On 06/13/05 01:24 pm CL (dnoyeB) Gilbert tossed the following
ingredients into the ever-growing pot of cybersoup:

Every
neighborhood I've ever SEEN (while shopping for houses) has houses of


WILDLY

varying market values. It's not unusual at all to see the lowest market
value house on a block be some fraction of the highest market value
house on the block.

Well my point was that is not visibly pleasing. and detracts from the
feel of a neighborhood. In Detroit where there are tons of homes, they
always try to knock down a whole neighborhood at once and upgrade together.

Sure home values/sizes can vary when there is overpopulation and
everybody wants into a certain neighborhood. Also when older
neighborhoods are being updated due to changing times/industries.

All in all, the building of a home in your neighborhood, especially on
your block will certainly affect the value of your own home. you can
put $300K inside a home so that two homes that look the same from the
outside are $300K different in price. Thats not my complaint. I want a
theme, and I want it maintained. You can choose to live without these
things its a free country.

That's the theory, but in practice it's difficult to find anything
recent without a HOA: we had to expand our criteria to include
properties more than 20 years old. Moreover, it's not always possible to
find out what one's letting oneself in for: I read one person's
complaint that when he asked to see the HOA rules he was told that they
were "confidential" and that he could not see them until he had agreed
to purchase the property and become a member of the HOA. He bought
elsewhere.

Again, developers will sometimes simply copy HOA rules from elsewhere
and, when asked about some specific provision, will say, "I didn't know
that was there; that doesn't make sense."

Perce