In low-trust societies you wish for an HOA and would gladly pay 10x your property tax to be in one that has rules and enforcement teeth.
Even something as simple as forcing the guy who keeps smoking and talking on speakerphone next to your window from 4pm to 1am to stop doing that.
In contrast, here in Mexico (where I am from) you need a HOA (or the equivalent) to avoid all sorts of crazy neighbours. From people blasting music and shouting at 1am, people leaving their trash out in the sidewalk permanently, parking their cars in front of your garage. To really making dangerous modifications to their house that will undoubtedly affect their neighbours.
I interpret such actions as what to normally expect in a lower trust society and culture. We pay for such settings in many different ways.
And never mind that the main value add of leaf blowers (over the traditional rake) is to coat your neighbors with debris and dust, thus necessitating even more cleaning (inside too, if they dared to have their windows open).
Also I'd say it's your characterization of freedom that is a narrow misunderstanding. I'd define freedom as the ability for individuals to make their own choices in the presence of society. Being the only person for miles and thus being "free" to do whatever you want isn't some sensible ideal of freedom, rather it's a pathological case that has made freedom irrelevant. In other words, freedom itself directly depends on tolerance. And by the time a city is forcing someone to build yet another ticky-tack fence to hide the mere sight of a perhaps-ill-advised boat it's clear that there is very little tolerance aka respect for freedom.
Question - Have you ever lived in a high-density environment? apartment block, terrace row etc.? Someone who has will have a different stance on what is acceptable regulation to someone that's only lived in the density of typical US suburbia.
Could just be that are used to different rules but I would not say we have more rules in the cities.
OK. So you have your own rules, which you enforce on others? That's swell but I can imagine it could lead to problems. Maybe some form of committee where people can settle disputes and agree on standards?
So - as a society we've tried multiple different strategies to make it easy for people to live in close proximity and they all have different success rates and different trade-offs. Pick your poison.
You are positing an individualist solution (don't be a "gaping asshole" by some vague standard) to a society-level problem (people disagree on behavioral norms, and even if they agreed not everyone would comply). This doesn't work and is tantamount to just pretending the problem doesn't exist - a pretty common failure mode in the conservative mindset. See also: gun control is unnecessary because all you have to do is not shoot people...
The system we use in rural countryside where police basically don't exist, ultimately, is a direct jury of your peer neighbors. It's better if you don't like those decisions centralized to some far away assholes with even less aligned motives.
I personally think it's a thorny problem with no easy solution - which is why I'm not a libertarian.
If I buy a house in a nice neighborhood and I pay extra because it's a nice neighborhood - I want to know that everyone has some standard of maintenance.
There’s always something. sigh
I'll take a small town politics over an HOA any day, because the few local HOAs are far more likely to make weird and obnoxious requests.
I live on a dirt road in the woods. I don't care whether my next-door neighbor cuts his lawn or what color he paints his house, or whether he decides to start keeping goats. The landowner across the street is running a tiny part-time farm, and I'm a fan. I know most of my 20 closest neighbors.
I don't mind the occasional HOA for people who want that sort of heavy community control. For me, it was an automatic "no" when buying a house.
Some local politics sucks, some does its job with minimal fuss. The difference is not made by the label you put on the political entity.
HOAs are basically private pseudo-governments, and most of the ones around here seem to impose far more stringent rules about how people use their land than the towns do.
[1] If I were operating on a scale beyond an individual homeowner or a small farm, the town would pay more attention. Want to keep a dozen goats or turn 5 acres into a truck farm? Go for it. Want to raise 1,500 pigs with a manure lagoon? You'll need to go through a permitting process.
The odor externality from the manure piles/lakes usually riles such characters right up, but that is the least of it. Even when the manure management challenges are properly mitigated (and there are no such CAFO feedlots that can mitigate to only 2-3 incidents per year, it is more like 20-30 per year for the average one), neighboring properties like your parent commentator's are adversely impacted with sharply increased pathogen and contaminants control in their groundwater. As rural properties like your parent poster's usually rely upon well water, this becomes a pretty acute issue for neighbors.
Fracking operations also are frequently very sloppy with their adverse impact upon groundwater, even though they are very diligent upon staying on their property. Redress that makes whole including judicial system interaction expenses is difficult, expensive even for single-digit liquid assets millionaires, and rare.
At the end of the day, this has many characteristics of a classic engineering modeling problem, subject to unperceived historical biases. People who hold absolutist property rights interpretations like your parent poster are generally historically biased to a time period when such interpretations were couched in an energy-poor and population-sparse time of our civilization. Back then, as long as one was within approximately human- and animal-power scales of energy over the generational time span, and rural population densities, externalities from large scaling scenarios were rare for most people, and mostly theoretical. With our current access to energy and ability to rapidly densify neighboring properties, the available externalities to present materially change, and the interpretations (which are actually the mental models we work with) break down in the face of a engineering-like scaling step change that requires categorically different solution spaces.
I'm personally very sympathetic to your parent poster's position, but realistically, my personal experience has informed me of the dynamic I've shared, and I've since substantially modified my position.
I forgot to mention that the lack of forest now means I can see floodlights from the local high school sports fields 20 miles away and can hear the freeway traffic that passes through the nearby town, also 20+ miles away. It’s not deafening just annoying and persistent instead of wind blowing through thick forest.
I don’t give a flying fuck that you don’t give a flying fuck about your neighbhors. I want neighbors that care about me and ask if they can have a stick of butter or borrow my table saw or carpool my kids to school. My neighborhood is a true community. We help each other. We organize with each other. We raise kids with each other. All from our huge McMansions with perfect lawns adorned with labradoodles who don’t bark at strangers. It makes my life better and I have never once gotten worked up about some bullshit notion that the HOA is treading on me. It’s possible to like conformity while eating suburban Chipotle while reading Kant. You can be a free thinker while also agreeing to not park your car on your lawn. If you want a pink mailbox and want to use your chainsaw in your birthday suit at 6am go right ahead, in any thousands of neighborhoods or hermitages that allow it in the land where the ratio of eagles to hamburgers is nearly equal. I’ll be in my garage with my neighbor smoking weed with our shirts off, making sawdust, listening to Steely Dan. Oh the tyranny
These don't even exist for the standard reasoning any longer. It's turned into a financial grift for developers to avoid paying for improvements, and municipalities to expand the tax base without having to pay for infrastructure. Plenty of "communities" out there currently having their cake and eating it too - at least for the first one or two generations of owners. It's about as sustainable as you'd expect such arrangements to be the more you look into them.
If you want suburban new home construction in my area you have had to buy within a HoA for the past 30 years. It's getting to the point where only the older "city core" and inner ring suburbs come devoid of a HoA. So it's either exceedingly expensive dense urban living or a 2 hour drive from a rural property. Such "choice" indeed.
HoAs kill freedom more than they offer it from my experience. They also slowly suffocate any future development forcing everyone into exceedingly hard to break covenants of the past. The ossification and hollowing out of middle class America continues.
It’s great this country is large enough to accommodate all types.