Typically the HOA's I've seen manage community resources. Where I used to live that meant the neighborhood parks, green spaces, 3 docks in the river, a pool, and a few lakes. No value seems a bit hyperbolic.

most HOAs manage a tiny amount of communal green space that should have been turned over to become city property, but was held back as HOA property to give the HOA a reason to exist.

I think we have the wrong units of measure for government size. I live in a county where the lines made sense 200 years ago: Everybody in the county can ride their hose to the courthouse, file whatever they need and be home in time for super. These days everyone drives and can be there in half an hour or less. Instead what I care about is the metro area. I want a unit that ensures my transit system is a coherent whole, the water supply is cheaper to consolidate to one large entity vs many small ones.

There is one suburb near me where some people would have to drive 25 minutes to get to the city library - most of that is uncongested highway. I really need a smaller unit to own and run a library so kids are always in bike distance. That city does a good job of scattered small parks but there is one complex with large fields for softball - if you don't live close maybe you shouldn't pay for something you don't use. I want parks owned by a smaller area government that can bring my neighborhood something they don't have. - HOAs often serve that. They just have a poor legal structure.

If you own part of a shared walls building then a corporation is required to manage that. You have to pay your share of the share costs. However the corporation should be limited in what else it can do, but it must exist.

You are just making this up at this point. Why do you think the city would accept property that they would have to legally maintain and be responsible for, when it is generally isolated and (largely) accessible to only a specific neighborhood?

Mostly I don't understand why an individual neighborhood would need it's own out of band election process (that typically allows people to gain tremendous power and authority without anyone voting for them), and representatives completely decoupled from the state or government but often times acting in parallel.

Come on, at least try. HOAs (typically, your word) have elections. Someone doesn't just walk in and declare themselves the association president.

Typically elections would take place during the annual meeting. Usually there is such low community engagement that there is no home owner quorum under the Covenants Conditions & Restrictions. Depending on the CC&Rs a property management or build rep will appoint the open board seats, or for example in the case of my HOA they will go by default to whomever is attending the meeting and wants the spot, assuming the current board doesn't object to that person.

For my association the board has basically been self appointing each other and their spouses for the last 15+ years. The current president has managed to obtain several proxy votes of rental property owners and the current board members use these to overrule any objections to them reseating themselves. They also squash any attempts to force a community wide vote, because again lack of quorum. Basically impossible to get enough people to actually attend the meeting to get the current board replaced, especially when they've gone all digital and tend to cancel/reschedule the meetings last minute and then provide very little notice of the new time.

If they are using "proxy votes", then there is in fact a vote. If your objection is that they ran unopposed because no one else bothered to give a damn, then... you should try giving a damn. Apparently you can be the person able to "gain tremendous power and authority" just by showing up, and then you can do something about it.

Not OP, but that is exactly what happened in my neighborhood. It has parks and trails and several sports courts, two playgrounds, dog parks. It was all turned over to the city to be public land to avoid having a HOA.

> generally isolated and (largely) accessible to only a specific neighborhood?

No. It's just land around the neighborhood, easily accessible to anyone in town (or nearby towns).

Mine should. That's literally the city's job.

There are unincorporated areas of the USA if you don't want a city government and want to do it all yourself.

It’s really not hard to find, though last time I bought was a decade ago and prices have increased, the HoA status (a lack of an HoA) has not changed.

I also explicitly refused to even consider an HoA neighborhood. Lol, fuck all that.

The typical HOA (and by typical I mean asymptotically close to 100% of them) do not maintain 3 docks in a river and a few lakes!

If a neighborhood has those kinds of resources, some kind of HOA fee seems reasonable, agreed.

Even in such a neighborhood, the HOA should be limited by law to managing those common area rivers and lakes, not allowed to have any opinion about what flowers someone plants in their yard or what color windoshades they install.

The typical HOA does not have rivers nor lakes. They only have bitter dictator-wannabe board members who look for ridiculous "violations" like your grass is 3/4" tall when their rulebook says 1/2" tall, so they can send eviction notices to flex their power.

If my neighbor decides to start blasting music at 3am for some reason, I don't have to suck it up for the next decade, I can just get the HOA to deal with it. Very peaceful.

If there is blasting music at 3am the police in my area would deal with that and every city I have lived in deals with those type of nuance issues quickly.

HOAs are not common where I live and they just sound like people privatizing what your local government should be doing.

Yes, that is what they are. It's easier to agree to a covenant to follow some rules and do things than it is to change laws and then get them enforced. You can't think of one thing you wish would be enforced that isn't a law? "I wish my neighbor didn't paint his house an ugly hot pink and park a rusted tractor on the lawn." Well with a hoa you can all agree to not do that.

American cities are largely failed states where police would not respond to anything short of murder, so yeah be grateful for your place of living

Also since my city is a democracy with vibrant civic engagement, if I thought a law needed changing I am pretty sure it would be fully debated and considered. What I have heard from friends who have lived in HOAs would suggest that I could not be confident the HOA board would give a crap.

And yet, people still live there. Sounds like a reasonable work-around.

This is true sometimes, but if you are upset at a specific HOA, look at your docs to see what it actually manages. HOAs exist to pay for community obligated costs; sometimes that is a pool, sometimes it's "water and gas bills", and sometimes it's an entire golf course.

Further, if you're talking about a condo building (which, yes, is technically a COA, but the two get combined all the time), it is literally paying for your roof and elevators to work.

Buying into a "little club" and agreeing to pay your share of expenses only works when everyone participates. If not, your neighbors are just paying upkeep on your property; why should they have to do that?

Neighbors in a HOA are very clearly never paying upkeep of your property, that's is nonsense.

A condo association is a whole different ballgame, since there is legitimate shared structural walls, roofs, elevators, etc. But single family home HOAs, there is nothing the HOA does to maintain individual homes.

Such arrangements used to be common, but they have become increasingly rare in the past few centuries. Many were explicitly abolished by law when free markets started getting popular. Often for antitrust reasons, or because people thought it would not be in the public interest to have certain types of contracts the previous owner made also bind the new owner.

I can think of a few similar arrangements in Finland. For example, membership in student unions at research universities is still mandatory, as is membership in reindeer husbandry associations. Those entities perform government functions, and the actual government has chosen not to assume the responsibility for one reason or another. As a consequence, the entities and their officials are subject to the same regulations as the government when wielding powers used to justify mandatory membership.

Condos are another story. If the entire complex is a single property for legal or practical purposes, it makes sense to have a single entity in charge of it.

> they should lose access to the pool, not their house.

To enforce this you have to be able to gate, secure, and prevent them and their guests from using this. That costs a lot more money just to ensure they pay in. The HOA is the least worse option to "consent" and ensure that they do. Taking away the house is a much later step after a letter, 2nd and 3rd warnings, fines, ignored fines+interest, and a lein is ignored.

Since presumably you're also preventing people from outside the neighborhood from using it, then it is beyond trivial to prevent the non-paying neighbor as well, using the same gate key mechanism.

Because they signed the paperwork saying they wanted to be part of the little club and gave that little club the power to take away their house.

Then "people want a house without dealing with strata" gets misinterpreted as "people want big houses on big lots". Not necessarily true, just that the premium for the BHoBL is the necessary price of not giving busybody neighbours power over your home.