> co-owners
HOAs don't make neighbors co-owners of your own property, do they?
Anyway HOA is something that shouldn't even exist. Or at least not with power to prevent people from having air conditioning in their home.
HOAs don't make neighbors co-owners of your own property, do they?
Anyway HOA is something that shouldn't even exist. Or at least not with power to prevent people from having air conditioning in their home.
Home-owner associations in Europe are frequently set up for apartment buildings, in which case, yes, the roof, foundation, hallways, stairwells, main piping, electricity, etc are all legally co-owned. Primary purpose of HOAs is to save for & plan long-term maintenance on the entire building.
HOAs for neighbourhoods, or blocks with single-family homes or terraced houses are pretty rare in Europe.
Not everything is a HOA
They force homeowners to decide together (and pay for) everything from road maintenance to what noise levels are allowed.
Another issue they cause is that, of course, the homeowners living there do not just use HOAs to override the wishes of individuals, but also feel disinclined to let the local authorities ... and the locals ... operate as normal there, given that they pay for everything, sometimes literally including the roads in the area around them. These communities may have banks, parks, even beaches, and there are conflicts about who gets to go there, given the local homeowners pay for maintenance. For example, given they clean up left-behind garbage, do people from the nearby town get to play there ... and leave behind more garbage?
The root of the problem is that more housing is no longer a net positive for many communities in a great many places. The increase in taxation income does not justify the extra infrastructure in many places. This means local authorities refuse building projects unless they pay for their own infrastructure. Hence, HOAs are being forced to take over the functions that public authorities used to have ... because local authorities are forcing the responsibilities that local authorities used to have on them. Of course, then the public nature of public space goes into question.
So a municipality can just refuse to build infrastructure?
That's just the "fuck you, got mine" mentality that permeates the living experience of US citizens. That's how they got their healthcare system as well.
Technically they're refusing to let people build unless they pay for (and arrange for) infrastructure. They will certainly claim that this is in fact building infrastructure.
> That's just the "fuck you, got mine" mentality ...
Of the entire world, yes. Absolutely.
The point of HOAs is to force homeowners to CO-decide (in houses: to make things cheaper for local councils) on what happens to the shared infrastructure. What and how to spend of maintenance and what to change.