Househacking: Dealing with Draconian HOA CCR's

[David Martin]

I have on two recent occasions come across HOA CCR's that are so Draconian in nature, that if faithfully observed, completely block househacking as a strategy. I'm placing this here as a place for open discussion on how everyone deals with these. Do you just call it naught and walk away from this craziness? I'll leave an example below that I just had, but seeing that many new folks are looking to start out with a househack, I think this is a good place to just dialog about this particular issue.

In the most recent example we saw, we found a home with a sizeable lot, somewhere to the effect of being 4-5 lots in size for the average neighborhood in the area, with potential for just a slight cashflow as-is, but as we saw it, the opportunity to expand by building a detached garage with an apartment over-top that would allow us to keep kosher for owner-occupant with the lender, but up the cashflow for the property by a good estimated $600 a month. Architectural rules for the neighborhood allowed for garages without issue, but where the catch came was in property use. They (1) forbade any use deemed to be commercial in nature, including down to the level of "renting even one room", they then (2) forbade any residential use of any building other than the main dwelling unit, and so on. The literal only other residential that was allowed on the property that was not part of the main dwelling unit was for the purpose of "servant's quarters". I contemplated the idea of just changing the design concept to have it be attached to the main home, but even in that scenario, the explicit CCR's against even renting one room seemed too controlling to be sane, considering that if this worked as we wanted, there were like 200 other nearly identical situations with lots with homes in that neighborhood that we would have just wanted to rinse and repeat that strategy.