I grew up in a neighborhood where the first thing you’d see driving in was a sign that read: “Riverwood is a Restricted Area.” As a kid, I never really knew what that meant—honestly, I don’t think I ever saw a single “restriction” actually enforced. Years later, I found out it was one of those old rules meaning only white folks could own a lot there. Can you believe it? This was a place where indoor plumbing and electricity weren’t even a sure thing—our house didn’t get a bathroom until 1949, and the power? Well, it flickered a lot, which was pretty normal back then. My best friend’s family had a hand pump at the sink and an outhouse out back, while the folks behind her kept a bathtub in their kitchen and a fancy little outhouse in the yard—decorated nice, but still too stinky to play with our dolls in!
What I remember most, though, is how we fussed with neighbors about what went on in other people’s yards. Some neighbors buried old cars in their lots, and others had their kids sleep in cars due to no room for beds in the house. However, if it bothered you, well, you could move—or just hope they did! There was no neighborhood structure in place to enforce a standard. Back then, you moved to a neighborhood where you liked the standard until you didn’t. Then you moved. My own family ended up being there until 2009. As much as I would have liked to have had a house along the river, I couldn’t do it there.
As a young adult, I bounced around in rentals until I married, and we bought our first house. No HOA there, so nobody could say a peep that could motivate action about the trash piles that kept growing along a neighbor’s house because they either didn’t want to pay for trash pickup, or couldn’t figure out how to put it out, until the city got involved. Between that and the Great Dane that regularly used our front yard for a bathroom that even animal control refused to deal with, we moved south to a small city in south-central Indiana. At first, most houses there were kept up nice, but over the four years we lived there, things started sliding. So, we decided it was time for a change—hoping a new neighborhood with an HOA would mean neighbors who actually cared about keeping their homes and yards in shape.
That was my hope, at least.