Who?
Heh. Unintentional pun.
I barely remember NightOwl... wasn't that the poor woman rcagera was using as his personal verbal punching bag?
Any new housing I have encountered, regardless of the price range, comes with a homeowner's association/covenant that you must sign before you can live in the neighborhood. The only way to not deal with those is to be lucky enough to afford an older house in a neighborhood that hasn't gone that route.
In Troy, where I live now, old houses are pretty cheap (at least initially). In Raleigh, the old houses tend to be more expensive because they have more land. New houses tend to run the gamut, because builders are required to build affordable housing in a development *before* they get on to the more expensive stuff.
Trish and I bought the second to last house in the "first wave" of a five-stage housing development. The house cost $120,000... to a guy who had lived in Northern Virginia and Richmond, that was amazingly cheap. (120K in Northern Virginia will get you one bedroom, one bathroom, a kitchen and a living room).
The older houses (the ones we knew about anyway) were more expensive. OR, they were in such disrepair that there was no hope of us being able to fix them without sinking a lot of money into it. Since the new houses were affordable and came with a *warranty* (up to ten years on some parts of it) they were the best choice.
But... they all come with that damn rider.
