Comment by crooked-v

It's racism and tax avoidance.

Like, there's other contributing causes, but those are the root origins of it all. The US suburban HOA structure started from a mix of communities trying to keep minorities out, and from suburban towns trying to push off infrastructure costs by legally forcing HOAs to provide their own services instead of covering it with taxes.

Combine dysfunctional structural origins and you get a dysfunctional culture around the subject.

US condo HOAs tend to be fairly culturally distinct from the other HOAs since they exist for fundamental and obvious pragmatic reasons (somebody's got to keep the roof repaired), though they also tend to have the same disease of excessive cost-cutting that's like a microcosm of US politics in general (see the Surfside condo collapse for an example).