HOAs
[Bruce Frohnen  02/23 05:17 PM]

The issue on HOAs, it seems to me, is one of purpose. My neighborhood has a pretty intrusive HOA, which imposes a lot of rules. In some ways I'm unhappy about that because people should know not to leave their trash out all week and the like. Unfortunately, common courtesy being all but dead, it actually may be best to start out with everyone knowing the rules; my hope is that good customs will come to displace those rules, and I'm satisfied that I live in as true a neighborhood as I could find around here, that is, one in which we all recognize to some reasonable degree our need to be decent to one another and try to promote our local, common good. To this extent HOAs are a good thing. But when, as in every gated community I know of, the whole purpose of the "community" is to keep "different," generally less affluent people out, or more generally to replace the public square with the private neighborhood board (in essence seceding from the town, county, etc.) then we have, to my mind, something destructive of any true community — and by the way generally populated by people who are there only during the few hours each day they can spare from work, commuting, and vacation.