When I lived in Frederick, we paid $52 a month. This included trash pick-up, landscaping in the common areas/grass mowing, pool membership, tennis courts, soccer fields, several playgrounds, miles of walking and biking trails and the Gestapo protecting us against garden gnomes. The covenants were about 300 pages long.
Where I live now, it's a new neighborhood. The State requires an HOA be set up. We pay $25/year, which is intended primarily to maintain the common areas. The developer never installed the playgrounds like he was supposed to, so common areas are mostly stormwater ponds, grass and woods. $25/yr won't get the grass cut, so the HOA had to require residents to do it, some do, some don't but there's barely enough money for postage to send letters, forget hiring a lawyer to enforce the rules.
The only way to dissolve the HOA is to get someone else to assume responsibilities for the common areas and the county ain't about to do it, so who will.
In Pinefield, when I was a kid they had a very active HOA but people stopped paying. Some private organization took over the park maintainance and no one paid the electric bill for the street lights. About 2 yrs ago, they turned off the streetlights b/c the bill was seriously delinquent (like 2 years). That's when a lot of people said "HOA, what HOA?" The county assumed responsibility for the street lights and got them turned back on. We made an offer on a house there, last year and we signed a paper saying we were aware that there was no HOA. Carrington, in St. Charles was the same way. 30 yrs ago they had a very active HOA, now, nothing. They even had a pool there, but I don't think you can even get down the road to it anymore, it's so overgrown.
the HOA would hire someone to clean it up and send the home owner the bill. Well they kept it clean for about a month and they were back to leaving trash every where. The bad thing was on trash days when they would put there trash out and not put any lids on there cans and the big crows would come along and rip the bags open and there would be trash up and down the street and all the time it comes in my yard. It's awful. Sometimes the HOA works pretty good for some things but not for everything.
