Tips to Change HOA Restrictions

[mhillgoth]

Hello All! I'd love any tips that have successfully led to changes in your HOA restrictions. My town doesn't allow for poultry, however, my subdivision is unincorporated so not under town restrictions. Therefore, my obstacle is the HOA. With food shortage warnings, I especially feel a sense of urgency to raise food for my family. Any advice on successfully changing these arbitrary restrictions? Moving is not an option for my family at this time, although we dream of a hobby farm at some point.

 

[Kiki]

Hello All! I'd love any tips that have successfully led to changes in your HOA restrictions. My town doesn't allow for poultry, however, my subdivision is unincorporated so not under town restrictions. Therefore, my obstacle is the HOA. With food shortage warnings, I especially feel a sense of urgency to raise food for my family. Any advice on successfully changing these arbitrary restrictions? Moving is not an option for my family at this time, although we dream of a hobby farm at some point.

Make friends with everybody in your neighborhood starting today... And convince them all to vote to change the rules.

 

[Boppo]

Hi, glad to meet you. Check out the Section on changing laws and ordinances (and making arguments to HOAs.

 

[Grammy60]

Hello and welcome to BYC So happy you have joined our flock.

 

[rjohns39]

Hi and welcome to BYC We're so happy you've decided to join us

These guys can help: http://www.chickensandyou.com/OccupyBackyards.html

 

[N F C]

Best of luck with the HOA!

 

[Isadora]

Hello, and welcome to BYC! I'm so glad you decided to join our friendly and helpful community

 

[gtaus]

I'd love any tips that have successfully led to changes in your HOA restrictions. My town doesn't allow for poultry

Welcome the BYC community.

Thankfully, I have never been part of an HOA, so I can't offer you direct advice on dealing with them.

However, I was thinking that you should have your poultry requests for the HOA well thought out and ready to go before you talk to them. For example, how many chickens do you think you should be allowed to have on your property? Are roosters OK, or not? Can a person free range their chickens on the property, or should they be enclosed in a chicken run? Are the chickens, coop and run confined to the backyard, out of sight, or anywhere on the property? How would complaints about chickens be handled?

If you know of other towns around your area that have dealt with this poultry issue successfully, then maybe you could use their experience to bolster your request. If you know the people in that town that got approval for poultry in their HOA, talk to them and ask them how they did it.

Maybe take a picture of the empty egg shelves at WalMart, etc... and put that side by side to a chicken nest box with fresh eggs? I know our local WalMart had almost no eggs for sale last time I was there. Shelf after egg shelf was empty.

Have a list of many benefits of having a backyard flock. If you garden, they can make great compost. I dump all my grass clippings and leaves into my chicken run and the chickens turn that into compost for my garden. Instead of throwing out waste paper, I shred it up and use it as bedding in the coop, then it gets composted when I clean out the coop. Then the compost goes back into the garden. All that paper is reused at home instead of dumped in a landfill or sitting at a recycle center costing taxpayer money.

Almost all our kitchen scraps and leftovers get offered to the chickens. They eat most everything you can think of, and what they don't eat, can easily be composted. That reduces the amount of garbage sent to the landfill. You will find many posts on the BYC forum talking about how many ways we have found to reuse waste products at home for our chickens and in the process have reduced our trash sent to the landfill. I know, in my case, we used to have about 2 bags of garbage every week sent to the landfill. Now that I shred all our paper products, we give all the kitchen scraps and leftovers to the chickens, we have reduced our trash output to about 2 bags per month! Of course, we now also separate our metal and plastic for recycling. So, it's a whole green attitude which is good for the planet, but maybe your local people would be more interested in the possibility of reducing their landfill costs.

Hope you keep us update on your efforts to get poultry accepted into your HOA. Good luck.

 

[sourland]

Welcome to BYC. @Boppo and @rjohns39 have provided good starting points. Good luck.

 

[swampfox440]

Hi, welcome to BYC!