Comment by klardotsh
8 hours ago
HOAs in general are nothing but classic American privatization of that which would otherwise be public, because counties and cities here either lack the tax base (rural), budgeting skills (urban), or both, to provide the services some subdevelopments are built with.
It’s dumb. Here in Washington it’s rather common, I’m finding, for rural land plots to be part of a “Road Maintenance Association”. Exact same legal construct as an HOA, but scoped only to road maintenance on roads the county didn’t want to deal with. It would make so much more sense for the county to socialize those roads and reuse the same maintenance crews and vehicles for these stretches of road! But instead, a private entity pays through the nose to duplicate all that maintenance infrastructure (or pay contractors).
The way I see it many HOAs are the opposite of privatization, at least when they cannot be opted out of. They control land, impose taxes (sorry, "fees"), have elected leadership, provide services, make rules that they have the power to enforce, and the only way to leave them is to move out of their territory.
In my eyes this is essentially the same thing as a form of local government, just on a smaller scale.