Creatively & Compassionately Raising Dues?
From: Melanie Mindlin (sassettamind.net)
Date: Sat, 4 May 2024 09:47:55 -0700 (PDT)
I can’t even imagine how your community has survived without raising dues. 
While having dues go up is not popular, we have expenses and they must be paid.

Our community has two homes that are part of our City’s affordable housing 
program. We chose at the beginning to get more money up front for them and 
excuse them from our HOA dues.  We calculate our necessary expenses, which are 
our HOA dues separately from our “community expenses” which the affordable 
homes also pay. Our HOA dues include our reserves (about 50% of the budget), 
utilities and maintenance. Our community expenses include childcare for 
meetings, parties, trainings, and other support for social activities. The 
community expenses only come to about $20-30 per household.

Since our reserves, utilities and maintenance are not optional, and the rest of 
it doesn’t add up to much, there is very little quibbling about the budget and 
the dues in our community.  Each of our teams submits a request yearly for what 
is needed to keep their activities going and it is rarely questioned. 
Basically, we have found that after dividing everything between all our homes, 
the price for anything optional is hardly worth fussing over. 

We had a controversial request last year over helping our neighbor pay to 
remove a tree that was threatening to fall on our property. Since we were not 
required to pay for this, there were differences of opinion on whether this 
should be a community expense. In the end we agreed to pay a small amount from 
our budget and passed the hat to raise a more respectable amount.

Finally, I want to say that in our state there is no mandatory way to calculate 
HOA dues. Since we are not a condominium, each house is responsible for it’s 
own upkeep, leaving only our common areas in group ownership. We decided to 
calculate our HOA dues on a per house basis rather than by square footage, 
based on the concept that all those costs are based on usage and the size of 
the house has no bearing on the amount of use of the common space. If anything, 
the smaller homes use the common space more because they have less space at 
home. We have seen little correlation between the size of the homes and the 
number of people occupying them. This original assumption has turned out to be 
correct as our smallest homes make greater use of the common laundry, guest 
room, and personal use of the kitchen. Nobody has raised any concerns about 
this early decision.

There are a couple of important issues contained in your situation. If you are 
not collecting money for your reserves, you are reducing the value of all of 
your homes  as you are creating the need for special assessments in the future 
when something is needed. Smart buyers will know this. Much has been said in 
this list serve about the importance of having adequate reserves, and they are 
required in many states. 

I believe that it is also important to be transparent about the subsidies you 
are providing to people with financial challenges. Paying the HOA dues for our 
two affordable homes amounts to a subsidy of about $200/month for each home and 
constitutes about 20% of our total budget. 

Hope this helps.
Melanie
Ashland Cohousing

> On May 4, 2024, at 3:16 AM, cohousing-l-request [at] cohousing.org wrote:
> 
> In our 25+ year history, our community has discussed raising dues a number
> of times. Far more often than not, we end up deciding not to increase
> because there are 1-3 households for whom the increase would be too much of
> a burden.
> 
> Have any communities come up with a compassionate work-around to this?
> I would love to find a way so that the ~20 households who are willing to
> have their dues increased actually have an increase, but the ~1-3
> households that can not afford it do not have the increase.

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