Abolish HOAs too, they heavily restrict anything visible on your house and to anyone saying just don’t buy a house with an HOA a good 95-99% of homes around me are in HOAs.
a good 95-99% of homes around me are in HOAs.
In case anybody is wondering why that is, it’s because local governments heavily encourage developers to establish them in order to shirk their responsibility to maintain public infrastructure and shift that liability onto the homeowners more directly (compared to paying for it through taxes). This is necessary because single-family houses are revenue-negative and bedroom communities without a substantial dense (i.e. tax profitable) downtown can’t afford to subsidize them in the long run without going bankrupt.
In other words, all these suburban neighborhoods of single-family houses are ticking time-bombs that will devastate somebody’s finances in a few decades when the streets need to be repaved. The purpose of HOAs is to make sure that that “somebody” is the homeowners themselves in order to contain the damage.
The real issue is that forcing development to be low-density and therefore financially unsustainable is fundamentally the wrong thing to do to begin with, and forcing people to be subject to capricious privatized HOAs is just the shit icing on the shit cake.
My previous house was in a tiny city (0.9ish square miles) that had no hoa and had some of the absolute best municipal areas, parks, and events of anywhere I have seen. The costs of that were baked into the property taxes paid to the city and they never had any issues. We had code enforcement but they were largely unintrusive.
Where I moved to has good parks but the hoa is mental. I would not have moved out of my old city if the houses were bigger but we just outgrew our house with our kids.
Point is, if you set it up right, the funds are there. If you want to be a shitty city and buck responsibility HOA’s allow that, same with MUD’s and LID’s. Its all privitization of stuff governments are supposed to provide from tax revenue.
Talk to your representative. The state makes the rules hoa’s like by.
hoa can be useful, but many get bogged down on things they should not.
I wish that would be effective but I am in Texas…
HOAs do have their uses. Better to get involved and fix yours. It’s literally the most local and direct political change you can be a part of.
You also never hear about the good ones because people don’t bitch about them every chance they get.
My HOA is goodish. It is only $175/year and the leadership is pretty laidback. What’s helped is a developer keeps wanting to build a massive apartment complex illegally next door (destroying a riparian zone, without adequate emergency vehicle access, etc…).
It has kept all the busybodies in the neighborhood occupied for over 10 years. The developer just lost its 3rd lawsuit (with an appeal).
It’s given the busybodies something to focus on and sucked up all the money they would use to cause mischief. Instead they have had to prioritized their enforcement on the worst offenders.
They have also slowly gotten rid of the AirBnB and Corporate owners by fining the shit out of them. It’s stabilized the home prices and let a lot of younger families move into the neighborhood.
From the same publication:
Painting roofs white and creating lighter coloured pavements and roads are recognised as ways to reflect heat in urban areas and help combat global heating. However, a new study shows that this geoengineering technique unexpectedly causes temperatures to rise in the surrounding region.
We have hundreds of years of history where civilizations have concluded that white roofs are cooler. We have decades of modern academic research that backs that up.
One study indicating the opposite may be true in some cases is not sufficient evidence to start overturning legislation. It’s not enough to start submitting to the lobbying of these huge corporations trying to sell darker roofing materials. It IS enough to call for more research into the matter, and if enough research confirms this new finding THEN we start changing laws.
I cannot imagine any way that a dark roof would absorb less heat than a light roof. By definition a dark roof absorbs more light than a light roof, that’s why they appear dark/light.
I’d be interested in reading this one study though, if you have a link
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jun/01/dark-roof-lobby
The “one study” I was referring to was in response to the previous commentor,and this is the link they had.
I am just as skeptical as you are. The argument they seem to be making is that white roofs reflect heat back into the atmosphere instead of absorbing it, which leads to reduced cloud cover and rainfall. Their conclusion is that white roofs result in lower temperatures locally, but higher temperatures across larger regions.
They could potentially be on to something, but it’s also possible that either they are mistaken or biased by the same money these corporations are throwing at legislatures.
But we also have a lot of data about how reduced ice coverage in places like Greenland is resulting in a positive feedback loop that increases temperatures in part because more light gets absorbed by the ground and less gets reflected back, which leads to more ice melting. If this one study is correct, I would expect to see much more stable temperatures and ice sheets in the poles than we see today and have seen historically.
It’s just microclimates. I particularly hate the article’s framing of white materials as “geoengineering”, which implies that black asphalt roofs and roads are somehow not. We also know urban heat islands shift moisture downwind. So they’ve modeled some micro interaction that shows piecemeal application of low and high albedo surfaces can possibly result in some weird local effects on precipitation, all packaged up for misinterpretation by EPDM manufacturers.
Meanwhile everyone with a brain knows that black asphalt and roofs are hotter than white surfaces. The solution is of course stop black roofs and the bate minimum amount of roads/parking lots, not try to make everything heat absorptive in the name of equality.
Oh yeah, the black roof industry produced a study that says that black roofs are better. I’d be highly skeptical, especially considering that ‘a study’ has no legal definition.
I’m a few days away from having a new roof installed (hurricanes 🙄), I chose a cool roof-compliant architectural shingle. So, I’ve done a bit of studying of this as well.
Based on my research, black roofs are still affected by the laws of thermodynamics, no matter how many lobbyists I surround it with.
You’re on point with that Greenland reference. That’s a very well studied phenomenon. I mean, assuming you believe scientists and observational data (which isn’t a guarantee here on social media).
Yes, dark colors absorb more heat. Trapping it and making the city hotter. Light colors reflect heat back, meaning the heat doesn’t stick around to heat up the area.
So if everyone has a white roof, the perimeter heating effect would be negated?
In most of the populated areas of the world we use a lot more energy to heat our buildings than we use to cool them. More people die of cold exposure than of heat. Warming up is good for us.
I hate to be this sort of guy. But if you had read the article it mentions a study that found exactly the opposite of what you claim.
Researchers have also found that even in most cold North American climates, the energy savings from cool roofs during warmer months outweigh any added heating costs in the winter.
Yep, mostly becuase cold climates are high latitude and they don’t get a ton of free BTUs from the sun all winter anyway. An exception might be lower latitude, high altitude areas (just guessing). I’d also guess that people doing white roofs are more likely to do basic air sealing and insulation retrofits.
It’s just not true.
North America & Europe (temperate/cold climates) Heating dominates. In the U.S., for example, space heating accounts for roughly 2–3× more total energy than cooling on an annual basis, especially in northern and central states. In Europe, cooling demand is tiny in comparison — many countries use almost no air conditioning outside southern regions.
Why heating dominates overall:
- Large parts of North America and Europe have long winters.
- Heating often uses high-energy fuels (natural gas, oil, electricity), so the energy content is higher even if cooling is more frequent in some places.
- Cooling is mostly electric and can be efficient with modern A/C systems, so it consumes less energy per degree of temperature change compared to heating.
That’s not disproving what the article said. Heating can dominate while the impacts of white roofs are still beneficial.
For one, the sun is far more active in summer than winter, especially further up north.
That’s just complete bullshit. The sun’s activity doesn’t have anything to do with what the position of the earth is at any given time.
