The price of order: Pros and cons of homeowners associations

The price of order: Pros and cons of homeowners associations
 About 15 percent of housing developments in Berks have some form of homeowners association, said Glenn R. Knoblauch, executive director of the county planning commission. The biggest growth in planned communities with associations is in communities that will accept only residents age 55 and older.

In most cases the rules and regulations do preserve order, said Tom Campisi, executive director of the Community Association Institute of Pennsylvania, an industry group that advocates for such associations.

"You don't want your neighbors putting a junk car on blocks in their front yard," Campisi said. "An important thing to remember is that both sides, the association and the homeowner, have rights. They also have responsibilities."

Campisi said most disputes between homeowners and association boards involve a lack of communication and reasonableness. While not wanting to comment on the Yergers' case specifically, he said doing the reasonable thing and communicating your intentions before taking action often will prevent a dispute. 
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Fred Pilot sent me this piece from the Reading Eagle in Reading, PA.  It is ironic that I wrote Privatopia while I was living in Reading and teaching at Albright College.  Didn't change a thing in Reading, though, did it?  That was in 1993-94. And here in the Reading Eagle we have the sort of thing that provincial journalist used to write in the 1990s --a silly, ignorant, one-sided puff piece for CAI and the CID industry, published as if it were a real feature article.  Today, of course, the news media are much more educated on this subject, and even a quick Google search will produce some insight into the actual situation owners face with this industry, the huge volume of reform legislation, the tsunami of association insolvencies, etc.  But in a cultural backwater like Reading, which is still in a 1950s time warp in every way, somebody with a job on a newspaper can still produce claptrap like this and have an editor sign off on it.