A 70 year old friend of mine writes on Facebook that she just got a new electric snowblower because her "HOA dues no longer cover snow shoveling driveway and sidewalk."
There are lots of reasons that HOAs are horrible institutions. But one of the things that they do often do well is that they make removal of snow from sidewalks a collective neighborhood function, rather than something that must be done by each individual in the neighborhood.
When are people going to wake up and realize that decentralization and private responsibility is not the solution to all problems? We seem to understand this for roads, but not for sidewalks.
Collective neighborhood snow shoveling is much more efficient since you can mechanize it with industrial grade snow blowers and snow clearing equipment.
Even if the work is outsourced to landscaping companies so that it can be mechanized, it is still less efficient to have many separate landscaping companies do the work in the neighborhood in a patchwork fashion, rather than having one provider do it, in addition to being more expensive per unit or for the neighborhood as a whole, despite not providing the service for everyone in the neighborhood.
Also, if the HOA bought its own snow clearing equipment and hired someone directly to do the job (as many municipal governments and school districts do), cutting out the middle man which its scale would often make feasible, it could do it more cheaply than hiring a landscaping firm to do the job, since it wouldn't have to cover the landscaping firm's profit and overhead costs (e.g. marketing, office and insurance costs that the HOA already incurs, billing and debt collection costs that the HOA already incurs, etc.). It could even provide a measure of economic relief to HOA members by preferring to hire residents to do the work (also reducing commuting times and demands on local road infrastructure, and making an inability to do the job at all or on time due to heavy snow making roads less passable less of a concern).
Collective sidewalk snow clearance also produces much better returns because sidewalks are a network. One delayed or not done at all link in clearing snow from sidewalks dramatically reduces the value of the sidewalk system for everyone, even if everyone else does a perfect and timely job of clearing the sidewalk in front of their house. And, in real life, perfect compliance with early sidewalk cleaning by each homeowner rarely happens for understandable reasons like being out of town, or being sick or infirm, or working atypical shifts like three twelves or having to work multiple jobs, so that you are at work when it snows.
The same logic applies to maintaining sidewalks in good condition when they crack. A badly broken sidewalk in front of one house makes the entire sidewalk network less useful for everyone who uses sidewalks in the neighborhood.
Sidewalks are a good that everyone in the community benefits from, and the homeowner benefits little from having the sidewalk in front of their own home clear. Clearing sidewalks is something you do for the benefit of your neighbors.
There is a collective action problem which HOAs solve when they correctly treat sidewalks as a common element owned by the community as a whole and managed by an entity that is responsible to the entire community.
This is less true of driveways. Mechanization from economies of scale is still present, although it can be moderated with outsourcing to landscaping companies. But the benefits of driveway snow clearing primarily inure to the homeowner whose driveway is cleared. There isn't the same network functionality problem.
But, of course, in the HOA suburbs no one cares about sidewalks because everybody drives everywhere, which also makes not only the people in the HOA less healthy, but also makes the community less vibrant.
And, then there is the issue that 70 year olds face a vastly elevated risk of serious physical harm when they try to shovel their own driveways and sidewalks. This is true for driveways as well.
The other lurking issue is that many suburbanites in HOAs are cash poor and time rich. Paying HOA dues or a more efficient landscaping company to do the job costs money which many people in these communities don't have. Doing it yourself with a cheap and inefficient snow shovel doesn't cost money, even though you are effectively valuing your own time and effort at a tiny hourly rate when comparing the time it takes you to the time it takes a professional to do it with the proper equipment.
The tradeoff between doing things in the monetary economy v. doing things in the non-monetary household or by barter or volunteering is an understudied issue in economics.
5 comments:
" in the HOA suburbs no one cars about sidewalks"
CARES
Maybe an intentional pun/
If the case is so open-close, then why isn't it a city responsibility?
City responsibility isn't a bad idea (and in Denver maintaining sidewalks now is a city responsibility but not shoveling them). The case for a more local approach (e.g. at the HOA level), is that in a large city, it may be hard to hold political leaders responsible on a neighborhood by neighborhood level.
Typo fixed. Or, maybe it was a Freudian slip.
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