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Comment by em-bee | Hacker News Reader

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeowner_association

A homeowner association is a private, legally-incorporated organization that governs a housing community, collects dues, and sets rules for its residents.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_institution_(United_Sta...

A public institution is a juristic person in the United States which is backed through public funds and controlled by the state.

HOAs are not controlled or funded by the state, no more than Private Businesses are. municipalities are controlled by the state.

if municipalities have the same reach into how people manage their homes like HOAs do then the distinction may not matter. it is however a legally significant distinction.

one point where the distinction matters is that HOAs can limit your freedom of speech, while municipalities can not.

https://www.hopb.co/blog/freedom-in-associations-exercising-...

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By your definitions public companies do not exist - most public companies are not funded by state. But sure, in this framework HOA's are "private" but so are the municipalities - they are not funded by state. And, obviously, everything is controlled by state - we have laws and regulations, both from the state and from the federal government.

>if municipalities have the same reach into how people manage their homes

Municipalities have bigger reach because they also control what you do inside your home. Codes are more expansive and detailed than any HOA bylaws and cover interior much more than the exterior. And, of course, the municipality controls if you can live in your house at all and can kick you out if it wishes so.

we are simply using a different definition of public and private. i am using the legal one: public is government, private is everything else. i explained why the distinction matters and what effects it has.

your points are valid but arguing about the definition of what is public isn't helpful.

same goes for government control. you are not wrong, but again, the legal difference in what that control is matters. private entities have constitutional protection and rules that are clearly defined and distinct from the protection and rules for public institutions. the control the government has is simply different and that difference matters.

the bigger reach of municipalities doesn't go away in HOAs because most HOAs are within a municipality. that makes HOAs at best redundant, at worst you have to suffer both. at least with municipality you have democracy on your side. HOAs are controlled by owners, everyone else is second class. that's not a democracy. the result is that the combination of government and HOA gives you less freedom than government alone. HOAs don't replace the government, they don't make it go away.

HOAs in my opinion should be treated like government entities because they are given quasi government like powers without the same checks and balances that government has. they aren't and for me that's a problem.

We are not in a court, so even if there was a legal definition of "public", which does not appear to exist, it would not matter. The question is why HN "urbansits" are so livid about HOAs and want to replace them with municipalities. The reasons I see are pretty bizarre: while not having both makes some sense (in case you optimize for the absolute minimum regulations over everything else), this thread is specifically about replacing HOA with a municipality in case when only the former is present, which means more regulation. Your democracy argument makes no sense to me: the vote is always restricted, in HOA to owners (or rather to properties themselves, a husband and wife co-owning a home don't get two votes), in a city - to residents (and on some matters, to property owners only). In neither everyone can vote. HOAs are already treated as government entities - their bylaws are not different from the city ordinances, their fees are as same as city taxes and they are hard to get rid of. I imagine you mean something else since in your country the government is descending from feudal lords and your municipalities have started as fiefs. But in the US only similar government is at the state level, the states have constitutions and laws, everything else is what you would call "private" - townships, PTAs, school districts etc are essentially corporations.

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