Contact 13 Chief Investigator Darcy Spears takes us down that hall, so you can decide whether it's shame on the homeowners or shame on the HOAs. "It's a sickness. It's a cancer on our society," says self-appointed homeowner advocate Jonathan Friedrich.
The concept of an HOA--keeping property values up and neighborhoods looking nice--is a good one, but the reality can be a nightmare. "Extremely, extremely bad," sighs frustrated homeowner Brigitte Porter.
And for Dr. Robin Huhn, "It has tainted the home for me." "It almost becomes like a Gestapo where everybody's spying on everybody else," adds Friedrich.
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13 Action News of Las Vegas reports on the goings on in private local government that often resemble something out of Peyton Place and Lord of the Flies.
1 comment:
The libertarian Cato Institute recently published a "Local Government Stupidity Contest" (Dec. 27, 2010).
Since Cato is an advocate of HOAs (see below *), privatized corporate governments -- no matter how communistic -- are simply incapable of stupidity, repression, corruption, tyranny, etc. The spirit of Walter Duranty is alive and well among libertarian thinkers like the Cato Institute, Reason, Overlawyered.com, the Independence Institute, etc.
* Abstract of "What Are Private Governments Worth?" Cato Institute, 2005 (250 KB PDF file): Homeowners associations (HOAs) and other local private governments are expanding in number both in the United States and around the world. Local private governments are also expanding in scope, with many offering private security and a few even offering services such as day care, schools, and local courts to arbitrate homeowner disputes. How valuable are those services to association-members? Our data indicate that houses in HOAs in Northern Virginia are worth, on average, more than 5 percent more than similar houses in the same neighborhood but outside of HOAs. Given those large advantages, it is not surprising that HOAs are growing rapidly.
The advocates of the "HOAs preserve property values" argument have been as accurate in their predictions has the advocates of "We must do something about anthropogenic global warming."
Both are a group of closet communists and apologists for failed theories who have some perverted collectivist vision that requires the elimination of individual rights, whether through coercion by the State or so-called "contracts" (usually mandated by municipalities).
"The Road To Serfdom" and "The Privatized Toll Road To Serfdom" lead to the same place.
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