Sunday, December 25, 2005

Abiding by rules of your neighbor: Disputes increase as more live under home associations - baltimoresun.com
From Nancy Levy comes this link to a Christmas day story about conflict in HOAs. It is worth reading and has quotes from me, Bob Nelson, and other suspects. Unfortunately it starts with the "good fences make good neighbors" line. I have to digress here. I wish reporters would give poor old Robert Frost a rest and switch to somebody more pithy, such as Edgar Allen Poe. How about starting a story on HOAs with a long quote from Poe that is appropriate to the subject, such as "...the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious. When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys. This was an extensive and magnificent structure, the creation of the prince's own eccentric yet august taste. A strong and lofty wall girdled it in. This wall had gates of iron. The courtiers, having entered, brought furnaces and massy hammers and welded the bolts. They resolved to leave means neither of ingress or egress to the sudden impulses of despair or of frenzy from within. The abbey was amply provisioned. With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion. The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime it was folly to grieve, or to think." That's from The Masque of the Red Death.

See? Now here you have wall, gates, authoritarian government, and separation of the fortunate few from the rabble. That would get the reader's wheels turning. But I digress. Here's a passage from the Baltimore Sun story (did you know that Poe lived and died in Baltimore?):

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Favored by developers and local governments, community associations are also popular among home-buyers because they usually help keep up the neighborhood. But they can be nightmares for the unwary, who learn the hard way that their homes are not their castles. And politics in homeowner or condo groups can sometimes make the former Soviet Union seem democratic. Associations represent a "de facto privatization of local government," says Evan McKenzie, a political scientist at University of Illinois, Chicago. The problem is, he says, these entities designed for economic purposes often conflict with the civil liberties and accountability Americans expect...Half of all new housing built since 1980 has been in community associations, estimates Robert H. Nelson, a professor in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland and author of a recent book on the phenomenon. The growth of what he calls "private neighborhoods" is transforming how people live and govern themselves, he suggests. "Americans may want less government," says Nelson, "but that's at a higher level. At a lower level, they want more government. They're voting with their feet."

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

It is shocking that someone with Nelson's academic background and expertise ignores the role of local government land use policy driving the growth of local government privatization. Scholars including Evan McKenzie, for example, have noted that local governments particularly in the fast growing Sunbelt states require all new residential development to be common interest developments governed by homeowner associations. These policies negate free market choice and thus invalidate market-based explanations for CID proliferation.

It smacks of intellectual dishonesty attempt to blur the lines between this widespread local government land use policy and organic, market driven growth. Indeed, Nelson describes the growth of CIDs in public policy terms as a "constitutional revolution" with the outcome being "the overall constitutional status of local government in the United States is in the process of being significantly reworked..."

Evan McKenzie said...

I think Bob seriously underestimates how supply-side driven this phenomenon is. But HOA advocates of all persuasions try to launder every bad situation with either the individual "consent" of the purchaser (you bought, so you can't complain) or the social validation of the entire institution that they imply from its rapid spread.

Anonymous said...

Nelson isn't the first to make this error. In 2003, the Public Policy Institute of California made a similar fallacious assertion in a draft abstract of a research paper on common interest developments that "individuals are increasingly opting to live in common interest developments." After objecting comments were sent to the author, the statement was subsequently removed from the final version of the abstract.

Academics who make such dubious declarations are incorrectly labeling homebuyers' passive inability to opt out of CIDs (as exists in many areas of the U.S.) as active opting in to CID regimes. The logic is flawed.