the fact that so many people choose to live in HOA-governed neighborhoods. you might think that because all you hear are the horror stories, but that is because you never hear from those who are satisfied with their HOA. as always, ymmv.
The fact that so many people choose to live in a HOA is not on its own evidence that they aren’t despised. There’s a housing crisis in the States and people will live where they can. HOAs are often something you move into a neighborhood in spite of, not for.
Maryland has HB232 which supersedes all HoA law and says any low impact landscaping / xeriscaping is permissible AND favored if it prioritizes native plants and fauna / pollinators.
The simplest thing to come of it is “you can’t force me to grow grass”
Can we vote to ban HOAs?
I had a thought the other day:
If your HOA sues you and YOU WIN, they (usually) have to pay your attorney fees in addition to their own.
But…you’re part of the HOA. Your dues will go up to cover the costs of a stupid lawsuit that you beat.
HOAs are the devil - even if I could afford property there’s no house cheap enough to put up with one.
Just ban the fucking HOAs
They should be called KOA’s Karen’s of America
What’s the point of even having a yard if it looks like the ones in the picture? Why not just go live in an apartment then. To me, owning a piece of land to enjoy was kind of the key reason I wanted to own a house in the first place.
Wait are you referring to the flat green lawns or the native / overgrown one?
What’s the point of even having a yard if it looks like the ones in the picture?
Dog bathroom.
Where I live, it’s a bathroom for other people’s dogs.
Yeah native plants does not mean you have to keep your lawn an overgrown jungle.
If it’s your yard you should be allowed to have an overgrown jungle if you so wish.
I agree, if only you are controlling invasives, and promoting native plants. Emphesis on controlling invasives.
Most grasses that people intentionally plant and cultivate are invasive.
Just like what ICE are doing you mean?
ew what
Your land has effects on you’re neighbors’ land.
Anyone who has had a big tree stretching across the property line can tell you this.
What you say is true, but I have absolutely no idea which direction you are trying to go with that comment.
…do you see where you’re posting?..thriving verdant habitats are kind of the entire point of a no-lawns community, and while you’re free to rail against natural growth within groomed enviroments it’s kind of an old-man-yells-at-cloud exercise in futility…
I’m guessing they’re referring to the empty lawns that are clearly just there for show.
OP, this was introduced September 25, 2025 (you mention this), sponsored by 14 of the Pennsylvania House’s 203 members (all Democratic in a split House), and its only action so far after introduction was to be referred to the Housing & Community Development Committee (read: nothing).
It’s not dead per se, but it’s made no progress whatsoever in six months, and the next session starts January 2027. This bill categorically is not evidence that it’s “becoming law across America”.
(Here’s the bill on the official General Assembly website btw. I have no idea where Fast Democracy gets its summary you pasted here; an LLM?)
Thanks for the additional context
