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Yeah, with townhomes, you're pretty much guaranteed an HOA, because there's not much other way to tell people that they need to fix their roof in order to prevent water from coming into your house. And other similar things that have to do with sharing the same building.

How do the British deal with this sort of thing in regards to, uh, terraces(?)?

My house is a terrace, which, just in case there's any ambiguity, means that it has shared walls with the houses to the left and to the right, but I own it from top-to-bottom and from front-to-back. There is no HOA, nor anything like it, and I'm pretty sure there are no special deed conditions either. I'm not sure what would happen to the neighbours if I decided to knock the house down: even assuming I left the shared walls, next door isn't quite self-contained as there's no proper wall between the attic spaces. Probably they'd just sue me for damaging their property, to the extent that knocking my house down damaged their property too (there are places round here where an end-of-terrace got knocked down, and the next house had to have great big tie rods bolted through the entire building to stop it leaning over).

Having said that, one reason I couldn't just decide to knock the house down and build something completely different, is that it's in a conservation area: this is a council-mediated thing where a particular area of town is judged to be worth keeping in its "authentic" state (it's a bit like a "lite" version of being a listed building). This has some of the same effect as a HOA: the council planning department can veto proposed modifications (extensions etc.) that are "out of keeping" with the authentic 1880s ambiance. In theory even such things as replacement windows and rooftop TV aerials are covered, but in practice only really major changes get vetoed. However, relatively few UK houses are in conservation areas; it's certainly not correlated with being terraced or not.

Peter