Housing's 800-Pound Gorilla: Homeowners associations are growing in numbers and power.
From Planning, the journal of the American Planning Association, a great article on HOAs with input from me, Bob Lang, Monica Caruso, Cliff Treese, Mike Schneider, and others.
5 comments:
I do view HOAs as a failed social structure. Unfortunately, dinosaurs, even ones who have had such an historically short period of origin as these, live longer than they deserve. As Spencer MacCallum clearly pointed out some of the fundamental weaknesses in his essay, Land Policy and the Open Community, following on the lines developed in his book, "The Art of Community", it is an inherently unstable organization which cannot survive in a multi-generational environment.
Enjoyed your book BTW.
Just a thought
Just Ken
CLASSical Liberalism
Kenneth:
Thanks for your comment.
There is a division of opinion among libertarians (broadly
defined) about HOAs. A few seem to see the problems with this
way of doing things. But most of them are enthusiastic about
HOAs because they offer an alternative to local public
governments and fit nicely with the public choice theories of
Tiebout and the private protective associations idea that Nozick
advocated in Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Last year I attended a
meeting on this subject at which most of the speakers were
prominent libertarians. I pointed to the problems with the
existing system. They (almost to a man or woman) responded by
talking theory. In theory HOAs are voluntary; based on
contract; freely entered and exited from; therefore no
oppression is possible, no issues of loss of liberties are
conceivable.
I have another conference coming up on this in NOvember. Any
suggestions for new arguments?
Best,
Evan
"In theory HOAs are voluntary"
There's the fatal flaw in the Libertarian argument. It might have held water in 1970 when there were only 10,000 common interest developments in the entire U.S.
It won't today when there are more than a quarter of a million of them, with much of the growth not driven by voluntary preference but by default to the local government land use policies that require nearly all new residential developments to be of the common interest variety.
Evan,
Fred Foldvary, a well known libertarian who has written criticism on your "Privatopia" (for which he got some award from CAI), is not only an HOA entusiastic supporter, but also an old neighbor and friend of mine from Berkeley. We used to take long walks in the Berkeley Marina and climb the beautiful Berkeley Hills, discussing his social, political and philosophical ideas. This was in my pre-HOA days.
I recall him telling me about some ideal communities (he used Reston, VA as an example), which have private governments and are operating efficiently and smoothly without any government intervention, to the satisfaction of all their voluntary inhabitants. At that time I knew nothing about the subject.
I met Fred again about a year ago when I visited in Berkeley. He is now a professor of political science and teaches in a local university. On a cup of coffee at the Berkeley Gourmet Ghetto I told Fred that his ideal communities were not so ideal, and laid out for him some of the problems and the fundamental flaws of the HOA concept.
Fred's response? He simply said that wherever such problems exist, it's the fault of the people who live in those communities and who don't follow the idealistic provisions of their voluntary CC&Rs. When I said that there are no means to force them to obey the "mutually agreed contract", and that under these "voluntary contracts" HOAs have tremendous power, with no checks and balances and no state supervision, he said that the courts should resolve the problems. I explained that the courts yield to the independent powers of those wonderful nonprofit corporations, and he said that then it's the courts' fault.
In the end I did not succeed piercing Fred's HOA blown baloon; he remained firm in his idealistic, but totally unrealistic, libertarian view seeing HOA as an example of a great concept of ideal society.
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