The United States faces many challenges in setting a path forward to a prosperous and sustainable future. Among the most intractable are semi-hidden rule sets that inhibit people and institutions from making the Energy Smart choice. To be able to move forward to a lower-polluting, healthier, sustainable, and more prosperous path, those Energy Smart choices must become the preferred and easy choices to make.
Sadly, throughout American society, there are explicit, oblique, and simply obscure obstacles that inhibit Americans from making Energy Smart choices. They include how we misrepresent the costs of energy usage, with the damages and costs from “externalities” like coal-fired electricity plant mercury emissions, gasoline/diesel fuel health impacts, and fossil-foolish carbon-dioxide emissions (climate change) not being including in the direct price of the energy bill, even though these are quite real costs. There are also significant regulatory challenges, such as those that inhibit factories from pursuing combined-heat power (CHP) to generate electricity because the rules inhibit their selling the electricity for a fair price. And, of course, many of these barriers are cultural, such as Americans wanting a two-year (45+%) or so payback on energy efficiency investments when they would be happy with a fraction of that investing in the stock market.
Amid the cultural and regulatory challenges, one of the significant — and too little discussed — barriers to Energy Smart choices comes from HOAs: Home Owners Associations. While the name seems so empowering, with that association of home owners implying a community gathering for grass-roots organizing for better communities, the truth is not nearly so benign. HOAs, which cover a surprisingly large share of America’s home owners, are mainly a creation of home builders seeking to structure the largest profits on home sales rather than from the bottom-up association of home owners.
HOAs, all too often, work from rigid, builder imposed rule sets to enforce norms that inhibit Americans from making Energy Smart choices.
What are some examples?
- Restrictions against drying clothing outdoors. For too many HOAs, evidently, drying clothes in the sun is an uncivilized sign of poverty rather than sensibility.
- Prohibitions against installing solar systems. Evidently, producing low-carbon electricity is worse than putting mercury and carbon into the atmosphere when flipping the light switch.
- Requirements to waste energy. Evidently, wasting energy is a sign of a better life. Perhaps my favorite (least favorite) case was the HOA that required its residents to maintain gas-fired exterior lights burning 24/7 and whose board refused to allow an owner to put in energy efficient lighting instead.
Simply put, around the nation, 10s of millions of Americans live under HOA rules, rules that constrain them from taking simple, straightforward, Energy Smart steps to improve their lives and improve others’ lives by reducing the pollution footprint of their homes. Want to take the Energy Smart step of putting up a white roof in a hot area? Forget that cool roof — unless you spend $10,000 more for the one the HOA board prefers. Want to put in a water barrel, forget it because it is an unsightly statue. This has led to legal action, such as laws forbidding HOAs from stopping solar projects. And, there is plenty of advice out there for HOA members and directors as to how to green your HOA. Even so, the progress is incremental and the ways in which HOAs constrain Americans’ rights and ability to make Energy Smart choices are almost innumerable.
Considering the power of and imperative of making Energy Smart choices to reduce our pollution and foster a more sustainable energy system, how Home Owners’ Associations stand in the way of Energy Smart practices drives a simple question:
Does HOA stand for Hatred Of America?
That is a serious question meriting serious examination which will occur in future posts.